Donkeys in Stocking Caps

Now that the contracts have been turned in and it's all officially official, I just wanted to let y'all know that my essay "On Making Noise: Confessions of a Quiet Kid" will be appearing in Kate Bernheimer's Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales, which will be coming out from Wayne University Press. You may recognize some of the other contributors' names; the list I've seen includes folks like Charles de Lint, Christopher Barzak, Gregory Maguire, Neil Gaiman, Ben Rosenbaum, and Jeff VanderMeer. If you saw Kate's previous antho, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales, you can guess how excited I am to be included.

I wrote my piece on "The Bremen Town Musicians," and I was even able to dig up the ragged old copy of Grimm's where I initially encountered it. The cover depicts the musicians mid-performance:



My essay is about noise, of course, but it's also about the way I interpreted the world as a child--rules of what was real and what wasn't on TV, strategies for dealing with robbers, reasons that a story about talking animals was acceptable fare while stories about giants or people turning into swans were not. Also, why a donkey is like Mike Nesmith. (I was a weird kid.) I'm really looking forward to the rest of the anthology; I hope you'll all keep an eye out for it.