Sara Levine’s fiction has appeared in Nerve, The Iowa Review, Caketrain and other magazines. Her essays are anthologized in Best of Fence: The First Nine Years and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Her prose poems can be found lying on the carpet. She chairs the Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I read fairy tales for consolation. During a particularly trying time, which strangely enough corresponded with graduate school, I reveled in tales in which princesses are betrayed and wasted away, peasants whipped and led through burning hoops, rabbits—well-mannered but obviously controlling— mercilessly deserted by human brides. In my favorite, a witch turned a girl into a log and threw her into the fire.
Dana De Ano’s dimensional drawings on paper are meandering walks through childhood metaphors. Images pulled from an array of nostalgic paper findings are cut, painted, glued, and stitched. Quite often hybrid, stunted animals and people interact in a world of obstacles and drift in vast landscape-like expanses. The disturbing vignettes address a storyteller’s folklore in an arbitrary way. A myriad of interpretations are invited through these drawn stories. I guess it all began with “The Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage,” and continues to make me wonder…