Ceallaigh's Blog
"The play's the thing."
After a year of writing that began just before Christmas in 2020 and a year of production in the hands of the Odyssey Theatre in Ottawa, I am delighted to bring you my modern fairy tale audio drama, "The Belt and the Necklace," starring Chandel Gambles, Mark Huisman, Neta J. Rose, and Nicole Wilson. I hope you'll listen to it, and I hope you'll share it with friends. (Grab your headphones for this one. The soundscape is gorgeous.)
Learn more about "The Belt and the Necklace" on The Other Path website.
Hello, and welcome to the November 2022 Folklore & Fiction dispatch. This month, I'm bringing you a bit of Arthuriana rescued from a fire and later added to the Child ballad collection. I wish I could sing it for you, but alas! There is no air to pair with it, and the ballad itself is fragmented. Dispatch readers will see evidence of this fragmentation in the transcript, while podcast listeners will hear it in the pauses I've added to the reading.
Let's get started.
Here are the folklore-related memes I published to social media in October 2022.
Hello, and welcome to the October 2022 Folklore & Fiction dispatch. This month, I'm delighted to bring you the work of guest poet and actor Math Jones. Math was born in London, but lived in Worcester for many years, and is now based in Oxford. A pagan in the Old English and Norse tradition, he often writes poetry on the stories and in the metres of that tradition. He also writes more usual verses, performing throughout the Midlands and London. A bookseller for many years, he retrained in 2008 to be an actor, and has been acting professionally since then, as Math Sams.
Here are the folklore-related memes I published to social media in September 2022.
Hello, and welcome to the September 2022 Folklore & Fiction dispatch. After last month's somewhat theoretical discussion, I thought it might be interesting to undertake a straightforward exploration of a Japanese folktale and discuss the ways it employs structural symmetry in storytelling. Let's start by taking a look at that tale, titled "Luck from Heaven and Luck from the Earth."
Here are the folklore-related memes I published to social media in August 2022.
Hello, and welcome to the August 2022 Folklore & Fiction dispatch. This month, I'm utilizing an Israeli fable to discuss the ways folkloristic and literary analysis can help you adapt and subvert traditional narrative themes. Let's jump right in.
Here are the folklore-related memes I published to social media in July 2022.
Hello, and welcome to the July 2022 Folklore & Fiction dispatch. First, my thanks to PJ Lynch, whose illustration of Oisín as an old man graces my social media cards this month, for permitting me to utilize his work. You'll find him online at www.pjlynchgallery.com. After May's discussion of fairy magic, I thought it would be interesting to discuss fairy time, specifically the supernatural lapse of time found in folktales about human travel to the fairy otherworld. There is a powerful sense of the implacable in these tales; our heroes might visit the otherworld for any number of reasons, but time still passes in our world, and death often waits for them to return. With this in mind, it's also worth discussing how these heroes navigate the internal conflicts associated with time and death to see if there is any wisdom for storytellers who want to write characters like them. I'll begin with a tale of the Fianna titled "Usheen's Return to Ireland," recorded by Lady Gregory and collected by renowned folklore scholar Henry Glassie in a book titled Irish Folktales.