Why the newest fairy tale magazine might reignite Britain's folk heritage

...Unsettling Wonder was officially launched at the beginning of the month - click the logo to explore the website!

If you follow any of the blogs I link to on my sidebar, then chances are this won't be news for you! But in case you missed the deluge of blog posts last week, here is a bit of information from the website:

Unsettling Wonder is about going back to...that troubling, entrancing glimpse into story. Childhood affords us the first glimpse, but it is by no means the last. And the oldest stories—the fairy tales we met in childhood, the folklore and folk traditions that gave rise to them—can still be woven together for telling today. We want embrace [sic] and celebrate, re-imagine and re-invent, our folk traditions, the wild and variegated scrapheap of story and theme and motif that lies open to the magpie gaze of the writer.

But why do I think Unsettling Wonder could 'reignite Britain's folk heritage'? 

After having a look around the site I was struck by a couple of things: firstly, of the five members of staff listed, four of them have strong links to Britain, particularly to Scotland. Secondly, in the 'about' section of the website, which provides a type of mission statement for the magazine, we can read that the magazine wants to tell the tales of 'Woods and princes, elves and fools, voyages and rolling cheeses, tricksters and righteous sages, kings dressed as beggars, stories told by thieves.' Rolling cheeses? Now, that's not something I've ever seen mentioned specifically before by a fairy tale magazine! Cheese rolling is an ancient - and possibly pagan - British tradition that is still celebrated today in the Cotswolds. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I have never heard of such an event happening elsewhere in the world.

Does the British folk and fairy tale need a renaissance?

Maybe. Maybe not. I think when most people think of the British fairy tale, chances are they'll be thinking of the works of Victorian writers who, for all their moralising, produced great works and great names that stay with us: Andrew Lang, Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti...What I personally love is the slightly blurred boundaries between folk tales and fairy tales that occur: Victorians wrote moral versions of familiar fairy tales, but also incorporated that moral tone into stories of fairies, sprites and all the other mischievous little folk whose legends litter our countryside. Kingsley's The Water-Babies is an example of this, yet it is still called a fairy tale.

And things seem to have been a bit quiet since then (although perhaps the passing of time will make it easier to see otherwise...) Fantasy is something that Britain has always done well, in short stories and novels, but I'm not aware of any rejuvenated fairy tales that have had much impact. American writers seem particularly good at producing the 'modern' fairy tale set in, say, a desert or a high school. But I haven't seen many British writers take the fairy tale in that direction - perhaps we are struggling to move on from the unique blend the Victorians produced for us? A lot of fairy tale magazines/ezines seem to be based in America and have American editors too.

I don't know. I'm just speculating, and I won't pretend I've spent hours and hours researching this - I am basing this purely on my own observations (so criticise me, agree with me, attack me - lets debate this!) But perhaps Unsettling Wonder will allow British writers to shake off the dust covering their tomes of folk and fairy tales, and re-explore a land left behind long ago, creating new footprints in the dust...

Let nature be your teacher

Ah, I feel the shift! The leaves have begun to change colour, the temperature has dropped, and the first crisp chills have started to hang in the morning air...

by IgnisFatuusll @ dA

I'm sure I say it every year, and with every change in season...but I feel as though I must carry on sharing this feeling, because it is just too uplifting and inspiring to contain! I want to be out connecting with nature and finding inspiration in the wild places! I want to find a way to capture all the feelings of autumn in words! I love the way everything is on fire, and yet it can be so cold...it's magical!
Each year my birthday becomes more and more entwined with celebrating the first day of autumn, as I can welcome in the new season along with a new year of my life. Perhaps that explains why autumn is my favourite season - I'm an autumn baby!

As I am struggling to express all my crazy nature-loving feelings, and as I am using far too many exclamation marks in proportion to the number of words on the page, I've included a poem by William Wordsworth who, as always, says it best...

THE TABLES TURNED

AN EVENING SCENE ON THE SAME SUBJECT

        UP! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
          Or surely you'll grow double:
          Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
          Why all this toil and trouble?

          The sun, above the mountain's head,
          A freshening lustre mellow
          Through all the long green fields has spread,
          His first sweet evening yellow.

          Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
          Come, hear the woodland linnet,                             
          How sweet his music! on my life,
          There's more of wisdom in it.

          And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
          He, too, is no mean preacher:
          Come forth into the light of things,
          Let Nature be your teacher.

          She has a world of ready wealth,
          Our minds and hearts to bless--
          Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
          Truth breathed by cheerfulness.                             

          One impulse from a vernal wood
          May teach you more of man,
          Of moral evil and of good,
          Than all the sages can.

          Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
          Our meddling intellect
          Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
          We murder to dissect.

          Enough of Science and of Art;
          Close up those barren leaves;                               
          Come forth, and bring with you a heart
          That watches and receives.

Feminist Fables

I have been reading various anthologies as part of my short fiction module at university, and I recently came across three of Suniti Namjoshi's Feminist Fables in an anthology edited by Angela Carter. I was struck by how her writing could be both humorous and deeply meaningful in such a small space - they can't be more than a couple of hundred words...

I particularly enjoyed 'A Room of His Own', which is a take on Bluebeard. Bluebeard goes through the usual routine with his new wife, goes on his travels, and when he comes back finds that she hasn't been in his room. He questions her and wants to know why she didn't look, and why she wasn't curious. When she tells him 'I think you're entitled to a room of your own,' he is so angry he kills her. 

It really made me think.

And it definitely made me want to try re-writing fairy tales again!

by fatamorgana1989 @ dA

The anthology I referred to is called Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (ed. Angela Carter) First published in 1986 by Virago Press.

The Kindle has landed

I celebrated my birthday last week, and knowing that I am a writer, book lover and English student, my parents very generously bought me a Kindle Touch! I know that e-readers are nothing new anymore, but it has taken me a while to get to a point where I feel like I want and could make good use of one. I'll admit I am a sucker for physical books; I love the way they feel in my hands and the way they look on my bookshelves!

Recently though, I began to see how an e-reader would be a good investment in my life...but more as a writer and a student, than purely as a reader.

English students spend how much on books each year?!

Yep, the biggest draw is the money I can now save on my books for university. I was talking to a friend  recently who studies sociology, and she was having a bit of a rant about her £10 course reader and the other £15 she'd spent on a mandatory text book for the term. I bit my tongue, and didn't tell her that in my first term as an English student I spent nearly £100 on my books, followed by about £70 for the second term.

Whilst there's no way my massive anthologies will ever be released as e-books, a lot of other books are accessible, either at a significant reduction or, through sites such as Project Gutenberg, for free.

How many English students break their backs each year?!

OK, I'm exaggerating slightly here. However, I have a back problem that may have been caused by the heavy loads I've been carrying throughout my school/uni life, and is definitely exacerbated by those days where I have a lecture and two seminars for different modules, and need three+ different books for the day. (Especially when one of those books is a Norton Anthology. Seriously. Go and find one if you think I'm stretching the truth about how massive they are!)

Bring an e-reader on to the scene, and my day gets a little less painful.

Students' eyesight deteriorates by how much per term?!

I have to read a lot of PDFs from the university's electronic library. These essays and articles can be thousands of words long, and require translating into laymen's English and serious note-taking. I can't look at a computer screen for more than about an hour before I start to get a headache and tired eyes. And popping pills every day isn't a brilliant solution.

Thank you, Kindle, for your non-glare, 'just like paper' readability! You will be giving my optician something to smile about for the first time in 10 years!

You want to write? Read!

This isn't a new idea by any means - it's common knowledge that if you want to be a writer you need to know what's popular, what works, what doesn't...and that means reading a lot. And how does one read 'a lot' of books?

Besides finding making the time, you need to have the books in the first place. My library is great, but they don't always stock the newest releases (particularly for kids books) and they don't always have a great selection in certain genres or the sorts of non-fiction books I need. Buying the books builds up the cost, and then there's the issue of storage. Where on earth am I supposed to keep ten different children's books about rabbits that I bought because for a while I was dead set on writing an amazing children's book about rabbits?

My e-reader stores something like 3000 books. Amazing!

It has taken me a while to get here, but it now looks as if my Kindle and I have a beautiful friendship ahead of us...

Brothers Grimm on The World Tonight

Last night, the Brothers Grimm featured on BBC radio 4's The World Tonight programme, as part of celebrations for the 200th anniversary of their first published collection of fairy tales.

The World Tonight  

BBC radio 4, 22:00, 20th September

It was only a short segment of the programme, but they discussed some pretty interesting things. For example, according to a survey of Britain's parents, 90% say they read fairy tales to their children, and more then 50% prefer the Grimm fairy tales to all the others. 90%! I didn't expect the number to be so high considering all the negative media recently about 'how bad fairy tales are for children'. 

One writer was asked why fairy tales still appeal to children - because surely it is all about Harry Potter these days - and they said a large part of it was probably to do with the fact that things just happen to you, regardless of who you are, unlike in Harry Potter, where only certain children are selected for great things to happen to, who then have to spend time in training anyway.

They did bring up the violence and unjust punishment in the earlier tales, e.g. in the original Frog Princess, the princess attacks the frog in order to gain her reward. A psychologist commented that this is how children learn to deal with scary situations - within the safe confines of a book.

There appear to be quite a few Grimm features around the BBC at the moment, so keep your eyes and ears peeled!

Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tale and Fantasy

If you live in the south of England you may be aware of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tale and Fantasy, based at the University of Chichester. They frequently hold events that will interest any fairy tale fans out there, and this is the latest one:

Sex, lies and Videotape: The brothers Grimm experience
Wednesday 10 October 2012 5.15pm-6:30pm, Cloisters, Bishop Otter Campus,University of Chichester**Professional story-teller Janet Dowling presents the story of how the brothers Grimm cleaned up their act for contemporary readers … and what Disney did next.

Their advisory board is made up of big names in the global business of fairy tales, including Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar and Marina Warner. There are a couple of videos of lectures on the site, and a link to buy their journal, Gramarye.

It has occurred to me that I am only about 1 hour and a £13 train fare away from Chichester, and that I should definitely make use of such a wonderful centre that is practically on my doorstep!

Marshland by liselotte-eriksson @ dA

Contradictory thoughts

Hello!

I have returned. I returned a week ago, actually, but I've needed a bit of time to adjust and catch up with my tiny corner of the world. I have also been struggling to figure out how to write about my experiences - I've certainly been awed and inspired, but there is so much to say, so much going on, so much variation in India that I can't find the right words.

I think the best way to sum it up is probably in a single word: contradiction. 

'Holy' cows wander the streets, avoiding starvation by eating rubbish

I could spend a long time talking about the myriad reasons India is contradictory, my chief concern and confusion being that the world's second most populous country lacks basic sanitation...it looks like an epidemic waiting to happen. How can an 'emerging' global player be so floundering? The mind boggles. But I have been thinking about this with a certain sense of irony too, because if I were to write India, or 'world-build' a place based on what I experienced there...I don't think it would be believable to a reader! Seriously, I highly doubt I could get away with it; there are too many loose ends, absurdities and...yes, contradictions.

This trip has reminded me that nothing is as insane and unbelievable as real life. Books might contain the most accessible adventures, but nothing beats going out and experiencing things first hand for their randomness, uniqueness, and that overwhelming, heart-stopping feeling of wonder.