Ceallaigh's Blog

Congratulations, Nathan!

Folklore & Fiction subscriber Nathan Waddell reached out to me today to tell me that he had sold a story with the help of F&F materials. I'm over the moon for him and can't wait to read it. Meanwhile, he wrote a lovely testimonial. Here it is: 

Hello, and welcome to the February 2021 Folklore & Fiction dispatch. In this edition, I'll be exploring ATU 60 "Fox and Crane Invite Each Other." I'll also be providing an exercise designed to help you adapt the tale type's plot and motif for your own creative purposes. Let's start with an example of the type from Russian folklore, a tale entitled "The Fox and the Crane."

Hello, and welcome to the January 2021 Folklore & Fiction dispatch. In this edition, I'll be introducing you to three indexes of recurring motifs and plots found in folk tales. I'll also be providing you with a writing exercise extracted from Julia Cameron's excellent motivational book on the creative life, The Artist's Way. This dispatch has been released with the first of its companion Folklore & Fiction podcast episodes, and you'll find a link to that episode below. It's also the first in a two-year exploration of folkloric motifs and plots from around the world paired with writing exercises designed to help you make use of them as storytellers.

On March 11, 2020 - the day the pandemic was declared - I was in Toronto undertaking ethnographic research for my doctoral dissertation. I had been in the city for six weeks and planned to continue my research until the early autumn. Four days later, we included a young man attending university in the city as part of our departure caravan and left a strangely subdued Toronto behind us, fleeing eastward to our rural Atlantic Canadian home, where his mother planned to pick him up.