Issue two: Editorial
How it started: how it's going, and what we're looking for ...
Dear readers,
Welcome to the second issue of The Orange & Bee. We’re so thrilled to be launching this issue today, and reflecting on what we’ve learned since launching our fairy-tale project. Things have not gone as we anticipated. Largely, it’s been wilder, busier, and far more amazing than we could have dreamed.
How it started
When we decided to launch The Orange & Bee, we hoped to curate a community-based conversation with like-minded readers and writers who share our love for wonder tales. What we quickly discovered was that our niche subject has a broader appeal than expected. We now have almost 700 subscribers!
We started with a modest budget, and a publishing plan that we could fit in around our various other obligations. We planned on publishing quarterly issues, with each issue including a range of pieces we would create ourselves (an annotated traditional tale, an essay, a review, and an interview), as well as a suite of creative works selected for open submissions (two poems, one piece of flash fiction/non-fiction, and one piece of short fiction/non-fiction).
We made a commitment to keeping The Orange & Bee free to read for any subscribers, for at least the first year, and put together a budget that made that possible.
And then, we launched …
How it’s going
To our delight, you—yes, you—subscribed! And you, and you, and YOU! We now have almost 700 subscribers, which is absolutely incredible, and far beyond our wildest dreams. We cannot thank you enough for subscribing, following, sharing, and (most importantly of all!) reading!
After some reflection and consideration, we also opened up the option of paid subscriptions. Paid subscribers did not (originally) receive any additional information, posts, newsletters, or anything else: paying for a subscription is more like being a patron of the project, with all your contributions going towards expanding our publication schedule to include more poems, flash, and short fiction/non-fiction.
While we are committed to keeping all the poems, stories, and essays we publish free to read for anyone and everyone, we decided we wanted to honour and reward our paid subscribers with something a little extra, and so we’ve added two new Things to The Orange & Bee: Thing 1 (Writing roundtables) and Thing 2 (Reading roundtables).
Writing roundtables are opportunities for you to engage with the editorial team, and with each other, as fellow writers. Each writing roundtable includes a prompt, provocation, writing exercise, or conversation starter. Our first writing roundtable (Writing your life as a fairy tale) was released on 24 May.
Reading roundtables are a little bit like a book club, but instead of meeting in person, we meet online (on Substack), and asynchronously, to discuss a piece of writing we’ve all read. Our first reading roundtable (a discussion of Angela Carter’s short story ‘The company of wolves’) will be released on 14 June.
While our first issue was filled with creative works commissioned from some of our favourite contemporary writers of fairy-tale work, we put out an open call for submissions for our second issue. We hoped we might get a few submissions. To our astonishment, we were inundated by a flood of marvellous and magical writing. In fact, we received over 800 submissions for Issue Two (this issue!) within just two weeks. Submissions were coming in at a rate of one or two every ten minutes. We knew we could not read and respond to more than 800 submissions, and so we reluctantly closed for submissions, inviting anyone who did submit after we reached 800 submissions to consider re-submitting during our next open window: 1 to 14 August.
Eight hundred submissions, for just four slots! We had to send a lot of rejections, including for some work that we would love to have published, which was heartbreaking. We hope that you know and understand that, sometimes, a rejection is not about the quality of the work you submitted.
Reading so many submissions—and responding to queries about what we are seeking—also gave us an opportunity to reflect on and discuss what we are looking for (and what we are not looking for!).
What we’re looking for
As the inestimable scholar of the fantastic, Brian Attebery, once said:
Imagine you have just picked up a story and started reading it. If you’re like me, you’re waiting to be won over: “entertain me,” you say to the story first, and then “convince me you matter” (2016).
This perfectly reflects our passion for works that are both entertaining and meaningful. In terms of what we are looking for when we open your submissions: these are the first two things we are seeking.
Beyond that primary search for works that are entertaining and meaningful, we have four key criteria: we are looking for writing that is fresh, and contemporary, and innovative; and we are seeking works that extend and enrich the ongoing conversation about fairy tales.
Fresh in that this is your voice, your vision. One that we have never seen before. Not a story or poem that borrows its vision or voice from another writer. Not a tried and true reimagining that relies on well-worn or hackneyed tropes and clichés.
Contemporary in that while the story draws on the fairy-tale tradition, it also speaks to and will resonate with our contemporary readership. This doesn’t mean your work has to be set in the contemporary world, but it does mean that wherever or whenever your story is set, it should provide your readers—our readers—with a sense that this story has something significant and relevant to say about … well, that bit is, of course, up to you.
Innovative: Capture our attention with the innovativeness of your approach to working with fairy tales, to the genre/form of your creative work, or to some other aspect of your work. Push the envelope when it comes to style, imagery, form, or structure. Use fairy tales in a surprising or unexpected way. Give us new insights into, or perspective on, the fairy tale tradition. Make us feel something! Provoke deep thoughts! Challenge us! Surprise us with your wit, humour, and emotion. Be courageous. Be confident. Be bold!
Extend and enrich the ongoing conversation: In the same talk that we quoted from above, Brian Attebery goes on to talk about the ways that many literary works are in conversation with others texts, tales, or traditions. Once you notice the connection, he writes, you want to know how the piece you are reading is going to ‘work out this time’. The old text lives (lives!) within the new; it ‘amplifies and energizes and gives the reader ways to care. The relationship between the two texts is … ultimately beneficial to both’ (2016).
In terms of this final criteria, we’re seeking new works that move the conversation forward, rather than looking backwards. Bold new moves rather than nostalgic attempts to revivify the dead. Angela Carter’s revisionary fairy tales of the 1980s did this by exploring the capacity of reworked fairy tales to say new, subversive, and even dangerous things about women, power, and sexuality. Just over a decade later, Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the witch (1993) reimagined many of the women in the Grimm tales as queer narrators of their own stories, while Sheri S Tepper’s Beauty (1991) grappled with themes of environmental change, capitalism, and greed. Another ten years later, Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin folk (2001) shattered the persistent whiteness and Eurocentrism of English-language fairy-tale works. Around the same time (1997), Steven Milhauser’s ‘A visit’ employed what Bernheimer describes as normalised magic—collapsing the day to day with the wondrous—to tell a story that playfully and eerily disturbs our understanding of human-nonhuman relations.
In 2022, Kirstyn McDermott published a series of fairy-tale works (Never afters) that pushes back against the persistent motif of women and girls as enemies, always in conflict with each other.
In 2023, Orion magazine published a whole issue dedicated to fairy tales for the climate crisis.
Put on your seven-mile boots: take a leap forward. Ask yourself (as we ask ourselves, when we’re reading each submission): what does innovation look like now?
Some stories that inspire and delight us
Herewith a list of some stories that we adore, and which we feel meet our criteria (or did at the time they were first published!). Offered in alphabetical order, by author surname/family name.
‘Our beans grow fat upon the storm’ by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi (Electric Lit)
The bloody chamber by Angela Carter
Kissing the witch by Emma Donoghue
‘Seasons of glass and iron’ by Amal El-Mohtar (Uncanny)
‘The glass bottle trick’ by Nalo Hopkinson (Fantasy Magazine)
‘Red’ by Katie Knoll (The Masters Review)
White cat, black dog by Kelly Link
‘The husband stitch’ by Carmen Maria Machado (Granta)
‘The peach boy’ by Sequoia Nagamatsu (Fairy Tale Review)
‘The boys of Karachay Lake’ by Angela Pelster (Granta)
‘Emma Goldman takes tea with Baba Yaga’ by Veronica Schanoes (from Burning girls)
‘Fairy tales for robots’ by Sofia Samatar (Lightspeed)
‘Fable’ by Charles Yu (The New Yorker)
Things we aren’t looking for
Straightforward retellings of traditional fairy tales and/or other forms of folklore. We are not a market for newly-collected or newly-transcribed traditional fairy tales or folklore, or for newly translated traditional tales.
Work that is not in conversation with fairy tales, but instead with key works of children’s fantasy literature, such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books, JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, or Frank L Baum’s Oz books. (Look, we know that some folk consider these works part of the fairy-tale web or canon, and that there’s a lot of overlap between children’s literature of the fantastic and fairy tales, but … well, it’s just not for us.)
Cultural appropriation. We are not interested in works that appropriate lore, stories, wisdom, or words from a culture that is not your own, especially without demonstrating deep, respectful engagement with that culture.
Outdated approaches to poetry. While we’re interested in both closed form and free verse poetry, we are not interested in works that use outdated language and form (ie: rhyming quatrains filled with old-worlde English words like thee and thou are unlikely to appeal to us!)
Stories written for children. Our audience are adult readers.
Anything that’s ableist, racist, sexist, queerphobic, ageist, etc etc. (This doesn’t mean we aren’t interested in works that thoughtfully engage with these issues. What we don’t want is work that participates in unhelpful and outdated stereotypes).
Stories and poems that rely on graphic violence, including but not limited to sexual violence, for shock value.
Works written by, or with the support of, so-called Artificial Intelligence.
References
Attebery, B 2016, ‘The James Tiptree Jr. Book Club; or, A Mitochondrial Theory of Literature’, Lireactor, 12 December, viewed 21 May 2024, <https://reactormag.com/the-james-tiptree-jr-book-club-or-a-mitochondrial-theory-of-literature/>.
Bernheimer, K ‘Fairy tale is form, form is fairy tale’, The writer’s notebook, Tin house books, New York &. Portland.
Scafidi, S 2005, Who owns culture? Appropriation and authenticity in American law, Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, NJ.
Thank you for this informations.