A little light goes out inside me. But I can't locate exactly what was ever lit up.

Sabrina Orah Mark, Happily (2023)

Fairy tales themselves are well-trodden paths. ... I connect pieces of fairy tales to walk me through motherhood, and marriage, and America, and weather, and loneliness, and failure, and inheritance, and love.

Sabrina Orah Mark, from The New York Times review of her book Happily: A Personal History, With Fairy Tales

A poem by Sabrina Orah Mark

In The Origami Fields

where I fold and unfold my left arm into November, my hair into my sister, where the black-gloved woman plays my heart like a crumpled violin, where I stand creased and lusting for paper, where I have no more dead lovers than you, where beautiful girls are always asked for directions, where I keep myself real, flirting with the ventriloquists, where my father holds me like a paper doll, where doors can be torn down swiftly, where neither one of us is a miracle,

I understand only this:

It is lonely in a place that can burn so fast.

Sabrina Orah Mark

More work by Sabrina Orah Mark is available through her website

Sabrina Orah Mark, Happily; "Ghost People"

[Text ID: In late sixteenth-century Prague, when waves of hatred rose against the Jews again, a story brewed about Rabbi Loew, who made a golem out of prayers and clay, a golem whose job it was to guard the Jews from harm. There are two versions of how the rabbi brought the golem to life. The first is that he inserted the shem, a parchment with God’s name, into the golem’s mouth; the second is that he inscribed the word emet, or “truth,” on the golem’s forehead. Unlike Pinocchio, the golem doesn’t speak. Unlike Pinocchio, the golem doesn’t lie. But he can hear and he can understand. [...] I don’t know how to protect my sons. I wear their names around my neck on a thin gold chain. Sometimes I lie to them. Sometimes I say nothing. Sometimes I have to tell them that people do terrible things. Every day I send them out into the world, and they come home with rocks and twigs and wood chips and acorns and dead bugs in their pockets. It’s been getting colder and colder here. If I could, would I have a golem sit in the corner of my kitchen, follow my boys to school, accompany us to synagogue, and stand at the door? I look around my house. Maybe the golem is already here. “Hello, hello?” More silence.]

An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club‘s March selection, Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark forthcoming from Random House on March 13, 2023.

Subscribe by February 15th to the Book Club to receive an early copy of Happily and an invitation to an exclusive Crowdcast with Mark.

Happily: A Personal History — With Fairy Tales, by Sabrina Orah Mark

⭐⭐⭐ 1/2

What happens when a Jewish woman from New York City marries a Black man and moves to the deep south? Serving first as stepmother to his three existing daughters — from two previous marriages — then also as mother to the two sons they have together, Sabrina turns to the familiar patterns of storytelling to make sense out of her life. From her experiences back in NYC and the struggles involved in being a wife, mother, and stepmother, to the struggles of raising boys who are both Black and Jewish and the trials of the Covid-19 pandemic, there's few areas where fairy tale lessons don't have something to say on the matter.

When I picked up this title, I wasn't familiar with Sabrina Orah Mark or her column. I do, however, enjoy reading about fairy tales. I wasn't sure what exactly to expect from this collection of memoir essays, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Every essay had an event or theme from her life being related to one or more lessons from a fairy tale. This might be a general musing on mothers and stepmothers in story and life, a discussion of hair loss being related to Rapunzel, or wicked wonderings about the role of mother-as-fairy as a child begins to lose their baby teeth. A few of them felt like they'd been a bit shoehorned, but most were interesting. I particularly enjoyed that she often cited multiple versions of the same story, noting where they differed and where they agreed in relation to the point she was making. The tales explored stayed largely within what we'd consider to be the western canon, which may be disappointing to some readers who were looking for more diversity. While there are frequently references to Jewish tradition, it's not quite the same thing.

The most distinct thing about the essays is their seamless blend of the real and the fantastical. She might be relating an event that happened to her, then suddenly halfway through the scene it begins to feel implausible, as if we've slipped sideways through the fabric of reality and wound up inside a story. It took me a few chapters to catch on and embrace this method of storytelling. There were a many times when I read along for several sentences, unsure whether I was in reality or fairyland. Ultimately I enjoyed it more than I didn't, but I know this won't be for everybody.

These are incredibly personal essays. She frequently discusses her family — parents, sister, husband, children, and step-children — which is to be expected in memoir. But where it gets a bit uncomfortable is at certain points in the chapters when she mentions her writing alienating those close to her, presumably due to her including them in the works. Obviously there's a conversation to be had around boundaries and oversharing when you're emotionally close to someone who makes their life public, in whole or in part. As the consumer, our assumption is that the creator has done the necessary work to have those conversations, avoid sensitive areas, and secure any necessary consent. But her admission that she'd run into troubles with this before left me uncertain, devoid of context, and feeling almost voyeuristic at times. I certainly hope nobody was harmed by any content included in this volume. But ultimately I'm not sure I trust that was the case, which left me feeling conflicted.

Time for The Question! Does the tarantula die? Very mild spoilers ahead. Some of the essays have to deal with her stepdaughter's pet tarantula. The tarantula survives just fine.

revolutionary girl utena // fuck the bread. the bread is over. by sabrina orah mark

Small Press Roundup!

As I was making my silly little 2022 book gift guide, I thought I’d round up some (teeny tiny, small, and medium) indie presses to go support this season and beyond. Small press books make especially great gifts since your book-loving friends and family are less likely to already have read them.

Enchanted Lion Books - Beautiful, unique, and translated picture books for kids and adults with more experimental sensibilities. I recommend the Chirri & Chirra books and Sato the Rabbit, A Sea of Tea.

Candlewick Press - If you’re a fan of Jon Klassen and the hat books (or Mac Barnett or Carson Ellis--the group behind the Picture Book Manifesto), you’ve already heard of this publisher, but they do make outstanding children’s books.

Small Beer Press - Speculative fiction fans, run over to Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant’s incredible, weird, magic book factory. I recommend In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan for the fantasy fans or anything by Elizabeth Hand.

Two Dollar Radio - Their books are cute in trim size and weird in content--the ideal combination. You can also join their tattoo club and get 10 free books. Their lobby/HQ/bookshop/cafe seems like a dream.

Hub City Press - Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction with a focus on promoting diverse stories and underrepresented voices in the South. Novels are more conventional and historical. Good, bleak poetry and thoughtful, specific nonfiction.

Night Boat Books - A bit more on the esoteric side. Their books would be great for academics and poets and anyone interested in queer studies or works in translation.

Wave Books - A poetry press with gorgeous books and lit crit. I recommend Bluets by Maggie Nelson (her other books are published by Graywolf, keep scrolling).

Dorothy - A tiny feminist publisher of fiction or about fiction founded by author Danielle Dutton (check out Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark or The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington for some surreal, dreamlike times).

Feminist Press - Books with a focus on gender, sexuality, and marginalized voices. (Margot Atwell, publisher/editor, has a newletter On the Books, for publishing nerds out there who want to hear a fresh perspective on what’s up with this convoluted industry.)

Tin House - Eclectic--both literary and commercial. I recommend Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett.

Milkweed Editions - Nature lovers, these books are for you. Milkweed is also Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s publisher. I recommend Bright Dead Things and her newest collection, The Hurting Kind.

Graywolf Press - Want more Maggie Nelson? Or Carmen Maria Machado? Or experimental printing like Telephone by Percival Everett with its 3 versions? It’s all happening in the Minnesota literary world (I’m serious).

Coffee House Press - Also part of the Minnesota book group. Their books are on the experimental and readable side.

Catapult/Counterpoint/Soft Skull - These presses are sisters. You’ve definitely seen these books around--they do hit the bestseller list and are stacked in neat piles at all the best indie bookshops. Danielle Dutton’s (founder of Dorothy, mentioned above) book Margaret the First is published by Catapult.

50 Watts Books - Surreal reprints of older books in stunning colors; the curation of their bookshop is also impeccable and unique.

McSweeney’s - If you have a lowbrow/highbrow sense of humor and enjoy satire, these books are for you. They also publish the creative magazine for creative kids, Illustoria.

Nobrow Press/Flying Eye Books - UK based press for comic and bright color lovers of all ages. I recommend the Hilda series by Luke Pearson and Hicotea by Lorena Alvarez. Katie Harnett’s and Simona Ciraolo’s picture books are also wonderful.

Pioneer Works - This is the book intersection for art, tech, design, music, and science. I recommend Notes on My Dunce Cap by Jesse Ball for (arts) teachers or anyone interested in pedagogy.

Fuck The Bread. The Bread Is Over.

Sabrina Orah Mark // 7 May, 2020

In February, as a plague enters America, I am a finalist for a job I am not offered.

I am brought to campus for a three-day interview. I am shown the library I’ll never have access to, and introduced to students I’ll never teach. I shake hands with faculty I’ll never see again. I describe in great detail the course on fairy tales I’ll never offer. I stand up straight in a simple black-and-white dress. “Don’t say anything strange,” says my mother. “Don’t blather,” she says. “You have a tendency to blather.” I meet with a dean who rubs his face until it reddens, then asks me whether writers even belong in universities. I meet with another dean who asks me the same thing. There are so many deans. I cannot tell the deans apart. Another dean asks me who the babies in my first collection of poems, The Babies, actually are. “We only have a few minutes left,” he adds. “They don’t exist,” I think I say. I am hurrying. “I was writing about voices we’ll never hear,” I think I say. He stands up and shakes my hand. I shake so many hands. I can’t tell if everything is at stake, or nothing is at stake. All I know is that I am being tested, and whether or not I am offered this job will depend on the appetite and mood of strangers. “Your final task,” I imagine the dean saying, “is to make a rope out of these ashes. Do it and the job is yours.”

On the third day of the interview, the head of the creative department asks me if the courses I would be expected to teach should even exist. “No,” I wish I had said as I made my body gently vanish. “They shouldn’t exist at all.” Instead I say yes, and pull a beautiful, made-up reason from the air and offer it to him as a gift. Gold for your dust, sir. Pearls for your pigs. “Who is watching your sons right now?” he asks. “Their father,” I answer.

What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living? What does it mean to be hired? What does it mean to be let go?

It’s May now. More than thirty million Americans have lost their jobs. What mattered in February hardly seems to matter now. My sons, my husband, and I are lucky. We have stayed healthy, and we have enough money and enough food to eat. In between teaching my sons the difference between a scalene triangle and an isosceles, and moving my writing workshops from my garage to pixelated classrooms, and cleaning my house, and going nowhere, and being scared, and looking for bread flour and yeast, I can barely remember what it felt like to plead my case for three straight days. It feels good to barely remember.

“You write a lot about motherhood,” says the sixteenth or seventeenth dean.

In the Brothers Grimm’s “Cherry,” an old king with three sons cannot decide who of the three should inherit the kingdom, and so he gives his sons three trials: the first, that they should seek “cloth so fine” the king can draw it through his golden ring. The second, that they find a dog small enough to fit inside a walnut shell. And the third, to bring home the “fairest lady” in all the land. In the Grimms’ “The Six Servants” a prince will win his princess if he brings back a ring the old queen has dropped into the red sea, devour three hundred oxen (“skin and bones, hair and horns”), drink three hundred barrels of wine, and keep his arms around the princess all night without falling asleep. And in “Rumpelstiltskin,” if the poor miller’s daughter spins larger and larger rooms full of straw into gold she will become queen. If not, she will die. Fairy tales are riddled with tasks like these. Some contenders cheat, and some were never worthy, and some take the dreary, barren road, and some take the smooth, shady one, and some are helped by birds, and some are helped by giants, and some by witches, and some by luck.

I call my mother. “I can’t find bread flour or yeast anywhere.” “Fuck the bread,” says my mother. “The bread is over.”

In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away.

In fairy tales, the king is the king. If he dethrones, his bones clatter into a heap and vanish. Loosen the seams of the stepmother, and reach in. Nothing but stepmother inside. Even when the princess is cinders and ash, she is still entirely princess.

I send my sons on a scavenger hunt because it’s day fifty-eight of homeschooling, and I’m all out of ideas. I give them a checklist: a rock, soil, a berry, something soft, a red leaf, a brown leaf, something alive, something dead, an example of erosion, something that looks happy, a dead branch on a living tree. They come back with two canvas totes filled with nature. I can’t pinpoint what this lesson is exactly. Something about identification and possession. Something about buying time. As I empty the bags and touch the moss, and the leaves, and the twigs, and the berries, and a robin-blue eggshell, I consider how much we depend on useless, arbitrary tasks to prove ourselves. I consider how much we depend on these tasks so we can say, at the very end, we succeeded.

Tomorrow, on day fifty-nine, I will ask my sons to “find me an acre of land / Between the salt water and the sea-strand, / Plough it with a lamb’s horn, / Sow it all over with one peppercorn, / Reap it with a sickle of leather, / And gather it up with a rope made of heather.” I will tell them if they perform each one of these tasks perfectly, they will be rewarded with more tasks. And if they perform each of those tasks perfectly, they will be rewarded with more. Until, at last, they will not be able to tell the difference between their hands and another boy’s hands.

Over the years I have applied for hundreds of professorships, and even received some interviews. I’ve wanted a job like this for so long, I barely even know why I want it anymore. I look at my hands. I can’t tell if they’re mine.

“Of course you can tell if your hands are yours,” says my mother. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I have no real job,” I say. “Of course you have a real job,” she says. “I have no flour,” I say. “Fuck the bread,” says my mother again. “The bread is over.”

And maybe the bread, as I’ve always understood it, really is over. The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in. Our touchstone is changing color. Our criteria for earning a life, a living, are mutating like a virus that wants badly to stay alive. I text a friend, “I can’t find bread flour.” She lives in Iowa. “I can see the wheat,” she says, “growing in the field from outside my window.” I watch a video on how to harvest wheat. I can’t believe I have no machete. I can’t believe I spent so many hours begging universities to hire me, I forgot to learn how to separate the chaff from the wheat and gently grind.

If I had a machete I would use it to cut the mice, and the princess, and the king, and the stepmother, and the castle, and the wolf, and the mother, and the sons, free from their function so they could disappear into their own form.

But also I wanted an office with a number. I wanted a university ID. I wanted access to a fancy library and benefits and students and colleagues and travel money. I wanted the whole stupid kingdom. “And then what?” says my mother. “And then nothing,” I say as I jump off the very top of a fairy tale that has no place for me. “You’re better off,” says my mother. I look around. I’ve landed where I am.

I like it here. I feel like I’m in Gertrude Stein territory, where the buttons are so tender they’ve come undone. The whole kingdom is spilling out of itself. There are holes everywhere. To the east, a pile of impossible tasks of my own making. To the west, a mountain of broken crowns I will melt and recast into a machete. “This is so nice,” writes Gertrude Stein, “and sweet and yet there comes the change, there comes the time to press more air. This does not mean the same as disappearance.” It’s day sixty of homeschooling. Eli asks me to remind him how to make an aleph. I take a pencil, and draw it for him very carefully. “It’s like a branch,” I say, “with two little twigs attached.”  “You know what, Mama?” he says. “You’d make a really good teacher.” “Thank you,” I say. And then I show him how to draw a bet.

Antonio Velardo shares: Mirror Images: 4 Picture Books About Seeing Our Reflections by Sabrina Orah Mark

By Sabrina Orah Mark Sometimes our reflections have nothing to do with us; sometimes they’re “the hide to our seek.” Published: August 16, 2023 at 05:01AM from NYT Books https://ift.tt/Wx0TYzt via IFTTT

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Book Review: ‘Happily,’ by Sabrina Orah Mark

bookjubilee.com http://dlvr.it/SkNxY2

Nature, it seems, is trying to forget us.

- Sabrina Orah Mark, All the Better to Hear You With.

In Exodus, the first set of ten commandments (broken by Moses) are not buried but placed in the Aaron Hakodesh (the holy ark) beside the new unbroken tablets which the Jews carry through the wilderness for forty years. I imagine the broken tablets leaning against the unbroken ones telling them secrets only broken things know. I imagine the weight of the broken tablets, and the heat, and the thirst, and the frustration. Why don’t we just leave the broken tablets behind? What good is all this carrying? To know your history is to carry all your pieces, whole and shattered, through the wilderness. And feel their weight.

Sabrina Orah Mark, “U Break It We Fix It,” published in the Paris Review

I don’t collect any objects, but I feel like when I’m writing, I am a collector of language. For instance, let’s say I start with a word like ‘snail,’ I’ll try to collect all of the language that surrounds the snail, both sonically and associatively, and then this little world starts to build around the snail, and I try to stay with it, stay with the images obsessively, to push beyond what I think is possible in the snail’s realm of language. What is that Lucie Brock-Broido quote, ‘Obsession is what gets me up the stairs at night’? Obsession is really important to following that image relentlessly, then cracking it open, trying to make more use of it. Pushing it beyond its limits. It’s funny, someone once asked me, why is there so much red in The Babies, and I thought, what red? There’s no red in The Babies. And then I looked through the entire collection, and there really is so much red that I didn’t even realize I was obsessively following. Nabokov talks about it, how writers will plot subliminal coordinates that you’re working with, and it’s like this secret thread beneath all of the poems. And then the worst question would be, in like a workshop, what does the red symbolize? You don’t want to show those insides. You want to feel them.

Sabrina Orah Mark interviewed in The Iowa Review

The original Greek word «ΜΕΤΑΦΟΡΑΙ» means “transports.” It is embossed on every moving truck in Greece. To metaphor is to move the contents of one house into another.  To metaphor is to move the contents of hope into a pokeberry seed. Or move the contents of love into a rubbed off “A” on a typewriter. Metaphor is a moveable burial plot. It contains, like soil and air, the uncontainable. Metaphor is a ghost turning back into a boy.

Sabrina Orah Mark, “Metaphor. Hotline. Support. Network.” 

What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living? What does it mean to be hired? What does it mean to be let go? [...] I call my mother. “I can’t find bread flour or yeast anywhere.” “Fuck the bread,” says my mother. “The bread is over.” In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away. In fairy tales, the king is the king. If he dethrones, his bones clatter into a heap and vanish. Loosen the seams of the stepmother, and reach in. Nothing but stepmother inside. Even when the princess is cinders and ash, she is still entirely princess. [...] And maybe the bread, as I’ve always understood it, really is over. The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in. Our touchstone is changing color. Our criteria for earning a life, a living, are mutating like a virus that wants badly to stay alive. I text a friend, “I can’t find bread flour.” She lives in Iowa. “I can see the wheat,” she says, “growing in the field from outside my window.” I watch a video on how to harvest wheat. I can’t believe I have no machete. I can’t believe I spent so many hours begging universities to hire me, I forgot to learn how to separate the chaff from the wheat and gently grind. If I had a machete I would use it to cut the mice, and the princess, and the king, and the stepmother, and the castle, and the wolf, and the mother, and the sons, free from their function so they could disappear into their own form.

Sabrina Orah Mark, Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over.

We are knee-deep in broken things.

Sabrina Orah Mark, from “U Break It We Fix It“ (The Paris Review, November 12, 2020)