More to be added, and I’m sure I’m leaving something off by mistake! But I’ve been asked to post these, so here they are so far. Would that I could go everywhere I am asked to go—if only I had a robot double?

September 16
Antigone Books, Tucson, AZ Reading with Lydia Millet, our stories from Fantastic Women (Tin House Books)

October 14
Afternoon of Fairy Tales, University of Washington in Seattle

October 15
Reading at University of Washington in Bothell

October 24 – October 27
Minneapolis, MN (events TBA)

November 14
Reading with Dorianne Laux sponsored by the Poetry Translation Club at San Diego State University

November 15
Fairy-Tale Workshop for the Poetry Translation Club at SDSU
February 3 – 5
Grimm Legacies, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

February 16
Reading for the MFA Program for Poets & Writers, University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA

February 28
Lake Forest Literary Festival

March 1 – March 3
AWP, Chicago IL

April 1
Fairy-Tale Event, Louisiana State University

June 12
Sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation, San Francisco
Two Voices Reading Series (with Maria Tatar and Ilya Kaminsky!)

Some really wonderful news: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin 2010) has just been named a nominee for the World Fantasy Award. The other nominees are eclectic and interesting and wonderful. Such an honor, such a surprise. I can hardly believe it! This book was such a labor of love for fairy tales, and it’s just very exiting to see fairy tales appear on the ballot for such an incredible award. What a gift.

The full list is available here http://www.worldfantasy.org/awards/

And I paste it below. Congratulations, fellow nominees!

Winners will be announced at this year’s World Fantasy Convention, to be held October 27-30, in San Diego CA. I wonder if anyone wants to send me to it—hint, hint?

Best Novel
Zoo City, Lauren Beukes (Jacana South Africa; Angry Robot)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
The Silent Land, Graham Joyce (Gollancz; Doubleday)
Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada; Roc; Harper Voyager UK)
Redemption In Indigo, Karen Lord (Small Beer)
Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)

Best Novella
Bone and Jewel Creatures, Elizabeth Bear (Subterranean)
The Broken Man, Michael Byers (PS)
“The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon”, Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All-New Tales)
The Thief of Broken Toys, Tim Lebbon (ChiZine Publications)
“The Mystery Knight”, George R.R. Martin (Warriors)
“The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window”, Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Summer 2010)

Best Short Fiction
“Beautiful Men” , Christopher Fowler (Visitants: Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts)
“Booth’s Ghost”, Karen Joy Fowler (What I Didn’t See and Other Stories)
“Ponies”, Kij Johnson (Tor.com 11/17/10)
“Fossil-Figures”, Joyce Carol Oates (Stories: All-New Tales)
“Tu Sufrimiento Shall Protect Us”, Mercurio D. Rivera (Black Static 8-9/10)

Best Anthology
The Way of the Wizard, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Prime)
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, Kate Bernheimer, ed. (with Carmen Gimenez Smith) (Penguin)
Haunted Legends, Ellen Datlow & Nick Mamatas, eds. (Tor)
Stories: All-New Tales, Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio, eds. (Morrow; Headline Review)
Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, S.T. Joshi, ed. (PS)
Swords & Dark Magic, Jonathan Strahan & Lou Anders, eds. (Eos)

Best Collection
What I Didn’t See and Other Stories, Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer)
The Ammonite Violin & Others, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterranean)
Holiday, M. Rickert (Golden Gryphon)
Sourdough and Other Stories, Angela Slatter (Tartarus)
The Third Bear, Jeff VanderMeer (Tachyon)

Best Artist
Vincent Chong
Kinuko Y. Craft
Richard A. Kirk
John Picacio
Shaun Tan

Special Award, Professional
John Joseph Adams, for editing and anthologies
Lou Anders, for editing at Pyr
Marc Gascoigne, for Angry Robot
Stéphane Marsan & Alain Névant, for Bragelonne
Brett Alexander Savory & Sandra Kasturi, for ChiZine Publications

Special Award, Non-Professional

Stephen Jones, Michael Marshall Smith, & Amanda Foubister, for Brighton Shock!: The Souvenir Book Of The World Horror Convention 2010
Alisa Krasnostein, for Twelfth Planet Press
Matthew Kressel, for Sybil’s Garage and Senses Five Press
Charles Tan, for Bibliophile Stalker
Lavie Tidhar, for The World SF Blog

Also, here’s a little interview I did for Tin House upon publication, recently, of their very neat anthology Fantastic Women. So nice to be in there. I was asked to define fantastic writing for it so, of course, I said that “Fantastic writing has the affect of being fantastic.”

Kevin Brockmeier, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Timothy Schaffert, Maria Tatar and I discuss fairy tales for the Center for Fiction’s new magazine edited by author Dawn Raffel, The Literarian. This vibrant issue also includes work by Rick Moody, Ann Hood, Tiny May Hall, and others.

In the fairy-tale piece, beautifully accompanied by art by Nicoletta Ceccoli, you’ll find mention of Nabokov, George MacDonald’s The Light Princess, Disney’s Snow White, and Horace McCoy’s brilliant novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They. And Legoland! Fairy tales allow such great lines of flight.

From the conversation,

“A few weeks ago I was slowly floating along Fairy Tale Brook, the calmest, sleepiest ride at Legoland: A plastic boat winds through a miniature forest populated by huge animatronic versions of Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty and Aladdin, built entirely out of Lego. They were pretty strange. But this forest was full of the most beautiful mushrooms! Real ones. All different kinds and colors. They seemed to have sprung up by accident there in the theme park.”

–Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

Timothy Schaffert, author of the wonderful novel The Coffins of Little Hope, and guest editor of The Brown Issue of Fairy Tale Review, lovingly mentions The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, The Complete Tales of Merry Gold, and The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold here, in a post about forthcoming & in-progress books by Fairy Tale Review contributors and, er, its editor, me.

The Shirley Jackson Awards nominees have been announced, and I’m delighted that My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin, 2010) is on the list. The Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented at Readercon 22, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts (so near where I grew up!). Shirley Jackson is one of my favorite authors, so this feels pretty special.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with the wonderful writer Alissa Nutting, whose first story collection (Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls) was issued this year, selected by Ben Marcus for the Starcherone Prize.

Monkey Bicycle asked her, “As readers, I believe we always want to know what the authors we love are reading – so, what books have you been digging lately, loving perhaps?” Here is her lovely answer.

Kate Bernheimer’s newest novel The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold, just out from FC2. It is the third and final novel of an incredible trilogy (The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, The Complete Tales of Merry Gold), but each book stands alone (once you read them, you will understand how heartbreakingly/wonderfully true this sentence is, oh how each stands alone!! Deliciously, woefully alone). “Stands alone” is very much like something Lucy would say to euphemistically describe a brutal death (He stands alone now) or a victim of a stabbing (Afterword she stood alone in the corner ). Alone Lucy might be my favorite of the three. The wrenching comic disconnect between the tragedy of her experiences and the nonchalance of her unmoved, subjective description of them is incredible. It is brutally funny, and affectingly sad as only the best art can be. You’ll love it immediately. It lends itself to compulsive rereading. It’s like a bruise you can’t help but keep touching. There’s something very reassuring in the way that it hurts.

[Thank you, Alissa Nutting. KB]

June 19 – June 25
Juniper Summer Writing Institute
I am teaching a session called Tiny Tales in which each writer will produce one complete, miniature, stylized story, with special attention to the domestic mise-en-scene. Can’t wait to spend some time in beautiful Amherst, MA. Reading with Dara Wier!

June 12 – June 17
Nebraska Summer Writers Conference
I’m teaching a workshop called Everyday Magic. There may still be space. There are other workshops taught by Maud Casey, Daniel Handler–truly a wonderful line up! Readings every night, and so forth.

Thursday, April 7, 6-7 p.m.
Chicago Public Library/Chicago Humanities Festival, Evening of Modern Fairy Tales
Reading and discussion with Lydia Millet
(In conjunction with the One Book, One Chicago program, which is celebrating Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere this year)

Friday, April 8
Lecture on Fairy Tales
University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN

June 12 – June 17
Nebraska Summer Writers Conference
Enrollment is now open for my weeklong workshop, “Everyday Magic,” in which we will discuss fairy-tale techniques, and write fairy tales. This year’s conference, put together by novelist Timothy Schaffert, looks amazing.

June 19 – June 25
Juniper Summer Writing Institute
I will be teaching a workshop in which we will write fairy tales in the form of “miniature domestic myths,” and giving a reading at this lovely gathering at UMass, run by poet Lisa Olstein in the fairy-tale town of Amherst, MA.

Lisa Guidarini (Member, National Book Critics Circle; heroic librarian; and book reviewer) emerged as an early supporter of Horse, Flower, Bird and recently contacted me. She asked me lovely questions about the literary Fairy-Tale Revival I have been working on for many years. I am grateful for her kindness to the book, to fairy tales and to my longstanding fascination with the color pink which began with a pink shag rug in childhood and Andrew Lang’s Pink Fairy Book.

An excerpt of her thoughtful review:

Kate Bernheimer’s collection Horse, Flower, Bird contains eight fairy tales featuring women. In each the female protagonist is ultimately left alone, marginalized or contained in some way. A few choose isolation, and selective mutism, drawing into themselves as a means of self-preservation. The cages these characters choose are real, and often of their own making. Which isn’t to say there is no attempt to find happiness, but, rather, circumstances assume the same larger-than-life control that exists in fairy tales geared toward children . . . I hope readers who don’t consider fairy tales to be normal reading fare will consider giving this collection a try. You just may be surprised how well you enjoy them.

A chapter from The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold, recently published, has been made into a comic (“The Ladies’ Room,” which is based on a Chinese fairy tale). I love seeing the writing like this and posted it, and wrote about the influence of comics on my work, here.

Katy Waldman of Slate’s Doublex.com selected My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me as “Book of the Week” late last month. I am so glad she writes that the editorship “aspires to a kind of lawlessness” and succeeds because the stories are “gorgeously stitched.” It is such a nice gift, when a reviewer praises the exact effect you spent years working toward on a book. Here’s an excerpt from the review:

Whether you’re secretly horrified to learn how many taboos have been packaged between “once upon a time” and “happily ever after,” or whether you’re the kind of adult who will happily snatch any chance to revisit that terrifying, enchanted terrain, you‘ll be bewitched by the new anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. The 40 authors that Kate Bernheimer has gathered to rewrite and modernize classic fairy tales are experts at collating darkness and wonder.

Honored that Horse, Flower, Bird is reviewed in Dalkey Archive’s Review of Contemporary Fiction (and, appropriately, in “The Failure Issue”). Here is an excerpt from the review:

In “A Star Wars Tale,” two sisters enact the age-old battle between good and evil in modern masks as “the Princess Leia sister” is confined in a pantry by “the Darth Vader sister” and threatened with torture. With only two sisters, the black hat must also play the hero, and so the “Luke Skywalker sister often forgot whether to be tender or mean, having to juggle so many roles.” It’s a finely written story indeed that can simultaneously serve as a comic family scene and hint at the corrupting effects of the ongoing war on terror, and it’s a fine writer who can demonstrate so perfectly how a primal form maintains currency in any era.

Room 220 of New Orleans ran this very, very nice article before my reading at The Columns last week. A very appropriate setting for a fairy-tale reading; “Pretty Baby” was filmed there–definitely a fairy-tale film. I’ve never seen anyone take note of the fact that obviously, the photographer, Belloc, is named after the French author Hilaire Belloc of the incredible Cautionary Tales for Children. From a Belloc verse: “And when your prayers complete the day/Darling, your little tiny hands/Were also made, I think, to pray/For men that lose their fairylands.”

What a great city, what a great audience, what a lovely hotel. The 1718 Reading Series is jointly sponsored by Loyola, UNO, and Tulane, and I urge those of you who live in New Orleans to support it however you can.

Thanks to the Victoria Advocate for the illustration accompanying their article about my reading at UHV last week. The image definitely has elevated me in my daughter’s opinion! (“Can you really fly?”)

A heartfelt year-end thank you to the many readers who showed incredible support for fairy tales by taking note of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me and Horse, Flower, Bird in 2010, along with other new fairy-tale titles.

With your support, fairy tales will continue to flourish as a glittering art form into the 21st century. I will work on updating this news page in early 2011, but in the meantime, here are some new links, for which I am so grateful.

So nice to be mentioned in a round-up by NYRB Classics (a heroic imprint) of 2010 Staff Favorites

NPR, “Indie Booksellers Pick 2010 Favorites”

Storyville, a clever app for the iPhone and iPad, publishes “Whitework”

Brain Pickings “picks” My Mother She Killed Me!

The Tucson Weekly lavishly praises area contributors to My Mother She Killed Me

The Paris Review shows some fairy-tale love!

The Globe and Mail publishes a very thorough and engaging review of My Mother She Killed Me

January Magazine chooses Horse, Flower, Bird as a Best Book of 2010.

The Lobster and Canary lovingly takes note of Horse, Flower, Bird and its “minatory” nature. In 2011, I want to use the word minatory more often–it’s one of my favorite words.

Contrary Magazine publishes a thoughtful, moving review of Horse, Flower, Bird and implores readers to “come back to fairy tales.”

Lovely writer and faithful BookCourt bookseller Emma Straub praises My Mother She Killed Me

WORD Brooklyn showed incredible support for My Mother She Killed Me all year, as has the great Skylight Books

Author Jeff Vandermeer recommends Horse, Flower, Bird to readers on the Amazon Omnivoracious blog, as a gift for the “imaginative, the curious, and the weird”–definitely endlessly nicer to be called weird by the likes of Jeff Vandermeer than by junior high “friends”!

Sweetly, Horse, Flower, Bird made it onto the New Pages’ Book Review Editor Gina Meyer’s personal Year-End List with my own favorite 2010 book, Patti Smith’s fairy-tale-like memoir Just Kids.

There are many more to thank, and more news will be posted in time. For now, may your early 2011 be filled with wonder.

From Maria Tatar’s elegant fairy-tale blog, Breezes from Wonderland:

Laura Miller weighs in on Salon.com about the NBA’s exlusion of retellings of folk-tales, myths, and fairy-tales. I liked her illustration but I think Maxfield Parrish’s princess contemplating a frog works even better to alert readers to her subject. Kate Bernheimer and I are hoping that the NBA Committee will respond to our petition soon.

Bernheimer and Tatar point out that the NBA rules don’t exclude “retellings of the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays,” or, for that matter, retellings of any other literary form. The singling out of fairy and folk tales belies a long-standing uneasiness with the form, its vaguely disreputable air. The fairy tale plays havoc with the premium we moderns place on originality.

It was such a pleasure spending time in the studio talking to Lynn Neary and Neil LaBute about fairy tales. Our segment aired on November 7, and is available here. I can’t help but admit to loving the teaser some NPR-affiliates are using: “Kate Bernheimer is a fairy-tale detective on the lookout for bread crumbs from old stories in everything she reads.”

I am so honored to be interviewed about Horse, Flower, Bird by critic Eryn Loeb here. The headline, “Champion of The Fairy Tale,” is really lovely indeed. It’s such an honor to serve up fairy tales, to help preserve them.

It was quite a challenge to review a 600+ page book about a man who has written thousands of pages of fiction I so admire in 700 words, but I loved doing it for Roald Dahl nevertheless here. Something I couldn’t fit into the word count, but which readers might want to know: one of Dahl’s most celebrated grown-up literary works, the horror story “Pig,” is clearly a retelling of “How Children Played Butcher with One Another,” one of the gruesome fairy tales retold, more than a 100 years earlier, by the Brothers Grimm. Dahl devoured fairy tales as a young reader. You can find “How Children Played Butcher with One Another” and other gruesome and beautifully translated traditional fairy tales in The Grimm Reader by Maria Tatar. Dahl’s “Pig” is a fascinating retelling of a fascinating retelling: a great example of how, through fairy tales, the old becomes new and new becomes old, collapsing time into storybook beauty and horror.

I love the series of questions that the Book Brahmin interview poses to writers.

To the National Book Foundation,

We write as strong supporters of all that the National Book Foundation does for American letters. But we are also puzzled about one point in the eligibility guidelines for the prestigious National Book Award. Currently the Foundation’s website states that “collections and/or retellings of folk-tales, myths, and fairy-tales are not eligible,” an exclusion that applies to the categories of both Fiction (for adults) and Young People’s Literature. Yet this body of literature is arguably one of the greatest literary influences on a vast number of contemporary American writers. Might the National Book Foundation reconsider this point in its guidelines?

Under the guidelines as stated above, John Updike’s 1964 National Book Award winner, the novel Centaur, would actually have been ineligible as it retells multiple classical myths. There are other examples of retellings among the wonderful books you have honored. In fact, we believe that the National Book Foundation already recognizes and embraces the literary value of retellings. Removing the exclusion would simply more accurately represent the Foundation’s actual practice, which represents a welcome appreciation of this iconic literary art form. Also, it seems that the National Book Foundation intends to welcome formal diversity; as such, there is no exclusion for “retellings of the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays.”

In changing its guidelines the National Book Foundation will take the opportunity to help preserve the enduring tradition of fairy tales for future generations of readers. While scholars cannot always trace fairy tales to single sources, new versions of these magical narratives are indeed literary works in their own right. In turn these newer versions help bring attention to a very old and diverse body of work, now fading from view. To acknowledge the value of fairy tales, folk tales and myths as they are appropriated, adapted, revised, fractured, and retold seems in line with the National Book Foundation’s overall mission.

In sum, we would be delighted to see the National Book Foundation change its National Book Award guidelines to allow retellings of fairy tales, folk tales, and myths. We would be glad to consult with you more on this matter, and truly appreciate your consideration of this request. We look forward to hearing from you with your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Maria Tatar
John L. Loeb Professor of Folklore Mythology and Germanic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University
Author, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood and The Annotated Brothers Grimm

Kate Bernheimer
Writer in Residence & Associate Professor, University of Louisiana in Lafayette
Author, Horse, Flower, Bird; editor, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales; and founder and editor, Fairy Tale Review

A few ways to join in the cause: ‘like’ the Facebook page called “Petition to the National Book Foundation”; leave a comment here saying you support the petition; or reach us directly by writing to fairytaleappeal [at] gmail.com

The New Yorker‘s book blog The Book Bench beautifully, wonderfully recommends My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me here.

Rachel Phipps of Venus Zine has written a lovely review of Horse, Flower, Bird saying “the entire collection amounts to a beautiful little book of fairy tales meant for grown-ups.” I especially love her closing, as these are some of my favorite writers and makes the book sounds like a magical seance: ”Horse, Flower, Bird is what I think might happen if Emily Dickinson, Hans Christian Anderson, and Emily Bronte all set out to write a bunch of fairy tales together. And it actually works beautifully.”

The heroic David Gutowski of Largehearted Boy was kind enough to include me in his Book Notes series. You can find the play list I wrote for Horse, Flower, Bird here.

Around a year ago, I was so happy to be invited to write the foreword to a collection of Nicoletta Ceccoli’s incredible art in a book called Beautiful Nightmares. The book is now in print and is it ever gorgeous! You can view sample pages, including my foreword in French and in English, here. Nicoletta Ceccoli illustrated my first children’s book, The Girl in the Castle inside the Museum. (When I first saw the artwork she had done for that book, I nearly passed out from bliss.) I wrote my foreword as an embellished collage of Nicoletta’s own words from interviews she has done over the years with art magazines along with some imagery from a beautiful, pink-hued photograph she sent me of objects that inspire her in her studio. It is an homage to her work. Though we never have met, we continue to exchange emails about art and loneliness and stories. One of my dreams is to meet her in Italy someday, and to collaborate with her again. You can link to buy Beautiful Nightmares here. It is published as part of the cool Art Pop project Venusdea, established by the incredibly talented artist Barbara Canepa (Sky Doll).

Baltimore City Paper says of Horse, Flower, Bird: ”By taking up residence in the main female characters’ hearts and souls and by looking out from their eyes, these stories give others a glimpse of not just what she sees of what’s taken place, but what she thinks of it all . . . the stories in Horse, Flower, Bird are melancholy—as are Rikki Ducornet’s accompanying illustrations—but also as bright and sprightly as a little caged bird.” Full review here.

Wednesday, December 1

8:00 p.m., Poetry Center/University of Arizona Prose Series

The Contemporary Fairy Tale: A Reading and Discussion along with Kathryn Davis, Lydia Millet, and Joy Williams

Friday, December 3

8:00 p.m. Poetry Center/Alumni Series

University of Arizona

Reading with poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson