Chagford Filmmaking Group

Chagford Filmmaking Group, the intrepid group of fairy tale filmmakers from Devon, have got lots of exciting things going on at the moment. The clip above is the opening of their first feature film, Sir Lanval, a twelfth century fairy tale. They shot it in fifteen epic days in two countries on a budget of just £25,000!

This weekend, as part of the Fantasy, Faeirie and Visionary Arts event at the Flavel Arts Centre in Dartmouth, there is a Talk On The Filming of Sir Lanval by Elizabeth-Jane Baldry (director and co-writer of the film) on Saturday at 12noon. This will include clips from the film and a chance to hear about behind-the-scenes adventures, and tales of pigs, maggots and magical white horses appearing from nowhere. On Sunday 28th at 11.30am, there will be a Screening of Peerifool: An Orkney Fairytale - a tremendous tale about three little girls who outwit an ogre. And it's full of porridge fairies! (Film duration = 40mins).

Also currently at the Flavel is an Exhibition of Costumes and Other Delights from the film, which runs until the end of the month. And at Exeter Castle the Shared Legends Exhibition of newly commissioned artworks inspired by the Lanval story opens on the 6th December and runs until the 18th. And it features the work of internationally known painters, sculptors, and graphic artists such as Brian Froud, Wendy Froud and Alan Lee as well as young rising stars in the mythic arts field (there is a wonderful post by Rima Staines over at The Hermitage about her experience of creating work for the exhibition).

This is all part of the group's Shared Legends Project, a unique cultural exchange between two countries that share a rich mythic heritage, which has been funded by the European Union and South West Screen.

Two fairy tale related calls for papers...

George MacDonald among his Contemporaries
30 March 2011
CALL FOR PAPERS

A one day conference hosted by the School of English, University of St Andrews, Kennedy Hall, St Andrews, Scotland

George MacDonald (1824-1905) is most often discussed in terms of what came after: his role in the development of fantasy literature and his influence on writers such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Though providing valuable insights into MacDonald’s legacy, this emphasis tends to obscure his involvement in his own time. MacDonald was a Victorian. His works attest to his wide knowledge of his time and culture, and his deep engagement with the issues of the day.

George MacDonald among His Contemporaries looks to re-establish MacDonald’s place within his own context. We invite proposals for a variety of disciplines for papers and presentations which offer critical reinvestigation of MacDonald’s work. We particularly welcome papers that look beyond MacDonald’s fantasies to consider other aspects of his works.

Relevant topics might include:

• examinations of MacDonald and social issues, such as women’s rights and suffrage, racism and abolition, poverty and social welfare, animal rights, et al.
• genre criticism of MacDonald: historical fiction, sensationalism, romance, et al.
• gothic influences on MacDonald
• medievalism in MacDonald’s poetry and fiction.
• MacDonald and science or pseudo-science: evolution, vivisection, and mesmerism
• MacDonald’s literary criticism
• MacDonald and Victorian readings of Shakespeare
• critical re-examination of MacDonald’s poetry
• the interplay of poetry and prose in MacDonald’s works
• the interfacing of visual arts and MacDonald’s narratives, notably his connection to the Pre-Raphaelites
• MacDonald’s role in the Scottish preaching tradition
• MacDonald in relation to other Victorian literary figures: Dickens, Eliot, Kingsley, the Rossettis, Tennyson, Ruskin, et al.
• MacDonald and Scotland: Burns, Scott, Hogg, the Highlands, et al.

Keynote speakers will be Stephen Prickett and David Robb.

Papers will be 20 minutes. Please submit a 300-word abstract, in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format, with biographical information to Ginger Stelle (gs345 [at] st-andrews.ac.uk) and John Patrick Pazdziora (jpp6 [at] st-andrews.ac.uk) before 15 January 2010.

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A two-day international conference hosted by the Film and Literature Programme of the University of York's Department of English and Related Literature in association with The Centre for Modern Studies

Myths and Fairy Tales in Film and Literature post-1900

25th-26th March 2011
(please note these are the new, confirmed dates and have been adjusted by one day since I first posted this)
CALL FOR PAPERS

This forthcoming conference invites renewed reflection on fundamental, inherited tales as these have found self-reinventing expression in film and literature post-1900. It seeks to interrogate the dramatic, poetic and visual character of culturally core stories (fairy/mythic/classical/religious/Shakespearean etc), the formal operations and cultural force of their variant tellings (and showings) across media and moment, and the ways in which their psychological, social, political and aesthetic functions have been interpreted and employed.

Abstracts are solicited for individual 20-minute papers on the theme of the conference (interpreted in literary or film terms, or both). Proposals of pre-constituted panels (composed of two or three 20-minute papers) are also welcome.

Questions informing case studies might include (without being limited to):
- Why do some stories endure across multiple retellings while others fall into neglect?
- What primal impulses are encoded, fears expressed or defused and/or desires satisfied in those that resurface repeatedly in altered guises?
- Which narrative elements and characters have proved largely stable across time and place, apparently immune to cultural disruption, and which have been gently or radically adjusted in response to other cultural-historical forces?
- How have particular post-1900 literary and screen engagements with culturally embedded stories appropriated, revivified and disseminated those inherited tales in distinctive and/or culturally illuminating ways?
- How have the behavioural models promoted, social imperatives implied, modes of telling adopted and artistic allegiances embraced in the ongoing lives of particular tales been revised over time to fit new circumstances, new audiences and new media?
- How have theories of transmission, narrative endurance and narrative change accounted for the culturally revealing reinventions of various fundamental story pools?
- Which theories of narrative transmission, inter-medial adaptation and/or inter-textuality can illuminate the ongoing life of a story most tellingly? (And, perhaps, which have proved interpretively diversionary or limiting?)

Panels have thus far been suggested on the following themes: classical subjects, scriptural/religious subjects, Shakespearean subjects, fairy tales for children, fairy tales for adults, the transculturing of inherited myths. Contributors are welcome to submit with these proposed panels in mind, or in any other area in line with the theme of the conference.

Abstracts of not more than 250 words should be submitted, not by attachment but within the body of the email, to: film-and-literature@events.york.ac.uk

Deadline for receipt of abstracts: Tuesday 21st December 2010.

A brief personal biog-sketch (not more than 100 words) including institutional affiliation, current appointment/stage of study, principal publication(s) (where applicable) and main research interests, should be included in the same email. All submissions will be responded to, and all contributors notified, by Tuesday 11th January 2011. Registration details to follow.

Conference chair: Judith Buchanan (judith.buchanan@york.ac.uk)

Addition to post: There are now more details about the conference here.

Illustration by Dorothy Lathrop from The Light Princess by George Macdonald via the chawed rosin

The Word Dress

On Saturday I read a new fairy tale at the Lancaster Literature Festival. And I am incredibly lucky because I got to read it wearing this...

The dress was made by bridal designer Jennifer Pritchard Couchman from several copies of Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales (courtesy of Virago Press). The story I read, 'A Book Tale', was commissioned by Litfest and featured a dress made of grass and rain, a dress made of smoke and feathers, and, of course, a dress made from the pages of books. I love books more than almost anything, but I never expected to end up dressed in them. Wearing a dress made from over 2500 pages was one of the most peculiar and exciting things I've ever done!

There are lots, lots more pictures of the dress at every stage of the process here.

The Lancaster Literature Festival runs until the 24th October and there are still lots more fantastic events to come, including a reading tonight from Ali Shaw author of The Girl with Glass Feet, and a brilliant looking storytelling event on Wednesday called The Court of the Queen of Claywood Flats. The Word Dress will remain on display in The Storey throughout the festival.


All photographs by Jonathan Bean @Litfest. Creative Commons: some rights reserved.

Dresses in fairy tales

I have been thinking a lot about dresses recently because I've been commissioned by Lancaster Literature Festival to write a contemporary fairy tale featuring a dress made from the pages of old books. The dress itself is being made by designer and dressmaker Jennifer Pritchard Couchman, it will be exhibited throughout the festival and I get to wear it to read the story(!).

When I first started pulling together ideas for the tale I couldn't get the Disney Cinderella ball gown out of my head, which bothered me. A lot. I'm not a fan of the Disney versions of fairy tales, or of clothes worship or fashion in general. For the past four years I've spent most days dressed in scruffs accessorised with baby sick, snot, paint and porridge (in various combinations) and not been that bothered about it. But I can't deny the power of a beautiful dress.

Disney Princess culture may be malign, with its sparkly nylon tentacles gripped round the world's little girls (and their parents' credit cards), but Disney didn't invent the idea of the fairy tale dress as a garment of transformation. In the Perrault version of Cinderella, from 1697, Cinderella actually gets to wear two dresses to two balls, and after having her 'nasty rags' transformed into clothes made of 'cloth of gold and silver, all beset with jewels' by her godmother she silences the ballroom with her beauty and the King's son falls for her on first sight. (For an excellent dissection of the problems with this version, and the multitude of versions it's inspired, and a look at some more positive Ash Girl heroines I'd recommend Terri Windling's excellent essay Cinderella: Ashes, Blood, and the Slipper of Glass.)

In the Grimms' version of the tale the maltreated Ashenputtel gets to go to three dances and wear three dresses, each more magnificent than the last. There is no godmother but instead a little white bird, which brings the dresses when Ashenputtel makes a wish beneath the hazel tree she has planted on her mother's grave. And we're told 'when she went to the festival in the dress, no one knew how to speak for astonishment'.

In fairy tales spectacular dresses aren't only a magic ticket to get you into a ball, they can also be an important tool for bargaining with. In The Singing, Springing Lark the heroine finds her husband (who used to be a dove who used to be a lion who was really a prince) is about to be married to another woman, a princess (who used to be a dragon). She uses a dress given to her by the sun and 'as brilliant as the sun itself' to get a night with her lost husband...

The dress pleased the bride so well that she thought it might do for her wedding-dress, and asked if it was for sale? "Not for money or land," answered she, "but for flesh and blood." The bride asked her what she meant by that, so she said, "Let me sleep a night in the chamber where the bridegroom sleeps."

In Donkeyskin the beleaguered princess whose father wants to marry her is advised by her godmother to ask for a dress that can't be made. So she tells him she can't give him an answer until he has presented her with a dress that matches the sky, and when (after much coersion) he manages to get her a dress which looks 'as if it had been cut straight out of the heavens' she asks next for a dress of moonbeams and then one of sunshine. Each impossible dress is brought to her and it is instead the skin of an ass which affords her escape from the situation. Although, of course, the beautiful dresses come in handy for the happy ending.

Donkeyskin's fantastical sky dresses bring to my mind Max Lüthi's comments on dresses in fairy tales in Once Upon a Time On the Nature of Fairy Tales:

And in another Greek fairy tale, a fig, a nut, and a hazelnut each contain a dress. On one “the month of May could be seen with its flowers”; on the second “the heavens could be seen with its stars”: and on the third “the sea could be seen with its waves.” One cannot express more beautifully how the world is woven into the clothing of man in the fairy tale, how the enormous patterns of the cosmos are connected with man in a manageable and beneficial form, and how man is securely established in the realm of heaven and earth, and assimilates them both.

Whilst I've been writing my tale featuring dresses for the festival, I've collected together all kinds of dress links and other bits and bobs in an online scrapbook to inspire me. And I've discovered the taste for impossible dresses isn't confined to fairy tales, there have been real fads for dresses made of glass and of paper, there have been dresses made of chocolate and even hair.

The story I read will just be one of the fairy tale elements of the festival. Carol Ann Duffy will be reading her fairy tale The Princess' Blankets, Ali Shaw will be reading from his haunting novel The Girl with the Glass Feet, and Sara Maitland, author of many fairy tales, will be reading as part of the Great Short Fiction Day. And storyteller Dominic Kelly will be sharing Mossycoat with under 5s and their grown ups. And that's all just a fraction of what's going on in the wider festival which runs from the 15th to the 24th October. The full brochure is available here.


Both of the illustrations in this post are of the Grimms' tale Ashenputtel, the first by Arthur Rackham and the second by Elenore Abbott.

Into the forest...

This is one of those times I desperately wish I had a mossycoat I could put on to travel across country in an instant. Deloitte Ignite 2010 is an amazing looking three day festival of contemporary arts taking place at the Royal Opera House in London this weekend. It is being curated by Joanna MacGregor and the theme is forests. Here are a few snippets from their website to tempt you (or torment you—I'm sorry about that):

For the 2010 festival Joanna has taken her inspiration from forests: forests as a place of quiet, reflective beauty, mystery and discovery, as places of fairytale narrative, as well as metaphorical spaces. She has invited artists to create forests all over the Royal Opera House in different materials: recycled and reclaimed wood, organic materials, old costumes and mannequins, shimmering projections and reflecting pools. There are films, music and dance performances, soundscapes and installations.

Fairy tale highlights include:

Into the Woods: a cinema – unlike any you have visited – will occupy the Clore Studio Upstairs, as distinguished writer and cultural historian Marina Warner introduces and discusses a programme of fairytale-inspired films. The delicious little Russian-language animations Kuygorozh and Little Vasilisa (2007) partner the darker worlds of Joan Ashworth’s How Mermaids Breed (2002) and Alice Anderson’s The Night I Became a Doll (2009).

The German silhouette animator and film director Lotte Reiniger’s magnificently opulent and imaginative The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) was only discovered and reconstructed in the last few years, and is considered the world’s oldest-surviving feature length animation. Over the weekend it receives four screenings, with a wonderful contemporary score composed and performed live by WARP artist Mira Calix. Reiniger’s better known Fairytales – brief, endearing animations from 1922 – form the basis and backdrop of scorching performances from the Rumanian violinist Alexander Balanescu and Russian accordionist and singer Evelina Petrova, combining the brilliant virtuosity of improvisation with raw, aching qualities of Russian folk music and singing.

There are many more intriguing and tantalising descriptions of events and installations to explore on the website. I'd really recommend clicking though. And if you can get there, book and go and come back and tell us what it was like—the daytime events are free!

Because I will, unfortunately, be nowhere near London, or even a forest, this weekend I thought I would take solace in a couple of my favourite forest links. They are both from the treasure chest that is the JOMA archives: Into the Woods: On British Forests, Myth and Now is an interesting exploration of forests by poet Ruth Padel. The Green Man & the Green Woman: Art Inspired by Forest Myths features a fascinating essay by Terri Windling and is accompanied by beautiful artwork from Windling, Charles Vess, Alan Lee, the Frouds and others.


Photo by Graham Dean, used with permission.

On Anti-Tales

Robert Powell, Lance, 2008, watercolour etching

...most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode...
—Angela Carter, 1983

My two favourite things about going to conferences are meeting fascinating people, and returning with a notebook stuffed with names and links and titles and doodles—all of things I desperately want to find out more about. The Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment Symposium was no exception. It always takes me a while to unpack when I've been away (over a week later my rucksack still has things in it) but I thought I'd unpack my notebook a little bit here, and share some of the things I got a tantalising taste of and want to follow up on.

Over the course of two days there were 23 papers, 2 plenaries, an artist's talk and 3 fiction readings given. Researchers came from a range of disciplines and from universities around the world. Happily many of the papers given will be collected together and published by Cambridge Scholars publishing in 2011. I can't possibly do justice to everything that went on, so I'm not going to attempt to. I do hope the following links may be of some use though...

(apologies that this is in no particular order, and messy, like my notebook)

Tales and books I now want to read:

• After hearing about Nalo Hopkinson's reimagining of Bluebeard in a postcolonial setting 'The Glass Bottle Trick', in a paper by Natalie Robinson, I really want to get my hands on Hopkinson's collection Skin Folk.

• One of my favourite papers was Dr Jessica Tiffin's exploration of the vampiric versions of Snow White by Neil Gaiman and Tanith Lee, and of the unusual interplay between the gothic and fairy tale elements in these tales. I now really want to read Tiffin's examination of narrative and metafiction in modern fairy tale Marvelous Geometry.

• 'A Suburban Fairy Tale' by Katherine Mansfield, covered in a paper by María Casado, is a brilliant tale I'd not come across before and really should have. It's available to read online here.

• I was intrigued by humorist James Thurber's tales, covered in a paper by John P. Pazdziora. Thurber has been named as an influence by Neil Gaiman and I definitely want to read more.

• Hearing about Rikki Ducornet's tales, in a paper by Dr Michelle Ryan-Sautour, was a revelation for me. Why had I never heard of Ducornet before?! I am now desperate to read her collections The One Marvelous Thing and The Complete Butcher's Tales. Hunting for info on her online I've come across this interview and this electronic chapbook (which features several of her tales and some of her artwork for the wonderful Borges story 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'). Ducornet is also the illustrator for Kate Bernheimer's forthcoming collection of fairy tales Horse, Flower, Bird (another book I want!).

Some of the other writers covered (whose work I was already more familiar with) included A S Byatt, Roald Dahl, Sara Maitland, Margaret Atwood and, of course, Angela Carter.

Art and the anti-tale:
As well as literature we were treated to several papers on the anti-tale in the work of visual artists such as Dorothea Tanning (I have included her painting Birthday, to the right) and Paula Rego. The symposium also had a resident artist, Robert Powell (I've included an image by him at the top of this post). He is currently exhibiting his stunning work at the Henderson Gallery in Edinburgh.

In terms of film, a paper by Professor Suzanne Buchan on the Quay Brothers' Street of Crocodiles, followed by a screening of the film was a real treat. Buchan's paper also included what has to be my favourite quote from the symposium, taken from the Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin:

Children are fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, carpentry, tailoring or whatever. In these waste products they recognize the face that the world of things turns directly and solely to them. In using these things they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together materials of widely differing kinds in a new volatile relationship. Children thus produce their own small world of things within the larger one. The fairy-tale [sic] is such a waste product—perhaps the most powerful to be found in the spiritual life of humanity: a waste product that emerges from the growth and decay of the saga. With the stuff of fairy-tales the child may be as sovereign and uninhibited as with rags and building blocks. Out of fairy-tale motifs the child constructs its world, or at least it forms a bond with these elements.

(I found the quote online, in a paper by Buchan on 'Animation Spectatorship: The Quay Brothers' "Animated Worlds"', in EnterText journal)


So what is an anti-tale?
I'm not a literary theorist, or fairy tale scholar, I research fairy tales for fun (and get a lot of inspiration from them for my own writing along the way). Whilst the term anti-tale was used and applied widely at the symposium I think everyone had their own particular idea of what it means. Retellings, reimagnings, subversions, new tales—all can come under the banner of anti-tale if they are employing motifs, or themes, or characters from the glorious ragbag of traditional tales in non-traditional ways.

What the symposium brought to light, for me, was the sheer abundance of anti-tales in literature and art. And although anti-tales can be identified as being contemporaneous with the oldest known fairy tales, within 20th and early 21st century literature they would seem to be the dominant of the two forms.

Anti-tales and fairy tales draw from the same well of material, but, perhaps, where a fairy tale dips a sturdy wooden bucket beneath the surface, the anti-tale is as likely to use a glass bucket, or a plastic sandcastle one, or a shoe. We are lucky to have such a diversity of tales to treasure.


Many thanks to symposium co-organiser Catriona McAra for sending the photo of me above, and to her and David Calvin for such a fantastic event in all respects!

Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment Symposium

Registration is now open for this fascinating looking symposium being held at the University of Glasgow on the 12th-13th August. It is free to attend and the full programme is available online here. There is a great range of papers being given and panels with titles such as 'Wicked Women and Feminist Anti-texts', 'Not so, SnowWhite', 'Bluebeard', 'Surrealist Anti-tales', and 'Cinematic Reimaginings'.

John Patrick Pazdziora, whose wonderful fairy tale 'Ragabone' we published in Issue 5 of New Fairy Tales will be giving a paper entitled ‘ ‘‘You Know How Happy Kings Are”: The Anti-Fairytales of James Thurber’. And I am very excited to have been asked to give a reading of my fiction and to talk a little bit about New Fairy Tales. I'll be reading my anti-tale 'Raven', which was published online at Cabinet des Fées, and a new story 'Feather Girls' which is an anti-tale inspired by the swan maiden tale collected by Joseph Jacobs.

At the moment, the anti-tale is an under-researched concept, despite its being a popular form in terms of genre publishing. The symposium's organisers, Catriona McAra and David Calvin, have this to say about it:

The anti-fairy tale has long existed as a shadow of the traditional fairy tale genre. First categorized as the 'antimärchen' in Andre Jolles' seminal Einfache Formen (c.1930), the anti-tale was found to be contemporaneous with even the oldest known examples of fairy tale collections. Rarely an outward opposition to the traditional form itself, the anti-tale takes aspects of the fairy tale genre and re-imagines, subverts, inverts, deconstructs or satirizes elements of them to present an alternate narrative interpretation, outcome or morality. Red Riding Hood may elope with the wolf. Or Bluebeard's wife is not interested in his secret chamber. Snow White's stepmother gives her own account of events and Cinderella does not exactly find the prince charming.

The anti-fairy tale takes many forms. Some revisit and deconstruct familiar narratives (as above) or formulate new stories, characters and ever-afters, relying on and subverting familiar archetypes and plot devices. Following Jolles' seminal, respected text, the subgenre of the anti-tale has become dominant, as writers such as Angela Carter, Neil Gaiman and Phillip Pullman, artists such as Kiki Smith, Anna Gaskell and Kara Walker, and filmmakers such as Matthew Bright and Jane Campion have produced a diverse collage of anti-tales.

(read more here)

The organisers can be contacted with any enquiries at: antitales@googlemail.com. And I would really encourage anyone with an interest in fairy tales, who can get there, to come along and participate. It would be lovely to meet you (and for people who live too far away, I'll report back here after the event).

When I went to play at the Manchester Children's Book Festival...

(click on the image to see a larger version)

... I had an amazing time. I ran three family fairy tale workshops, in which everyone, from toddlers to adults, had fun dressing up, drawing and creating new fairy tales together. The picture above was drawn by festival illustrator Dai Owen, who came in and magically captured four of the participants in just a couple of minutes (they were busy trying to work out which key would unlock the bird cage in the golden castle, at the top of the glass mountain—they decided a feather key would do it in the end).

I owe a lot of thank yous; to the festival organisers for such a lovely day, to friends Carys Bray and Elaine Wilson, who did a fantastic job running the New Fairy Tales stall, giving away postcards, badges and selling some handmade chapbooks of our stories to raise money for Derian House Children's Hospice. And, to various members of my family (Mum, Dad, Aunty T & Grandma), who were dragged into making everything from crowns and keys to capes and banners! And thank you to Dai for allowing me to share his wonderful drawing.

The festival website is still online, so if you missed it you can still have a nosey at what went on, and the good news is the festival will return in 2012.

Manchester Children's Book Festival

I'm very excited about this! Here's the introduction to the forthcoming Manchester Children's Book Festival by Poet Laureate, Festival Director (and fine fairy tale writer) Carol Ann Duffy:

The 2010 Manchester Children’s Book Festival is the first festival of its kind to run in the North West of England. We’re thrilled to present a four-day programme of events and activities featuring some of today’s favourite children’s writers, illustrators, books and characters.

Aimed at everyone who has ever loved children’s books, our exciting series of events will run at Manchester Metropolitan University’s city centre campus as well as in a variety of schools, libraries and other venues across the region.

No matter if you can’t make it to Manchester – you’ll still be able to take part in our competitions and in our international Festival Readathon. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you can join us.

Carol Ann Duffy

There are far too many wonderful events taking place for me to list here, the full programme is available online. Highlights for me include: Carol Ann Duffy and John Sampsons' performance of The Princess' Blankets (the space will be decorated by Catherine Hyde's beautiful illustrations so that 'you'll feel you're stepping into the book'); the screening of Jeannette Winterson's Ingenious, introduced by the writer; wonderful pop-up book workshops; Michael Rosen leading a Bear Hunt!; a lecture on the World of Edward Gorey; an A-Z of Children's Books exhibition; Adele Geras and Mary Hoffman discussing their imaginative historical fiction; and a chance to meet three of the authors behind the latest series of Doctor Who novels (Daleks and Cybermen will be patrolling the building!). Phew.

Faye Durston and myself will be taking part in the Family Festival Fun Day on the Saturday. We'll have a New Fairy Tales stall and be running Family Fairy Tale workshops which will involve dressing up, drawing and lots of fun!

If you're too far away to make it to the festival there is still the international readathon you can take part in (and I'm planning a special fairy tale read as part of that which I'll blog about soon). If you think you might make the trip, and you're not familiar with Manchester, Creative Tourist is a great online guide to the city.

Hope to see you there!

Call for papers - Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment

(this is an edited version of the call for papers, the full version is now available online here)

“…most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode…” - Angela Carter

An interdisciplinary research forum and subsequent publication of proceedings (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) based around the currently under-researched notion of the 'anti-tale' to be held at the University of Glasgow, Thursday 12th - Friday 13th August 2010. Our confirmed plenary speaker is Dr. Anna Kérchy (Senior Assistant Professor, University of Szeged), and our resident artists will include Robert Powell (Edinburgh College of Art).

The anti-fairy tale has long existed as a shadow of the traditional fairy tale genre. First categorized as the 'antimärchen' in Andre Jolles' seminal Einfache Formen (c.1930), the anti-tale was found to be contemporaneous with even the oldest known examples of fairy tale collections. Rarely an outward opposition to the traditional form itself, the anti-tale takes aspects of the fairy tale genre and re-imagines, subverts, inverts, deconstructs or satirizes elements of them to present an alternate narrative interpretation, outcome or morality. Red Riding Hood may elope with the wolf. Or Bluebeard's wife is not interested in his secret chamber. Snow White's stepmother gives her own account of events and Cinderella does not exactly find the prince charming. The anti-fairy tale takes many forms. Some revisit and deconstruct familiar narratives (as above) or formulate new stories, characters and ever-afters, relying on and subverting familiar archetypes and plot devices.

This project is interdisciplinary in its scope, and our call goes out to a diverse range of disciplines including, but not limited to, scholars and students from: Literature, History of Art, Media/ Film Studies, Psychology, Creative Writing, Music. Our call for new research on 'anti-tales' is intended to provoke creative, imaginative responses, though we are particularly interested in contributions on the following topics:

Once upon a time…
…happily ever after?
The use of the anti-tale and disenchantment in children's and/or adult's literature
Rewritings/ re-readings of the fairy tale
Narrative voice in anti-tales; authorship and authority
Dialogues between the creative and the critical
Morality versus immorality
Feminist interpretations
Decolonizing the fairy tale; culture versus anti-culture?
Context and politics
New perspectives: new writers, new illustrators
Pedagogy (lessons unlearnt)
After 'ever after'?

Please email abstracts of 300 words (max.) for 20 minute papers and C.V. to David Calvin (University of Ulster) and Catriona McAra (University of Glasgow): antitales@googlemail.com by 30th April 2010.

Forthcoming events

A couple of fantastic looking events are coming up which I'm too far away to get to, but I wanted to highlight them in case any of you are nearby:

The first is the premiere of Peerifool, a fairy tale film made by the Chagford Filmaking Group (I've written about their brilliant work bringing British fairy tales to the big screen before here). The premiere takes place on Sunday 28th March at Exeter Picturehouse at 12noon and you can buy tickets online.



The tale of Peerifool is available to read online here.

The second is a Marina Warner lecture 'Dark Arts: Magic and Strangers after The Arabian Nights' at Queen Mary University of London on Tuesday 30th March:

'Enchanters in The Arabian Nights are frequently outsiders, infidels who worship fire and command djinns who disobeyed God; in many of the tales, the magicians come from Persia or Africa, or some other elsewhere depicted as faraway and exotic. Marina Warner will explore how these representations combined with a European desire to distance western culture from its tradition of magical thinking, and - in the writings of Voltaire and William Beckford, for example - offered fertile proxies for conveying the enduring fascination - and uses - of enchantment.'

This is Warner's second public lecture as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University. The podcast of her first 'Figures in the Carpet: Magic and the 1001 Nights' is available here.

Free public lecture by Marina Warner

'The Figures in the Carpet: Magic and the 1001 Nights'

On Tuesday 24th November, Marina Warner will give her inaugural lecture as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London. If you can get there this is an opportunity not to be missed:

Professor Warner, an expert on fairy tales, will focus on the story of the magic carpet, its appearances in the Arabian Nights and its connection to airborne fantasies prior to the invention of flying machines.

“For as long as people have told stories, flight has been a magical, divine power conferred on fairy tale heroes and heroines,” explains Marina Warner, who is also a professor at the University of Essex, in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies.

“And many myths and tales tell of fantastic flying vehicles that enable such characters to take to the skies,” she says. “Most famous of all of these is the ‘magic carpet’; synonymously linked to the Arabian Nights and everything the stories promise – free-floating fantasy, exoticism, pleasure, and trouble-free travel,” she added.

This well-known symbol has a history and a context, and Professor Warner will explore how they are interwoven with modern ideas of narrative, fantasy, and consciousness.

All the details you'll need to attend are here.

And for those, like me, who wish they had a flying carpet so that they could get to London for the lecture, but unfortunately don't, here's an excerpt and link to a tale from the Arabian Nights which features a magic carpet;

The Prince called to the crier, and asked to see the tapestry, which seemed to him to be valued at an exorbitant price, not only for the size of it, but the meanness of the stuff; when he had examined it well, he told the crier that he could not comprehend how so small a piece of tapestry, and of so indifferent appearance, could be set at so high a price.

The crier, who took him for a merchant, replied: "If this price seems so extravagant to you, your amazement will be greater when I tell you I have orders to raise it to forty purses, and not to part with it under." "Certainly," answered Prince Houssain, "it must have something very extraordinary in it, which I know nothing of." "You have guessed it, sir," replied the crier, "and will own it when you come to know that whoever sits on this piece of tapestry may be transported in an instant wherever he desires to be, without being stopped by any obstacle."

From The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou (as retold by Andrew Lang in The Blue Fairy Book)

If the story seems familiar it might be because elements of it inspired Lotte Reiniger's 1926 feature-length silhouette film The Adventures of Prince Ahmed (this is a great link if you're interested in Reiniger's work).

And I couldn't resist linking to this 2007 article from New Scientist: Three ways to levitate a magic carpet. Perhaps one day a trip down to London on a magic carpet may be more than just a dream!


Addition to the post: a podcast of the lecture is now available here.

Event - The House of Fairy Tales at Clumber Park

If you went down to the woods this weekend (well to Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire) you certainly would have had a big surprise. The Victorian Pleasure Grounds of this beautiful park were transformed by The House of Fairy Tales and their travelling troupe of artists, musicians, puppeteers and storytellers. I was invited along to represent New Fairy Tales and I had a fantastic day working with children to make up their own new fairy tales. Over 80 wonderful stories were created and these certainly were new fairy tales - featuring aliens, robots and elephants alongside the more traditional trolls and princesses. The children were inspirational and I had such a wonderful time (based on a giant four poster 'Grandmother's bed') that I was only sorry I was so busy that I didn't get to see any of the other workshops and performances taking place, which included the magical Feral Theatre, Matthew Robins' Death of a Flyboy Opera (fresh from The National Theatre) and Jim Bond's Kinetic Art.
The House of Fairy Tales is an arts education charity set up by artists Deborah Curtis and Gavin Turk which 'uses the vast narrative scope of fairy tales to provide creative, innovative and transformative learning experiences for young people of all ages and their families' visit their site to find out more about their brilliant mission (and there are some fun games on there too!).

fairy tales and... beds

Why beds? Well as a sleep deprived mother of toddlers a bed laden with plump mattresses and eiderdowns and some time to spend in it is one of my favourite fantasies, easily fuelled by the wonderful SurLaLune's gallery of Princess and the Pea illustrations (I will be linking to SurLaLune frequently as it is a wonderful site and the best fairy tale resource on the web!). The beautiful illustration on the right by Nicki Dennett, a lovely printmaker and illustrator who worked on issue 2 of New Fairy Tales, shows seven peas which is the number in the traditional Swedish tale which is thought to have influenced Andersen. The pea (or peas depending on which translation you read) has always fascinated me, I love the fact it is valued enough to be placed in the royal curiosity cabinet and I like to imagine it wasn't lost or stolen but is sitting there still, all shrivelled and dusty, looking like a little old lump of earwax.

Two brilliant picture book versions of the story are Mini Grey's hilariously inventive tale told from the point of view of the pea The Pea and the Princess and Lauren Child's The Princess and the Pea, with photography by Polly Borland. Child's version uses paper cut out people and dolls house furniture to create an enchanting miniature world. I was so excited to see some of the sets for the book (including the gorgeous little bed) at Manchester Art Gallery last summer as part of the Green Drops and Moonsquirters: The Utterly Imaginative World of Lauren Child exhibition. Now on tour, this incredibly child friendly exhibition is currently in Aberdeen and is heading on to Hull, Cardiff and then the wonderful Seven Stories centre for children's books in Newcastle.

Beds also make me think of blankets and one of my favourite recent fairy tales is Carol Ann Duffy's The Princess' Blankets (published by the brilliant Templar) in which a princess who is always cold is smothered, by a stranger, in the ocean's blanket, the forest's blanket, the mountain's blanket and lastly the suffocating earth's blanket:

'The blanket was woven in the darkest brown. It was embroidered with corms and bulbs. There were tangled roots in the blanket, pale, hollow skulls, and the crumbling bones of dead creatures.'

Duffy's lyrical prose is illustrated by Catherine Hyde's sumptuous paintings which convey a real sense of texture and the enchanting beauty of the happy ending 'under a blanket of stars'. This is a stunning book which really has to be held to be appreciated.

I notice that Hyde will be part of the event Introducing Fairytales: Meaning and Making, on Saturday 3 October 2009, at the V&As current Telling Tales exhibition of fantasy and fear in contemporary design. Make sure you visit the exhibition's online treasure trove and look out for the Linen Cupboard House, by Jurgen Bey in the Forest Glade which looks like a lovely place to climb into and curl up for a sleep.

As for other famous fairy tale beds, well plenty of fairy tale characters seem to end up in them, whether in an enchanted sleep (Sleeping Beauty) or in someone else’s bed (Goldilocks, Snow White, the wolf!). And of course fairy tales make perfect bedtime reading but more on all that another time. Sweet dreams!

Illustration Princess and the Seven Peas, Collograph by Nicki Dennett