Does anybody want to come sit up here?
I've been [INAUDIBLE].
There's a lot of floor space if you do so.
They didn't want to.
There's some coming.
I'm waiting for the buzzer to go off so I can [INAUDIBLE]..
Thank you, Aurelie for that beautiful introduction.
And thank you to the Prose Series-- is this good--
at the University of Arizona, the MFA program,
and the Poetry Center for inviting all of us here today
to celebrate fairy tales.
And for all of you for coming out tonight.
What a brimming and wonderful room.
Aurelie didn't mention, but she's written a lovely fairy
tale or two herself for Fairy Tale Review in one place.
And then we have other contributors here--
Stacey Richter is back there--
is also in this collection.
So there are fairy tales everywhere.
And this is just a tiny sliver of the giant candy
house of fairy tales tonight.
But it's great to be here to celebrate My Mother She Killed
Me, My Father He Ate Me with you.
That sounds like a weird sentence
actually as I say it like that.
Actually, the other newsworthy item that recently happened,
in addition to the National Book Foundation petition--
which is ongoing and I do urge you to sign on to it either
by Facebook or by email somehow--
the other recent newsworthy item is
that I was very publicly accused of promoting cannibalism
with this collection.
There was a very upset reviewer on Amazon
who generated some 17 or 23 comments about the book saying
that I was a terrible person not only urging children
to eat people but parents to terrorize their children
with fairy tales.
And it went on and on.
It became quite controversial.
But I actually thought that was one of the best
reviews I'd ever gotten.
So it was great.
And scholars have discussed the power of fairy tales
for many years.
Recently, Polish radio called for donations of fairy tale
books to be sent to a boy in the hospital who'd
eaten a poisonous mushroom because they believed it would
help give him the courage to live if, in his coma,
he heard fairy tales.
Poor little Tomas he didn't fare so well.
But the story of Polish radio I think
is a wonderful fairy tale.
Traditional fairy tales have such incredible--
I didn't want to look and see what had happened to him.
But I did.
I think that traditional fairy tales,
with their flat language, everyday magic,
and just-so arrangements, do have the power
to console at the same time as they're
full of all the bewilderment and darkness that marks each of us
at some point in our lives.
Fairy tales have been long misunderstood however,
in part because of their association
with the nursery and, let's face it, women and children.
And, in part, I think too, because of their refusal
to sugarcoat some of life's darkest realities-- child
and spousal abuse, child abandonment, sexual violence,
famine, incest, and rape.
I hoped in gathering the diverse works in this collection
to celebrate this artful form of storytelling, which
contains the very bones and breath,
I think, of story itself--
adaptive to any stylistic device and any expression.
You know a fairy tale even if there are no words in it--
if it's just like a pantomime practically.
It's no coincidence that when hiding in the secret annex
during the war, Anne Frank wrote fairy tale after fairy tale,
with their themes of survival, bravery,
and courage against all the odds, mixed
with the wonder in animals we truly do need to live,
fairy tales have the power to save even if in the end,
unlike in a story, we can't live happily forever after.
When Charles Dickens said, "Little Red Riding Hood
was my first love.
If I could have married Little Red Riding Hood,
I should have known perfect bliss."
I think despite the wrongness of that sentence in just about
every way, I think he was getting at something--
I think he was getting at something very lovely.
And I think that what he meant was that reading a fairy tale--
I think he meant it as a reader.
Reading a fairy tale as sublime, and he would do it
till the end of his days.
Yeah, that's a bad one.
But everyone loves that quote.
And, actually, I finally decided it was just
about reading when he encountered Little Red Riding
Hood, he just fell in love with the story--
I hope.
And I hope this event and this collection will inspire you
to turn back to the old fairy tales that maybe you heard
as a child or maybe you weren't so lucky to hear or just scraps
of story you somewhat remember or picture book that you loved
for just some ridiculous reason--
because of a white horse on its pages--
that it encourages you to turn back to not only
those childhood books, but also just
the old translations-- tattered and moldy
and bookstores-- to rescue them and reread these stories,
which are just an incredible fantastic tradition.
I'm going to introduce our three readers
today in the order in which they're going to read.
And they're each going to read either from the collection
or from a work inspired or related
to the collection-- inspired by or related to the collection.
And after I introduce them, I'm just
going to go through the introductions,
and I'm just going to read a tiny fairy tale myself.
And we may have time for questions or not.
We'll see how it goes--
see if the buzzer or the gong or the big thing.
But it's such an honor to read with these three writers
tonight.
I can't tell you how much their work has
meant to me over the years and will on into the future.
And my introductions are somewhat impersonal,
almost like little CVs, but I can just say right now,
these are incredible people and they mean so much.
So it's really special to be here tonight.
Joy Williams is the author of many novels, story collections,
and essays.
Her first novel, State of Grace, was
nominated for a National Book Award for fiction.
Her most recent novel, The Quick and the Dead,
was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
And you might know her collection of stories
Taking Care or Escapes and a 2001 essay collection
highly recommended, "Ill Nature--
Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals"
was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award for criticism.
And "Honored Guests," her most recent collection
of short stories, came out in 2004.
And her wonderful fairy tale novel, The Changeling,
was first published in--
when was it first published--
1978.
And recently reissued in 2008 in a special 30th anniversary
edition with an introduction by Rick Moody.
I can't say enough about Joy as a writer and person.
She makes great margaritas, builds great bonfires,
and her writing actually makes you
feel like you're drunk and maybe in some kind of beautiful hell.
So margaritas and bonfires make sense.
Kathryn Davis, who's going to read next, lives in Vermont
and is the senior fiction writer in the writing
program in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St.
Louis.
She is a recipient of the Kafka prize,
the Morton Darwin Zobel Award from the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship,
and a Lannon Foundation Literary Award.
She's the author of six novels--
Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell--
a theme here--
The Walking Tour, Versailles, and The Thin Place.
I've seen her sing to hippos.
And she has a very particularly close relationship
with one hippo in St. Louis named Maria.
And so this reading tonight, I want
to dedicate to the lovely Maria.
She really does talk to the hippos.
They come over to her.
She's that supernatural.
It's pretty special.
And Lydia Millet is the author of seven books, most recently
a story collection called "Love In Infant Monkeys,"
which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a novel,
How the Dead Dream, that was named in LA Times
best book of 2008.
An earlier novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 pen USA award
for fiction.
Lydia lives in the Arizona desert.
This is from an old bio, I think,
that I must have printed out.
Lydia lives in the Arizona desert with her family
and works as a writer and editor for a group that
protects wildlife.
Her writing is always expansive, apocalyptic, hilarious,
poignant, and new--
not always hilarious when a character is an homage to you
in a rather unflattering light.
But it's wonderful.