The author thanks Jeannine Hall Gailey for permission to excerpt her poem ‘The Little Mermaid Warns You, You May Have Already Become Forgotten’ (originally published in Enchanted Living Magazine [formerly Faerie Magazine]) as an epigraph. She thanks Patrick Friesen for permission to excerpt lines from his essay ‘Poetry Was My Back-Up Plan, After Music’ (originally published in the Winnipeg Review).
Chapter Eight, ‘Monsters and Marvels,’ was originally published as ‘Monster or Marvel: The Disabled Life in a Superhero Universe’ on LitHub, April 26, 2019.
Select parts of the untitled memoir sections in this book were originally part of the essay ‘The Second Art Form,’ published on The Rumpus on September 3, 2013.
Unless otherwise noted, definitions in this book are taken from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.
Unless otherwise noted, historical definitions of words are taken from the Online Etymology dictionary, available at www.etymonline.com.
Unless otherwise noted, references to the tales in the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmarchen are taken from The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of The Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. This is the first English translation of the original volumes of the KHM published in 1812 and 1815. This translation was completed by Jack Zipes and published in 2014.
Where later editions of the tales are noted in the text, those readings were taken from The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, All-New Third Edition, published in 2003. This text was also translated by Jack Zipes and taken from the 1857 edition of the KHM, the seventh and final edition to be published while the Grimms were still alive.