Welcome to the first issue of The Orange & Bee. We are so thrilled to be launching this project, which aims to take a then-and-now approach to fairy tales by republishing traditional and classic tales alongside new works by contemporary authors engaging—in a myriad of ways—with the fairy-tale tradition. We also hope to foster conversation and community around the writing, publishing, collecting, curating, and editing of fairy tales by publishing essays and reviews, and encouraging you—our readers—to embrace fairy tales as consolation and inspiration. As a source of wonder, and a provocation to wondering.
While we take the scholarship of fairy tales seriously, particularly in terms of the history of fairy tales, we also aim to take an expansive and inclusive approach to the question of what ‘counts’ as contemporary fairy-tale literature, one at least partly inspired by Cristina Bacchilega’s notion of the fairy-tale web as as a fluid and expansive network of reading and writing practices1. Like Angela Carter, we are thrilled by new works that revision existing fairy tales, both familiar and obscure, particularly new works that expand, subvert, and extend the field of fairy tales. As Carter wrote in her essay ‘Notes from the front line’:
most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the bottles explode (p. 69).2
We are also very interested in the possibilities and challenges of new works that do not retell existing tales, but are in conversation with them, pulling out silent or erased characters, telling the story that happened before the Grimms’ Es war einmal … or after the traditional tale has ended.
We are also interested in, and will be publishing, other works that explore and expand our understanding of the form, and of its history. Biographies and criticism, personal essays and poems. Works that engage not just with the tales, but with the history of the fairy tale, and with fairy tales as a particular mode of storytelling. Our goal is to bring you (and to encourage you to create!) new works that draw on the fairy-tale tradition in exciting new ways, inviting us all to reconsider what a fairy tale is, what it can do, and where it can take us. Works that invite us, again and again, to reconsider the limitations and possibilities of a form that has been in a state of almost constant change since the first fairy tales were told or recorded.
Each quarterly issue of The Orange & Bee will be released over a period of three months, providing you with a steady stream of new (and old) writing to relish. Each issue will include a traditional tale (accompanied by some discussion questions and a writing prompt), an essay, a review, and a suite of contemporary fairy-tale works (poetry, flash or micro-fiction, and a short story). Below we’ve provided the combined table of contents and release schedule for our very first issue.
This issue includes a range of imaginative works commissioned from some of the most talented and creative writers we know, and are excited to share the work they have created with you. Stay with us as we travel back in time to the late 1600s, to the Parisian salon where Mme d’Aulnoy first told her tale of wrecked ships, cannibals, ogres and shapeshifters, Le Oranger et l’arbeille.
Our enchanted first issue includes a Bluebeard poem by Jeana Jorgensen, a folklorist and dancer (check out her wonderfully accessible and enchanting books on folklore: Folklore 101 and Fairy Tales 101). We’re also thrilled to bring you a magical revisioning of Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ by Molly OlguÃn, whose forthcoming collection of fairy-tale works, The sea gives up the dead, won the 2023 Grace Paley Award for Short Fiction, selected by Carmen Maria Machado. And—last but by no means least—two atmospheric works from Lee Murray, a writer once described as ‘New Zealand’s Stephen King’.
Issue one release schedule
1 March: editorial & traditional tale
Issue one: editorial [you are here!]
‘L’oranger et l’arbeille’ (The orange tree & the bee) by the countess d’Aulnoy, annotated by Nike Sulway. Our republication of this traditional tale, first published in French in 1697, includes a short introductory preface, the tale itself, and (at the tail end of the tale) some discussion questions and a writing prompt.
11 March: review
14 March: poetry
29 March: essay
11 April: short story
26 April: flash fiction
24 May: writing roundtable (paid subscribers only)
We’ll post the provocation for our first writing roundtable on 24 May at 9am AEST. This issue, our writing roundtable will be writing prompt that builds on and responds to Carina Bissett’s essay ‘Your life as a fairy tale’.
Bacchilega, C 2013, Fairy tales transformed? Twenty-first century adaptations and the politics of wonder, Detroit, Wayne State University Press.
Carter, A 1983, ‘Notes from the front line’ in Wander, M (ed.), On Gender and Writing, London, Pandora Press, pp. 69-77.
Oh I am so excited for this - what a brilliant idea. I've been a lover of fairytales (and the conversation around it) for what seems like my whole life - I even had the chance to study folklore and fairytale as part of my degree (my deep dive back then was into Little Red Riding Hood but I still regularly dip into my collection of Marina Warner when I'm thinking about my own writing). Basically I love this concept and I'm so intrigued to see where it goes!!
What a title, and what a fabulous idea!