I want a vaccine, but what I want even more are magic beans I can plant in my arm that will grow into a beanstalk.

I’m mourning something nameless that has vanished into thin air.

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

We are knee-deep in broken things.

No one wants to pay, but it’s time.

In fairy tales animals are always talking. Even when they are dead, they are talking. 

My sister decides not to cut her hair. Instead she lets it fall out, slowly and then suddenly. She yawns, rises, and climbs up the stairs. She leaves behind a trail of blondish gold thread, like a princess coming undone.

Where do you put your personal grief when an entire nation is grieving?

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

This Passover our exodus will not be made by wandering a desert, but by a desert—a desertion—wandering through us.

Each of us wants something different from the wizard. I wanted to be undone.

As my sons grow, the American imagination grows around like them like water hemlock. Poisonous and hollow.

Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.         It is December in Georgia, and we are driving past twinkling lights, and wreaths, and mildly poisonous winterberries, and a wire reindeer w…

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who is the motherest mother of them all?

“Is it really worth it,” my writing student asks. “All this vulnerability? All this exposure? Possibly hurting everyone you love?”

For whom is a child’s childhood? I think it’s for all of us. But it’s not for when we are children.

For a marriage to survive, pieces of the tale need to be left out.

How else do you call attention to your sadness? There are days I wish I could cry one whole boulder. A city of rubble. Glittering hail.      

Lately I have been hurting people I love with my writing.

On fairy tales and stepmotherhood.

On lost boys, fairy tales, and raising black sons in America.

I mean to write about home, but I keep confusing it with hunger. I mean to write about hunger, but I keep confusing it with home.Home in fairytales is more like a parenthesis. A single curved bracket before a picture is hung.

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who is the motherest mother of them all? 

Many things set this president apart from other presidents, but one in particular is how tweet and burst and whim turn foreign and domestic policies into scribble. 

In fairy tales, you can open up a wolf and find an old woman. When you find an old woman in a fairy tale often she is tucked deep inside the folds of an underworld. Somewhere the psyche grows intuition like wild mushrooms.

I haven’t yet read my boys Pinocchio, the story of a boy carved from a tree, and I don’t tell them about the shooting at The Tree of Life either.

What I’ve come to the Holocaust museum to see are fairy Tales. Specifically, the fairy tales the Polish writer Bruno Schulz painted on the walls of a boy’s nursery.