Introduction

There are stories we can't stop telling, and in the retelling, they become new stories and old stories at the same time. Fairy tales, with their once-upon-a-time and kingdoms that do not match our geography, are outside of our time and space. They live in the moment of the retelling. Myths explain why things are the way they are. History and geography are built into the idea of a myth. We are here now in this place, and the myth holds the past and present together for us, tying us to the time and the place before the retelling. Fairy tale and myth are two sides of the same coin, Janus-faced, the paired siblings of Artemis and Apollo, Hansel and Gretel. This Pleiades special feature has three fairy tales and two myths. The stories cover ground from Atlanta, Moldova, Appalachia—the Old World and the New.

The contemporary fairy tale has a rich tradition, from the cities of Italo Calvino, the Gothic reworkings of Angela Carter, and the everyday atrocities of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. Reworkings of myths range from James Joyce's Ulysses to Christa Wolf 's Cassandra. The stories we have here in this special feature retell Catskins, Hansel and Gretel, Golem, Sisyphus, and Baucis and Philemon.

Catskins is a English fairy tale in the Cinderella family. Lucas Church's "Catskins & the Boy-King" takes the tale to contemporary Appalachia. Church has also incorporated a myth in The Frank C. Brown Collection of NC Folklore about a headless dog that would follow anyone who disturbed the place of its master's death. Compared to other Cinderalla stories, Catskins has an unusually active heroine, but in Church's tale, the boundaries between genders are blurred even further.

The legend of the Golem, the clay creature brought to life with the power of a word to do his master's bidding, is taken from Jewish Prague and placed in early twentieth-century Atlanta in Maggie Nye's "We Made a Golem." It's after Leo Frank's 1913 trial for the murder of Mary Phagan. Leo Frank was Jewish; Mary Phagan was not. Mary Phagan was a child laborer in Frank's pencil factory. Leo Frank was lynched in 1915 and posthumously pardoned by the state of Georgia in 1986. The girls at the center of Nye's story might make a Golem, but their story echoes the Salem Witch trials as well. The Golem has many mistresses.

My version of "Hansel and Gretel" is about the Moldovan Famine of 1947, using both Moldovan oral tales and some of the most famous Grimm tales on famine to provide a framework. I am interested in tales of famine because they are stories stripped down to their elements. What will characters do to survive? They speak to cultures in catastrophe, but also to environmental disasters and epic failures of government, providing a useful mirror to our own contemporary culture. When I first came to Moldova as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I kept noticing that people would refer to certain families as cannibals. I thought it was a joke, or some kind of slang insult I wasn't understanding, maybe some kind of reference to some kind of capitalist instinct, cannibalism as a metaphor. I'd never heard of the Moldovan Famine of 1947. "Hansel and Gretel" is a story that holds our memories of famine. "Hansel and Gretel" is a story that contains not only our fears of famine and cannibals, but our draw to dessert: that which we do not need, but that we crave for excess, the sugar that delights us.

Sisyphus pushes his rock up the hill in Hades forever. In Teresa Milbrodt's "Sisyphus" this repetitive action has turned him into an old man who looks like he works out, an old man with freakish strength. He's irresistible at the senior center. The story takes the classical epic move of the journey to the land of the dead.

Fairy tales abound with stories of the test of whether or not it is possible to be kind to the ugly and/or annoying old woman in the woods, and...