The Orange & Bee: Reading roundtables

Reading roundtable #8: The sentry and the shell fairy

The Orange & Bee — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 22:00:57 GMT

In the early 1920s, in Australia, the British Imperial Oil Company came up with an unusual way to promote their fuel and oil products. They decided to commission children’s books, including both full colour and black-and-white illustrations, to give away to customers (with small children) who purchased their products.

The two most well-known of these small, delicate, but beautifully-produced pieces of fairy-tale propaganda are The sentry and the shell fairy, and The fairy story that came true.

Reading roundtable #7: Transformations trio

The Orange & Bee — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 16:52:47 GMT

For Issue seven, we are examining three of the seventeen fairy-tale poems in Anne Sexton’s collection Transformations (first published in 1971) including ‘The gold key’, ‘Cinderella’, and ‘Snow White and the seven dwarfs’. By the time the American poet wrote Transformations, she had already published four books of poetry, including Live or Die (1967), which won the Pulitzer Prize.

In the introduction to The complete poems: Anne Sexton (1999), Maxine Kumin underscores the diametrical oppositions found in critical commentary about the poet’s work: ‘The intimate details divulged in Sexton’s poetry enchanted or repelled with equal passion’. According to Kumin, in Transformations Sexton takes things a step further by adding a ‘society-mocking overlay’. Of particular interest is her focus on the stereotypical female representations found in the Grimm fairy tales: the dutiful daughter, the wicked witch, and the evil stepmother. She then transforms these familiar tales even further by layering references to American pop culture:

the Queen in ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ is ‘as persistent/ as a Jehovah’s witness’; Snow White ‘opened her eyes as wide as Orphan Annie’s’, and Cinderella in her sooty rags looks like Al Jolson (Kurmin xxviii-xxix).

Sexton—who struggled with psychotic episodes and suicidal impulses—has little use for the traditional ‘happily ever after’ endings tacked on to the tales during the editing and development process by Wilhelm Grimm.

Cinderella and her prince end up as ‘Regular Bobbsey Twins./ That story.’ And the princess and her husband in ‘The White Snake’ are condemned by way of a happy ending to ‘a kind of coffin,/ a kind of blue funk’ (Kurmin xxviii-xxix).

Indeed, Sexton finally lost her battle with depression and committed suicide on October 4, 1974.

Anne delineated the problematic position of women—the neurotic reality of the time—though she was not able to cope in her own life with the personal trouble it created. It is true that she attracted the worshipful attention of a cult group pruriently interested in her suicidal impulses, her psychotic breakdowns, her frequent hospitalizations, it must equally be acknowledged that her frankness succored many who clung to her poems as the Holy Grail. Time will sort out the dross among these poems and burnish the gold (Kurmin xxxiv).

A quick recap on reading roundtables at The Orange & Bee

The reading roundtables are only available to paid subscribers. If you haven’t moved to that level yet, we hope you will consider joining us. Each reading roundtable includes an introduction to a specific text; an exploration of connected social, cultural, and/or scientific material; and some questions to ponder.

There are no set rules or guidelines to follow. Whatever your responses (thoughts! feelings! wonderings!), we invite you to offer them courageously and boldly. The only thing we ask is that you take an approach to the text that’s largely curious and appreciative, focused on engaging deeply and honestly with the text, and with each other.

In this collaborative space, we are hoping to spark creativity through close reading. Other things we hope to see emerge include insights into the craft of writing, the connection between folkloric traditions and contemporary writing, and a deeper understanding of the focus of our reading (Sexton’s poems this time) through active engagement.

Reading roundtable #5: 'The faery handbag'

The Orange & Bee — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 02:14:29 GMT

For Issue five, we are looking at an older tale by renowned author Kelly Link as the subject of our reading roundtable. ‘The faery handbag’ is a fantasy novelette that was originally released in The faery reel: Tales from the twilight realm, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (2004). This story won a slew of accolades including a Hugo, a Nebula, and a Locus award for Best Novelette.

You can read the story online at Kelly Link’s website here. It can also be found in her brilliant short story collection Magic for beginners (2005), which won the Locus award for best collection.

This story opens in Boston’s Garment District, a place Genevieve scours on a regular basis in hopes of finding her grandmother Zofia’s missing handbag. This two-hundred-year-old family heirloom is ‘big enough to hold a chicken, an egg, and a cooking pot’. As the story continues we learn that hidden inside the handbag is the village of Baldeziwurlekistan:

and all the people under the hill and mountains and forests and seas and rivers and lakes and orchards and a sky and stars and spirits and fabulous monsters and sirens and dragons and dryads and mermaids and beasties and all the little gods that the Baldeziwurlekistanians and people under the hill worshipped.

Zofia safeguards the handbag, and Genevieve (who happens to have a bit of faery in her blood) will one day take over her grandmother’s role as guardian of the magical purse. What could possibly go wrong?

A quick recap on reading roundtables at The Orange & Bee

'The glass bottle trick' by Nalo Hopkinson

Nike Sulway — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:01:10 GMT

On the first of January—the first day of this year—we shared our first post, introducing the short story we’d be discussing with you for Issue four: Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘The glass bottle trick’. We’ve already enjoyed a robust conversation about the story in the comments section on that post. So the first thing I want to do here is thank everyone who’s dived in and commented with such lush, wild, generous and insightful responses to the story.

Your responses there remind me of what a pleasure it is to read in company with other astute and engaged readers.

In this follow-up, I want to offer some of my own thoughts on this piece of fiction, and see if we can’t continue our conversation about this fascinating short story. What follows are some rather rambling musings. Among those musings are questions, which I’ve highlighted in bold. In responding to this post, you’re welcome to address those questions themselves or pick up on anything else here that interests, troubles, or amuses you. Perhaps, after reading these musings, you’ll go back to the story and look at it a little differently, and come back here, to this thread, and let us know how the story has shifted for you (if it has), or how your relationship to it might have changed.

I (we) welcome your responses and musings, and look forward to reading them, and engaging with you in the comments.

Subscribe now

Reading roundtable #4: 'The glass bottle trick'

Nike Sulway — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 23:01:00 GMT

This is our fourth reading roundtable and, while lots of you have read, liked, and commented on our prior prompts, we’ve noticed that you haven’t gone so far as to really engage with each other, or us, in responding to the stories themselves.

We figure maybe it’s because we went OTT (Over The Top) with information introducing the stories, not leaving enough space for your own voices and thoughts. So, this time, we’re taking a slightly different approach. Less introductory framing, more … space. For you. For discussion and exploration.

So, here’s what we’re going to try this time: today, I’m releasing this post with the story title and author, and a link to where you can read the story online (if you don’t have a hard copy tucked away on your shelves).

Our reading for this roundtable is a retelling (revision) of the classic tale Carina wrote about for this issue (ATU312 Bluebeard, or The maiden killer): the retelling is by Nalo Hopkinson and is called ‘The glass bottle trick’. It was first published in 2000, in an anthology of speculative fiction edited by Hopkinson (Whispers from the cotton tree root: Caribbean fabulist fiction).

You can read the story online at Fantasy magazine here.

This week, our focus is on reading the story and thinking about it.

I encourage you to read it all the way through at least once just for pleasure. For the leisurely, readerly experience. Once you’ve done that, you might like to read it again, this time with a more active or critical curiosity: asking yourself questions about why the story provoked whatever thoughts, feelings, or questions it raised for you. You might like to make some descriptive notes (What is going on in this story? Who are these characters and what are their relationships to themselves, each other, or their world? How is it written? In what ways does it ‘retell’ the traditional tale of Bluebeard?)

Later in the month, (on 17 January 2025) I’ll publish a follow-up post, further opening up our discussion of this story. I’ll offer some of my own thoughts and questions, and invite you to offer yours as well. I do hope you’ll join me in a robust and generative conversation about this amazing piece of work.

A little note on Orange & Bee reading roundtables

Orange & Bee’s reading roundtables are only available to paid subscribers. If you haven’t moved to that level yet, we hope you will consider joining us.

We hope, through sharing readings with you, and reading them alongside you, to spark creativity and connection through collaborative close reading. Other things we hope to see emerge include insights into the craft of writing, the connection between folkloric traditions and contemporary writing, and a deeper understanding of the focus story through active engagement.

Reading Carmen Maria Machado's 'The husband stitch'

The Orange & Bee — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:14:59 GMT

In Issue #2, our first reading roundtable took our paid subscribers on a literary exploration of ‘The company of wolves’—one of the stories in Angela Carter’s wolf trilogy, which were eventually published together in her feminist fairy-tale collection The bloody chamber. (On a side note, if you missed this deep-dive into Carter’s fairy tale retellings—with a specific focus on ‘Little red riding hood’ [ATU 333] and the folkloric traditions connected to wolves—you can still join the conversation in the Issue #2 archives: Reading Angela Carter's ‘The company of wolves'.)

One of the questions posed in last issue’s discussion pointed to Carmen Maria Machado’s 2017 short story, ‘The husband stitch’ and the ‘strategy of tucking a range of folkloric narratives’ around a familiar tale. To continue our conversation around retellings and re-imaginings, we will be taking a closer look at the work of Carmen Maria Machado and her marvelous tale of a girl with a green ribbon tied around her delicate neck. Shall we begin?

Illustration by Dirk Zimmer, from In a dark dark room and other scary stories (1984).

A quick recap on reading roundtables at The Orange & Bee

Subscribe now

Reading Angela Carter's 'The company of wolves'

Nike Sulway — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 23:00:15 GMT

Welcome to our very first Orange & Bee reading roundtable!

What is a reading roundtable?

Reading roundtables are a little bit like a book club, but instead of meeting in person, we’re meeting online, and asynchronously, to discuss a piece of writing we’ve all read.

The basic idea is that the editorial team at The Orange & Bee choose a text for us to read (for future roundtables, we will ask you to nominate texts for us to read, too), and one of us provides a brief introduction to that text, and then we all (you included!) dive into the comments to further discuss the text.

There are no set rules or guidelines to follow. Whatever your responses (thoughts! feelings! wonderings!) we invite you to offer them courageously and boldly. The only thing we ask is that you take an approach to the text that’s largely curious and appreciative, focused on engaging deeply and honestly with the text, and with each other.

What I’m hoping we’ll work towards is a collaboratively-generated close reading of the text. I anticipate that, because I’m a writer and editor and writing teacher/mentor, and many of you are also—like me—both readers and producers of writing, some of our close reading will emerge out of attempting to read the text as writers (or editors, or translators, or publishers, or illustrators).

We might seek insight into writing (processes, techniques, strategies, etc) from reading this work.

We might seek insight into the relationship between fairy tales and contemporary writing.

We might seek insight into what it is to be human (or nonhuman); we might ask what this story has to teach us about life, and other catastrophes.

We might, more simply, seek to gain some deeper understanding the story than we can gain reading it on our own/in isolation.

We might discover other types of insights, or understandings, depending on the text itself, and what we each have to offer.

Shall we begin? Let’s begin …

Subscribe now