Ceallaigh's Blog
Myths, legends, fairy tales, and fables are distinct folk narrative types with specific characteristics, but the terms are often conflated in common usage, and the genres themselves are sometimes muddied in contemporary storytelling. Many writers and readers also believe they are inflexible categories of established tales, when in reality they are dynamic tools we can use to weave familiar narrative patterns into new tales.
Hello, and welcome to the July 2021 Folklore & Fiction dispatch. In this edition, I'll be exploring ATU 1096 "Sewing Contest." Let's begin with a British poem of the tale type that pits a humble tailor against the Devil himself.
"The Devil and the Tailor"
There was a tailor in our town,
Who was a worthy wight;
All through the day
He worked away,
And halfway through the night.
He had a wife whom he did love,
And he had children bright;
To find the meat
For them to eat,
Did puzzle the tailor quite.
It's been a real pleasure writing for the Alphabet Anthology series; some of my best stories have come out of Rhonda Parrish's prompts. So I'm delighted to show you the cover for the next instalment of the series; G Is for Ghosts. Subscribers to the Folklore & Fiction dispatch and podcast will have already seen an excerpt from my story around the letter "C," but here it is again, in case you haven't read it.
Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction dispatch. At the summer and winter solstices, I mimic the sun and pause to reflect on my own creative work. In this edition, I'm discussing fables in fiction with a passage from my short story "Metal Crow and Ghost Crow," forthcoming in the G Is for Ghost anthology.
Here are the folklore-related memes I published to social media in May 2021.
Three dreams of sorrow were given to Serkleit, Goddess of Art and Fermentation, Keeper of Caves at the Heart of the World, before her deification.
Once in a while, I love to occupy that liminal storytelling space between poetry and fiction and tell a richly-phrased story in just a few words. When Rhonda Parrish invited me to submit a story for consideration in her tarot anthology Arcana, I did just that. "The Moon" is the shortest story I have ever written and an effort to apply the meaning and symbolism of the card itself to the experience of being a transgender woman. While I'm a natal woman, I hope it offers something gentle and poetic to that experience and to my friends in the transgender community.
Hello, and welcome to the May 2021 Folklore & Fiction dispatch. In this edition, I'll be exploring ATU 852 "Lying Contest." This month's discussion is all about lies and the liars who tell them, so let's begin with a folk tale featuring the Ash Lad, that underestimated but entirely too clever Norwegian character.
Here are the folklore-related memes I published to social media in April 2021.
Hello, and welcome to the first Animism, Folklore, and Storytelling supplement of the Folklore & Fiction dispatch. In late February, I mentioned to followers of my Facebook page that I was planning to explore intersections between folklore, ecological activism, animism, and climate change, all with the needs of storytellers in mind. Animism, Folklore, and Storytelling is part of this plan; a sandbox for testing these intersections before I write the Folklore & Fiction material into a book series. Not everything in my queue is a good fit for the supplement, so sometimes I'll release a whole dispatch and podcast, sometimes I'll tack a paragraph or two onto the monthly offering, and sometimes I won't include anything at all. That said, folk narrative is a rich repository of motifs, plots, and themes related to these topics, so I hope you'll find the discussions interesting, if irregular.
Hello, and welcome to the April 2021 Folklore & Fiction dispatch. In this edition, I'll be exploring ATU 780 "The Singing Bone." This month's discussion is all about subversion, so to kick it off, I'll be singing my own subverted rendition of Child Ballad #10, "The Twa Sisters," which is itself listed in the ATU index as an example of the tale type.
