Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins

Familiar fairy tales change shape when the women inside them begin telling their own stories. A heroine expected to choose a prince finds another possibility; a frightening stranger may offer recognition rather than danger. Across thirteen connected tales, girls and women pass the narrative from one voice to the next, allowing figures who once stood at the edges of someone else’s adventure to become its center. Desire, loyalty, resentment and survival complicate the divisions between rescuer and rescued, beauty and monster, innocence and experience. These retellings draw on European folklore while imagining new alliances between women, asking what becomes possible when an inherited story no longer has to end in the expected way.