Hello, amazing peoples! We’re readying for a celebration. After some bumps in the road, it’s time to get together and have a party. So, we’re hosting a small challenge. Y’all, this is for authors and readers, and we have a fun prize to commemorate all this love. First, the prize. We’re offering two tickets to…
Tag: AHEA
Hoodwinked: Tricking students into having fun with fairy tales by Alisha Costanzo
When I was a teaching assistant, I taught an essay called the Adaptation/Variation, which allowed students to choose a text and change it in form, in character, in style, in any variety of means with one task in mind—interpretation. Most often, students chose fairy tales because they were familiar from their youth and had seen…
After the Happily Ever After Cupcakes! by Amanda Iles
In celebration of the release of Transmundane Press’s fractured fairy tale anthology, After the Happily Ever After, here is a recipe for delicious dark chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese icing. Ingredients Cupcakes 4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped ¼ cup dark chocolate cocoa (I used Hershey’s Special Dark) 1 ¼ cups boiling water ¾ cup cake…
Magic, Adventure, and Wonder: launching the After the Happily Ever After anthology by Anthony S. Buoni
AFTER THE HAPPILY EVER AFTER: A COLLECTION OF FRACTURED FAIRY TALES is the third anthology that TRANSMUNDANE PRESS has produced. What started as a nagging “what if…” question that we tossed out into the sea of creators quickly mushroom clouded into our most complicated and challenging project to date. Based on our previous efforts—DISTORTED and…
The Values that Transcend Fairy Tales by Jaclyn Adomeit
When I began to look at the way different cultures told fairy tales, I came to the task with a fair amount of bias. I was fully expecting to find that ingenuity was cherished in western tales, and obedience favoured in the east, but that was not the case. Fairy tales from all cultures have…
Fairy Tales My Father Never Told Me by Dimitra Nikolaidou
“Why won’t you read me Cinderella?” “I have another story, one you’ve never heard…” Long after I had learned to read myself and stopped requesting bedtime stories, my dad let slip the reason he never bought me Cinderella or Snow White or any other classic fairy tale: he was angered by the fact that the…
The Language of Fairy Tales by M. T. DeSantis
It’s often said of Shakespeare’s classics by many modern readers—his stories are timeless, but the language is inaccessible. The same could be said for the original versions of fairy tales. Writing, like any other part of a culture, has evolved. If the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen picked up a modern novel, they’d share…
“Your Best Fairy Tale” by Claudia Quint
Fairy tales will never die. In the passage of time, we push them to the background. They fade from memory as we age, forgotten. While tucking a child into bed, we are faced with that timeless request to keep the dark at bay: “Tell us a story.” And in an instant, we are transported back…
The Tylwyth Teg of Wales by Tom Williams
Dip deep enough into the folk history of any European country and you will find stories about another folk who share our natural world. A race who must be respected and who are best avoided, the Fairie. The Welsh Tylwyth Teg, or Fair Family, have much in common with the fairies of other cultures but…
Conquering our Dragons by Sati Benes Chock
“Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” -Neil Gaiman, Coraline (paraphrasing J.K. Chesterton) Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was a little girl obsessed with princesses. She drew beautiful maidens wearing shimmering gowns…
Animal Spouses: Beastly Husbands and Monstrous Wives by Clara Lawryniuk
Fairy tales are an old and influential form of cultural transmission. They reveal to us what people throughout the ages have deemed significant, what ideas they wanted to preserve and communicate. By examining fairy tales, not only can we learn a great deal about human nature, we can uncover beliefs we hold about each other….
Don’t Cross Tinkerbell by Lillian Csernica
The loving, helpful fairy godmother is largely a figment of Disney’s imagination. If you take a good look at the original fairy tales, fairy godmothers appear most often in stories written by the French précieuses, the best-known being Madame d’Aulnoy. These fairy godmothers are not the grandmotherly rescuer of Disney’s Cinderella, nor are they the…
