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Helen Pilinovsky writer and scholar Columbia U, New York | ||||
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Helen Pilinovsky was born in Vienna and raised in New York by Russian émigré parents. She attended Hunter College, majoring in English, Classics, and Art History, and graduated valedictorian in 2001. She completed her MA in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College in 2002, focusing on AT 510B, the tale commonly known as "Donkeyskin." She is currently pursuing doctoral studies in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University with the assistance of a Javits Fellowship, where she is working on the archetypal differences between the canons of Eastern and Western European fairy tales. Helen has been published in the Endicott Studio's Journal of Mythic Arts, and in Realms of Fantasy magazine. Her reviews have appeared in Marvels & Tales: the Journal of Fairy Tale Studies, and for the New York Review of Science Fiction, and can now be found regularly in the Endicott Studio Previous Book Recommendations & Recommended Reading. Helen is now at work on a casebook focusing on the fairy tale of "Donkeyskin" with Kate Bernheimer, which will include a broad selection of variants, modern retellings, and criticism. Her interests include fairy tales, folklore, and the fantastic, as well as teaching, arguing literary theory, and silversmithing. |
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"Once upon a time . . . these words are an incantation, signaling the beginning of a spell of enchantment—a magical spell, or a spell in the sense of a timeless period, or often some combination of the two. They describe a then that could have occurred at any time, in any place, a then which hovers in a delicious void of possibility. However, the thing that we —the modern readers, lovers, enchanted connoisseurs of fairy tales—can sometimes forget is that the prospects of the then can be equally relevant in the now. Fairy tales, folk tales, legends, and myths—fantastic stories of all kinds—are as relevant to the modern world as they ever were. " | |
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— Helen Pilinovsky | |
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