'Ask Baba Yaga' Is Getting Published! (And She Needs Your Help)

Vasilissa the Wise by Arantzazu Martinez

No - we're not asking for money, or anything similar. What Baba Yaga needs is your questions. Now.

It has been confirmed that oracle Taisia Kitaiskaia, has been offered a publishing deal for a published collection of Ask Baba Yaga. Here's the notice to Taisia from her agent:

And the official Publishers Marketplace announcement:

"Author of the forthcoming LITERARY WITCHES Taisia Kitaiskaia's ASK BABA YAGA, a collection of her surreal advice column of the same name for The Hairpin as well as all-new material, featuring write-in queries with responses from the perspective of a mythical Russian witch, to Allison Adler at Andrews McMeel, by Adriann Ranta Zurhellen at Foundry Literary + Media (NA)."

CONGRATULATIONS TAISIA!

Taisia has specifically asked for Once Upon A Blog readers to help out our favorite advisor by providing a wide variety of questions Baba Yaga can consider answering, to include in the new book. (!) Although she can't guarantee that every question will be answered and published, she is very keen to answer as many as she can in the time given her.

Mikhail Petrov

She's looking for 15 new questions in particular, and, as we know, first letters in, get the hungriest Baba!

Ask Baba Yaga, the book, has yet to have a confirmed release date, but we have our fingers crossed for 2017.

We'll make you a deal - if we hear via oracle-post that Once Upon A Blog readers have been eagerly sending Baba Yaga questions, we will host a giveaway contest of the volume when it is released.

Deal?

Good.

Go write up your message, send it, and we'll wait here, because we have more news to share.

Go on.

We're not going anywhere...

*whistling*

Back? OK then.

As we mentioned, that's not the only project our favorite oracle is working on. She's collaborating with friend and artist Katy Horan on a volume titled, Literary Witches, in which they've imagined canonized writers (such as Emily Bronte and Virginia Woolf) as witches. It works so well, you wonder if perhaps they might not have uncovered a long-hidden truth...

Take a look at some examples:

Amazing, no? You can see a few more examples HERE.

As far as the Ask Baba Yaga column goes, Kitaiskaia is still serving as oracle when she can, though a little less frequently at present and does hope to continue with it after publishing as well, though that all depends on how the wind, and Baba Yaga, blows at that point in time.

Mikhail Petrov

In the meantime, let's do all we can to get that collectible volume published, er, support Taisia with her expanding publishing career and help inspire her communication with Baba Yaga, by providing lots of brief, searching and heartfelt emails. And don't worry - your darkest secret questions will not have your name attached. (We should note, we would happily have Baba Yaga give us a nickname if she so preferred, as unflattering as it's likely to be.)

So, dear readers, email your questions directly to Baba Yaga herself - as soon as possible - using the address below:

AskBabaYaga AT gmail DOT com

Taisia awaits your requests and assistance in approaching Baba Yaga, for the benefit of us all.

It doesn't have to be fancy, flattering or formal - just a single sentence question is fine. Baba Yaga doesn't have much patience for more than that anyway.

Now, if you haven't already, go write your burning question - make it a good one - and hit that 'send' button ASAP. You may get your answer in permanent print!

You may be wondering: but where's our Thursday dose of advice? It's coming. Later today, this time. We wanted to be sure you saw this, and acted on it, first.

Stay tuned!

Note: we promise to provide updates on the Ask Baba Yaga volume as we get them. In the meantime, we will keep our column going for as long as Baba Yaga makes it possible.

Target + Wattpad Writers = New Book "Once Upon Now"

If you're a Wattpad member, writer or reader, you will have likely known about the #OnceUponNow contest that closed mid-year.

The news, however, is that they just published the winners' stories in a new book and it just hit Target shelves yesterday.

Digital writing community Wattpad has teamed up with Gallery Books to publish a new anthology of fairy tales for the contemporary reader. 

The collection is called Once Upon Now and takes a 21st century perspective on classic fairy tales. To promote the collection, the companies have started the #OnceUponNow. The promotion encourages writers on the site to promote their own modern fairy tale adaptation for consideration in the collection. Target is hosting the competition and will sell the book.

Here's the official blurb:

The stories are written by winners of the #OnceUponNow contest hosted by Target, in partnership with Wattpad and Gallery Books. In the anthology, Rapunzel is homeschooled in a high-rise apartment, and Sleeping Beauty is the victim of a rare medical syndrome. Classic tales like Princess & the Pea, Pinocchio, and other favorites are reimagined in the book.

The call was for short stories between 4 000 and 9 000 words and had to include "an engaging story about modern life or modern love that somehow alludes to or uses elements of a fairy tale or a myth" as well as no trademarked characters. (More of a description of the idea and parameters HERE.) Wattpad readers were to choose the top 25 via voting and the editors chose 10 for the book from there.

Here are the winning entries, shown via their "covers" (created by the writers to help attract their readers):

          

 
          

Wattpad member CliffJoneJr kindly compiled a list of eligible stories worth browsing (that is, legitimate entries as opposed to people just using the #OnceUponNow hashtag to gain clicks), put them in alphabetical order by tale and has given a one to three sentence plot synopsis that's worth reading all by itself. It includes a surprising variety of lesser known stories, including a Ukranian tale, the Sun Princess, Little Daylight, Jorinde and Joringel and the Princess Who Never Smiled.

All of the stories are still available to browse and read for free. You just need to join Wattpad to do so, which is also free.

Five Second Fables: The Twitterverse on God Creating Animals

Barlow's Aesop

Twitter has been telling tales - fables, to be more precise - and apart from the funny factor, it turns out they tell us a lot about us, our stories and how we see the world.

Barlow's Aesop

Crowd sourced information gathering and storytelling is a fairly new phenomenon, made possible by the age of social media. Twitter in particular, encourages people to distill meaning down to 140 (or less) characters, which is excellent practice for writers and storytellers, and for spreading the word very, very quickly. It's even become a wide-spread tool for distilling themes (ie. "elevator pitches" which are useful in a wide variety of fields) but there are other applications storytellers and folklorists can use them for as well. Memes, with their unique form of social commentary (yes, cat memes, DO say something about society), spread ideas, create context and bridge facts with fiction, often blurring the lines between the two to create a new "thinking space" for issues.

A few years ago fairy tale scholar Donald Haase* proposed a "communal catalogue" of #TwitterTypes, which were to be new summaries of traditional tales in 140 characters or less, to be used as a modern projection of the tale types classifications. Why Twitter? In Haase's words (from his personal Facebook page):

Because the discipline of 140 characters composed on a computer or smartphone forces creative choices about a tale’s “essence,” and those choices reveal, to the Tweeter, the alternatives — the “Tweets-not-taken.”

(Note: we did actually collect as many of these #twittertypes as we could find at the time and are considering adding a page for them to be stored here, perhaps added to if folk are inspired.)

While the project started well, and proved fascinating, it didn't last long and was not very extensive, which was unfortunate, as the potential for study using this tool and tack is wonderful and very reflective of how people today think. It also reflects the methods and thinking process for how we often tell stories in this social media and visual era. The experiment, though not proving successful as a modern alternative to the Aa-Th classification system as planned, did, however, make the point of showing that tales can be told, distilled, summarized, from various cultural and personal viewpoints via this social media medium.

God creating the animals ‘The Taymouth Hours’, England 14th century.

The "creation fables" shown below, though created purely for humorous intent, tell their own silly stories, not unlike many ancestral creation tales in which gods and goddesses were seen to be just as fallible and emotional as man, deciding and acting according to their personal agendas.

Described mostly via a brief dialogue exchange with God and an angel "sidekick" (or creation-technician), there isn't a lot of narrative detail, but each imply a situation and a result, and collectively - as they were written by multiple Twitter-users in a collective "brainstorm" - they provide a snapshot of modern humor and fable. They also wonderfully illustrate storytelling via memes (or memetics).

We're sure there are folklorists out there who could easily expand this into a fascinating lecture on storytelling and sociology but for today: the lecture is over. ;)

We've decided to call these, "Five Second Fables".

The Lion reads to the Animals (Aesop's Fables), 1869, Ernest Griset

Warning: While the content included in this post is generally considered humorous, we are aware that some people may feel offended as it uses casual references to God, and describes God (and angels) using colloquial humor and some bad language. As a result, we are putting these "tweet-fables", under the jump. Please consider yourself warned and read at your own risk. We do hope though, that it will add some smiles to your Sunday.

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