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:
Now that the Folklore & Fiction newsletter has successfully transformed into a dispatch and podcast, I have a bit of news to share with you and a bit of housekeeping to do for you. On tap, news about an upcoming theatrical production and a professional webinar, a handy list of the Folklore & Fiction genre series editions, a question about podcasting the archives, and a new copyright statement posted to my website.
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.
Here are the folklore-related memes I published to social media in November 2020.
Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about performance with help from scholars Dan Ben-Amos, Roger D. Abrahams, Richard Bauman, and others, author and playwright William Shakespeare, and the McGahan Lees Irish Dance Academy. I'm also exploring possible uses of performance in storytelling. This is the most theoretically chewy of the newsletters I've published in the last two years, but I've endeavoured to make it tasty as well, so grab a glass of water and dig in. =)
Here are the folklore-related memes I published to social media in October 2020.
