Ceallaigh's Blog

Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about the fable genre with help from scholars Patrick Olivelle, Christos A. Zafiropoulos, Harriet Spiegel, and others, helping you analyze a fable, and discussing ways to bring fables to your story craft.

Fables are a ubiquitous story form, found throughout the history of story transmission and in the folkloric traditions of people all over the world. Perhaps the oldest and most widespread of these are the Panchatantra and the collection of tales attributed to Aesop, who might or might not have been a real person. These two pillars of the fable genre will be the focus of my attention here, along with a brief foray into Harriet Spiegel's translation of Marie de France's Fables for contrast.

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Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about the märchen genre with help from scholars Christine A. Jones, Jennifer Schacker, Jack Zipes, and others, helping you analyze a märchen, and discussing ways to bring märchen to your story craft.

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Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. At the summer and winter solstices, I mimic the sun and pause to reflect on my own creative work. In this edition, I'll be discussing folkloric elements in my new short story entitled "B is for Burned/Every Broken Creature," which was recently released in the F is for Fairy anthology of short fiction.

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The When Words Collide festival has released its tentative final program, so I thought I'd share my itinerary:

Friday 3 PM - Canmore - Fairytales, Fables and Folklore Remade

C.S. MacCath, Carol Parchewsky, Jim Jackson, Ron Oswald [PM]

Fairytale remakes, historical reimaginings, using themes from the past to create a new story. What is being done in today's Young Adult fiction, and how can past inspiration be made new again?