Ceallaigh's Blog

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. 

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. =)

Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about child lore with help from scholars Gary Alan Fine and others, author Philip Pullman, and The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin. I'm also exploring the use of child lore in storycraft and providing you with an exercise on the topic.