Cahrina Chang

Cahrina Chang presents a playful version of Cinderella set way out West, with a mean stepfamily, farm chores, and a talking cow who is, of course, Ella’s late mother and her magical helper. Like the magical cows of other stories, Her Mother The Cow can talk, but unlike more traditional cowmothers, she has an iPhone and uses her hoof to order up the solutions to Ella’s chorelist from Shamazon and other stores with similar zany names. In the end, it’s the John Deere heir’s cowboy hat (not the glass boot, which must be returned to Shamazon!) that allows Ella to reunite with her beloved and start their tractor ride into the sunset. Cahrina Chang hails from Fairfield, Iowa, and is finishing her third year as a 3D Design major.

Moriah Lee

Moriah Lee’s “Figments of the Heart” draws inspiration from the familiar Brothers Grimm telling “Ashputtle” and a Chinese telling, “The Avenging Black Cow,” and incorporates the full array of elements shared by various Cinderella tales the dead mother, the hazel tree, the abusive stepmother and sisters, the cow and dove as magical helpers and the slaughter of the cow, the mysterious appearance of fancy clothes enabling her to attend a ball lulling us into a comforting sense of familiarity. But as the story progresses, the line between fantasy and reality begin to blur, and we may slowly begin to wonder how reliable our heroine’s point of view really is. Moriah Lee is an English & Creative Writing major from Berryville, Virginia finishing her first year at Iowa.

Figments of the Heart

Elsa Richardson-Bach

In “And So He Took His Vorpal Sword in Hand,” Elsa Richardson-Bach has adapted an Irish tale called “The Bracket Bull,” which features a dragon-slaying hero as Cinderella, instead of the more typical heroine. This story too features a dragon, a hero, and a princess, along with a lost boot, but it is set in a modern-day amusement park. Elsa Richardson-Bach is from Marblehead, Massachusetts, and is about to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in English & Creative Writing with a focus on publishing. She is not a robotics engineer, but if anyone reading this is, a big metal dragon would be a super cool thing to build. Just a thought.

And So He Took His Vorpal Sword in Hand