A literary magic show

Magic is normal.

A literary event Thursday features original work that starts with that premise: Enchantment is everyday. Otherworldly is ordinary. The school bus driver is a robot? Entirely possible.

Lilac City Fairy Tales, the event, will include readings by seven Spokane-area authors who ran with that idea. “Lilac City Fairy Tales,” the book, is a related anthology of prose and poetry by 30 area writers.

In one very short story in the book, grown-up Hansel and Gretel – vacationing with their families – argue about that incident from their childhood: Who was braver?

In a poem, an archangel’s wings start as a lump on his back, requiring “just the right dislocation of socket, radius, elbow, and wrist” to get at the itch.

Sharma Shields, the event’s organizer and anthology’s editor, said she invited authors to write prose and poetry that would fall under “fairy tale,” loosely defined. Their stories and poems didn’t have to be set in any particular kind of place. She required no magical beasts.

“Everybody kind of jumped on it,” she said.

The anthology – to be sold at a release party Saturday, at Thursday’s event and later at Auntie’s Bookstore and Atticus Coffee & Gifts – includes inventive spins on age-old tales. Frogs, when kissed, turn into whatever the princess doing the kissing needs most at the time (a digital camera, a La-Z-Boy recliner). The Tooth Fairy reveals what she does with all those teeth. Other pieces star mermaids, and, more than once, Magic Johnson.

Some, including pieces to be read Thursday, are dark. As such, Shields said, this literary event is not for young children.The anthology includes work by women and men. But all seven writers set to read at Thursday’s event are women. That’s no accident, Shields said. Women in the Spokane area are publishing books, winning awards and smashing genres, she said.

“Women are really powerful intellectually, and they’re flourishing in the community right now,” she said. “I wanted to highlight that.”

On the docket: Kris Dinnison, whose first novel, “You and Me and Him,” will come out next year; poet and prose writer Nance Van Winckel, whose books include “Pacific Walkers” and “Boneland”; poet Laura Read, who wrote “Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral”; poet Brooke Matson, author of “The Moons”; Maya Jewell Zeller, author of the poetry collection “Rust Fish”; and poet Ellen Welcker, author of “The Botanical Garden.”

The event also includes a panel discussion among arts organizers in Spokane – women who run literary and visual-arts events, performance venues and literary publications – and performances by Liz Rognes, an indie folk and Americana singer, and Mama Doll, an indie folk group.

The event is a fundraiser, with three-quarters of the proceeds going to Ink Art Space on downtown’s east edge, which offers classes for youth. The rest of the money will go to the Friends of the Bing.

Proceeds from sales of the anthology will benefit Ink and area libraries.

Shields’ own writing often includes elements of fantasy and magic. Her “monsters, human and otherwise, rise up from mundane corners to act out what’s best and worst in our natures,” wrote Jefferson Robbins in Spark, the online magazine of Humanities Washington.

Characters in her 2012 short-story collection, “Favorite Monster,” include a cyclops, Bigfoot and Medusa. Her novel slated for publication in 2015, “The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac,” is populated by unicorns, lake monsters and family members reincarnated as family pets.

Those elements heighten the emotion in her stories, Shields said. But her interest also goes back to her childhood love of mythology: “I’m still that little geek. I love that stuff.”

Shields said she borrowed the phrase “Magic is normal” from author Kate Bernheimer, who introduced the term “normalized magic” in an essay.

“The natural world in a fairy tale is a magical world,” Bernheimer wrote. “The day to day is collapsed with the wondrous. In a traditional fairy tale there is no need for a portal.”