Looking Back at Fairytales

My hardworking publicist at Watermark Publishing called my attention to this exciting retelling of classic international fairy tales. I wish I'd known about it when it first came out from Penguin in September, 2010, just a year before DON'T LOOK BACK was finally published (if you've not been to this site before, it's my new collection of Hawaiian myths retold by contemporary writers). Now I can't wait to get a copy and dig in. 

Here are the details:

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

The fairy tale lives again in this book of forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction.

Michael Cunningham, Francine Prose, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, and more than thirty other extraordinary writers celebrate fairy tales in this thrilling new volume. Inspire by everything from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and "The Little Match Girl" to Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" and "Cinderella" to the Brothers Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" and "Rumpelstiltskin" to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico, here are stories that soar into boundless realms, filled with mischief and mystery and magic, and renewed by the lifeblood of invention. Although rooted in hundreds of years of tradition, they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature."


For those of you wondering if it's okay to re-tell Hawaiian myths or fairy tales, check out this Slate piece by Libby Copeland. I love this quote, which is very applicable to my endeavor with DON'T LOOK BACK: 

"If altering fairy tales seems like politically correct white-washing, I would counter that it is the tradition of these folk tales to be changed by the era they’re in. We’re the fools if we treat them like gospel."

Liberating Knowledge

Photo courtesy of Bishop Museum Archives - Honolulu Newsboys, World War I

Part of the proceeds of my new book, DON'T LOOK BACK: Hawaiian Myths Made New, will be donated to Awaiaulu, an organization that develops resources that help bridge Hawaiian knowledge past, present and future. 

Their new project, 'Ike Ku‘oko‘a - Liberating Knowledge, the Hawaiian Newspaper Initiative, is unsurprisingly ambitious and yet surprisingly inspiring. They have set themselves a deadline of July 31, 2012 to transcribe 60,000 digital scans of Hawaiian-language newspapers into searchable typescript. "It will open up hundreds of thousands of pages worth of data on history, culture, politics, sciences, world view, and more," says Awaiaulu.

Many volunteers are needed--consider taking part and if nothing else, tell others about it. Here's the fine print:

"No Hawaiian language skill is necessary to participate. Volunteers log in and reserve a page for typescripting. An image file and a text file are downloaded and then saved on the volunteer's computer. The tiff image file is easily enlarged for viewing, and on the text file one types all the text that is seen on the page. Though the newspaper is in columns, the typescript spans the page like a letter. Guidelines are posted on the website.

"Once a page is completed and checked, it is uploaded through the volunteer's homepage. Upon submitting a file, the typescripter's name is imbedded, and the page can also be dedicated to a special someone. Both the typescripter and the dedication will be included in the searchable text on the web, "This page made possible by XX, dedicated to YY"."