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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hello, and welcome to the March 2021 Folklore & Fiction dispatch. In this edition, I'll be exploring ATU 365 "The Dead Bridegroom Carries off His Bride." I'll also be providing an exercise designed to help you adapt the tale type's plots and motif for your own creative purposes. This month's example comes from the Child Ballad collection, and I should probably tell you now that any time I can include a Child Ballad in this series, I will do it with the feral joy of a little girl.
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.
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'm discussing myth in fiction with my short story "T Is for Three (at the End of All Things)," which was published in the C is for Chimera anthology. Because the story is only about a thousand words long, and because it's a creation myth, I'm reprinting the whole thing here. Hope you enjoy it.
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.