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September 11, 2026
from “Inventory for Some Kind of Fairy Tale”
in Brevity
by Noel Thistle Tague
“...the tale of the grieving storyteller gathering flowers “early in the morning, before the wind can tear them apart.”
Noel Thistle Tague is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Maine at Augusta, where she teaches a range of students, including adult learners and incarcerated individuals. She also helps organize UMA’s annual Plunkett Poetry Festival, which has brought nationally acclaimed poets to central Maine for more than two decades. Originally from the Thousand Islands region of northern New York State, she lives with her family in midcoast Maine.
The essay appears in the current issue of Brevity. You can read the full version here. You can also find the original PDF version of the text that we use below on the Brevity site here.
The Paragraph of the Week
Fruit
On a scan, a brain bleed looks like rot in the flesh of a melon. A blot, a blight. An overdose looks like what’s left after a storm has swept through, the storm churning at the center of the self. Debris of bones and bodies. Sodden clothing and spoiled food. Homes tilting off foundations, doors ripped from hinges, windows black.
—Noel Thistle Tague
Commentary
This brief “Inventory for Some Kind of Fairy Tale” in six small sections by Noel Thistle Tague has ingredients of a folk tale about it: the grandmother, the cousin “with white blonde hair pooling upon the bedspread,” “an enchanted sleep,” thorns that “no one will slash through,” the name Melody Autumn chanted until it becomes a “spell,” a name that can save a girl “in a certain type of story.” It is hard to tell exactly what happens in this “type of story,” but when the fairy tale is stripped away, and real life squeezes in, the essay describes a grandmother who dies of a brain bleed which on a scan “looks like rot in the flesh of a melon” and a cousin who dies of an overdose that “looks like what’s left after a storm has swept through.” It is the autumn melody of the grieving storyteller gathering flowers “early in the morning, before the wind can tear them apart.”
—THE
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Announcements
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
