Tabla de contenidos para Summer 2023 en Orion

I HAVE PLACED my hand upon a sheep, but that’s about it. By this I mean I have not known a sheep, have not tended to one in any formal capacity. I’ve not, for instance, drawn milk from one or scraped the rot from one’s foot. I’ve not cradled a newborn lamb in my elbow. I’ve only watched from a distance as a flock was steered by a dog across some verdant hills in the Himalayas, and I was never asked to shear any of those, or any others. I have also not visited northern Europe on the eve of the solstice, when it’s said that sheep are enchanted with the ability to speak human language. In some accounts, they spend the evening singing hymns or they confer about the…

"THREE… TWO…. ONE!" Tara yelled, and on “Go!” I flung my sixty-year-old body into the air—bare arms raised, palms to the sky, bare legs kicked up behind me, off the Zodiac’s platform. I felt the little ruffles of my bathing suit flutter in the twenty-milean-hour wind and watched the deep green water of Carlsbad Fjord rush toward me. It took my breath away, an overused expression, was entirely apt when, on that thirty-six-degree day, the thirty-four-degree water closed darkly over my head. It seemed at first I would never breathe again, but then I was clawing back toward the surface, back to the boat, as alive in every cell as I had ever been. That morning, we had taken the Zodiacs out for a close-up look at the face of…

Shh! Rise and be quick about it. Gather your things. Brother, sister: You were olderbut I was the strong one,humming one leg, two, now socks, now shoes—all our games lost to shadow.Just one toy, small. Nothing that rattles. We knew not to whimper. We set outwhere the moon had lain downa silver rapier, gravel gnashing its teeth—straight intothe forest they walked us. (Orwere we sent? Either way, they left or fell back, were simply gone.)We plucked berries until nightseeped in, soaking the brambles; the pebbles dropped to mark our trailstuttering to a stop: We come this far,they whispered. No crumbs for birdsong, so you sang yourselftoward slumber. I lay down, out of habit,though there was nothing to see: The heavens were drowning.Then suddenly, it was day—still dreaming, we scrambled up…

One of the new vintage hankies is so delicate—linen lawn printed with blowsy ocher flowers, in them many black anthers—anemones—and with lining-of-the-body’s-openings bright pinks, and with lilies of the valley, turquoise inside—and I am taken back to who I was, what I came as, who they made, a fairly sturdy child with what they thought of as overactive senses. I loved to touch things soft, and to stroke them. I loved a light wind on my face, and, once I could tiptoe, I tiptoed. Luckily they did not hate me—they enjoyed me, in their way, and though I was peculiar, abnormally sensitive, and they teased me for it, to some extent they let me be—not morally, morally it was their duty to punish me—but they let me show them some…

HAVE MADE A rough sketch of my underground palace,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary on June 14, 1942. “I hope that this wish of mine will be fulfilled one day, but there would have to be a miracle then, since it doesn’t usually happen that… you can just disappear under the ground and then live there, it’s too beautiful to be true.” How is it possible that Anne Frank did not know, when she wrote this lovely meditation on the imaginary—as realist and dreamlike as the best fairy tales—that her father was making plans for his family to disappear? Too beautiful to be true is possible, as fairy tales show. The imaginary Anne Frank the world has made, since her murder, is neither beautiful nor true enough. Is it…

RAIN WAS FALLING when I carried my two-year-old daughter and her tricycle home from the park. Her legs, galoshes swinging, straddled my pregnant belly. One small rubber tricycle wheel bumped against my shin with each step; the other spun on its axle. At that moment, I didn’t know about atmospheric rivers, about the flooding that would devastate Whatcom County. I only knew that it was raining, and my little fox wasn’t feeling well. My arms were wrapped around her orange raincoat; its tail flicked back and forth. She rested her head on my shoulder, pressed a wet fox ear against my cheek. Once inside, I shuffled us out of our rain gear and over to the sofa, where I hoped we both might nap. I could hear the rain striking…

I am reminded of the blackbirdin the dead of heat & the cold of nightwho makes her voice known on the land. I am remindedhow you never let the story they tellbecome the story of you. Each quiet thread pulled with fingertipsunraveling the folded cuffs of memorythe layers of fabricmade to cover & touch the parts unseen. I am transported into a worldwhere the sky is staticlike a dormition of birds hovering in aira cover pulled over the earthgranting us solace for a momenta long, glorious moment untilwe gather strengthand see the new horizon. Matthew Shenoda is the author of the poetry collections Somewhere Else (winner of the American Book Award), Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone, Tahrir Suite, and most recently The Way of the Earth. Along with Kwame…

On rare occasions,Dad told me about the duwende,little elves living under the schoolhouse in Daet.And Mom described the kapre,a monstrous giant with too-long legs,hairy and dark, smoking a big cigarhiding in the magical balete treetrying to talk to passersbymaking them lose their way. All know of the manananggalthe sultry woman who splits in half at night,her winged portion seeking victims,a long, tubelike tongue suckingfetuses from pregnant women in the night.If you were to add salt to the bottom portion,her body could never reunite, perishingbefore the sun comes up. Upon my visit to the lush seaside province,my mother’s village of Mangaldan,where banana leaves brushed my skinand mosquitoes left a wasteland of bumpswhere they siphoned my too-sweet blood,we walked the mango grovesand villagers clambered up coconut treesso their fresh woolen shells could…

Nettle & Bone T. Kingfisher Tor Books T. KINGFISHER challenges the idea of the “wicked witch” through the gravewitch in her subversive fairy tale Nettle & Bone. The nameless dust-wife—part witch, part gravedigger—is all too willing to help the novel’s heroine on her quest to kill an abusive prince with the aid of her magic and her hilarious grumpiness, leaving behind her graveyard abode to do so. Although she is undeniably on the “good side,” she is morally gray. Because she is just as willing to sell the heroine’s teeth as she is to help her succeed, the dust-wife is able to inhabit a space that not many literary witches are allowed to. She’s deep and complex, not a good witch or a bad witch, but simply a witch. I…

VOR LANGER ZEIT—long ago—a wanderer from over the mountains and across the sea found herself lost, deep in the dimmest wood. Not in the Black Forest along the Rhine, nor Grunewald Forest in Berlin, but instead the German Forest—der Deutsche Wald—the idolized wilderness of Romantic dreams. She had strayed into a metaphor. Landscapes were supposed to have horizons, but this prospect had none—only a hint of sky beyond the trees, with scant light penetrating the understory. True, it was wild, even menacing, but quietude presided over the adumbral tangle. The wanderer recognized the treasure she had sought, ill lit and subjective as it was. This singular feeling had no name in her own language, but she would later describe it, wistfully, as the somber clarity one achieves through seclusion among…

Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber When you think about the landscape of the contemporary fairy tale, Carter may not exactly fit into the sexless, fluffy role of Mother Goose, so per-haps we can instead think of her as “Mother Gooseflesh.” Her work is sensual, prickly, and full-throated. The Bloody Chamber is essential reading. Naomi Novik Spinning Silver This novel is closest to what I think of as “heart of genre”—it’s a fantasy with kings, queens, demons, and fairies, in which capable, hardworking women survive great danger by using their wits. There’s also a strong thread of romance, and I’m glad to include it here, because so much of the fairy-tale genre concerns itself with happy endings and true love. Helen Oyeyemi What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours All of…

ANDREA DEZSÖ’S ARTWORK addresses the lived experience, often taking a figurative and narrative approach to explore personal issues: women’s roles, authoritarianism, family, ideological and societal influence on the individual, relationships with nature, the body. In her work, art is both a tool of resistance and an education against oppression, as well as a deeply meaningful expression of human experience. Dezsö travels widely to conduct visual research, reading across disciplines including philosophy, literature, history, science, and, of course, fairy tales. “Tales are powerful instruments,” she told Maria Popova in an interview, “and should be wielded skillfully.” She is interested in representations of nature and the spirit world in folk traditions and related visual narratives and has traveled to meet and study with Indigenous and traditionally underrepresented artists and craftspeople in…

THERE ONCE WAS a woman from the mountain village of Breznitsa who was kidnapped by an Arabian prince. In the desert, she lay down her black feredjé cape, stepped on it, and recited a spell. This is how she landed back in her Balkan village wrapped in her flying feredjé. I can believe it. There is something bold about Breznitsa (the Birches), with its glinting minaret, bell-towered church, and women who wear the most beautiful—and meaningful—clothes in Europe. How these clothes have been wrenched from extinction—political terror of the Soviet variety, industrialization, emigration—is miraculous. At dusk, women in flower-printed shalvars (baggy trousers), bright headscarves, and embroidered socks walk home at the end of their shift. The Mesta Valley is a major tailoring hub in Europe. Six days a week, women…

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: the perfume of a sleeping child, the four rain-colored wings of the dragonfly, the hourglass on the black widow’s belly pouring blood into blood. We have the mineral-green innards of cucumber, rain-pocked snow, the plastic crucifix on the sick whore’s wall, sincerer than any cathedral. We have an alley of poplars and road-darkened feet, bats sipping water from a dwindling creek, black bread at a blue table by the sea. We have on this earth what makes life worth living, what makes it so queer and lovely and painful, moon on snake in the dying rosemary, and the young couple upstairs in bed undressing each other regardless. Teddy Macker lives with his family on a small farm in Carpinteria, California.…

Gather the grooves and tines in gray bouquets, line up the fragments to make a patience. Collective—a den of sticks, an alphabet, memorial. Crows calling from the cypress, a gray afternoon in November, ripe for dry leaves and shaken seedpods, I show my son how to place and so intend. We arrange pebbles, redwood, baby pine cones by color, the golds and siennas, or by size, elliptical, jagged, chevron, thread leaves onto the thinnest sticks, plant them a half inch into soil, a stand of halos. Or we twist them together with vine hang crooked mobiles back on the trees that will somehow last all winter. Learn the prints in soft fen mud of snail shell, wing-case, peppercorn. A riverstone and the smooth bowl of its impression. It calmed him…

O EAT AN OYSTER, it is best not to anthropomorphize. Forget for the moment that an oyster, too, has a mouth, a stomach, a heart. THE FIRST TIME I can remember eating an oyster I was drunk, standing on a picnic table, noting the beauty of the Skagit River. I remember the beauty, but I don’t remember the river. I remember the oyster. Huge, I’d later learn, and in cocktail sauce. The menu said it was from Samish Bay. The oyster was a shooter. I shot it. Then I chewed it. Cream brine, mineral melon, horseradish, tomato. I wasn’t supposed to chew, someone said. I kept chewing. The satisfaction I craved from the first moment of being satisfied was one I could only achieve with teeth. I swallowed the little…

ONCE THERE WAS a woman with a needle, and she needed the needle to be an oar. She felt it was, at its core, an oar, and had entered the world wrong-sized. On the edge of town was a wizard whose shelves were lined with spindly glass bottles packed with colorful potions. When the woman showed him the needle and asked for an oar, he nodded. I see your point. Do you? I do. It involved a sprinkling of powder, a nearly full moon, a lakeside, and her heart empty of fear. I can do that, she said, unsure. Empty, he said. Wipe it clean. Enter a world of change and strength. Then your plan is what? To go into the lake? I plan to leave town in this way.…

“THERE IS SOMETHING in this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children.” So said Maurice Sendak a few months before he died, his rheumy eyes drifting off to gaze into yet another space others are unable to see. He was the author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are, yes, but also twenty-one other books that took kids seriously, revolving, he once said, around children’s growth, survival, and fury. I have not brought a child into this world. I remain frighteningly clueless about what young children read. Considering the concept of fairy tales, I went down the road to my local library, where it happened to be circle time. The librarian led me around a loop of children singing “… the wheels on the bus…

GOING THROUGH a person’s book collection is too much like going through a person. It is highly intimate and cloaks both the going-through-er and the book owner in a certain vulnerability that I’m yet to encounter anywhere else. Very few people can look at my own bookshelves without me feeling an outsize, recoiling horror—as though the magic of the books will be diminished by eyes that cannot, do not, understand their pages. Yesterday found me staggering through a tiny Southwest Scottish town with banana boxes filled to their relatively shallow brims with books. Three of them, each heavier than the last, holding books that once belonged to my grandfather, who has not walked the earth for some two and a half years. His library has been waiting through three winters…