Issue four: editorial
Our fourth and final issue for our first year
Just a little more than a year ago, Nike Sulway and I met over Zoom to chat about our shared love of fairy tales. This is something we have done fairly often during the six years we’ve known each other. We often dreamed of the ways we could work together. Should we write a book? Offer a workshop? Or start something entirely and brilliantly new?
Our answer was to create The Orange & Bee.
In that singular and special meeting, we picked the name for our fledgling publication, decided on a quarterly publishing schedule, and agreed to fund opportunities to publish three additions to the fairy tale genre in each issue: a poem, a piece of flash fiction, and a short story. To round out the magazine, we also added our own contributions including an editorial, an annotated traditional tale, a craft essay, and a review. Neat and simple goals for a niche magazine. Manageable.
‘We will start small,’ we told ourselves. ‘We will grow slowly’.
Dear reader, that is not how it turned out. You exceeded our expectations—a thousand times over.
Our first issue came out in February this year. By April, we had a hundred subscribers. (A hundred!) By the time we published Issue two, in May, we had more than 700 subscribers. Even more astonishing was that several of our subscribers took out paid subscriptions. Suddenly, we had a more generous budget, all of which we decided to dedicate to paying writers, by adding an additional poem, and an additional flash, to each issue’s schedule. At the time, paid subscribers did not receive additional content. After another magical editorial meeting, we decided to remedy that by adding writing and reading roundtables, exclusively for our paid subscribers.
By August, we reached 1,000 subscribers! When Issue three rolled around, our paid subscribers multiplied, which meant we were able to publish four poems, two pieces of flash fiction, and two short stories. We also added another bonus for our paid subscribers: our first fairy tale salon.
In this, the fourth and final issue of our first year, we are excited to be publishing two poems ( ‘Tender dough’ by Gabriella Ekman and ‘Growing my hands back’ by Jaya Penelope), two pieces of flash fiction (‘Dining on rose petals’ by Marisa Celeste Montany and ‘Who believes in wolves’ by EM Linden), and THREE! short stories (‘The troll-wife and the player’ by JM Spronk, ‘The tailor and the boatman’ by Toby MacNutt, and ‘Made to be broken’ by Kari Maaren).
We couldn’t have done it without you!
From Issue Five, which will be the first issue for our second year, we’ll be making a slight adjustment to our subscription offerings.
We’ll continue to publish all the same things that we planned to offer for free, and have offered since Issue one:
A traditional tale, with annotations
One new poem
One new piece of flash fiction
One new work of short fiction
One essay
In addition, we’ll be offering the following to paid subscribers in each issue:
Two additional new poems
Two additional flash fiction pieces
Two additional short stories
Open submission windows for 2025
NB: Please note that all dates/times are AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time)
Issue Five submissions: 9:00 am 1 January to midnight 14 January
Issue Six submissions: 9:00 am 1 April to midnight 14 April
Issue Seven submissions: 9:00 am 1 July to midnight 14 July
Issue Eight submissions: 9:00 am 1 October to midnight 14 October
Click here for more information about what we’re looking for and how to submit.
We are so very thrilled to be announcing this, our fourth issue, and to have seen our modest online publishing project growing by leaps and bounds. We could not have done any of this without you: our readers, subscribers, commenters. Our community of passionate, interested, and engaged fellow fairy-tale enthusiasts.
We cannot wait to welcome in the new year with you, and to continue to grow our little community.
bee-loved blessings!
Nike & Carina
Amazing work Jaya Penelope 😍