Art: Claire Degans "Snow White"

Claire Degans is a French illustrator who's style pays lovely and gentle tribute to the Rococo art movement. It's not a surprise to discover, that along with her degree in visual arts and a keen interest in printmaking, that she majored in art history.

While it's difficult to find complete collections of her fairy tale work (she's illustrated a number of books), re recently discovered, what appears to be, the entire set of paintings created for Snow White.

We thought it was about time we had a lovely art post for the weekend, so please enjoy.

Article: Seanan McGuire on Fairy Tales and Poetry: Pamela Dean's Tam Lin

On tor.com this week, writer of fairy tales and and folklore based novels (among other fun books), got wonderfully nostalgic about Pamela Dean's treatment of another favorite fairy tale of ours, Tam Lin. There's quite a group of people who were greatly impacted by this book, both for the fairy tale themes and the style of writing, not to mention the poetry.

Here's an excerpt:

I liked fairy tales. I liked folk music. When I found a book in a line of books about fairy tales, with a title taken from a ballad, I figured it would be good for a few hours. 

I didn’t expect it to change my life. 

Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean, is one of those books that defies description in the best way, because it both is and is not a fantasy. For most of the book, it’s the story of a girl named Janet starting her college life, with all the changes and chaos that entails. She sees weird things on campus. Okay. Everyone sees weird things on campus. I was already taking classes at the community college across the street from my high school, and I’d seen a man with six squirrels on a leash, a woman attending all her classes in a ball gown, and a person we all called “Troll” whose wardrobe consisted mostly of chain mail and rabbit skins. College campuses are alive with weird things. 

Only her weird things are very real, and eventually they make it clear that the book is a fantasy, and more, that Janet is in some pretty deep sh*t. 

...Tam Lin is a book about choices and consequences, friendships and relationships, and the way our adult selves are built on the bones of the children we once were. It’s also about poetry. If Pamela Dean had never written another word, she would still deserve to be remembered as one of the greats, for this book alone. 

Read it.

You can read the whole article HERE.

Theater: "The Handless Maiden" by Art House Productions

"Follow me down to the old stone mill, where the river has forgotten how to run..."

'THE HANDLESS MAIDEN'

A dark, immersive fairy tale

Looks like immersive theater is the new trend!

This new theatrical version of Grimm's The Handless Maiden takes the audience throughout a theater which is, we assume, filled with the sets you can see in this post. The stage is set in Jersey City, NJ and it is recommended that this production is not for children under 13. The environment may be too creepy for sensitive or young children, violence is implied (per the title and tale source) and there is one non-graphic sexual situation.

Here's the press release:

The spooky stage is set for Art House Productions' immersive, Brothers Grimm-inspired play.  

"The Handless Maiden" is the non-profit's main stage production. The 50 minute play takes a feminist twist on the the German fairy tale. In the original production, a young maiden flees into the woods after an evil force descends on her village.  

Playgoers will follow the seven-person cast throughout the theater while the production is underway. 

Art House posted a mini-interview about the show's inspiration and experience on their Facebook page, which I have re-posted below:

Art House had a conversation with one of our show's creators, Shayfer James, to talk about the upcoming production of THE HANDLESS MAIDEN: 

- What is the inspiration behind this play?
Director Mason Beggs and I have wanted to create something together from the ground up since meeting last year. We are both fascinated with Grimm's fairy tales and Mason suggested we start there. Our desire was to retell an old story in our shared creative language through original music and movement without using any dialogue. One of the most exciting things for me is that the piece was literally created from root to leaf in only two months. I'm a big advocate for capturing art spontaneously and from the gut. With a creative team like the one involved in this, that process has been fun, seamless, and incredibly rewarding. I must mention also that the lighting design by Lance Michel and set design by Andrea McKenna are absolutely stunning. 

- Why "The Handless Maiden"?
The fairy tale on which the piece is based, "The Maiden Without Hands" is rather obscure, which offered us a lot of freedom to re-imagine the story. It is important to us that the main female character has a strong arc that isn't dependent on "damsel in distress" nonsense. This story in particular gave us the opportunity to make that happen. Not to get too serious here, but for me "happily ever after" is a phrase that has done more damage than good through the ages, especially in regard to gender roles. It's also one of the darker tales. It really digs into horror a bit, which I love. 

- What can one expect from this "immersive" experience? What does that mean?
You can expect to be absorbed into a beautifully twisted world and become part of the story as it unfolds. It's a world of magic and horror, and beauty.

Shows are scheduled for Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, today (September 15th) through Sept. 24, at 8 p.m. An afternoon showing will be on Sunday, Sept. 18 at 4 p.m.
Tickets can be purchased in advance for $18 on Art House's website or at the door for $20.  

Donna Jo Napoli's New Snow White Retelling "Dark Shimmer" Released (+ Paolo D'Altan's Biancaneve)

A nice surprise turned up in the fairy tale newsroom room this week: a new fairy tale retelling by Donna Jo Napoli, Dark Shimmer. (Have to love pre-orders!)

Longtime readers are probably aware that Snow White is a tale our Fairy Tale News Hound has a special fondness for, (if you don't understand why, let's just say, she sees the tale very differently from most folk), so to find Napoli had given this tale a new skin, it was a given to add this to the library.

Napoli is a truly gifted writer whose YA retellings of fairy tales have a habit of making people see the tale - and the world - a little differently. Our perspective of the Hansel and Gretel tale has changed permanently, thanks to her book, The Magic Circle, and aspects of the Pied Piper retelling in her novel Breath, still haunt us. Dark Shimmer promises to do the same, particularly with regard for the queen in Snow White, but from a very different perspective than pop culture has been rehashing very much of late, tackling the oft-tabooed subject of mental disorders.

Here's the description:

Set in medieval Venice, this captivating fairy tale retelling by award-winning author Donna Jo Napoli explores belonging, beauty, and the transformative power of love through the eyes of a teenage girl. Dolce has grown up hidden away on an island in a lagoon. She is a giant, a freak, tormented by everyone but her loving mother. She spends her time learning the valuable secret of making mirrors. Following a tragedy, Dolce swims away and lands on an island where people see her as normal, even beautiful. Marin, a kind widower, and his little daughter bring Dolce to live with them in their grand palazzo. Eventually, Dolce and Marin marry. She secretly continues to make mirrors, not realizing that quicksilver endangers her . . . and so evil begins in innocence.

We have yet to finish reading this compelling book to give a proper review, but if you've read Napoli's other fairy tale retellings, you will recognize the unique style and "voice" she uses, to give a very personal perspective. Yet it doesn't feel like Napoli's other work either. While other books explore body image and the beauty complex, this book looks even more closely at the psychological impact of being seen as different, in combination with additional factors outside of a person's control.

Beginning the story on an island of dwarfs, where Dolce is considered, and feels, a freak, she tells the reader her story, with the narrative being a unique form of mirror, not unlike the profession she learns early on. But this liberty in learning a special skill also transforms her in ways she couldn't have imagined, changing her image from a recognizable character we feel much sympathy for, to a true freak and monster - one which is irredeemable. It is quite a feat that the reader still finds themselves moved by Dolce's story as her acts become more and more twisted, as they did at the beginning when Dolce was young, innocent and (almost) normal. (We have yet to get to the conclusion but, just like The Magic Circle had us sympathize with the witch's perspective in Hansel and Gretel, so too is Dark Shimmer proving to perform a similar feat, so far.)

From an interview with Napoli by Adventures in YA Publishing:

What do you hope readers will take away from DARK SHIMMER? 

Dolce goes insane.  I think talking about insanity is still a taboo in our society.  Some people still feel embarrassed if a loved one has a mental illness.  I wanted to show how mental illness can happen to very fine people, and when it does, they can do things -- sometimes terrible things -- that they really can't help doing. And even though you may know they can't help doing it, what they do still hurts everyone around them maybe as much as if they were in control.  It's very hard to have pity in those circumstances.  But I hope the reader can have pity on Dolce.  That's what I want very much -- for readers to see that they are capable of pity even when people do the so-called "unforgivable".

Although we recommend all of Napoli's fairy tale retellings, our favorites are those mentioned above as well as Bound, a Cinderella retelling, and Zel, a Rapunzel you likely haven't read before.

While the tale of Snow White is well know, it's the details and how it's told that makes it different and unexpected. Under the jump, we are including an excerpt from an interview with Napoli on Dark Shimmer, which has possible spoilers.

✑  ✑  ✑  ✑  ✑  ♛ (click the "Read more" link below this line) ♛  ✑  ✑  ✑  ✑  ✑

CW's "Beauty & the Beast" Series Finale Airs Tonight (& Thus Begins the End of the Fairy Tale TV Series Golden Age)

We haven't posted much on the CW's Beauty & the Beast over the years. This "Summer series" is somewhere between a star-crossed lovers romance and a police procedural - vacillating wildly from one extreme to the other at times - but overall it's had as many passionate fans as did the original from 1987 to 1990. Finishing at the end of four seasons, this modern reboot of the eighties New York city fantasy romance has lasted a year longer than it's predecessor, likely due to the active social media support it's received (despite it's lack of fantastical underground libraries and candle-lit dens). Unfortunately for fans, even with that advantage, the network didn't feel it rated strongly enough to continue and has finally pulled the plug.

The story, however, is set to a large and clearly final conclusion (according to reports and rumors), so hopefully it will still feel satisfying for folk who have been following the against-all-odds couple of Cat and Vince.

The series finale episode is titled "Au Revoir" and the plot is teased as:

Vincent and Catherine will be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to stop an attack and rid the world of beast makers once and for all. 

It's a tribute to the popularity of the concept and fairy tale source that this underdog series survived as long as it did. Although seeming to suffer from inconsistencies of writing and plot from time to time, the show did attempt to explore some of the themes in the original fairy tale and find their own contemporary "solutions" or outcomes to the inherent issues of such a couple (woman and beast-man) existing in this age.

We're going to wait to catch up until we can see it as a whole, to perhaps follow some of those themes and ideas through in their development and ultimate resolution, but in the meantime, even though it's not a show for everyone, it is bittersweet to see a TV series with a fairy tale-based idea, come to its conclusion. (You can currently "begin the binge" via Netflix.)

It won't be the only fairy tale show we'll be saying goodbye to in the coming months so this is the beginning of the end of an interesting era, in which regular people around the globe were discussing fairy tale plots and ideas via social media and creating fanfics (writing their own versions and developments of the stories and characters, ie. fan fictions), delving much deeper than the show did into some of those ancient roots.

In the meantime, we're back in a fantasy feature film golden era once again, even if most of them are reboots of old material (ahem - Disney), the best part being that many of those are fairy tales as well. While we've done our fair share of complaining of the lack of fresh material, it is wonderful to have new fairy tale films, of this time, (many surprisingly better than expected) to share with families and watch the responding social media and commercial trends. We haven't had that since the 80's, which isn't a complete coincidence. There are an amazing number of parallels between the eighties and the mid-twenties both in terms of pop culture (including entertainment) and popular concerns. The parallels even extend to the volume of fairy tale publishing in both fiction and scholarly texts. It's a pretty great time to be interested in fairy tales! (Someone should do a study...)

Following this Beauty and the Beast incarnation is the one everyone is waiting for: the Disney live action reboot, with Emma Watson as Belle, so B&tB fairy tale fans are a little distracted by the upcoming shiny to mourn too much at this point. What happens after that, since the Christophe Gans Beauty & the Beast is available for purchase and the TV series is done, remains to be seen. We've had a plethora of B&tB themed shows in the form of vampires, werewolves and other beasts so public preference for fairy tales may turn elsewhere for a spell (we have money on The Little Mermaid...), though there are bound to be ideas pitched to cash in on the popularity of the Disney blockbuster once those expected numbers are confirmed. It all depends on the numbers. And the climate. Who knows where the world's attention and cultural temperature will be in March 2017 when the next B&tB fix is released? I do look forward to watching which fairy tale rises back into the spotlight next...

Ask Baba Yaga: Is It Possible To Be Kind Without Expecting Reciprocation?

Jan Pieńkowski

Kindness. Why do people take advantage and walk over you? A better question: what should you do about it? Baba Yaga has some ideas, I'm sure.

Here's today's question and answer (via poet and oracle Taisia Kitaiskaia* of The Hairpin):

(Originally posted at The Hairpin HERE)

Tend to your garden, choose your company. You think that would be obvious. But how do you identify weeds? Is it so bad to see the flowers instead? I've always believed most people have the potential to flower, to show beauty, despite themselves. And isn't a weed, often only a weed because it's not in the right environment? But maybe that's the whole problem. I'm ignoring the essential nature.

This is going to take some re-training...

What do you think of Baba Yaga's advice?

Want to ask Baba Yaga a question of your own?

You can!

This is the email address where you can send your questions

directly to Baba Yaga herself.

AskBabaYaga AT gmail DOT com

To encourage Baba Yaga to continue imparting her no-bones-about-it wisdom (ok, there may be some gristle in there... bones too), I suggest we not to leave her box empty... 

Thank you Baba Yaga (& Taisia).

* Taisia Kitaiskaia is a poet, writer, and Michener Center for Writers fellow. Born in Russia and raised in America, she's had her poems and translations published in Narrative Magazine, Poetry International, and others.

Theater: "Bluebeard's Dollhouse"

Charles Perrault's murderous fairy tale "Bluebeard" merges with Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" in this haunting, immersive promenade-style theatrical event by Combustible Company. Marriage, violence and the power of secrets converge as this production winds through the unique and intimate spaces of the Hill House. A murder-mystery unfolds using theater, dance, puppetry and live music, taking the audience on a seductive journey through the suffocating marriage of Torvald and Nora, underscored by the brutality of Bluebeard's murderous compulsion.

Well this sounds... disturbing-yet-amazing. Bluebeard's Dollhouse, is a new take on the never-nice Bluebeard tale and sounds quite intriguing. With curiosity as one of the key (heh) themes in the tale, it's surprising we don't see more murder-mystery or procedural framing for retelling this story. And a bonus? They're partnering with the Minnesota Historical Society to give you that extra haunted (doll) house feeling, using three of the available floors of the Hill House Mansion to stage the performances. Sounds like an immersive experience.

Combustible Company seem to have taken this show beyond a simple retelling and are looking at the tale a little deeper, and with an unusual slant. There's an interesting interview you can read HERE with the creators about how they came to this "mash-up", and how they will be using the various rooms, moving the audience around from time to time I'm excerpting some tale pertinent bits below:

Erik: ...it's not as crazy as it may seem. Both stories are captivity tales in their own ways and both contain a measure of violence. In one story it’s physical and in the other it’s emotional. Both contain secrets that threaten to destroy the heroine. Kym: As I was researching the Bluebeard fairy tale, I was struck by the power that marriage had over a young woman’s life – how Bluebeard’s bride was essentially held captive as wife, even as his property – and that the only real agency she had was to explore forbidden knowledge. This reminded me a lot of Nora in Ibsen’s play: she is defined by the institution of marriage, infantilized by her husband, and she harbors a secret that reveals both Torvald’s and her own true natures. Bluebeard, Torvald, and Nora are each “destroyed” by the revelation of their secrets, and yet, especially for Nora, this shattering of the mask is the promise of freedom.
Erik: Setting Bluebeard’s Dollhouse in essentially a 19th-century castle reinforces the intersection of the stories we’re weaving together and creates an atmosphere that’s simultaneously grandiose and intimate. 

What specific types of puppets are you using in this show?Erik: We have a number of dolls, both found and constructed, that will be puppeted by actors themselves, but will also be manipulated either directly or indirectly by other actors.
Kym: We will [also] be animating found objects: suitcases, knives, keys, mannequins, dolls. Everything is alive in this fairytale world. In the Bluebeard story, even the key is alive – it bleeds, telling Bluebeard of his wife’s transgression. (You can read the whole interview HERE.)

Digging for a little more information on the use of the Bluebeard tale, we found this "Support Bluebeard's Dollhouse" page, which explains a little more.

By merging Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Perrault’s Bluebeard we create a new story, a “captivity tale” about the fight for personal emergence and acceptance that many face in our society. The struggle to “become human” and the emotional and physical violence that occurs when our humanity is limited by social constructs resonates most powerfully. In both stories the main characters struggle to be known for all that they are and hope for the redeeming power of love. They seek to escape the confines of society and reveal the “secrets” that contain the fullness of their humanity. In this marriage of stories both Nora and Torvald/Bluebeard act upon each other as catalysts for change, embodying our own need to confront terrifying truths locked away within ourselves and venture beyond the stultifying comfort of the Dollhouse into dynamic and transformative interaction with our world. They must transcend old notions of love and the rituals that anchor the status quo in their lives and risk moving into new definitions of themselves.

Perhaps the most informative of all, is this video, in which the creators explain their concept and "set the stage", literally:

This sounds like it's going to either be an amazing and unforgettable experience, or be so continuously bizarre for the audience the experience will head quickly into sensory overload. It makes us wish we had the choice to go.

It sounds perfect for some fairy tale themed Halloween entertainment!

Bluebeard's Dollhouse premieres on Friday September 30th 2016, with additional performances on October 1st, October 6th-8th and October 14 & 15. Each performance day has two times to choose from.

Boston Begins City-Wide Fairy Tale Reading & Discussion Of Kelly Link's "The Faery Handbag"

Charles Vess - The Faery Handbag (from The Faery Reel)

Yes. It's not a traditional fairy tale, but Kelly Link's Nebula and Hugo award wining novelette The Faery Handbag is one of those few "new fairy tales" that have stuck with us ever since we first read it, The Faery Reel: Tales From Within the Twilight Realm (Ellen Datlow & Terri Winding 2004). We have read a lot of "new fairy tales" and while the writing is usually lovely and, occasionally, a story will resonate with us, not many of those stories sink into our subconscious fairy tale soup and stay there, becoming part of the shared language. 

A very strange thing, to us, is that we remember reading it for the first time, and, while thinking it was kinda neat, though more modern, more magic realism than fairy tale, not what we would have thought as "fairy tale", so just went on to read the rest of the volume. But somehow the ideas and the story wouldn't go away and we found ourselves thinking about the story in the following days and well after that. We haven't looked closely at why this is. We agree the story feels more like a modernized Victorian fairy tale to us than a "classic" one - not our preferred tale types - but the ideas... they feel very like they fit, right in Faerie Land, and by Faerie Land we mean the land in which fairy tales take place, whether fairies appear there or not.

Magic bags that hold things larger than themselves aren't a new concept in tales. We admit we are quite enamored of the idea that you can pack an entire room - or house! - into a carpet bag (Mary Poppins, Merlin in the Sword and the Stone) and simply carry it with you to your new abode. Magic purses, sacks and knapsacks have been able to capture, tame and contain everything from the sea to Death (The Soldier and Death), not to mention come in useful for benevolent gift givers during the Yule and Christmas season. The classic rabbit in a hat magician's staple, is a variant of these as well. Modern fantasy films employ this idea regularly too, but Link brings a fresh take to this delightful idea.

But back to the news.

The annual One City One Story movement, launched as part of the Boston Book Festival, is a pretty neat idea. Here's what it is:

One City One Story is the Boston Book Festival’s version of an all-city read, but instead of a book, we print and distribute a short story. Our goal is to make a short story available to all, free of charge, to spread the joy of reading for pleasure among the teens and adults of our city, and to create a community around a shared reading experience.

As part of this initiative, in the past they have offered online translations and downloads, led citywide discussions, leading up to a town-hall style discussion with the author, library discussions, distributed the story throughout the city for free in multiple languages, held a writing contest, online reading groups and discussions with the author.

Shaun Tan's illustration for The Faery Handbag
is very different from Charles Vess'
but equally intriguing

This year they've chosen Kelly Link's The Faery Handbag, which means, people are having conversations and discussing fairies and fairy tales, especially in a modern context, in many different places in one city. Not entirely coincidentally, the story is also set in the greater Boston area, so locals are even more likely to imagine fairy tale magic just around the corner.

If you haven't heard of it, you will find many references to it. Here's a great way to introduce the central concept, by way of a discussion on fabulism:

Fabulism is a curious way to explore and understand the ordinary. In Link’s story, the speaker spends her time hunting for this handbag. It’s black, made from dog-skin, with a clasp of bone that can open three different ways:

 If you opened it one way, then it was just a purse big enough to hold […] a pair of reading glasses and a library book and pillbox. If you opened the clasp another way, then you found yourself in a little boat floating at the mouth of a river. […] If you opened the handbag the wrong way, though, you found yourself in a dark land that smelled like blood. That’s where the guardian of the purse (the dog whose skin had been sewn into a purse) lived.

Fabulism is a lot like this purse. It seems to belong to this world, but doesn’t follow all of the rules. It beckons you. It’s off. The more you explore it, the more mystery and power it has.

You can find the many, many different places they're giving out the story for free in a list HERE.

The Faery Handbag - Artist unknown

You can read the story online HERE or download an English, Spanish or Russian PDF, or a Kindle or Ebook version HERE (more languages coming apparently).

On September 28th there will be a discussion of The Faery Handbag, care of Boston's NPR, WBUR, and they promise other discussions throughout the community to be announced soon as well. There's also a writing prompt for a contest with prizes. (Gotta love that!)

Want more food for thought? Again from the highly recommended article on Diving into the Faery Handbag: On Fabulism:

The greatest part of the faery handbag is that there’s a wrong way to open it — meaning a dangerous way, a way that can eat you alive. And it’s that third compartment or “way of opening up” that separates the magical realism of childhood stories from the magical realism of stories for adults.

And because the proposed discussion questions are great to kick your brain into gear, even if you haven't read the story, we are putting the discussion prompts and questions below. Enjoy!

Chris Riddell - lady with carpet bag from sketchbook

Discussion Questions1. How did the jump between times/focuses affect your reading of the story?

2. Was Jake’s decision to go into the bag justified? Why or why not? Why do you think Zofia refused to let Genevieve go after him? 

3. After Zofia dies Genevieve becomes the official heir and guardian of the bag. What does this role mean if the bag is lost?  

4. Genevieve is a headstrong teenager entirely wrapped up in thoughts of her missing boyfriend and the fantastical world her grandmother taught her about. Does this make it difficult for you to sympathize with her or trust her as a narrator? Why? 

5. What lost item (like the Sesame Street shirt) would you like to find at The Garment District? What is the significance to you of finding something you thought was lost forever? 

6. How might this story have changed if Jake had not gotten expelled and MIT had not rescinded his acceptance? 

7. What is the importance of Scrabble tiles also acting as divination tiles in the story? Does it affect the way you read Zofia and Genevieve’s relationship to the game? 

8. What do you think will happen to Genevieve after this story ends? 

9. Does Zofia’s death (or absence, if you follow the thought that she didn’t actually die) force Genevieve to act differently than she would have before? If so, what is the difference?  

10. Do the characters in this story remind you of people you know? Is this affected by the familiar setting (greater Boston). Does this change the way you read the fantastical elements of the story? How? 

Writing Prompt 

In 500-700 words describe what you would expect or hope to see after disappearing into your own faery handbag for several decades. Email your story to info@bostonbookfest.org by Friday, September 30 for a chance to win a BBF prize package, including a signed copy of this year’s story!

The Boston Carpet Bag newspaper, 1851-1853