Confabulations, Iterations, and Other Collected Falsehoods

Abstract

This project is the beginning of a collection of fairy tale and fabulism-adjacent short fiction. It emerged out of a desire to create stories that lean on the conventions of fairy tale as a means of speaking to, subverting, and building upon the expectations of the genre. The specific approaches to this project vary from story to story, with some written using language and forms reminiscent of fairy tale, and others using realism to describe the impossible. All, however, lean on the tradition of oral folk tales, as well as writers like Angela Carter, Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin, and others creating innovative work in the genre of speculative fiction. Thematically, these stories work with long-standing topics of traditional fairy tale and fantasy (gender, growing up, social pressures and expectations, navigating responsibility, responding to injustice, etc.), but always from a tilted angle. My goal is to create a collection that asks readers to question their own expectations about storytelling, identity, and the norms of the world they live in, and inspires new conversations about narratives long taken for granted.