Fairy Tale Review: The Emerald Issue #10

By Kate Bernheimer

Fairy Tale Review is an annual literary publication dedicated to publishing new fairy-tale fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. It seeks to expand the conversation about fairy tales among practitioners, scholars, and general readers. Contents reflect a diverse spectrum of literary artists working with fairy tales in many languages and styles.

In the Emerald Issue, new stories, poems, essays, and artwork is inspired by the themes of "emeralds" and "Oz". In Frank L. Baum's introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the author indicates that his story "aspires to being a modernized fairy tale" in opposition to the "historical" stories with all their "horrible and blood-curling incident".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9780814341797

Kate Bernheimer

Kate Bernheimer has been called “one of the living masters of the fairy tale” (Tin House). She is the author of a novel trilogy and the story collections Horse, Flower, Bird and How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, and the editor of four anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award winning and bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she teaches fairy tales and creative writing.

Book preview

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Emerald Issue • Tenth Anniversary

FOUNDER & EDITOR

Kate Bernheimer, University of Arizona

GUEST CO-EDITOR, THE EMERALD ISSUE

Timothy Schaffert, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

MANAGING EDITOR

Laura Miller, University of Arizona

ASSISTANT EDITORS

Thomas Mira y Lopez, Erin Zwiener

University of Arizona

ADVISORY BOARD

Donald Haase, Wayne State University

Maria Tatar, Harvard University

Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

Katelyn Canez, Sylvia Chan, Anne Doten, Garrett Faulkner, Colin Hodgkins, Adam Kullberg

University of Arizona

ORIGINAL PRINT DESIGN

J. Johnson, DesignFarm

COVER ART (INSIDE FRAME)

Kiki Smith, Born

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

LAYOUT

Tara Reeser

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

www.fairytalereview.com

Electronic edition © 2015 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. Originally © 2014 by Wayne State University Press.

The Emerald Issue (2014) 978-0-8143-4179-7

FAIRY TALE REVIEW is devoted to contemporary literary fairy tales and hopes to provide an elegant and innovative venue for writers working with the aesthetics and motifs of fairy tales. How can fairy tales help us to go where it is we are going, like Jean Cocteau’s magical horse? We hope to discover. Please know that Fairy Tale Review is not devoted to any particular school of writing, but rather to original work that in its very own way is imbued with fairy tales.

Baum invented escapism without escape.

—John Updike

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Emerald Issue • Tenth Anniversary

ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS

KATE BERNHEIMER AND TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT

Editors’ Note

In L. Frank Baum’s introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the author indicates that his story aspires to being a modernized fairy tale in opposition to the historical stories with all their horrible and bloodcurdling incident.

ANDREA BAKER

Excerpt from The Incredibly True Adventures of Me

CHRISTOPHER BARZAK

Dorothy, Rising

Dorothy, rising, looks out the window and gasps. There are trees out there in the open air, their roots twirling through the sky like tassels.

GRACE BAUER

The Rhetoric of Oz

At least part of what made Glenda good

was the spell she cast in speaking—

the alliterative tap dance of Toto too that touched

Dorothy’s sentimental heart and sent her

packing back to black and white Kansas.

MARTINE BELLEN

A Thousand and One Gretels: Alone in the Wood

What we’d do not to be

Alone in the wood

CARRIE BENNETT

Ghost Plants

The grandmother thought it was time to take the child to see the ghost plants so she drew an elaborate map of where they would find them deep in the forest.

ANAT BENZVI

Preface

Nevertheless—

nevertheless

the bureaucracy creates

what it could have used

but also does not like.

JAYDN DEWALD

American Fairy Tale

Dorothy tapped her heels together & woke up in Kansas again. Once, at the height of winter, I hitchhiked from Athens, Georgia, to New Brunswick, New Jersey, coughing up little blood-flecked pebbles of I don’t know what—my heart?

CATE FRICKE

Tin Girl

My mother was already passed away, and my father, having fixed the old Ford truck at last, had driven with brother Benny to the Piggly Wiggly that morning. So the house on Monroe St. contained only myself the day they came knocking to tell me that my sweetheart Nick was dead.

MOLLY GILES

Kansas

The couch glitters, the coffee table glitters, the rug glitters too. Julia pushes the vacuum cleaner around the living room, sucking up every speck of dime-store sparkle that the late afternoon sun points out to her. Fairy dust, Kari calls it.

MICHAEL HURLEY

Uses for Birds I

I.

In New Orleans

when oil leeched its way onto the Gulf shore thirty, then forty days after the spill,

they named it Earl.

ROCHELLE HURT

Dorothy Poems

Dot, you won’t know what you’re in for

here until you’re choking on it, straw-

throated, and all those mistakes

KIM KYUNG JU

Translated by Jake Levine and Jung Hi-Yeon

On the Window Someone Taps and Leaves the Night

I turned off the light and lay down in my room

on the window, someone taps and leaves

Why tonight with no light on the window

does someone knock?

Is there someone who lived here who hasn’t yet left?

CYBELE KNOWLES

Reverie

I turned from the brink

and grew very tall.

Entering a forest

I brushed with my fingers

the soft spire of every uppermost leaf.

SARAH KORTEMEIER

Expatriate

I lack this courage: to walk barefoot in a nightgown

through the grass. To stand in my own

garden and think, I planted this. Tomorrow, we will eat.

SU-YEE LIN

White Snake, Green Snake

The grass that covers the hill pricks us with two pronged seeds, dagger-like, and the path is stone and long-fingered grass. We weave through alleys with broken glass atop walls. The secret garden is a hill of tea, flowers fallen, but the haze makes the city hard to see. Next door, a pharmaceutical company, all big-barreled wind turbines and the smell of nail polish. Climb the brick well, feet on rusted rings, and feel like you’re on top of the world.

LINDSAY LUSBY

Dorothy

Be the green sky.

You are a particle in motion

reflecting tall-cloud blue

reflecting low-sun yellow.

KATIE MANNING

No Place Like

A few months after

the storm, Dorothy asked

to paint the farmhouse

emerald green.

Her aunt and uncle

chalked this up

to her head injury

KAT MEADS

Flight of the 40 Crows

In a different story . . .

The crows defy the witch.

MATTHEW MERCIER

What Margaret Hamilton Means to Me An Essay

Mother—staunch feminist, veteran of the ’80s anti-nuclear protests, a blue-ribbon Peace Mom—does not allow war toys in the house. No G. I. Joes. No model B-52 bombers. And certainly no plastic guns—not even a water pistol.

CARRIE MESSENGER

Children in the Time of Dust

Once it was dirt. It was in the ground, it was the ground, it stayed at our feet. Now we call it Dust. It’s in our hair, our eyes, our lungs, coating the house in film, whistling at the door for us to let it in. It lives in the whorls of our fingertips.

STEPHANIE NASH

After the Wind

They find her barefoot in the stubble of the cornfield, listing like a drunk, her feet bleeding and her hair dripping with the rain.

DANIEL A. OLIVAS

The Last Dream of Pánfilo Velasco

One Monday evening, as he walked home from his dreary job making things nobody needed, Pánfilo Velasco saw two coffins that floated just within his peripheral vision.

BRENDAN PARK

Seeds

All morning it smelled like rain but I continued to defer mowing my lawn. I sipped my coffee and pored over a medical journal which had been sitting on a chair in my parlor for weeks on end while incessant house calls occupied my reluctant attentions. A seventy-three-year-old man’s broken rib, a high school athlete and his jock rash, a young mother inordinately worried over her toddler’s runny stools. Only twenty-six years old and already I was the only practicing physician within miles of our humble Kansas town.

SARAH SARAI

Anxieties

What do monkeys worry about

their imaginations grown dim?

EMMA SOVICH

I Must Beg You to Restrain an Imagination Which, Having No Brains, You Have No Right to Exercise

Within Tip a girl. Some days she feels old

and tall. Some days she climbs up to look out

Tip’s left pupil.

BETH STEIDLE

From the West An Essay

That summer thirteen funnel clouds touch down in televised wheat fields. Like Japanese ghosts, pale and legless. At the diner, my mother murmurs doomsday. The waitress asks if we’re ready.

LINDSAY STERN

The Great Forgetting

On an autumn morning in Year 20, the people of Lüz awoke to find Memory reversed. Recollections of the day to come wafted into their conversation, their morning jokes. History loomed, swept of images. The future, meanwhile, fell into view.

ANCA L. SZILÁGYI

More Like Home Than Home

The sleeves of her grandmother’s overcoat dangled low in the honeyed sunlight, a fuzzed cuff brushing the little girl’s knuckles.

GABRIEL THIBODEAU

Paint Chips

I want to kill my father but know my mother will miss him, so I turn him to stone and put him in the garden. It’s quite a task to drag him across the kitchen floor—you can still see the parallel grooves cut into the hardwood, one for each of his feet. I don’t mind the work.

CAROLYN TURGEON

The Sea Witch

They call me the Sea Witch. The one the others come to for curses and cures and spells. For transformation. Sometimes, those who come to me dream of the upper world. I can give them a potion that will wrench tails apart, reveal soft skin underneath the glittering scales. But there’s a price.

LEE UPTON

Oz Aphorisms

1. When a scarecrow disappears from a post a poor family endures a hard winter.

2. A city should be most beautiful from a distance.

3. A green city is a city of many greens: jade, algae, pine needle, sofa the cat lies on, unripe star fruit, dusk over tobacco leaves, lichen, horses, fire escape mold.

KATIE WUDEL

Halves and Wholes

It may seem now like it’s been ten-thousand thousand years, but those terrifying times are not so far behind us. It was a miracle then to make it to your deathbed still attached to all the parts you were born with.

CANDICE WUEHLE

Spectrum in Black and White

Dream girl, dizzy messiah. Gingham, garland, poppy, prayer: I

wand to be a good witch but I am in the gale

ABIGAIL ZIMMER

from Fearless As I Seam

She wants me to sip. Her lips salt crusted. These nine men are stories now. She sways, dress strap sliding off shoulder.

Contributor Notes

EDITORS’ NOTE

Timothy Schaffert: In L. Frank Baum’s introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the author indicates that his story aspires to being a modernized fairy tale in opposition to the historical stories with all their horrible and blood-curdling incident. Modern tales don’t require a moral, he argues; therefore, children’s fiction need only entertain. And yet, what has always thrilled me about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, from my childhood on, is its horror and mystery—not only its witches and their vicious, deadly rivalries, and all the threat lurking in Dorothy’s journey, but also in the less obvious anxieties—Dorothy is without parents, but somehow her bravery seems explained by her orphanhood, as does her maternal nature in gathering her odd collection of traveling companions. Her trusting nature is both comforting and terrifying, somehow.

Kate Bernheimer: The New York Times review of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz announced, in 1900, it will indeed be strange if there be a normal child who will not enjoy the story. This emphasis on the normal, cheery appeal of the book strikes me as an outlandish fictional lens, but I guess it worked. For me—and I was not a normal child—this book fit right in with all of the mysterious fairy-tale books I encountered. I don’t know that I differentiated at all between it and the Andrew Lang series, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen volumes—these were all fairy-tale collections, serial, authorless works that existed together in a whole universe. As a reader in childhood I did not wonder why the Oz books had a primary hero, Dorothy, while other books (of fairy tales) had many heroes. They were all interchangeable for me; that was their beauty. I read the series as you did—as a child hungry for adventure, mystery, and consolation. However, maybe there was a slight difference, which I’d like to pinpoint. It’s not that this was a modernized fairy tale precisely; I knew nothing of that. But I do think that the primary sensation I got from Baum’s writing, as I did from Lewis Carroll’s, was more tilted toward dread than consolation. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz scared me so much more than the Grimm fairy tales (which didn’t scare me at all)—I remember being especially distressed by an exchange about Toto, wherein Dorothy’s asked, and I paraphrase here to get the essence of this: Is that a meat dog? The idea of a meat dog weirder to me than the Grimm Brothers’ hedgehogs and ogres; I had a meat dog. Maybe the Oz books were more representational, which I’ve always experienced as a technique laden with dread.

TS: And at the time of my first reading the tales of Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault, I hadn’t any geographical reference for them; they all seemed to take place in a vaguely ancient and distant land, where even the moral conflicts were cloudy and foreign. It seemed to me the heroes and heroines were doomed from the get-go, their tragedies predestined. But The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was close to home. Dorothy’s Kansas was just across the state line, and the Wizard’s balloon promoted a fair in Omaha. And though most of the story takes place in Oz and surrounding fantasy lands, there are agrarian influences throughout. I could see the Tin Woodsman in the scrap metal out back on my own farm, and we resorted to all sorts of scarecrow-like decoys in the garden and barns. And if I remember right, the movie played on television every spring, just before tornado season. I don’t know if all that necessarily contributed to that dread you reference (which I felt too), but it certainly sharpened the tale’s edges, and made them a bit more jagged and rusty.

KB: At the time of my first reading of the European fairy tales, they seemed close to home, very real—I grew up in a house that sat next to a woods. The Grimm tales sometimes mentioned town names (Bremen, for example) and I lived in a town called Waban, and I could imagine it in an old fairytale book. The Grimm tales made my everyday world feel more magical to me. And the setting of Kansas had an even more abstract and mystical effect on me as a reader—Kansas could just as easily have been Alpha Centauri.¹ I could not even imagine going somewhere like Kansas, or Oz, and that was part of the attraction. It was a place that only seemed to exist inside of a book. My mother loved the movie and even has the Andy Warhol print of the Wicked Witch hanging in our dining room. My primary memory of the movie is frantically running out of the room whenever the flying monkeys entered a scene. The movie and the book series were very disparate for me from each other. I loved Ozma of Oz and Queen Zixi of Ix so much. Did you have any favorites?

TS: The landscapes of fairy tales did feel familiar to me too, even if I couldn’t quite place them on a map. Contrarily, whenever I read anything as a child, I often pictured the story taking place in a world I’d encountered nearby—I could easily picture the baby Moses set adrift in the irrigation creek that crossed through our pasture. And somehow the Oz of the book felt less fantastical than the Oz in the movie, largely due to Denslow’s illustrations—they were a mix of grit and whimsy. In the movie, the wicked witch, with her green skin and black dress, seemed a horror-show invention, while the witch as illustrated by Denslow looked like a bedraggled carny in a thrift-shop costume—someone who might pass through your town any day of any summer, and linger until she was rustled out. The Patchwork Girl (her story was among my favorites of the Oz books) impressed me similarly (as illustrated by John Neil)—she was like no rag doll I’d ever seen, and yet if I did ever see one, she’d look exactly like that, I was certain.

KB: That is the feeling I remember getting from so many magical books as a kid—they seemed exactly as I imagined. I also loved The Patchwork Girl—really the whole series, from my favorites to my least favorites, and of course there were books in the series I was more indifferent to than others. In a way that was part of the whole adventure—that duller book is necessary, its disappointments and obstacles to the next enlightenment pretty lifelike I guess. On the whole I just wanted more. To enter Oz was like mind reading—very occult. I am re-reading the series right now along with Fairy Tale Review’s Assistant Editors, who worked so hard on this issue, as we explore connections between each volume and a discipline within the various colleges at our university for our annual Night of Fairy Tales reading this spring. We’ve found fascinating connections to Economics, Border Studies, Philosophy, Physics, Film, Gender Studies, Literature of the Sublime. It’s amazing to revisit the whole confounding series together. We each have our own Oz, we are finding. Did you re-read the series as we gathered the work for this issue and as you completed your newest novel, The Swan Gondola, with its Baum themes?

TS: You’re much more patient with the duller books than I’ve ever been—I’m no Oz scholar, so I’ve abandoned a few