You are invited to The Australian Fairy Tale Society their first-ever storytelling concert – Stories of Light and Love! Come along on February 22nd, 2024 at 7:30 AEDT on Zoom to celebrate 10 years of the AFTS. Hear stories of welcome firelight and new dawns. Tales of what happens when there’s no light in the deep dark wood… Where loves are found, lost, and muddled!
This 90-minute concert will be welcoming and inclusive of everyone, and better still – it’s free!
Do gay fairy tales exist? How about bisexual fairy tales? Trans fairy tales? Asexual fairy tales? If you did a survey of the most well-known fairy tales you’d answer no. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. My name is Em Chandler (she/they), I’m currently the Vice-President of the AFTS, and I adore the odd, dusty, and overlooked; especially when it comes to fairy tales. And I’m here to tell you queer fairy tales do exist.
“But if queer fairy tales exist, where are they? What are they?”, I hear you ask…
Well, that is another story for another day. And I promise I will tell it to you. Just wait until June.
For as long as there have been stories, storytellers have been reimagining and interpreting those same stories. That includes queer storytellers. As here in Victoria (my home state) it is soon to be Midsumma Festival – our annual LQBTQIA+ festival, let’s have a look at a fraction of the retellings made so far.
English storyteller and author, Kevin Walker (he/him), has a delightful volume called Queer Folk Tales. Drawing from his own repertoire of stories, he adapts and reimagines queer folk tales, fairy tales, legends and myths. I love revisiting The Blue Rose in this collection. It’s a beautiful story about love and truly seeing someone, so I’m surprised this is the first queer version I have come across! If you know of others, let me know. (Though despite popular belief, the original is not Chinese but a 19th century literary fairy tale. But it’s been shared so much as a ‘folktale’ I wonder whether that really matters now…).
Everything Under the Moon is absolutely beautiful anthology only published last year. And best of all, over 50% of the authors are Australian! Edited by Michael Earp (they/them)*, like Queer Folk Tales above, some stories are set in once upon a time, others modern day, some even science fiction but each is delight to behold. I was kindly sent a review copy (which I received on behalf of the AFTS). A full review should appear in our next E-Zine, but don’t wait until then – I cannot recommend it enough. The book is physically beautiful, and the tales even more so. Picking one favourite is an impossible task, but… If The Shoe Fits by Lili Wilkinson and Moonfall by Alison Evans are still dancing in my head after the most recent reread. Wonders await no matter of these magic beans you chose.
Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins is a collection of thirteen interconnected tales by Emma Donoghue (she/her) exploring Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast and more with a decidedly queer and feminist lens. I adore that a character from each proceeding story becomes the narrator of the next in this collection. Each new fairy tale adding depth and complexity to the next, and vice versa.
But we’re not limited to short stories, there’s novels too. Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron (she/her) takes the Cinderella tale we’re most familiar and says, “what if it was true, and what would the world look like 200 years later”? Dystopian, fast paced, and a wickedly good re-examination of the tale we all know. One thing I love especially is that Bayron hasn’t set out to say the Cinderella narrative is bad – but how the narrative can be twisted and used by those in power.
The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel. Tiến Phong is a second generation American Vietnamese teenager, and its through fairy tales he helps his mother learn English. But he’s also struggling to tell his mum about his sexuality. So, fairy tales step in once again. It’s a stunning narrative with gorgeous illustrations, and fantastic use of colour too.
There’s theatre too! The Story Keepers is a play/emerging children’s theatre ensemble that retell and perform overlooked fairy tales, especially queer fairy tales. Yes, this is a shameless plug, because I’m the director and writer! Three fairy tales, none of which you will have heard of, from Iceland, Germany, and Catalan, and all funny, enchanting and queer. Perfect for everyone 5+. If you’re Victoria based, we’ve got shows on February 3rd and 4th for Midsumma. Details and tickets here: https://www.midsumma.org.au/story-keepers. And while I’m doing a shameless plugs, I’ve written my own queer retelling of Cinderella – The Midnight Princess – and its been included in a new anthology, Out-Side: Queer Words & Art from Regional Victoria (It’s being launch on February 11th https://www.facebook.com/events/1104647510583022).
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This list is barely the start, a needle in a haystack of diverse, brilliant, wildly different approaches to rediscover, reimagine, and reclaim fairy tales for queer people. There are a thousand and one queer fairy tales to explore, and I strongly encourage that you do. If you want a helping hand delving into queer folktales shared and collected from the oral tradition, I’m happy to give it to you. In June.
Do you think you can wait??
* For more information about the editor of “Everything Under the Moon”, ‘Take me to your reader’ will be interviewing Michael Earp on 24 February 2024.
The Australian Fairy Tale Society has launched many projects, events, and products, but the bones of what we do lie within the five fairy tales we explore in depth each year. In the last ten years (due to a few twinned investigations) we have actually looked at closer to sixty stories. For a long time we were content to look at what you might call the ‘Fairy Tale Greatest Hits’ – Hansel & Gretel, Cinderella, Jack & the Beanstalk and so on – but then in 2019 we tackled our first Australian fairy tale and from then on we have settled into a pattern of
One Grimms
One Australian
One well known European (Andersen, Perrault, Arabian Nights etc)
One obscure European
One non-European
which has pushed us to explore the folkloric and literary heritage of many cultures, and continue to re-evaluate what a fairy tale is, and how stories from around the world connect with us. If you want to immerse yourself in the fruits of our research, you can find all the Bibliographies and Points to Ponder for those sixty stories in our Members Only section.
Without doubt, finding and researching the Australian fairy tales is the biggest challenge. There aren’t that many, with the two periods of fruitfulness occurring right now, and in the 1870s to 1920s, when what the writers called fairy tales were usually fairy stories anyway, which have attracted very little scholarly interest until recent years. And let’s not ignore the diprotodon in the room – the horrific Aboriginal misrepresentation, and simultaneous cultural appropriation, that is present in every story from that early period. The hardest of all was the first story we looked at, ‘The Magic Gun’, while the most fun was Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, especially once we saw the sexual meanings underlying the character dynamics.
The final two fairy tales for this financial year include our Aussie tale (usually done over the summer when you should have more reading time) as a rare example of an original Australian fairy tale. Published in 1999, just when Juliet Marillier and Sophie Masson (both now AFTS members) were beginning their internationally-acclaimed work in retelling fairy tales. Winner of the Miles Franklin Award, so you know the writing will be beautiful, the big question will be –
is it really a fairy tale?
Our April fairy tale, ‘The Stolen Bairn and the Sidhe’, builds on our November ‘Elves’ investigation. It is a Scottish or Irish story of a baby who is taken by the sidhe (faerie) into the underworld and the mother who goes after her child in a quest in the spirit of Orpheus and Eurydice, or Tam Lin. A perfect story to lead up to Mothers’ Day.
Our 2024- 2025 financial year starts in June with another five stories. This year the theme emerges as rather beastly, in contrast to all the brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers we’ve dealt with over the last year.
‘The Ebony Horse’ (Arabian Nights) is a grand adventure, starting with a sultan so obsessed with gadgets that he is lured into handing over his daughter in exchange for a mechanical, flying horse. His son objects, takes the horse, and is swept away to another land and another princess in need. (Aladdin is the only other Arabian Nights story we’ve done so far.)
In contrast, we have the Russian story of ‘The Little Humpbacked Horse’ where Ivan the foolish grants freedom to a remarkable horse and wins instead the little humpbacked horse who helps him face the three impossible tasks set by the Tsar. This is our third Russian story (‘Vasilisa the Fair’, and ‘Tsarevitch Ivan, the Firebird, and the Grey Wolf’) and was made especially popular in Russia by a Pepita ballet.
These are the stories we’ll be exploring leading up to Horses’ Birthday on 1 August.
In September, we have the great Chinese love story (one of the Four Great Chinese Folktales) of ‘Lady White Snake’ where a mortal man and a snake spirit in the form of a beautiful woman, confront life, death, transformation, jealousy, and pills of immortality, so that they can be together.
Snakes again in November (I told you it was a beastly year) with the Grimms’ story of ‘Three Snake Leaves’. As soon as the princess makes a condition of marriage that if she dies, her new husband must be buried with her, you know that marriage isn’t going to equal Happily Ever After for these two. For a while it seems as if this is going to be another tale of deathless love, but a sea journey brings another threat to life, true love, and immortality. Will this be a good Halloween story?
As the Keynote Speaker at our 2016 conference, Into the Bush: Its Beauty and Its Terror, Jackie Kerin led us through many paths following the many traces of the bunyip in the overlapping cultures of our land…and so, at long last, we look at the very simple story of ‘The Bunyip’ as it appears in Andrew (and Nora) Lang’s Brown Fairy Book, as a starting point for all this creature has come to represent.
The tale of ‘Kovlad: The Lost Child’, our first-ever Slavic story (though they are closely related to Russian fairy tales), starts with a much-longed-for child, a taboo that is (of course) broken, and the haunting that follows. Don’t worry! There are three sisters who will try to break
the curse.
Our final story of ‘The Glass Coffin’ by the Grimms might
recall Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, with a beautiful maiden waiting to be liberated from her coffin by love (a gender flip of ‘The Lost Child’), but this one also features a poor tailor lured down into the depths, and a battle
between a stag and a boar.
With every story we investigate we learn more about the language of fairy tales, the meanings that are built into their imagery, and the relationship between written and oral tales around the world. May this coming year bring you ever more stories to appreciate, understand, and be inspired by.
Once Upon a Time…
(in June 2013 to be exact) I posted on my FaceBook page about a workshop I had just delivered at the English Teachers Association conference in Brisbane about adapting fairy tales into Australian stories, and Reilly McCarron, (also an Accredited Storyteller with the NSW Storytelling Guild) wrote back so enthusiastically that within a few sentences we were agreeing that what we both wanted was an Australian Fairy Tale Society – and since it didn’t exist, it was up to us to start it.
This happened at an extraordinarily fruitful time in Reilly’s life. She was enriching her work as a professional Storyteller, by playing her harp and singing,
was in the middle of doing her folklore qualification through the Open University, and now she was ready to create a new Society. But when we met at the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney in August I discovered her fruitfulness had extended to creating a small human – another claim on her time. But we didn’t stop. We both just continued to give our all alongside all the other things in our lives.
Our first step was to create a FaceBook page – and our first surprise was how popular it was.
We realised we were riding the zeitgeist. The AFTS came into being at exactly the time people wanted it to exist. 2012 had seen international excitement over the bicentenary of the Grimms’ first edition of Kinder-und Hausmärchen Children’s and Household Tales. Dr Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, Dr Belinda Calderone, and Catherine Snell had been running Monash Fairy Tale Salon symposiums since 2012. (Belinda and Catherine later became Presidents of the AFTS, as did Louisa John Krol, who was also heavily involved with the Salons.)
Front L-R: Belinda Calderone, Dr Danielle Wood
Centre: Roslyn Quin, Jackie Kerin, Louisa John-Krol, Suzann Sandow
Back: Toby Eccles, Anna McCormack
https://storytellingguildvic.blogspot.com/2014/07/transporting-tales-fairy-tale-symposium.html
Sarah Gibson had created her multi-media platform, Re-Enchantment, and Kate Forsyth, Sophie Masson, and Juliet Marillier were writing fairy tale re-tellings that remain international bestsellers. People were keen to find out more.
I honestly can’t remember whether we wanted to establish AFTS as a business in order to hold conferences, or whether we needed to hold a conference in order to get the Society started.
But they both involved a lot of building-the-plane-while-we-were-flying-it, obtaining advice from the Department of Fair Trading and Beyond Bank, so that in October 2013 we got our ABN and Registered Business Name – and thus, the Australian Fairy Tale Society was officially born ten years ago this month.
Money challenges were huge – it took two years before the Society could pay me back the money I had advanced – and that was even with the support of our forty-two Founding Members who paid membership fees twice within twelve months, and the Pozible crowd funding project that Reilly organised, using her own website for the AFTS until we could start our own.
Regan Kubecek contributed her artwork to the Pozible campaign
and created our beautiful logo which gave our Society our signature colours of blue, green, gold, and red.
By early 2014 we had attracted some ‘star’ members – Kate Forsyth, Sophie Masson, Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar – as well as Members interested in being on the Committee, which was absolutely essential to the Society continuing to thrive.
And finally it all came together on the June long weekend 2014 when he had our Inaugural Conference in Paddington Uniting Church in Sydney – and at last we could meet each other.
And that was the real beginning of us becoming a community.
Jenni Cargill Strong, Thang D Luong, Kate Forsyth, Rebecca Anne DoRozario, Jackie Kerin.
9 June 2014
Video courtesy Jackie Kerin
Jo Henwood
The Australian Fairy Tale Society is thrilled to announce that the winner of the 2023 AFTS Award for outstanding contributions to the field of fairy tales in Australia is Shirley Way.
Shirley Way has contributed immensely to the fairy tale community in so many ways over so many years – as former eZine editor, initiator of the podcast series (to be found on the AFTS youtube channel), member of the Brisbane Fairy Tale Ring, hardworking, skilled, and insightful Committee member, co-organiser of the AFTS conferences in 2020 and 2023, as well as captain of the hugely successful 2022 conference in Brisbane.
Congratulations Shirley!
Shirley’s co-nominees were:
Sophie Masson
www.sophiemassonauthor.com
This year, Sophie – with previous winner Lorena Carrington – launched a small indie publishing company, Pardalote Press, to get their magical stories and artworks out into the world.
Sophie’s book ‘French Fairy Tales’, which is illustrated by Lorena, inspired musician/composer Reilly McCarron to produce a CD, ‘Il était une fois’ (Once upon a time). And these three AFTS members are part of our anthology, ‘South of the Sun: Australian fairy tales for the 21st century’.
Sophie’s tales and passion for fairy tales have inspired art, music and readers around the world. Her body of work includes ‘French Fairy Tales’, ‘Satin’, ‘The Crystal Heart’, ‘Scarlet in the Snow’, ‘Moonlight and Ashes’, ‘The Firebird’, and ‘Hunter’s Moon’.
Spike Deane
www.spikedeane.com
An award-winning mixed media artist, specialising in cast glass, Spike draws much of her inspiration from fairy tales, folklore and mythology. Her prolific contributions to Australian fairy tale culture span from the old forests of Europe to engaging with chatbot, and an array of beautiful art in between.
Spike has volunteered her time, energy and skills as the AFTSeZine graphics editor since 2016.
2023 AFTS Award for Inspiration and Contribution to Australian Fairy Tale Culture
At the 2023 Sydney Conference, we will again honour, by popular choice the person who has most inspired and contributed to Australian fairy tale culture.
To date, we’ve recognised the very different achievements of Belinda Calderone (2017), Dr Kate Forsyth (2018), Dr Robyn Floyd (2019), Lorena Carrington (2020), Louisa-John Krol (2021) and Jo Henwood (2022). Their names are engraved in our permanent Award, created by Spike Deane.
For 2023, we’re asking for your nominations, from which the finalists will be selected based on their body of work. This will have enduring significance due to its a) originality, b) influence, c) beauty or quality, d) depth of insight and breadth of scope, e) contribution to understanding of Australian fairy tales.
More details about the Award, and previous winners and finalists are here.
2023 Bursary – travel to the NSW conference!
One AFTS bursary is on offer to a current member, who needs assistance to attend our Sydney conference. The bursary will cover a) transport and accommodation costs to $400, and b) a ‘fairy godmother/father’ as conference mentor.
Please note that the bursary holder is responsible for their own registration cost as detailed here. All best. We look forward to seeing you in Sydney!
Dr Michelle J. Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University, where she teaches fairy tales and children’s literature.
She has published research on Australian fairy tales and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in the Victorian era, as well as guest-editing an issue of Marvels & Tales. Michelle is currently writing chapters about fairy tales in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific for The Routledge Companion to Fairy Tales and The Cambridge History of Children’s Literature in English.
She is the author of three academic books and six edited collections on children’s literature and Victorian literature. Two co-edited books will be published in the coming year: Literary Cultures and the Nineteenth-Century Childhoods (Palgrave) and The Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals, for which she has written a chapter on fairy tales in St. Nicholas magazine.
EXTENDED TO 11 MARCH!
Our 2023 conference will be a live event, in Sydney on the weekend of the 24th and 25th June.
We are calling for any and all submissions relating to an Australian interpretation of a fairy tale. Submissions may be sent, by 11pm AEDT, March 11, by using the form via the bit.ly address in the poster.
EDIT: Submissions have now closed. We anticipate releasing the program and registration details in early April.
Salonline is a new webseries telling the stories of our stories in a whole new way.
Watch the subversive fairy tale writer of the French Salons meet to discuss their scandalous lives and share their latest stories – and read the book, now available on Amazon and Apple Books.
Created between August 2021 and September 2022, this original webseries communicates the stories of the origins of the fairy tale genre in the French Fairy Tale Salons of the late 17th century through the fictionalised dramatic lives of the most significant Salonnières: D’Aulnoy, Murat, and De La Force, and their performances of fairy tales they wrote.
Catch up with both well-known and little-known fairy tales and behind-the-scenes gossip on the Salonline AFTS You Tube channel.
Meet our Salonnières –
Alyssa Curtayne – storyteller, Ring Leader of the Perth Fairy Tale Ring, and academic, currently researching Charlotte Rose Caumont De La Force for her Master of Arts in Creative Writing at Deakin University. Alyssa re-enacts De La Force’s romantic life and performs some of her stories – Green and Blue, Fairer Than a Fairy, The Good Woman, and most famously, Persinette, the story which became known as Rapunzel.
Jo Henwood – storyteller, tour guide, and President, Ring Maiden and co-founder of the Australian Fairy Tale Society, is a museum theatre creative, and workshop leader on literature, history, creative writing, folklore, and storytelling. As Henriette-Julie de Murat, most scandalous of the scandalous Salonnières, she performs The Savage, The Pig King, The Isle of Magnificence, and The Turbot, re-telling these stories, just as Murat retold stories she found in Straparola.
Eliane Morel – writer, actor, producer, and singer of cabaret and opera, continues to perform her award-winning show ‘Disenchanted: A Cabaret of Twisted Fairy Tales’ which plays with the character of Marie Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, the Baroness d’Aulnoy, the leader of the fairy tale writers. Eliane performs some D’Aulnoy stories – The Ram, The White Cat (which you might know from the ballet of Sleeping Beauty), and Belle-Belle, which the AFTS explored in September 2020.
The Salonline webseries, edited by our website Guardian, Kathy Smart, is already available on YouTube for free viewing.
And very soon, an eBook full of biographies, timelines, essays, and the retellings of these forgotten fairy tales, illustrated with art by Debra Phillips and with graphic design by Devahuti Chahlia, will be for sale from this website.
We hope you enjoy this magnificent fairy tale offering from the Australian Fairy Tale Society.
UPDATE: Deadline extended to 13 December, 2022
Our next members’ exclusive eZine, ‘Magical Transformations’, will be published in March 2023.
Each issue contains works as varied as short stories, essays, poetry, interviews, Fairy Tale Ring reports and visual art. Your fairy tale related news, events, and releases (e.g. albums, books) are as welcome as original lyrics, music and audio performances – in fact any medium we can reflect in print!
Be sure to follow the members’ only submission guidelines and e-mail to austfairytaleszine@gmail.com by November 29.
In anticipation and warmest regards: Melanie, Patsy and Spike; the AFTS eZine Editorial Troupe.
Australian Fairy Tale Society 