New Fairy Tales Issue 6 now online

Here's the trailer to tempt you to read...



And here is the issue itself...

(this is a flash version of the magazine, there is also a PDF version available on our website)

New tales online

I have't had chance to dip into these yet because I'm busy putting Issue 6 of New Fairy Tales together, but there are lots of Hansel and Gretel tales to read in Issue 4 of Enchanted Conversation and the first issue of Wildberries, a new journal of mythic fantasy, is now online too.

Illustration by Kay Nielsen, from the book Hansel and Gretel and other Stories by the Brothers Grimm

Quick Link: Fairy Tale Review's online goodies

There are currently not one but two brilliant things available for free on the Fairy Tale Review website. The first is a web edition of the journal featuring lots of Little Red Riding Hood inspired short stories and poetry, and the second is a minicomic by Jennifer Parks called 'They Met in a Dream'. You can print the comic from a PDF and there are instructions on how to put it together. Lovely.

Quick Link: Silverweed, the beginning

Just a quick note to say that Chapter 1 part 1 of Dorlana Vann's new YA novel Silverweed is now online. She is serialising this dark new take on Little Red Riding Hood on her blog Supernatural Fairy Tales.

Fairy tale favourites...

Katherine Langrish, over at fantastic children's literature blog Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, has been kind enough to nominate the cupboard for a Unicorn Glitter Award. The award was set up by fantasy writer Katherine Roberts to celebrate bloggers who 'post in the spirit of the enchanted mists'. To accept the award I need to nominate some favourites. This is a difficult task for me because I am terrible at choosing favourite anythings. So to make it a tiny (and I mean tiny) bit easier I am going to nominate favourites that are fairy tale related and that have a good link or two to go with them...

My favourite fairy tale book:
This is almost impossible to decide. To the right is a picture of the fairy tale related books currently living by my feet under my desk (so they are always close at hand!). There are others, too, in piles all over the house. But if I go off the book that is looking most worn, that I turn to most often, that represents everything I love about fairy tales it has got to be The Virago Book of Fairy Tales edited by Angela Carter (it's out of print but has now been published together with the second collection as Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales).

Carter was, of course, a brilliant fairy tale writer in her own right (The Bloody Chamber is another favourite) and a translator of tales too. In this book she turned gatherer of tales, and she pulled together an eclectic mix of stories with women at their hearts from all over the world. I love the sections she divided them into, they have titles like 'Brave, Bold and Wilful', 'Sillies' and 'Good Girls and Where it Gets Them'. And her introduction gives a real taste of her knowledge of, passion for, and interaction with fairy tales. This quote, in particular, often comes to my mind:

Ours is a highly individualized culture, with a great faith in the work of art as a unique one-off, and the artist as an original, a godlike and inspired creator of unique one-offs. But fairy tales are not like that, nor are their makers. Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup? Think in terms of the domestic arts. 'This is how I make potato soup.'

This is also the book in which I first discovered Mossycoat, one of my favourite tales (sadly that version is not available online but there is a Philip Pullman retelling here).

My favourite fairy tale film:
Another tough one. From my childhood I would say Labyrinth, after that Edward Scissorhands and, although I still love and watch both of those, for the last few years it has been Pan's Labyrinth (there are some snippets of Guillermo del Toro on fairy tales, and a lot else, over at io9).

My favourite fairy tale poem:
The wickedly good lines 'The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers./She whips a pistol from her knickers./She aims it at the creature's head/And bang bang bang, she shoots him dead' have been etched on my brain since childhood. The poem is 'Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf' by Roald Dahl and it's available online, along with a recording of Dahl reading it, here.

My favourite myth or legend:
The Buried Moon, it's a deliciously creepy tale. It was collected in the late 19th century in Lincolnshire, England from a girl of nine who said she'd heard it from her Gran. But in Legends of the Lincolnshire Cars Mrs Balfour noted 'I think it was tinged by her own fancy, which seemed to lean to eerie things, and she certainly revelled in the gruesome descriptions, fairly making my flesh creep with her words and gestures.' It was later collected as a fairy tale by Joseph Jacobs who removed the dialect (that's the version I've linked to above). Jacobs also noted that the tale had an unusually mythic quality.

My favourite enchanted creature:
Trolls. I have never quite stopped believing in trolls. I have to blame this on my parents' insistence that we re-enact Three Billy Goats Gruff whenever we went over a bridge (a tradition I'm continuing with my children). In my teens I loved a slightly bizarre children's programme called The Rottentrolls (which no one I talk to has ever heard of), and as an adult I've discovered John Bauer's wonderful trolls.

And finally, I need to recommend another blog. All the fairy tale blogs I read and enjoy are listed in the sidebar. If I have to pick just one that deserves recognition (they all do really) it is going to be the Fairy Tale Channel for fascinating and informative posts alongside new translations of the Grimms, and of Lithuanian, French and Icelandic tales too. It's a blog I return to frequently and always get enjoyably lost in.

Quick Link: new issue of Scheherezade's Bequest

So much to read, so little time, but I will definitely be making time (or stealing some from somewhere) to read the 11th issue of Scheherezade’s Bequest.

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.

There's a new issue of Enchanted Conversation online...

...and it features short stories, poetry and essays inspired by 'The Little Mermaid' and other mermaid, nixy and sea witch tales. I can't wait to settle down to read it!

There are also two contests you can enter, one which asks writers to explore what it would feel like to be a "Daughter of the Air" (as in Andersen's original tale) in a poem or story, and another asking readers to suggest a menu for a mermaid-related meal for the journal's Fairy Tale Food Editor (with a note from Kate Wolford, the Editor, to say they do not mean some type of hideous mer-cannibalism!).

I have a poem called The Blackpool Mermaid in this issue and I should probably explain for readers outside the UK that Blackpool isn't, as its name might suggest, a dark, enchanted pool but a famous Lancashire seaside town (not too far from where I live). Once incredibly popular with holidaymakers, it's been in decline since the mid 20th century but it still has some charms.

As with previous issues of this journal, readers are warmly encouraged to join in and comment. You can enter the Enchanted Conversation here.

New Fairy Tales: Issue 5

The trailer...




and the issue itself...



We hope you enjoy it!

Visit the website if you'd like to download the PDF version or find out more about New Fairy Tales. And please help us to spread the word about this issue; share the YouTube trailer with friends or 'Like' us on Facebook. Thank you :-)

Scheherezade’s Bequest

Issue 10 of Scheherezade’s Bequest is now online at the Cabinet Des Fées website. It's one of my favourite journals and I can't wait to settle down this evening to read it. I am also incredibly excited because I have a story in this issue.

It's a contemporary tale inspired by the opening lines of the Grimms' tale The Raven, in which a mother wishes her fractious baby daughter would become a raven and fly away so that she could get some peace; the girl promptly does. I wanted to see what would happen if the raven couldn't fly away. (In the original tale 'she flew into a dark wood and stayed there a long time, and her parents knew nothing of her'. The tale then follows the adventures of the man who must release the raven girl from the bewitchment.)

Ravens appear frequently in myth, fairy tales and folklore, joining a host of other birds (there's a wonderful article on bird lore by Terri Windling here). I have always been fascinated by tales in which people are transformed into birds. I suppose it's because of the sense of freedom I imagine in flight, although in fairy tales being transformed into a bird is as often an ordeal as it is the form someone chooses.

One thing I was intrigued to find out when I was researching real (as opposed to literary) ravens is that they are playful birds and one of the few species who make their own toys. There's lots more raven info on Wikipedia and you can also hear a raven here (as recorded by naturesongs.com).

Call for submissions - Enchanted Conversation

Enchanted Conversation, is an online fairy tale magazine in Blogger format. They are currently publishing four issues a year, each takes the theme of a traditional tale as its starting point. Submissions are now open for 'The Little Mermaid' issue. They are also happy to look at submissions inspired by other watery tales such as Undine and The Nixy. The deadline is the 15th May and full submission guidelines are available here.

Also not to be missed are the two contests they're running alongside their current 'Beauty and the Beast' issue. One is a writing contest, and for the other you need only join in the conversation and comment on a piece in the issue to be entered.

Illustration by Edmund Dulac, taken from Stories from Hans Andersen (1911) on the Internet Archive.

A feast of fairy tales...

There are so many delicious looking fairy tale treats to feast on this week. The new issue of Goblin Fruit, the fantastical poetry zine, is up. And to celebrate their fourth birthday they're giving away lovely icons, like the one to the left, for you to peruse and use (the icons have been created by Deborah J. Brannon, using Oliver Hunter's gorgeous artwork).

The second issue of Enchanted Conversation has also gone live. It's dedicated to Beauty and the Beast and is packed with retellings, reimaginings and reviews of the tale. I can't wait to dig in!

And, if you're still not full up from all that fairy tale goodness, tomorrow night Heston's Fairytale Feast will air on Channel 4 at 9pm. The pudding sounds good: 'the guests make their way through a wooded glade to find a Hansel and Gretel house made entirely of sweets'. But I'm not so sure about some of the other recipes, which, according to the Radio Times, include 'Snow White-style apples, made from blown sugar piped full of boar mousse' and 'chicken testicles done in the style of jelly beans (with a squid-ink coating).'

Hmmm I think I'll stick to reading the tales...

Addition to post: Here's the programme on YouTube if you didn't catch it. Thanks to redridingtweets for the link.

Lots of lovely things to read....

I'm currently battling with essay deadlines so I haven't got the time to present these links in the kind of posts they deserve, but three wonderful looking fairy tale reads have appeared in the last few days:


The new issue of Goblin Fruit, the fantastical poetry zine, which has been guest edited by Mike Allen of Mythic Delirum fame.


The new issue of Scheherezade's Bequest from the brilliant fairy tale journal Cabinet Des Fées.


And the fantastic looking Fairy Tale News New Year's Bumper Edition from Once Upon a Blog.


I can't wait to delve in!
- as soon as I've finished the essays :-(