Weightless Books

Contributors to The Aquamarine Issue include Kim Addonizio, Joyelle McSweeney, Martine Bellen, Naoko Awa, Sandy Florian, Terese Svoboda, Tara Goedjen, Sam Martone, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, and many others.

Editor’s Note

The Aquamarine Issue is the fifth anniversary issue of Fairy Tale Review, and is appropriately its most oceanic, its most aesthetically diverse, issue to date. I often refer to my own method of identifying fairy tales as my sensing (through feeling and through close reading) what I call a fairy-tale feel.

The fairy-tale-ness of a work. I experienced fairy tales in every contribution you will find in The Aquamarine Issue. I felt a fairy-tale pulse. I have been thinking, lately, in terms of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of affect. Applying his concept of affect to new fairy-tale literature, one sees how these works may be identified atmospherically, scientifically, telepathically: in certain works, fairy tales are water and air. In Gilles Deleuze, author Claire Colebrook illustrates this concept of affect as such: “A horror film presents horror; for beyond the fear of the characters of the viewer there is just a sense of the horror which the film draws upon. The film is not about horror, or a representation of horror; it is a sense or feeling of horror which we may or may not enter. Before the viewer or character is actually horrified we view within the affect or milieu of horror in general.”

This Deleuzian notion of affect helps explain the range of writing that you’ll find here, as in every issue of Fairy Tale Review. The works are not about fairy tales, or a representation of fairy tales; it is a sense or feeling of fairy tales which we may or may not enter. In true fairy-tale fashion, I borrow her words: “Before the reader or character is actually enchanted, we view within the affect or milieu of fairy tales in general.”

Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers. The mind reels at their influence, omnipresence, phosphorescence: like a star or a planet, they shine, necessary. Like the sea, threatened now by our changing climate, fairy tales, too, are in danger today—often forgotten by grown-up people afraid of wonder—and therefore endangered.

For me what also contains this issue and holds it within the salt palace of tiny sea horses is how the narratives and poems, taken together in here, can be seen to contribute not only to the very important living body of contemporary fairy tales—so nascent and now—but also to the conversation about what constitutes “a fairy tale,” that monumental type of art we so know and love. As such, I hope that Fairy Tale Review helps preserve and protect fairy tales for future generations of readers who wish to immerse in their bounty.

—Kate Bernheimer
Founder & Editor

“Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 at 12:01 am. Follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed or via the notify by email option below. Please leave a comment below or trackback from your own site.