Guest Blog by Jennifer Lee Rossman

And here we see the writer in her natural habitat, the frozen tundra of Twitter.

It is November 2, 2018. While other creatures are preparing themselves for holidays, the writer knows there is a more important season approaching: an open submission window for an anthology.

There are many anthologies vying for her attention, but she has worked with this editor before and has confidence in the editor‘s ability to produce a strong, engaging anthology.
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But the writer is not prepared.

The writer is no newcomer to submission windows. She has a bookshelf of anthologies that she has contributed to, but she is not confident in her ability. She is just randomly throwing ideas together.

To make matters worse, she has just remembered that she has never actually seen the movie Ferngully and is attempting to base her entire story on a Ferngully coloring book she had when she was five. She will have to collect a large store of research if she is going to make it into this anthology.

Facing certain rejection unless she can find a plot, she expends all of her energy digging through Wikipedia for a fun fact she can base an entire story on.
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She has gone off track, though. She was meant to be researching narwhals, not medieval curiosity cabinets. And yet… What is that? She tries not to get her hopes up, but it looks like a tiny seed of an idea.

Emboldened by her success at foraging for ideas, the writer has become overconfident.

Fear overwhelms her. The editor will certainly reject a story set during summer.

The writer considers giving up. Maybe this is not the right time to submit stories. Maybe her time for submitting stories is over.
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But she pokes her head out of her burrow anyway, and she does a Google.

​Relieved to learn that narwhal migration would be in the right area during winter after all, the writer finishes her story. But there is one more hurdle in her path to publication.

Frantically, the writer goes to the other members of her herd for assistance. Writers are social animals, when the mood strikes them, and her community is integral to her survival.

She arrives to the submission grounds on the first day of the window, and she presents her cover letter and freshly titled final draft to the prospective editor, who recognizes her from past submission windows but must judge the story on its own merits.
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It is out of the writer‘s hands now…

Jennifer Lee Rossman is a queer, autistic, and disabled author who just thinks narwhals are neat. Her novel Jack Jetstark's Intergalactic Freakshow was published by World Weaver Press in 2018. She blogs at https://jenniferleerossman.blogspot.com and tweets @JenLRossman

GLASS AND GARDENS: SOLARPUNK WINTERS is out today, January 7, 2020! Featuring stories by Wendy Nikel, Holly Schofield, Sandra Ulbrich Almazan, Sarah Van Goethem, Steve Toase, and more, this anthology envisions winters of the future, with stories of scientists working together to protect narwhals from an oil spill, to bring snow back to the mountains of Maine, to preserve ecosystems—even if they have to be under glass domes. They're stories of regular people rising to extraordinary circumstances to survive extreme winter weather, to fix a threat to their community's energy source, to save a living city from a deep-rooted sickness. Some take place after an environmental catastrophe, with luxury resorts and military bases and mafia strongholds transformed into sustainable communes; others rethink the way we could organize cities, using skybridges and seascrapers and constructed islands to adapt to the changes of the Anthropocene. Even when the nights are long, the future is bright in these seventeen diverse tales.

​Learn more about the authors here.

Sarena Ulibarri is Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press, and she is also a fiction writer who has been published in magazines such as Lightspeed, GigaNotoSaurus, and DreamForge, as well as anthologies such as Biketopia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories in Extreme Futures and The Gamer Chronicles. She lives in a solar-powered adobe house in New Mexico, and can be found online at SarenaUlibarri.com and @SarenaUlibarri.

MULTISPECIES CITIES
A science fiction anthology in partnership with the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan 
Open for Submissions: January 1 - February 1, 2020
Story Length: 500 to 5,000 words
Payment: $0.03 per word (USD) + contributor copy

In order to attain better futures, we first must imagine them. But at this crucial tipping point for our planet, it’s important to imagine futures that include the many other species we share our world with. Cities tend to be anthropocentric—designed for the comfort and convenience of humans, often with little regard for the plants, animals, and insects local to that area. Science fiction tends toward anthropocentric as well, concerned with either the great achievements or failures of humankind. For this anthology, we want to see more-than-human stories that investigate humanity’s relationship with the rest of the natural world. We’re looking for stories that acknowledge humans as part of a larger ecosystem, for characters who strive for balance with (rather than dominance over) the creatures surrounding them, for settings that depict an optimistic balance of nature and technology.

​Preference for Asian-Pacific authors (broadly defined) or authors of Asian-Pacific descent. We encourage authors to set their stories in the Asia-Pacific region, or at least include some thematic tie to that part of the world.

Authors may wish to envision futuristic cities where people and wildlife can thrive together, or urban landscapes re-designed to heal past ecological destruction. Characters might need to make tough decisions to maintain the multispecies ecosystem of a city, struggle to negotiate coexistence between human and non-human residents, or fight back against a project that would threaten the balance of that ecosystem. Stories could focus on conservation efforts for currently living species, or explore de-extinction processes for species lost due to human impact. Or perhaps an encounter with an extraterrestrial species could serve as a metaphor for how humans interact with the non-human species of Earth.

Because this project is inspired by the solarpunk movement, we prefer stories to end on a positive or hopeful note. We want narratives that engage with fundamental political ideas and problems, such as non-human citizenship and ecological justice. Far-fetched situations are acceptable as long as they’re based in some realistic biology and/or climate science.

Submissions must be in English; translations are welcome, provided the original author has given permission. Original stories preferred, but reprints that match the theme will be considered.

Simultaneous submissions = okay. Multiple submissions = no.

How to submit: Send story as a .doc, .docx, or .rtf to solarpunk[at]worldweaverpress[dot]com.

Please do not summarize your story in your cover letter! No description or introduction is necessary. The cover letter will not be read by the panel evaluating submissions.

​On December 6, 2019, Crossed Genres announced they would be going on indefinite hiatus, and cancelling the planned anthology Recognize Fascism, a follow-up to their 2018 micro-anthology Resist Fascism. After discussions with editor Crystal Huff, and with the blessings of Kay T. Holt and Bart R. Leib of Crossed Genres, World Weaver Press is proud to announce that we have acquired the rights to publish Recognize Fascism in 2020.
 
Recognize Fascism contains speculative stories stories focused on the moment when people see the fascism in front of them for what it is, accept it as real, and make the choice to fight it. Crystal Huff will be retained as anthology editor. All authors whose stories were previously accepted by Crossed Genres for Recognize Fascism have been contacted and informed of the new publisher. A Table of Contents reveal will be posted once all contracts have been finalized. Recognize Fascism will feature cover art by Hugo award winning artist Geneva Bowers.
 
In order to pay the Recognize Fascism authors a SFWA professional rate of $0.08 (USD) per word, a crowdfunding campaign will run in spring 2020. Supporters of the crowdfunding campaign will receive early copies of the book as well as additional rewards. Traditional publication of the ebook and trade paperback editions is expected for late summer/early fall 2020.
 
If you would like to be informed of the launch of the Recognize Fascism crowdfunding campaign, please join the World Weaver Press email newsletter list (here), or follow @worldweaver_wwp or @crystalvisits.
 
Crystal Huff (pronouns: they/them) is the Executive Director of Include Better and former Executive Director of The Ada Initiative. They have a decade-long history of professional and volunteer work in tech and geek spaces, with particular commitment to anti-harassment and impostor syndrome work. Crystal runs science fiction conventions in their volunteer time, and has chaired or co-chaired seven conventions around the world, in addition to working on dozens more. Recently, Crystal has been working with the Future Affairs Administration to bring more Chinese science fiction to the rest of the world, and more international science fiction to Chinese audiences.
 
World Weaver Press, LLC is an independently owned and operated publisher of fantasy, paranormal, and science fiction founded in 2012 and currently based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We believe that publishing speculative fiction isn’t just printing words on the page — it’s the act of weaving brand new worlds.

Science fiction dominates our list this year, but there's also a splash of fairy tale, with two of our newest anthologies and one of our fan favorites making an appearance. Fairy tale retellings have always been the bedrock of World Weaver Press—and we do love them updated and mashed up as well as traditional. We prefer our science fiction with a dash of hope, and apparently readers have been in the mood for that, too! 

Want to see how this list stacks up to last year? See the December 2018 bestseller list here. The first half of 2019 can be found here. Below, you'll find our top 10 bestsellers for the second half of 2019, as well as a list of our top 10 bestsellers of all time. Is your favorite on these lists? Let us know in the comments!

A few notes on these rankings:

• This list takes into account all vendors (Amazon, iTunes, convention tables, libraries etc.), from all countries, in both ebook and paperback.
• Vendors do not report sales to us for one to three months after the actual sale, so even though I'm calling this list "second half of 2019," it may include sales ranging from April to November 2019, depending on vendor reports.
• Small presses rely on reviews from readers like you! If you read any of our books in 2019, please consider leaving an honest review on Amazon and/or Goodreads so more readers can discover our books.

Each year, the Pushcart Prize invites literary magazines and small presses to nominate their best short fiction to be considered for both a prestigious prize and a "best of" anthology. We published two short fiction anthologies this year, and chose six stories between them to nominate.

Scroll down to find out our Pushcart Prize nominees for stories published in 2019, and enjoy a brief excerpt from each story. Congratulations to these authors, and good luck!

From Skull and Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga

​That elocution contest was two years ago, and even that recently, she had cherished some plans. She would go to university, somehow, and study agriculture. She and Rywka and Zivek would farm on a kibbutz near Haifa. There would be olive trees in the sun, and a language that was old-new and strong and did not leave splinters or phantom traces of sweetness on the tongue. But now her plans have come to this. She is standing in autumn woods, among birch trees, not olive or palm. She shivers in a rising night wind, and she stands before a fence made of human skulls.
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Their eyes are alight, and they chatter at her from atop their posts with yellowed, weathered teeth, speaking no language that she knows. Skeletal hands clutch the long femur palings together. Fingerbones shift and twitch, clutching for purchase as the wind bangs the gate.

From Skull and Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga

​​There are all sorts of grannies in the wood. Some get eaten by wolves and others eat wolves. You can tell which is which easily enough—just look at the teeth. Are they soft and paper-yellow and crumbling with years of rice pudding and jam? Or are they iron hard and, apart from a speckling of rust, well equipped to slice through hot, canine muscle and crunch through bone?
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Well, you have your answer. 

From Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline: Dieselpunk and Decopunk Fairy Tales

The truth is that I’ve been dancing, moving, running since I was fourteen. Before that, I was a dreamier creature altogether, a girl who could sink into stillness like a bucket into a well. I loved reading. I loved the slow, methodical way soup came together in a pot if I stood beside it and stirred. I loved watching the leaves fall from the apple tree outside my window. My father called me lazy, though I tended all the animals on his farm and made three meals for us each day. The way I could stand still and look steadily at anything made him uncomfortable.

From Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline: Dieselpunk and Decopunk Fairy Tales

“You collect us only for experimentation,” I said, drawing my own finger over one of the routes. “Don’t think you fool me. I’ve heard of your Doctor Mengele, of his genetic studies on twins.” My voice had risen, and the girls gasped and covered their mouths, but I didn’t care. They should all know what we were in for. I moved closer to Eva and she backed into the wall, the world around her head like a halo. Sparks flew within me, and my palms burned, but I couldn’t stop. “Is your twin supply dwindling? Is that why you have to snatch us from across the ocean, now?”

​From Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline: Dieselpunk and Decopunk Fairy Tales

We’re an elite group of agents created by what is left of the military departments as we knew them. Originally I suppose they meant for it to be men, but with the men on the front lines, the women are picking up the slack. Not all of us can be riveting the newest war machines on the scientist’s assembly lines. Those of us who were selected for this were picked for a reason.

From Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline: Dieselpunk and Decopunk Fairy Tales

When the red-haired nymph opened her eyes, summer light broke and bent in slanted green sheets down from the surface and between the waving river grasses. She yawned silently in the deep water and stretched.

Her eyes, the same emerald green as the shimmering sun, caught those of the soldier. His were deep blue, and very wide. He drew no more breath than she did, and hung in the kelp just as lightly.

​Awake, she slid through the murk toward the dock. She needed her dress back, and someone would probably come to search for the soldier. There were sins in her that the abbreviated flow of the river could not wash away, but she took her chances where she could.

Guest Post by Wendy Nikel

If you follow me on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you might have picked up on the fact that I love a good cup of tea, especially when I'm writing. I enjoy holding a warm mug in my hands, feeling the steam on my face, and sipping something flavorful and bright, rich and dark, or smooth and soothing. Certain flavors and blends bring to mind different seasons, different places, and even — in some cases — different characters that I'm writing about.

So now that the Place in Time series has reached a conclusion, I wanted to step back and host a virtual tea party with my favorite characters, sharing what I think would be their drinks of choice!​

Elise Morley is a woman with classic tastes, who feels quite at home in the 19th and early 20th centuries, so for her, I'd brew a mug of classic earl grey tea – the same drink she enjoys at the South Western Hotel in Southampton in THE CONTINUUM. This black tea flavored with oil of bergamot was named after Charles Grey, a British Prime Minister in the 1830s, and was purportedly given to him as a diplomatic gift. Add a little bit of lavender for color and a twist on the basic flavor, and I think Elise would enjoy this caffeinated drink black.

​Former secret agent-turned-family man Chandler is usually a coffee drinker, but when offered a cup of tea – as he was by Dr Wells while visiting the Place in Time Travel Agency in THE GRANDMOTHER PARADOX – he's always willing to try something a little different. This tea is named after Pu'er City in the Yunnan Province of China, where it was developed and traded to other countries thousands of years ago. It's a tea with a flavor and characteristics that change as it ages, growing deeper and more complex over time. I'd include a bit of earthy hazelnut and bright strawberry for easy-going Chandler.

Cassandra Argent is young, ambitious, and full of energy, so the drink I'd pick for her is a white tea. This type of tea is usually made from new, young leaves that are harvested and dried with minimal processing or heat, and it will usually contain less caffeine than black or green tea, though still has enough to give a bit of an energy boost. It also, like Cassandra, has a bit of a complicated history – though its origin in China is well-established, the exact timing of it has been debated, and it was relatively unknown in the rest of the world until the last few centuries. The blueberry in this particular tea is a nod to the Fred Harvey Blueberry Cake, which inspired my CASSANDRA COMPLEX chocolate blueberry cupcakes.

​Dodge Greenley has been through a lot over the course of the Place in Time series. From being orphaned (twice) and surviving a large-scale disaster as a young child in THE CONTINUUM, to adapting to life with a new family in THE GRANDMOTHER PARADOX, to the troubles with time travel he faces in his own life in THE CASSANDRA COMPLEX and THE CAUSALITY LOOP, he's proved he's tough and resilient – much like this tea, which I think he'd  enjoy. First produced during China's Tang Dynasty, the leaves of this tea are rolled into small, pellet-sized balls as they're processed, giving it a thick, strong taste and preserving its freshness for longer than most other teas. It's usually served without milk or sugar, which I think would suit Dodge just fine.

​Who wouldn't love to sit down to tea with Dr Wells and hear about some of the things he's seen and done up and down the timeline? While he's had to make some significant decisions throughout the series, Dr Wells isn't the type of person to take himself too seriously, either. That's why I think he'd enjoy a honeybush tea. This South African infusion has all sorts of health benefit claims, but it's also sweeter than its close relative, rooibos tea, and tastes great with more "dessert"-like flavors like bananas and nuts.

​Nell is the only character on this list who is completely new to readers just diving into THE CAUSALITY LOOP. She's the long-standing, long-suffering receptionist at the Place in Time Travel Agency who teams up with Dodge to help him discover who's really been posing a threat to his family throughout the series. Dragon fruit, which is native to South America, is a type of cactus, so at first, it may surprise you that something with such a prickly-looking outer layer would actually end up being so sweet.

​Thank you all for joining me on this amazing journey; I've been so glad to be able to introduce you all to these characters and share their stories through the Place in Time series!

Special thanks to Dawn Vogel for this blog post idea! Watch her website and social media for her post on tea selections for the characters of her latest release, THE BOILING SEA!
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All the teas & images in this post are from Adagio Teas.

Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she's left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published by Analog, Nature: Futures, Podcastle, and elsewhere. Her time travel novella series, beginning with The Continuum, is available from World Weaver Press. For more info, visit wendynikel.com

It's always a bittersweet moment to finish a series. A Place in Time began its journey into readers' hearts in January 2018 with The Continuum, ​and wraps up now with The Causality Loop! Trying to bring his broken family together into a single era, professional time traveler Dodge Greenley discovers that someone else has been stalking his family up and down the timeline, and the Place in Time Travel Agency's "Rules" aren't the only thing he's willing to break to protect his time-scattered family.

THE CAUSALITY LOOP by Wendy Nikel is out in ebook and paperback today, October 29, 2019.

Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she's left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published by Analog, Nature: Futures, Podcastle, and elsewhere. Her time travel novella series, beginning with The Continuum, is available from World Weaver Press. For more info, visit wendynikel.com
​

This anthology envisions winters of the future, with stories of scientists working together to protect narwhals from an oil spill, to bring snow back to the mountains of Maine, to preserve ecosystems—even if they have to be under glass domes. They're stories of regular people rising to extraordinary circumstances to survive extreme winter weather, to fix a threat to their community's energy source, to save a living city from a deep-rooted sickness. Some stories take place after an environmental catastrophe, with luxury resorts and military bases and mafia strongholds transformed into sustainable communes; others rethink the way we could organize cities, using skybridges and seascrapers and constructed islands to adapt to the changes of the Anthropocene. Even when the nights are long, the future is bright in these seventeen diverse tales.

GLASS AND GARDENS: SOLARPUNK WINTERS will be available in ebook and paperback on January 7, 2020. Order the paperback directly through World Weaver Press, and receive it by December 20th! (Limited quantity available for this deal!) Pre-order the ebook for only 99¢—price will increase on release day.

​“Wings of Glass” by Wendy Nikel
“Halps’ Promise” by Holly Schofield
“A Shawl for Janice” by Sandra Ulbrich Almazan
“The Healing” by Sarah Van Goethem
“The Fugue of Winter” by Steve Toase
“The Roots of Everything” by Heather Kitzman
“Viam Inveniemus Aut Faciemus” by Tales from the EV Studio and Commando Jugendstil
“Recovering the Lost Art of Cuddling” by Tessa Fisher
“Oil and Ivory” by Jennifer Lee Rossman
“Orchidaceae” by Thomas Badlan
“The Things That Make It Worth It” by Lex T. Lindsay
“Glâcehouse” by R. Jean Mathieu
“Snow Globe” by Brian Burt
“Rules for a Civilization” by Jerri Jerreat
“On the Contrary, Yes” by Catherine F. King
“Set the Ice Free” by Shel Graves
“Black Ice City” by Andrew Dana Hudson

Click here to check out all the author bios!

​Sarena Ulibarri is Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press, and she is also a fiction writer who has been published in magazines such as Lightspeed, GigaNotoSaurus, and DreamForge, as well as anthologies such as Biketopia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories in Extreme Futures and The Gamer Chronicles. She lives in a solar-powered adobe house in New Mexico, and can be found online at SarenaUlibarri.com and @SarenaUlibarri.

Guest Blog by Alicia K. Anderson​

The call for stories for the Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline anthology appeared at the same time as the quarter’s syllabus for Folk and Fairy Tale Traditions class.  I’m pursuing a degree in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, which is nearly as fantastical a sentence to write as a fairy tale retelling might be. I hadn’t wanted to write Rapunzel, but I saw the image of her standing on a factory floor with her hair in a tight golden bun.  I could see the love interest in my mind’s eye tell her that she needed to let her hair down.  This was the first hint I had of the story that would become ‘Ramps and Rocket’.  

​I wanted to make my Rapunzel story a proper Rapunzel story. I used various versions of the tale — including Basile’s Petrosinella and de la Force’s Persinette -- which Jack Zipes credits as the primary inspiration for related tales from Bierling, Bechstein, and the Grimms. I also looked at the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folk tale index, and the descriptions of the pieces required for tale type 310. “The Maiden in the Tower” — a subset of the “Magical Adversaries” category. These are the basic components of the story:

1. Theft of greens from the witch’s garden, child promised to the witch in payment
2. The child — named for the stolen greens — is locked in a tower, and isolated
3. Long, golden hair is a ladder
4. Prince climbs the tower
5. The witch cuts the hair, blinds the prince, banishes the girl
6. Girl wanders the desert, the prince wanders blind, eventually hears her voice and finds her
7. The tears of the girl heal the prince’s blindness

 
Aside from setting and narrative frame, I left the initial transgression largely intact. The father in the story steals the rampion, and Gothel takes her payment in kind — a baby named Rampion.

Rapunzel is named after the German word for rampion, a European vegetable used in salads), and her name is the clue for understanding what happens. [….]  [T]he sorceress gains the care of Rapunzel because her parents had, first transgressed into her forbidden domain and, second, agreed to hand Rapunzel over. So the sorceress wanted Rapunzel more than her parents did, or so it seems. (Bettelheim 148)

The change in era and aesthetic made it necessary to adjust the tower in which Rampion is imprisoned.  She lives in, and is the beloved foreman of a tall, smoky factory that makes the bits and knobs used on dashboards of automobiles and airplanes. The tall factory tower still separates Rampion from reality. She is kept apart from her coworkers by Gothel and by her position in charge. 
​
The factory itself was born of the dieselpunk theme of the anthology.  The story needed to smell of exhaust fumes and leather belts, of fires and boilers and early versions of internal combustion engines. It needed to be dirty and productive, full of life amidst giant machines.  I needed to invent some new machine to cement my story in this aesthetic of time and place.  

The style of Rampion’s blonde hair is also adjusted for era and aesthetic purposes. Though I updated the quantity and styling of Rampion’s hair, I didn’t change its color. In her essay “The Language of Hair” in From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner brought to light the fact that “Blondness and beauty have provided a conceptual rhyme in visual and literary imagery ever since the goddess of Love’s tresses were described as xanthe, golden, by Homer” (363).

Fairness was a guarantee of quality. It was the imaginary opposite of ‘foul,’ it connoted all that was pure, good, clean. Blondeness is less a descriptive term about hair pigmentation than a blazon in code, a piece of a value system that it is urgent to confront and analyse because its implications, in moral and social terms, are so dire and are still so unthinkingly embedded in the most ordinary, popular materials of the imagination. (Warner 364)
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The concept of Rampion “letting down” her hair as a passport to her feelings, emotional release and possibly sex was not lost.  Though the story never speaks of her isolation from the outside world or the world of sexual maturity, her blondeness implies it. “All though blondeness’s most enduring associations are with beauty, with love and nubility, with erotic attraction, with value and fertility,” writes Warner, “its luminosity made it also the traditional colour of virgins” (367). Gothel cuts Rampion’s long banner of golden hair as a punishment for her indiscretion. “Maidenhair can symbolize maidenhead – and its loss too, and the flux of sexual energy that this releases [….]” (Warner 374).  

In Rapunzel, the element that fills me with envy and desire is the character of the Prince. Until he is blinded by the witch, he comes and goes as he pleases. He has a horse. He has access to enter and exit the tower. His movement and freedom inspired me to invent Rocket’s wheelchair that was also a motorcycle. Rocket is unlimited in where she can go, and at what speed. She can wheel indoors, or she can take off along the highway at the end of the day. 
​
The name “Rocket” is chosen for the dual meaning. First is the object that blasts off into space — how she might blast off down the road on her motorbike. The second meaning of “rocket” is the British slang for the green that in the US is called arugula. Rampion and Rocket are both expensive salad greens. They are both women. It was important to me on an emotional and intuitive level that the characters were more alike than they were different. 

When I write, my creative process includes tapping into the parts of myself and my own unconscious that are activated by the story I’m retelling. I have been working on my relationship to my chronic illness and my own identity as a disabled person. Rocket’s disability as a function of her freedom is absolutely something that touches upon my experience. The inability of my body to move freely forced me to become more emotionally vulnerable and “free”.

In his introduction to The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim writes of a young boy who found Rapunzel comforting. “Rapunzel found the means of escaping her predicament in her own body — the tresses on which the prince climbed up to her room in the tower. That one’s body can provide a lifeline reassured him that, if necessary, he would similarly find in his own body the source of his security” (Bettelheim 17). I had not read Bettelheim’s analysis of the story until after I’d written my retelling, and I’m very glad for it. He would have spoiled the ending!
​
"The fantastic element is that which provides that final consolation: the power of the body is imaginatively exaggerated by the overlong tresses, on which one can climb up a tower, and by tears, which can restore sight.  But what more reliable source of recovery do we have than our own body?" (Bettelheim 149)

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Knopf, 1977. Print.
​
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Noonday, 1994, Print

On nights and weekends, Alicia K. Anderson squeezes creative writing between the assignments for a Ph.D. program in Mythological Studies. During the weekdays, she is a freelance SEO consultant — which is a form of wizardry in its own right. Sometimes she wishes she were locked in a tower with only occasional headaches from visiting loved ones. Alas, her husband and stepson don’t have to ask her to let her hair down to gain entry to her lair. At best, they sometimes knock. Find her online at aliciakinganderson.com