Fables and Spells: Collected and New Short Fiction and Poetry by Adrienne Maree Brown

Fables and Spells: Collected and New Short Fiction and Poetry Reviews

• 
  Noémie Dubé

  ✨✨we plant the seeds of radical honesty / vulnerability, authenticity / and the kindness that eases inevitable change✨✨
• 
  Lauren Hunter

  I loved how REAL her characters are. The textures, edges, and vulnerabilities make each person walk right off the page.
• 
  Lisa Funderburg

  Healing. Sensual. Magical. So grateful for this collection of creativity and spiritual connectivity
• 
  Avory Faucette

  Fables & Spells is a collection of poetry and stories that is rich with magic and possibility, but also doesn't shy away from grappling with the grief and maddening nature of being a marginalized human in apocalyptic times. As always, adrienne maree brown engages with the natural world, collective liberation, and what it means to be in relationships with others through the experience of change. This collection also incorporates her love of visionary fiction and the witchier element of her work with a creative flair.
  
  I found Fables & Spells to very much resonate with other multigenre works I’ve read by women and queers of color who often transcend genre by weaving together different aspects of form, quilt-like, in their writing. This fierce resistance of categorization tends to come across as a more authentic presentation of self in a world that insists on defining, labeling, and boxing racialized folks in. In the introduction to the book, brown describes their writing as part of their “witching way,” typically channeled rather than planned, and notes that “[t]he labor I put into my work is clearing everything out of the way until I can listen. The work I do is to look at the moon, or a body of water, or some creature other than human, and wait until I understand something. The work I do is to repeat the instructions of love that want to be heard, over and over.”
  
  This description of the author’s own work really struck me as someone who channels through writing. When I stumble upon a particularly cutting turn of phrase, something that speaks to someone else or to myself, I’m often a little surprised by it. Those moments of brilliance come through primarily when I’m fully present, able to let some of the mental cruft of simply existing in apocalyptic times be processed and set aside. From that perspective, I deeply felt this description of the labor itself being the clearing, whereas the writing itself simply comes through.
  
  The pieces here are loosely categorized as short stories and poetry, but there’s also a thread of personal reflection that comes through in every piece, in that way that speculative genres often most clearly expose our present anxieties. brown wrestles with a number of interwoven threads—from the pandemic to the greater ongoing apocalypse of racial capitalism to the magic of Black experience and ancestral legacy.
  
  Something that struck me especially is how these poems and stories leave something open-ended, presenting more questions than answers. I tend to find speculative short stories tough, since I’m such a nerd about worldbuilding and almost always want to read a full book in the universe teased by the story, but in a lot of ways I actually found the open-ended nature of these stories to be exactly what I need in these times. Their ambiguity invites participation and reflection, even co-creation. How do we want the story to end? And is there such a thing as an ending in the first place? After all, “the end” is simply a matter of perspective.
  
  So many of our present challenges come from a collective delusion on the part of white America, generally speaking, that places the United States in either the 50s or the 90s (depending on one’s political leaning) at a kind of zenith of modern progress—a viewpoint that suggests we’re basically “done” achieving and should coast for a while, while also harkening back to that zenith point whenever inevitable societal change occurs. While white “progressives” may have a more multicultural view of progress than white conservatives, and criticize the longing for a “simpler time” as a racist fantasy, they similarly cling to neoliberal markets and the Clinton administration while trusting that the federal government is the answer, markets will recover, and incremental reforms are a reasonable approach. I remember reading an article in AP German class in 2002 from der Spiegel titled “das Zweite Rom?” and thinking “oh, shit. We really are an empire that can’t yet see it’s crumbling, aren’t we?” Of course, my Black and brown classmates were probably way ahead of me on that one!
  
  Twenty years on from that moment, Fables & Spells engages with this collective delusion from a Black, queer, emergent perspective and with a point of view that is both critical and hopeful. brown engages with what it means to be the person who is often associated with hope and possibility through her previous work in a time where it’s hard to remain hopeful, and even as she explores the possibilities of the stars and realms beyond the five senses or modern science they also engage with the real struggles of the present and the violations of the past.
  
  A story that I remember being particularly struck by in brown and Walidah Imarisha’s visionary fiction collection, Octavia’s Brood, appears again here in expanded form, recounting the tale of a near future Black Detroiter who witnesses from a boat on Lake Michigan the rage of the water itself turning against white gentrifiers and colonizers, swallowing an imported white mayor. Another story, possibly set in the same continuity, explores the power of a Black witch who is able to call upon the water in a time where Detroit city officials forbid unauthorized water-gathering and turn off the pipes, selling bottled water to poor residents at a steep markup.
  
  While whiteness and the state are fairly cast as villains and antagonists to nature, magic, and Blackness in these stories, this is not without complexity. “Hipsters and entrepreneurs were complicated locusts,” brown writes in the first story. “They ate up everything in sight, but they meant well.” Another story explores the psychology of Miski and Fred, an interracial couple who are separated when an invading alien race provides for humanity’s needs but removes those they call “dominants” to a parallel reality until they can learn to value everyone else’s lives equal to their own. Both Miski and Fred grapple with confusion, denial, and upset as they confront the fact that Fred’s professed anti-racist ideology doesn’t match up to his deepest-felt beliefs.
  
  While many of the stories in the collection are set in the future, some explore the wonders of the Earth itself while others reach for the stars, and brown’s writing explores the depth and the vastness of both. There’s also an engagement with history, particularly through the poetry but also in some stories. There are references to Harriet Tubman and Nina Simone, and even a story where Nikki Giovanni lives out her later years on a space station populated by Black folks. brown’s poetry is often rooted in present struggles, but with an eye towards what might be possible next, as well as prayer and ritual, including some of the lunar verses they originally shared on social media.
  
  I love how the stories here playfully decenter humanity in many cases, focusing on not only alien lifeforms and earth-based spirits but even, in one case, the dinosaur in O’Hare airport. My relationship to place, speed, and movement dramatically changed with the pandemic, as did brown’s. In 2019 I was moving near-constantly, whenever I had the energy against the backdrop of chronic fatigue and unsolved disabilities approaching crisis levels. When I wasn’t sleeping, I was on an airplane (okay, often I was sleeping on the airplane, trying not to feel too guilty about being paid by my nonprofit when I couldn’t bring myself to get any work done in flight), and I developed a strange relationship to the zombie-like transitory spaces of airports, and especially their odd amalgam of public art installations, murals, sculptures, and weird water features.
  
  I used to love the calming feeling of the tunnel between terminals in Detroit, for example, and it was the only moving walkway I’d actually stand still on, just absorbing the slow changing colored lights and being still(ish) for a moment. I’d try to quickly take in the schoolkids’ little art projects as I raced past them on the way to catch a train at Midway, and in Vancouver I lamented not having time to read the little plaques about the indigenous nations whose art was represented there. It never occurred to me that I might never return to one of these hubs again, that the pandemic would deposit me on the West Coast and then bring me to a dead stop, and so I felt very connected to this story where after a series of in-person conversations on the nature of grief, apocalypse, and humanity, brown reaches out telepathically to “Dino” for guidance while in lockdown, terrified that the pandemic might be our “asteroid moment.” “But… isn’t this your thing? Change, apocalypse? The collapse of capitalism? Right relationship to the earth?” Dino asks. “Totally. But I don’t want to lose the people I love,” brown replies. Oof.
  
  Dino has many words of wisdom, but one of my favorite passages is this: “I often think that we are all experiments of an Earth figuring out her destiny. She likes living things. She likes sentient creatures that love and make family and eat. In our experiment, she learned she wanted a species that could look up to the stars, defend her from asteroids.” I love the way this response shifts the perspective, making space for both grief and hope by de-centering humanity and putting us in context, which feels so important for the moment we’re in overall.
  
  This theme of perspectival shift repeats throughout the collection, from a goddess summoned to eat racism to an immortal future-human and a race of underground inhabitants of Mars confused by our tendencies towards planetary destruction. Another of my favorite stories features alien beings who telepathically connect with Virgos on earth, humorously confused about human tendencies and offering advice on everything from the use of bidets and proper sexual treatment of the clitoris to how to load a dishwasher alongside prescient wisdom on truth and collective consciousness. The aliens in these stories are often non-corporeal, so the focus is less on their physical differences than on their impressions of our own species, with a general vibe of “what the fuck is wrong with humanity?”
  
  There’s also a playful queerness throughout, and a delight in the erotic as well as reverence for love of self. There’s a story about a polyamorous transqueer triad, and one about a human who chooses to become a computer partnering with a three-person network. Another features a Black queer couple in a futuristic city where humans are used to a kind of VR consciousness dominated by advertising. Together, they experience a strange kind of resonance through sex that shifts them into another world, programmed by a group of Africans who invite them and other Black folks who’ve similarly travelled to this constructed world modeled on what Africa was like prior to human disconnection from our environment. Their mission is to learn from witnessing what it was like for their ancestors to be in healthy relationship with the planet, and then bring that wisdom back to their dystopian world. There’s an obvious immediacy to this tale, given our present climate crisis and how disconnection from the planet is what’s killing us, hastened by an unwillingness to listen to Black and indigenous folks pointing the problem.
  
  One of the most beautiful and emotionally raw stories in the collection centers on three young biracial women who come to a fabled witch’s home and find healing in a water-magic dreamworld of ancestral experiences, framed around Nina Simone’s “Four Women.” The story is hauntingly tender and simultaneously empowering, and while I can hardly speculate as a white reader, I can imagine that it will be powerfully meaningful to magically inclined biracial readers who share experience with brown herself. The love between the friends and for the women who came before them is palpable, as is is the love each woman holds for herself.
  
  This collection does an excellent job, I think, at holding simultaneously the heartbreaking struggle of survival and the glimmer of possibility within the present moment—and particularly within the creative ideologies that spring from the magic of Black queer women and femmes. It encourages us to wake the fuck up through the mode of story and poetic reflection, using unfamiliar perspectives to make more clear what it deeply wrong in where we are and where we’re going, but also allows for the importance of honoring the little moments of play, humor, magic, and love that we’re able to access inside even the darkest collective moments.
  
  [ARC provided through Edelweiss.]
• 
  cat

  Multiple times I exclaimed, "oh my god, her brain is just SO AWESOME and SEXY" while reading these. This book and amb herself are both magic.
  
  From the introduction ::
  "It can take a while to recognize what you are when the lineage has been swept away. I reach back for the tools I was given to be in and shape the world, and at first, I cannot find them. I hear the smooth instruction to love myself and many iterations of instruction to surrender my power to others, to trust someone else to stand between me and the divine, translating, interpreting, directing the exchange. But under all of that there is a feeling that cannot be denied--a direct feeling of connection and invitation to the natural world. It is both within me and between me and life. This feeling courses through me when I hold space, hold change, when I doula, when I work as a healer and when I write.
  
  I call it witching.
  
  Witching is a practice of engaging the essential, natural world with magic and supernatural intentions. Throughout history there have been many names for witches and the work of witches, including shamanism, sorcery, healing, herbalism, midwifery and doula labor, conjuring, rootwork, ritual and spellcasting. There are lineages that provide a lot of guidance for the developing witch, and there are intuitive paths where the practices are shown, felt, called. I am definitely an intuitive witch I answer the call and I trust the love in the universe to guide my actions. And I use my witching for liberation.
  
  This act of witching is about putting our attention behind our intentions. And being willing to invite and shape the unseen forces of the world (which go by many names and beyond all comprehensible names) to align with the highest good for ourselves and the whole.
  
  There have been negative connotations and fatal consequences for witching, especially as organized religions have taken the center of common societal space. Many people have died for these good intentions, for trying to help, for having this sense in themselves of the parts of the world that are material but not visible, the realm of the energetic and interconnected. I am so grateful I was born in a time when I can embrace my practice publicly, even as I learn it. I think perhaps we witches are workers of the mycelial realm of humans.
  
  As is my way, I was practicing before I claimed any language for it, and I brought many questions to those with more established practices of witchcraft and divinity. I finally gave in to my witchy ways when I looked at my life and realized I was casting spells, channeling nature, divining with tarot, creating altars of earth, crafting rituals, and practicing astrology. Being a witch isn't the only way I tap into the limitless capacity of the divine, but it is undeniably powerful in my life, and a way that I recognize and am recognized by others who are earnestly attempting to change what is ours to change.
  
  As such, I wanted to uplift the pieces of my work that are doing active, intentional work to cast spells and create meaningful change, as well as stories in which I explore the lives of those discovering their magic. My witching way has always included writing. I rarely craft my poetic writing - I feel and channel, I get taken over by the need to express something that feels true, and I listen, editing and shaping as I write it. For that reason, I have always hesitated to call the work poetry. I am surrounded by people I think of as real poets. I see the labor they put into each of their choices, and I respect it, I honor it. What I do is different. The labor I put into my work is clearing everything out of the way until I can listen.
  
  The work I do is to look at the moon, or a body of water, or some creature other than human, and wait until I understand something.
  
  The work I do is to repeat the instructions of love that want to be heard, over and over.
  
  The stories in here may not fit strictly into the category of fables, and the poems may not all be spells, but that is also my way I get rebellious around boxes and labels. These are all spells to me, and they have been cast.
  
  As you read, I encourage you to listen for your own spells. I do know that reading your spells out loud increases their power, and reading into a candle increases their intensity, especially for release. Pay attention to the state of the moon when you choose to cast spells, as that energy of darkness, waxing, fullness, or waning will imprint on your magic. Folding a long-term spell and putting it under your bed helps you activate your dream shifting labor. Listen to your instincts as your read these spells and write your own. I hope something in these pages touches your untamed nature, reminds you that you, too, can shape the world around you."
  
  
  and some spectacular selections from the mind of adrienne maree brown that are in the book:::
  
  "Her college dorm windowsill was covered in propagating planes, the roots swirling around each other in jars of clear water. It was the first thing she had done when she arrived, go to gather living things to breathe in the room with her, find ways to have water near. She had chosen UC San Diego because she was able to get housing that faced the ocean. Each morning she woke up when the light came and slipped out of her room, up to the "living roof" where she could watch the tides. She rarely missed a sunset; this green sprawling roof was her home as much as the shared dorm room below with its glassed square of sea. She felt a power returning to her with each day that she was by the water, each day far away from her mother. She felt that what moved in her had the rhythm of waves and tides.
  
  She swam in the big ocean, with the salt moving against and through her. She went early, and sometimes at night, so she could dive down as long as she wanted without troubling any other swimmers with their fearful assumptions. The salt cleansed her of the insults and terrors of her mother. The current told her she didn't have to carry anyone else's burdens. The sand offered her gifts, sunken treasures, and lost shells.
  
  She had forgotten most of the water miracles of her childhood, in the normal way trauma obscures magic. But in this practice of giving herself to the ocean, she felt an uninterrupted sense of herself emerge, a self that could extend to the horizon without falling off, a self that could carry an emotion across a continent before releasing it."
  
  and this one that made me cry out loud at a table of other people as I read :::
  
  "how to open the channels, she was careful, she practiced bothers led unity with her clients.
  She stayed in California, and her mother stayed in Detroit, um more than a decade had passed. Her mother would some. times call het, meaning to invite her home. The anguish of missing her, the confusion of a child so far beyond her would take Tanyas tongue; she would begin to say things she didn't mean and then get lost in anger and the woman-child would withdraw for months, changing and growing and healing herself and others.
  
  When she turned thirty, she had a moon dream. Every so often these dreams would come where she was the moon, and she was so aware of the tides, so aware of the work she was doing, so new, of so fil. In this moon dream, she saw her mother, sleeping. a body of fetid water, stuck and full of rot, of things that had died but nor been allowed to go back to the sea. When she came to, she booked a ticket home before she had even been able to think.
  
  When she got to her mother's door, she was astounded by the pain she felt. Every joint in her body her gut, her hands. It was typical that she could feel the pain of her clients. Had her mother always been this walking wound, this sack of need?
  
  When her mother opened the door, her face opened in a familiar way-the wonder of her daughter had always humbled Tanya, frightened her. Tanya remembered her child, pouring out of her hands somehow, splitting the lake, bursting the pipes, becoming a stranger. Before Tanya could say the wrong thing, this grown woman in her Black beauty stepped through the door, closed it and then placed her hands on her mother.
  
  The first stuck place was in Tanya's heart, where there was a fissure that had filled up with loneliness. The second stuck place was along her spine, which had all kinds of aches and bends that were ancient-the dazzling wounds of slavery and white sociopathy.
  
  Tanya cried out as this wound flowed out of her. The third stuck place was sensual, was the place where Tanya had been touched too young, had been broken instead of nurtured. Only shared weeping can heal that kind of injury, and Tanya wept into her daughters shoulder as she caught her daughter's tears, until the pain was shared and released.
  
  The women were there in the foyer for hours, kneeling on the floor, fetal on the floor, wrapped around each other as one body becoming whole, one family coming home. Finally, finally, the healing was done. Without words, Tanya showed her precious child to the bedroom. They slept there, for the first time, in tenderness.
  
  When they woke, there was nothing to say. They had to begin again. They had to meet each other, as if for the first time."
  
• 
  Simone Ivatts

  This book! This book is genuine magic! Reading it has changed me in so many ways; I feel so enriched, expanded and healed by it. It took me longer than anticipated to read cos it's so rich and I needed time to absorb and reflect on the poems/stories/fables/spells fully before moving on to more. A book hasn't excited my brain and my heart this much in so long. It's rooted in so much love and is so full of wisdom. I never say this about books, but I genuinely want EVERYONE to read this. Will be buying copies to share with loved ones. A huge, heartfelt THANK YOU to Adrienne Maree Brown for everything in this.
• 
  Xan

  WOW. I love this book and every little story and poetry line written. I know that I will always have this book as something I am coming back to or re-reading certain poems before bed, to friends/lovers and anyone who will listen! I think that everyone can find joy, teachings and love through this book.
• 
  Sarah

  Love her, and her values. Only weird part as a leftist is her thinking voting is revolutionary.. this does not make sense with her being an abolitionist. Very confusing few poems at the end about voting. Overall though, her works are very profound and moving. The short stories were afrofuturist magnificence that inspired my hopes for the world. AMB always moves me to think and feel more deeply. 🩷
• 
  Katie Jones

  adrienne's words inspire me to access a magical version of healing that is less about fixing ourselves or dimming our rage and more about accessing the power and freedom of ourselves, our grief, and most of all our love.
• 
  Allison

  "Our work is to observe and intervene in the patterns of existence."
  Ahhh. AMB is so brilliant. The first "spell" in her book I had read before and shared widely. She is inspiring.
• 
  Debbie

  I have finished reading Fables and Spells by Adrienne Maree Brown. It is a collection of short stories and poems.
• 
  HoneyBakedAmbs

  This woman is a formidable talent. I’ll be buying a hard copy of this so I can refer to it in my own spells.
• 
  Jennifer

  Lovely. I want to live in the world she is creating.
• 
  Miriam Hall

  4.5
  When it’s good, it’s really fucking good. Wow. Damn. When not, it’s still strong, just not life-changing.
• 
  Kate

  Delicious future visioning!
• 
  Emma Craig

  Really enjoying AMB fictional work, some of these stories are so wholehearted and beautiful.
• 
  Susan Peak

  An amazing book, deeply personal yet with a wide and compassionate gaze. It has futuristic elements but these are secondary to the story and have roots deep in the past. Powerful and magical