“Poor dear,” the old woman murmured. She added that I would do well to take courage. As you may imagine, the old woman and doctor were at once subjected to the greatest of my suspicions; and as I subjected them privately, I also protested publicly, for I knew I had done nothing to lose all I had learned to love there in that mysterious prison or home. No: I should have been very happy to be lame and blurred, to have my companion bring me teacups of wine at night, and in the morning my coffee and rolls. I never minded that the rolls were so tough to the bite that my teeth had become quite loose in their sockets, as loose as my brain or the bluebirds in the forest when their nests are looted by ravens.
Cheerfully, the doctor spoke over my protests. He said that my prognosis relied on one thing, and one thing alone: to eliminate every gloomy idea. He pointed toward a room I had not noticed before. “You have the key to the Library,” he said. “Only be careful what you read.”
I wrote this story in the public library in a small town in Massachusetts, in the summertime. It was fishing season at the time. Outside, children in yellow slickers slung lines over the bridge as I drove to the library, buckets of still-living fish by their feet. But it was always fishing season in the library, with its dioramas of schooners and nets with starfish on the knotty pine walls. I sat at a table across from an old man doing crossword puzzles. He really looked like he belonged in The Old Man and the Sea. I had been reading Poe, and some scholarship on these instances in seventeenth-century novels of fairy-tale scenes. Somehow, the proximity of all that saltwater, combined with the Poe and the seventeenth-century German, transported me into this story. It is for me a most architectural story, a Joseph Cornell box or diorama, and by writing it I got, for a brief time, to live in the impossible cottage of my dreams. Certainly, it could be said to be a story about the anxiety of influence, or, perhaps more aptly, the influence of anxiety — it contains the code to my work with fairy tales as a writer, I think. But the code is submerged, just as secrets should be.
Sources
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Oval Portrait” (1848 version).
Karoline von Wolgozen, Agnes von Lilien (1798), as translated in Jeannine Blackwell’s essay “German Fairy Tales: A User’s Manual. Translation of Six Frames and Fragments by Romantic Women.” In Haase, Donald, ed. Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK HAS BEEN MANY YEARS IN THE MAKING. CONVERSATIONS with Maria Tatar about the perils and beauty of fairy-tale editorship provided inspiration and godmotherly guidance, as has her entire body of work. I would not have found John Siciliano at Penguin had Jack Zipes, a kind and most generous thinker, not pointed me toward him, and he is simply a national treasure. When invited to write a foreword to this collection, Gregory Maguire didn’t hesitate for a moment: what a gem! Kristen Scharold at Penguin was a dream to work with throughout the entire editorial process: meticulous, enthusiastic, and kind, she deserves all gratitude. And the book would not exist had Carmen Gimenez Smith and I not met after a fairy-tale reading at AWP and discussed our shared vision that a book like this would someday exist. In compiling this volume, odd research needs were fulfilled, often at the very last minute: so thank you, Amanda Phillips, Morgan Fahey, and Hanne Winarsky and Christopher Chung at Princeton University Press. To all the contributors to this volume — you must know that our correspondence over the years of this book’s evolution has been illuminating, moving, and deeply satisfying to me. This book also owes so much to many writers, known and anonymous, past and present, who are the spirit of the tradition, and it belongs, too, to the children who are hearing fairy tales for the first time. From my graduate and undergraduate fairy-tale workshop students at the University of Alabama, I had the privilege of talking to a new generation of avid fairy-tale readers and future authors. To my parents, siblings, in-laws, and their children, your support is invaluable. The University of Nebraska Press, current publisher of Fairy Tale Review, and The University of Alabama Press, its former publisher, are rare and wonderful havens for fairy tales. I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude and admiration to Maria Massie and John Siciliano, who have honored my fairy-tale habit with care. Finally, Brent and Xia, you are my fairy-tale family, full of bliss.
Thank you to Kate Bernheimer. Kate’s exquisite vision of the book’s possibility and her ability to orchestrate such an ambitious endeavor is awe-inspiring. I’d also like to thank Evan Lavender-Smith, who helped me a great deal on this project, and Sofia and Jackson for giving their mother space when she needed to work. I’d like to thank Dylan Retzinger for his eleventh-hour help, and, finally, the writers, past and present, who bring us such joy in their work.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Kim Addonizio is the author of several collections of poetry, including Lucifer at the Starlite, as well as the novels Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street and the story collection In the Box Called Pleasure.
Chris Adrian is the author of the novels Gob’s Grief and The Children’s Hospital and a collection of stories, A Better Angel. He is a pediatrician in San Francisco.
Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The Hakawati, Koolaids, and I, the Divine, and the story collection The Perv. He lives in San Francisco and Beirut.
Naoko Awa (1943–1993) was an award-winning writer of modern fairy tales. As a child, she read fairy tales by Grimm, Andersen, and Hauff, as well as The Arabian Nights. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Japanese literature from Japan Women’s University.
Aimee Bender is the author of the story collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures and the novels An Invisible Sign of My Own and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. She teaches at the University of Southern California.
Francesca Lia Block is the author of many books, including Dangerous Angels, the Weetzie Bat books, Wood Nymph Meets Centaur: A Mythological Dating Guide, Pretty Dead, Blood Roses, and The Rose and the Beast.
Karen Brennan is the author of the poetry collection The Real Enough World, the story collection The Garden in Which I Walk, and the memoir Being with Rachel.
Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. He has received a PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA grant.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and winner of the Kafka Prize. She has been a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA fellowship, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The Georgia Review, and The Best American Short Stories.
Lucy Corin is the author of the story collection The Entire Predicament and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls.
Michael Cunningham is the author of the novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film of the same name, as well as the novels A Home at the End of the World, also adapted for the screen, Specimen Days, and Flesh and Blood.
