Mulan

I discussed this ballad/legend in Stories from Songs. Here is Adam YJ's look at it:
http://www.fairytalefandom.com/2015/04/the-stuff-of-legends-mulan.html

"While the original story may be a bit bare bones, the ability of this story to change with the times and cultures and appeal to new generations really does make it The Stuff of Legends!"

I'm Going on Tour! Author Interviews: Gail de Vos

Gail de Vos

How did you get started in storytelling?

My mother would say that I started storytelling the moment I could string two words together but I did not officially begin my career as a storyteller until I was much older. I had travelled around South East Asia and Australia after I graduated with my B.Ed. but when I returned home, instead of teaching, I got married, had two daughters and decided to return to university to become a librarian. Because my daughters were still quite young I chose an evening course as my first foray back into the academic world. The course was storytelling, not a course I particularly wanted to take as I had dreams of being a research librarian working with ideas, not necessarily people. When I initially took the course I thought that it might help with parenting skills but….what I discovered absolutely changed the direction of my life!
I was very fortunate with both my instructor and the fact that seasoned storyteller, Tigge Anne Andersen, was auditing the course. She became my mentor and, for several years, my fellow storyteller in residence at Fort Edmonton Park, bringing history alive through story. She and I also collaborated on the first Fort Edmonton Park Storytelling Festival which celebrated its 25 anniversary last year. I finished my degree and became a librarian but never worked in a library in that capacity. Immediately after graduation the opportunity came to teach the storytelling course for the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta and I went from graduating student to sessional instructor in the blink of an eye. These many years I am still teaching at SLIS as a sessional with additional courses such as Canadian Children’s Literature and Comic Books and Graphic Novels. I wished to remain a sessional instructor so I would be also free to follow my path as a storyteller and an author of resource materials on storytelling and folklore for educators and librarians.
I soon realized that my absolute favourite age of audience to tell stories to was teenagers and, while I love telling stories to all ages, that became a major focus of my story seeking, telling and writing.
I have since travelled this continent and a great deal of Europe telling stories, conducting workshops on storytelling and working with diverse groups of people, ages and backgrounds. I think I have the best occupation in the world and am so glad that I, however reluctantly, took that evening course those many years ago.

What (or who) inspires the stories you create and tell?

I am absolutely fascinated by the reworking of folklore and folktales in popular culture. When I sadly realized that many of our young people did not get the allusions to many of these tales, I began to tell these stories. Two of my books look at various folktales in the western cannon of tales but those are not the ones I usually tell. I want to introduce new audiences to old tales that are still relevant today but have not been shaped by the Disney machine. I also tell stories from my Jewish culture and, because of my lifelong fascination with Canadian history, local history highlighting place names, important historical figures and the tastes and smells of a past era. Because of this interest in Canadian history for young listeners I have the privilege of being the ongoing jury chair for the Canadian Children’s Book Centre Geoffrey Bilson Award for historical fiction.
My favourite stories have a twist or direction that gives pause for thought. Telling stories for me offers me the opportunity to encourage listening skills and critical thinking skills in audience members along with communication skills.

What was your favourite story as a child? Why?

Baba Yaga. I loved, and still do, stories about this Russian witch figure who sometimes eats children and sometimes helps them. I loved the imagery of the house on chicken feet and the thrill of the danger of the forest. The baba yaga (in Russian folklore it is not a proper name but a generic one) has recently “made” a comeback in North American popular culture with numerous depictions in comic books, novels, films, and plays. She is the ultimate earth mother and is neither totally benign nor horrendous.

How can teachers use storytelling in the classroom?

Values of Storytelling for students of all ages: Introduces listeners to a range of story experiences and increases knowledge and understanding of other places, races, and beliefs. Teachers can use a story to illuminate and discuss multiculturalism. It is a traditional teaching tool for Aboriginal students and should be employed when teaching all subjects regarding First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.
Because storytelling provides students with models of story patterns, themes, characters, and incidents listening and retelling stories helps them in their own writing, oral language, and critical thinking. Having the students tell stories helps put children’s own words in perspective and creates a safe place for expression. The exposure to oral stories helps students to develop a sense of story, to make better predictions to anticipate what is next, to increase awareness of cause and effect while developing an awareness of essential story elements: point of view, plot, styles, characters, setting and theme. Listening to a teacher telling stories inspires students to create their own and to communicate them in oral and written forms. If the teacher tells stories in all of the subject matters, students soon realize that storytelling is a major communication tool that is an essential skill beyond the boundaries of the education system. They soon realize, as well, that the world is made of stories.
To summarize my long answer to this question: teachers can use stories and storytelling in every aspect of their teaching. For example, discoveries made by mathematicians may bring arithmetic alive for a student.

What are you looking forward to most during TD Canadian Children’s Book Week?

I am looking forward to revisiting various places in the province of Quebec. I have told stories there several times now and am always refreshed by the people, history, and landscape of the province. I am looking forward to hearing stories (echoes of tales) from members of the audiences in our discussions. I am most looking forward to sharing my versions of the old tales and Alberta history to listeners who, hopefully, will take the stories and the spirit of the storytelling experience, home to their own classroom, homes and family.
Click here to read Gail's author profile.

Excitement building for this year's CCBC TD Bank Book Tour

I am beginning to get a sense of the places, times and audiences that I will be telling stories to in just over a month. I will be basically in the Montreal, Quebec area -- and I am not complaining one little bit! I will be posting on this site throughout the tour as well as on Facebook with the odd tweet or two on Twitter. Do come along with me on my storytelling tour May 4-8, 2015

2015 TD Book Tour

I have been selected by Storytellers of Canada/Conteurs du Canada to tour Quebec as a storyteller for the TD Canadian Children's Book Week, sponsored by the Canadian Children's Book Centre during May 2-9, 2015. Updates to this blog as more details are forthcoming. Information on past tours can be found at http://www.bookweek.ca/

Mercy, Mercy Brown

Just finshed reading Kathleen Tierney's Blood Oranges, the first book in a proposed trilogy by one of my go-to-authors (recognized more readily as Caitlin R. Kiernan). This is a witty parody, filled with tropes and commentary on many of the current poular fantasy novels and films featuring vampires (definitely doesn't sparkle) and werewolves in a contemporary urban setting. While I enjoyed/cringed/gulped the adventure, I was particularly taken by the many references to Rhode Island's historical famous "vampire," Mercy Brown.

I spend a little time with Mercy and legend tripping behaviour in What Happens Next? Contemporary Legends and Popular Culture (page 48). Two of Kiernan's earlier works are annotated: the novel The Red Tree (2009) and the short story "As Red as Red" published in Haunted Legends (2010).

Kiernan, writing as Tierney, has her narrator Quinn say this about the gravesite:

The tombstone's nothing fancy, a slab of marble with dates of birth and death, just the usual. Visitors had left a random assortment of tokens lined up along the top of the storn: pennies, small stones, a pewter pin from the Newport Folk Festival. In front of the stone there was no grass at all, just a dirt patch worn smooth by long years of the feet of those who came to see. The letters engraved in the marble had become ever more indistinct as a hundred and sixteen years of rain had eaten at the stone. Another hundred, it'll likely only be an anonymous slab. But maybe I'll still be around, and I'll remember.

The stone was securely bolted down with iron bands and concrete to ensure some damned frat boy, goth kid, or eBay huckster wouldn't try to make off with it (241).

Contemporary Legend Spotting: The Mistletoe Bough

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/10/short-fiction-spotlight-the-mistletoe-bride

Looking forward to reading how Mosse has adapted this tale.
(the following is from the review blurb linked above)

“The Mistletoe Bride” chronicles the wedding day of a young woman five hundred or so years ago. The party is held in Bramshill House in the middle of the winter, thus “there is mistletoe and holly, white berries and red,” and—in a tradition as old as time—a fine feast, made finer with wine. When all the sweetmeats are eaten, the new wife of Lord Lovell suggests “a game of hide-and-seek, for all those who yet have strength in their legs.”
The play is a way, attentive readers will realise, of delaying the daunting prospect of the wedding bed, an inevitability which leaves our narrator feeling conflicted. “I can see Lovell’s eyes on me and know he means to be the one who discovers my hiding place. There is part of me that shrinks at the thought of it, but he is a gentle man.”
Nevertheless, when the game begins, the mistletoe bride—Mosse gives her no other name—decides on one hell of a hiding place: in a “wooden coffer [that] is deep and long, the length of a man, and bound fast by four wide metal bands.” She settles into it as if it were a bed, and though she does not mean to sleep, sleep she does... with haunting consequences:"

"As the author asserts in her short survey of the various versions of this tale, which has been told almost as long as there were tales to tell, “The Mistletoe Bride” is “grisly, oddly compelling [...] the sort of story that sticks in the imagination,” and indeed it does. Some say it is founded on fact. Others suggest it springs from a song. In any event, it’s been an inspiration to many authors through the ages:

Charles Somerset produced a play of the same name in 1835, Henry James wrote ‘The Romance of Certain Old Clothes’ in 1868, transposed to eighteenth-century Massachusetts but clearly inspired by the story, and Susan E. Wallace published a short story—‘Ginevra or The Old Oak Chest: A Christmas Story’—in 1887. The tragic tale, a favourite of the protagonist, Brandon Shaw, is recounted in Hitchcock’s 1948 film, Rope. Jeanette Winterson wrote a haunting Christmas version of the story in 2002.

Whatever its legacy, “The Mistletoe Bride” is a fitting fiction with which to kick off this collection—and in a sense to bring it to an end as well, because the final short is another take on the same tale, if anything more impressive than the first: a strangely straightforward story for all its suggestiveness."

Spotting contemporary legends in popular culture: Wisp of a Thing

"I can by to bring Doyle his lunch one day, and he was up under a car working on it," Berklee explained. "I was felling kinda silly, so since his legs were sticking out, I bent down and unzipped his pants on my way into his office."
"Where she found me sitting at my desk," Doyle added.
"Seems he'd hired this Barnes boy without mentioning it to me," Berklee said, " And now the poor kid cam staggering in, bleeding from where he'd smacked his head when he jumped 'cause somebody opened his fly." (105-106)

Published 2013.
Subject headings:
1. Musicians- Fiction
2. Magic- Fiction
3. Great Smoky Mountains (NC and Tenn.) - Fiction

Also found numerous allusions to ballads such as "Omie Wise" and others I will add when I uncover them with further reading. This is a sequel to The Hum and the Shiver (highly recommended as well).

Spotting contemporary legends in pop culture

"Not much scared me, but someone scratching under my bed as I lay on it was way too urban legend for me. Next I would hear a drip only to discover it was the blood of my boyfriends hanging dead from a tree. Luckily, I had no trees in my apartment. Then I thought, Hey, a tree would add a nice touch." (page 68)
A bit of a mismash from "The Boyfriend's Death" and "Dogs Can Lick Too." Fun all around.

"The Devil's Widow" aka "The Ballad of Tam Lin" Released On Blu-ray

http://fairytalenewsblog.blogspot.ca/2013/10/the-devils-widow-aka-ballad-of-tam-lin.html

"Despite being one of those obscure films only Tam Lin fanatics (yes, I'm one of them) and fairy tale folk well versed in film (and possibly die-hard Ava Gardner fans) know about, The Devil's Widow has had enough studio backing to make it to Blu-ray. It's a film that ended up with a couple of titles (not always a good sign) and it's interesting to see that this time around Tam Lin made it on top. When it was released on VHS you had to ask for it by it's more provocative title, The Devil's Widow."

Review of The Bones of Paris

I read the galleys for several reasons -- to recommend them to my library for purchase as part of my duties as board member and selection consultant (which I did for this title) and for reader's advisory for young adults reading adult titles (which I also did for this title).

I am personally a big fan of Laurie King's writing but it is often difficult to enter a series mid-step, so to speak; it was a pleasure to be able to recommend a stand-alone title that was filled with acute characterization of people and of Paris.

"Two Sisters" at the Movies, with Anthony Ladesich

One of the ballads I discuss in Stories from Songs. Hopefully this film will be available soon for our viewing pleasure

"Two Sisters" at the Movies, with Anthony Ladesich:

When is a murder ballad high art?  Certainly when filmmaker and musician Anthony Ladesich and his creative compatriots get hold of it.

Ladesich was kind enough to speak with me at length about a wonderful film project that he brought to fruition in 2011 with the help of a highly talented group of folks. Simply put, they turned the ancient murder ballad "Two Sisters" into a unique and compelling short film.

There were two sisters...

What sparks the vision to do something like that?  It started with curiosity about a murder ballad Ladesich thought he'd heard on an older album.

"I remembered hearing the band Mule's song, I thought it was "Two Sisters", I thought it was a murder ballad… turns out it was 'Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet' instead!"  "But that sent me down the road to trying to figure out what the song was and I came to Gillian Welch's version …"  

(Mule – "Now I Truly Understand", 1993 - Spotify)   (Gillian Welch - "Wind andRain", 2001 - YouTube )

From Fun with the Viola

Welch's version, powerful and evocative, inspired him to dive in to the history of the ballad. He listened to every version he could find and the idea for the movie took shape.  "I wanted to make a narrative film that used that song as a basis…  I wanted to play it out in front of people."

Why?  For one thing, Ladesich is no stranger to murder ballads.

"I remember singing "Tom Dooley" in kindergarten…  having it be in the Mel Bay book, then later finding out that "Tom Dooley" was a murder ballad…  I'm not unique. I came to *understand* murder ballads the way a lot of people in my generation did - through Johnny Cash, songs like "Folsom Prison", "Delia"…  I was always drawn to those songs.  Bands I played in always played those kinds of songs."

But there's more to it than just musical fascination. Ladesich has been interested in people's *reactions* to murder ballads since the release of Eminem's "Kim" in 2000.  "I was just baffled by why there was so much outrage, because Country and Western has songs that are much worse."

The disconnect really affected him, and still does.  

"I've heard people sing "Folsom Prison Blues" at karaoke nights. Children sing murder ballads…   people are such passive consumers of traditional material, and you hear people kind of do these songs, and they don't realize they're singing a song about a vicious person!"

Anthony Ladesich on set - photograph by Phil Peterson

Addressing that is part of the motivation for this art.  "What if people could actually see what happens in these songs?  I wanted a visual representation… not a horror film, but a film that's horrific…  I'm gonna grab you by the scruff of the neck and pin your eyes open and make you watch!  I wanted to make something that would kind of burrow in and maybe bother somebody in that way…  it's ended up more poetic than horrific, but still has that grotesque vibe."

I've had the chance to preview it, and I know of nothing else in the world of film that attempts such a feat - to directly and faithfully recreate (not just 'reproduce') an Anglo-American murder ballad cinematically - and that alone makes the film a unique experience.

Set in rural 19th century America, this short film is not just novel and creative - it feels timeless.  Certainly "poetry" is the right word to describe it.  It is indeed a lyric ballad writ large successfully on the screen, and more.

Here's the official trailer.

Two Sisters - OFFICIAL TRAILER from Anthony Ladesich on Vimeo.

"Two Sisters" is on the festival circuit (where's it's already taken top prize at two events, and the next screening is at the Kansas City Urban Film Festival, Sept. 7-9, 2012) but is not yet available for online viewing. Thankfully, Ladesich is willing to let us offer details here - and this film is worth talking about!  I'd warn you, but it would be hard to say that the discussion below contains spoilers.  As he pointed out to me with a laugh, if you know the ballad, then you know how this movie goes!  It's no murder mystery.

The only tune that fiddle would play...

So, first, let's be clear on the version of the ancient ballad "Two Sisters" (Child 10 / Roud 8) that beats at the heart of this film.  The core version is "Wind and Rain", an introduction to which you can find in this post, which also covers the origins of the whole ballad group.  Another entry, here, provides a more detailed exploration of the roots of "Wind and Rain" in the second half of the post.

If you don't want to read all that, here's the skinny (or just skip this and the next paragraph if you're familiar with the ballad.)  "Two Sisters" was in print as an English broadside by 1656, but is likely at least 500 years old, and possibly even twice that age.  Its origins are Scandinavian. In full traditional versions of the ballad, or the related fairy tales, one sister (the elder / darker, almost always) drowns the other (the younger / fairer) because of jealously over a man and the gifts he gives her.  The body of the youngest floats in a stream and is discovered by a wandering minstrel.  He makes an instrument (usually a harp or a fiddle) of her bones and hair, then the instrument "sings" the truth of the eldest's treachery at her wedding to the stolen bridegroom.  

Binnorie - John D. Batten, illustration for "English Fairy Tales", 1911

(Here's my Spotify playlist of all versions I've found there so far, now numbering over 70 tracks.)

The "Wind and Rain" variant spends less time on the back story before the murder and more on the act itself, and describes in detail the minstrel's discovery of the body and the making of the instrument from the younger sister's bones.  It implies the revelation of the crime in the last verse, usually with lyrics like "the only tune that fiddle would play was "Oh, the Wind and Rain."  The listener has been hearing the magic tune the whole time and thus knows the truth.

Remarkably, while the film is faithful to the broad narrative in traditional versions of "Wind and Rain", what Ladesich and his cast and crew achieved is not simply a retelling of that ballad on the screen.  Ladesich even composed a new version of Child 10, though you'd never know it because the new lyrics fit the traditional structure so well.  

"I wanted to change the story slightly.  I looked at all of the versions of the song starting with Gillian Welch, and I took lines from older versions… then I wrote new lyrics. I wanted to add to the oral tradition.  It feels really pretentious when I say it, but I just wanted to add to the song."

Folks, there's nothing pretentious about it.  Ladesich's version of the ballad is fine handiwork, both craft and art; the seams don't show at all.  The new lyrics, to my mind, open up an entirely new chapter on this ancient story and, particularly when integrated with the film, become that addition to the oral tradition he was hoping for.

As well, the wandering minstrel's delivery of the ballad on screen is powerfully haunting, in no small part because of an outstanding arrangement and performance.  Betse Ellis plays a mournful fiddle while Mark Smeltzer sings the tragic tale with such power and authenticity that I got shivers.

Luckily, Ladesich agreed to allow Murder Ballad Monday to post this wonderful track.  Enjoy!  (Though you can't download the track or share the widget, you should be able to comment on it in Soundcloud, or feel free to do so down below!)

Ladesich has the highest praise for Ellis and Smeltzer.  "I surround myself with people that are very exacting.  When we were talking about arranging the song, Betse said, "No one's going to believe this unless we do it right…"  I knew she had to be the fiddle player - the fiddle is the *soul* of that woman.  Mark, the travelling minstrel, is an incredible musician in his own right - builds his own instruments…  even out of trash!  I knew he had to be the minstrel because he's that guy!  In many ways, he's that character.  He's not an actor, he's a musician.  He made that fiddle.  He studied the fiddle, the history of the fiddle, and Gray's Anatomy for the film, like "If I was going to make a fiddle out of bones, what would it look like?".  He made that fiddle the night before we started filming.  He made it in one night.  That's what he wanted to do." 

simulated bone fiddle by Mark Smeltzer photograph by Phil Peterson

Indeed, the effect of the simulated bone fiddle is strong - and like so much else in this film, it works just under the surface.

All along the road came a minstrel fair...

So anyway, how did Ladesich change the story?  For one thing, the younger sister's husband wants to be with the dark sister, and has *something* to do with the way things play out, though we're left to wonder how much.  But the critical change is more subtle, and makes all the difference. 

Ladesich explains; "In some ways the song is about two sisters, but the film is about the travelling minstrel.  In the song, he's in their story.  In the film, they're in *his* story."

It didn't start that way exactly.  Ladesich first cut the movie chronologically, as one hears it in any version of the traditional ballad.  This is critical in the way the viewer understands the narrative because the script has little sustained dialogue.  Ladesich noted in fact, "There was a version of the script where there was no dialogue at all...  As we added dialogue the film got richer." 

Still, when filming was done, things weren't falling in to place for Ladesich - not at all.

"When I first cut the film I had a dark night of the soul…  I cut the film the way the script was written, but it didn't work because it wasn't sympathetic… I just couldn't handle the fact that it wasn't working emotionally. I felt like I'd wasted everyone's time..."

Ladesich called many of his friends involved in the project to share what he was going through, but for the most part they just didn't seem as upset; they trusted that he'd find the way to make it work.

"Ultimately, everyone gave me enough rope to hang myself - they let me sit with it…  cutting it in a non-linear fashion, that's when that happened. And ultimately I cut it up and I could tell immediately that it was working…"

The film opens and closes at the key event, the minstrel's performance at the harvest ball, the forum for the revelation of the crime.  But as he begins to play the murder ballad, the story behind it all unfolds in a series of flashbacks that do not follow a strict chronology.  The scraps of dialogue build on each other emotionally, not simply logically.  And, most importantly, the non-linear approach creates space for Ladesich's key contribution to the development of Child 10 - it allows the minstrel to become the core of the narrative.

Mark Smeltzer as the Travelling Minstrel photograph by Phil Peterson

"The way the film is now - the way it jumps back and forth in time - we get clues and evidence to what's happening and why, and by the end hopefully you see him not as some psychopathic person but as the deliverer of justice, which is what I think he is… Mark's a lovely, glorious, creative human being who I'm lucky to know.  He's very trusting and I'm lucky he trusted me so much.  By allowing the film to be about him, it allows everything he did emotionally to breathe and to make sense."

He sang before her family all...

The lack of chronologic linearity does not detract from a key feature of the film - it is paced and otherwise structured precisely as a traditional Anglo-American murder ballad should be.  I asked Ladesich about how hard this was to accomplish.

"Because I'm a musician *and* a filmmaker, it's become second nature.  Really, scenes are just verses - there's verses, chorus, and bridges…  You really can orchestrate a film like it's a musical composition."

And, as it turns out, Ladesich and Smeltzer weren't the only musicians on the set.  The rest of the main cast were as well!  (Erin McGrane plays the elder sister, Kasey Rausch the younger, and Richard Alwyn Fisher her husband.)  Ladesich credits this as one of the crucial elements in the success of the film.

"It wasn't just *me* making the film.  *Everyone* bought in, and everyone was thinking about it in musical terms… I directed the actors using terms like 'tone', and 'tempo', and 'rhythm' - down to phrases like "wait a beat" and things like that."

"It wasn't just *me* making the film." photograph by Phil Peterson

What we've got here then is singular and compelling. Most of you haven't yet seen the film, so I hesitate to say too much about my interpretation.  I love the traditional versions of Child 10.  But bringing the wandering minstrel's part to the center and redefining the husband/lover's role to include ambiguous blame in the crime to my mind make this film a remarkably evocative and fresh take on the traditional narrative.

So, it's more than an ancient murder ballad made in to a movie.  Ladesich has added another link to a chain that stretches back perhaps a millennium to barbarian hearths in Northern Europe, glowing in warm light as the storyteller unfolds a tale about singing bones dealing out magical retribution - to a place and time where even stories of Christ had just begun to be heard.  He and his team did not simply retell the story of "Two Sisters", they recreated it.  It is *exactly* what a ballad must go through to survive - a true rebirth.

Ladesich puts it more humbly.  "Seriously, it was one of the most gratifying, humbling, and coolest experiences in my twelve years of this work.  'Cool' doesn't quite sum it up; profound is a better word."

Profound indeed.

Coda - Oh, the dreadful wind and rain...

Somehow seeing this film, with this ballad at its core, during this most murderous of summers, means a great deal to me that I doubt Ladesich or anyone else involved with the film could have predicted when they completed it last year.  It comes down to that old "make your own meaning" theme we hit often when we parse ballads in this blog.

There's just something deeply moving about the minstrel in this film to me - about the way he takes in the murder, 'processes' it, and then shows it back to the community.  The movie may be set in 19th century America, but in my heart something about him represents the artist or, perhaps more precisely, the *creative human being* in our violent society *right now.*

the younger sister and the travelling minstrel -  photograph by Phil Peterson

No, what's happening these days isn't like the treachery of the dark sister.  It's much more impersonal, more random and passionless.  So, how can one use this ballad and film to make meaning of the tragedy which seems to be closing in around us today?  

Here's what I feel.  Be like the minstrel - take it in compassionately and turn the energy that arises in you into art.  Don't hide - face it, plunge your knife in - make a fiddle from horror's breastbone and tuning pegs of its fingers.  String your bow with death's golden hair.

Write.  Paint.  Make photographs.  Act.  Sketch.  Dance.  Garden.  Make jokes.  Play and sing - murder ballads or whatever other kind of authentic music lights your fire.

Make wonderful, awesome movies like Anthony Ladesich and his pals.

Create - do what ever it is that makes you come alive, and in that experience stare down meaninglessness - your example will let folks know that anyone can do the same.

Sorry...  I don't mean to preach - because I don't know for sure.  But in the end, besides truly loving each other, have we ever been able to do much more?

Meeting with the Devil at the Crossroads Updates

Since I can no longer edit the manuscript regarding mentions of the legendary alleged meeting at the crossroads with the devil motif in popular culture, I will be posting the ones I find here.

In Kevin Hearne's Hammered (the Iron Druid Chronicles, Del Rey, 2011), Jesus has come for a visit and when walking to the nearby coffee shop he and our series hero, Atticus O'Sullivan, spot a busker.

(excerpt)
We passed an extraordinarily sunburned man in wrap-around sunglasses busking with his guitar. He was strumming 'They're Red Hot" -- an old blues tune about hot tamales -- and singing the infectious lyrics in a gravely voice. His open guitar case rested on a planter beside him, and Jesus wagged his head back and forth a little bit and got his shoulders into it too. "What a delightful riff," he said. "Do you know who wrote this song?"

"I believe it's by Robert Johnson, a Mississippi Delta blues man."

"Truly?" The Christian god stopped dancing and looked at me. "The same one who went down to the crossroads?"

"The very same."

He laughed and continued walking north, shaking his head. "My adversary is thumbing is nose at me, I think. It is enjoyable, though, to be surprised like that...." (111)

Ballad Sptting: Tam Lin

From the "Once Upon a Blog" : The Ballad of Tam Lin (explored in my book Tales Then and Now co-authored with Anna Altmann

http://fairytalenewsblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/tam-lin-grimm.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FVFWg+%28Once+Upon+A+Blog...%29

Forthcoming Title (April 2012)

Reworking of Hansel and Gretel

http://www.chasingray.com/archives/2011/08/only_the_third_holocaust_title.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ChasingRay+%28Chasing+Ray%29


Because I always knew Hansel & Gretel was a Holocaust story:


I have a very high standard when it comes to reading about the Holocaust. This is not because I am personally connected to it in any way (while I had many family members fight in WWII we are not Jewish or from western Europe) (although the jury is still out on my one great grandmother's origins so this could actually change but she emigrated in the late 19th century) (more on that subject later).


Part of what bothers me about most Holocaust books (especially those written for kids and/or teens) is that they are so manipulative. The novels in some ways are the worst as they use the backdrop of a global atrocity to wring emotion out of readers that they would not receive otherwise. (Yes, I'm talking about a striped pajama boy here.) I also think we have reached a saturation point on the subject to a certain degree. I say all this just to make you understand that a Holocaust book is a very hard sell for me. The only two that have truly stayed with me over the years are Anne Frank's Diary and BRIAR ROSE by Jane Yolen. (Better than DEVIL'S ARITHMETIC in my opinion - although that is very good too, of course.) Then over the weekend I finally read KINDERGARTEN by Peter Rushforth and it was simply one of the most impressive books I have ever read. Period.


Rushforth approaches his subject from the side - there's almost a WG Sebald type feel to how he tells this story. The protagonist, "Corrie" (for Cornelius) is a 16 year old British boy in 1978. He and his two younger brothers live in the countryside with their father, headmaster of a nearby boarding school, in a house next door to their grandmother. The book is set over the Christmas holidays the same year that the boys lost their mother in an airline hijacking in Rome. Their father has gone to the US for a fund raising drive to help terror victims organized by other families of those on the plane and thus the boys are with their grandmother, who was originally born in Germany but lived in England since just prior to WWII. When she was younger, Lilli was a renowned artist of fairy tale paintings. She stopped painting after moving to England but lately her work is receiving some new appreciation. Over the years she has given the family some of her old work and Corrie has a picture she did for Hansel and Gretel on his bedroom wall. The painting and the German poem "Kinderstimmen" by Joseph von Eichendorff have inspired Corrie, a talented musician, to compose a song. His ongoing work on the piece is what prompts much of the book's ruminations on "Hansel and Gretel" and other fairy tales of lost children.


At the family settles in for Lilli's traditional German Christmas celebration, they are also riveted by another terrorist nightmare going on in West Berlin. A group has taken over a school and promised to start killing children if some of their comrades are not released from prison. The authorities, of course, are refusing to do so. The standoff is being covered on the television and has caused the boys, already missing their mother so much, to mourn her anew.



For Corrie, all of this, his own now motherless siblings, the lost children in the fairy tale, the children in the school, is powerful stuff. He and his brother Jo have fallen into a habit of comedy to cope with their sorrow but both are aware of how deep their feelings go. Jo in particular is struggling mightily and Corrie wants to help him but is not sure how. To keep himself distracted he has become obsessed with a cache of old files he has found in the school's music room where he goes each day to work on his composition. (The school is empty for the holidays but he has his father's keys and permission.) The letters are from German Jewish families who desperately tried to send their children to the school in the mid to late 1930s. At first they went simply to continue the education that was then denied them in Germany but increasingly the letters became more and more emotional as the parents lose access to the money they need to pay tuition and fees but their need to keep their children out of Germany only intensifies. At one point Corrie reads a letter from a little girl who was homesick and after the holidays has decided not to return to school. It is 1938 and her family decides to seek shelter in another country. Rushforth writes:


In October a postcard had come from the Goetzels saying that they are safe in Amsterdam, and that was the last communication the family made with the school.


Anne Frank and her family had been German refugees in Amsterdam.


All of this, Corrie's music, Lilli's mysterious past, little brother Jo devastated by his mother's death, the hostages in West Berlin, the letters, spread across the floor in the music room charting the lives and potential deaths of the Jewish children decades before, all of this comes together in a whirl and a swirl that includes excerpts from "Hansel and Gretel" and Lill's final, unsurprising but utterly heartbreaking, revelation about what she left behind in Germany so many years before. Corrie learns just how close his own life is to those he found in the letters and to the children in the fairy tale. And even though you suspected this was coming, on some level, still all of it together is so beautifully written, so wonderfully wrought, that it reaches you in a far deeper way than you expected.


It's like that passage in the Holocaust Museum in DC. It is all very obvious there (of course) with the train car and the compressed passageways to give you the feeling of being forced into a tight space, and the recorded oral histories and the many displays of propaganda and artifacts. But then there is this light filled passage, a bridge actually, you walk across and the walls are lined with black and white photos of all sizes and they stretch up for several stories and they are all of different people in different settings. Happy, sad, group shots, class pics, just standard photos that any album from the 1930s or 40 would have. And then you read at the end that all of these people lived in the same village and all of them - all of them - were killed by the Nazis. The village is gone. And so you look back now, you study them more carefully, you consider them for all their sameness to you and yours and in that moment, for me anyway, the reality of the Holocaust hits home. The big number is almost too big to wrap your head around but this much smaller number, this tiny village with all those faces, is one you can see and feel. It is one that makes sense of the entire six million.


In KINDERGARTEN Corrie knows about the Holocaust just as he knows about the Magna Carta and the Battle of Hastings. These are things, he thinks, that every school child knows so they can be ready for test - the dates, the locations, the figures. But reading the letters in the school, getting to know the families through the children who made it out and those who kept trying and then vanished, is what makes the history real to him. Just like the sight of the small girl in the window of the West Berlin school is what terrorism is really all about, just like their mother, just like Hansel and Gretel.


Just like, of course, the story Lilli tells her grandsons in the book's final pages.


Peter Rushforth was a master storyteller, a truly amazing writer. KINDERGARTEN appeared on my radar years ago after a most favorable mention by Terri Windling. I'm so glad I finally read it. As a reader it is amazing but as a writer it is by far one of the best examples of our craft that I have ever come across. Life changing.


[Post pic: The kindergarten of Maria and Roman Ginzberg, class of 1930, Piorkow Trybunalski, Poland and photo entitled "Urban Hansel & Gretel" - the person who took it is now lost due to a dead link, sadly.]

Ballad Spotting: Thomas the Rhymer

From: Feature Interview: Seanan McGuire

by Paul Goat Allen

http://www.fantasy-magazine.com/new/new-nonfiction/feature-interview-seanan-mcguire/

 

I studied folklore in college, and I’m still studying it now, as an adult. I expect to be studying folklore for the rest of my life. With that in mind, I truly believe that the current blurring of the borders between fantasy, horror, and romance are not representative of a mutation; they’re representative of a bunch of walls we didn’t really need finally coming down. The oldest stories we have were, at the time, what we would classify as “urban fantasy” today. Thomas the Rhymer?  His mother was dead when he was conceived, and he was carried to term in her coffin (horror). He fell in love with the Queen of Faerie, calling her “Queen of Heaven” and charming her heart (romance). So she took him to the fairy lands to dwell by her side (fantasy), even though they had to wade through red blood to the knee to get there (horror). Eventually, he chose to leave her to return to his own kind, and she cursed him with honesty (fantasy). In the end, he returned to her, and to Faerie, forevermore (romance). When this story was new, the settings it used were as familiar to the people who heard it as Chicago or Melbourne or San Francisco will be to modern readers of urban fantasy.
In some of the oldest forms of the Snow White/Rose Red story, there’s a third sister, Lily Fair. I like to say that urban fantasy writers are the Children of Lily Fair, the ones seeking the balance between Snow White’s fantasy and Rose Red’s horror. We’re the place where the lines drop away, and that’s a beautiful place to be.

Ballad spotting: The Mermaid: Child Ballad 289

http://surlalunefairytales.blogspot.com/
The Mermaid: Child Ballad 289: "

One of the side benefits of working on the SurLaLune fairy tale anthologies is that I am becoming more familiar with various Child Ballads. While I enjoy ballads, they hadn't inspired much research on my part until the last few years. (There just isn't the time to do everything that interests me!)

I previously posted about Clerk Colvill, Child Ballad 42, which I enjoyed as I edited Mermaid and Other Water Spirit Tales From Around the World. The other ballad I included in the collected is Child 289 and I personally prefer it over Clerk Colvill. Most commonly known as The Mermaid, seven versions from Child appear in my book under various titles, including Greenland, The Seaman's Distress, and The Stormy Winds Did Blow. As I read it, Iwanted to listen to it, so I hunted some versions down on the internet.

Here's the text to Child 289B, which more closely resembles many of the modern recorded versions. Actually, most of them tend to be a hybrid of 289A, 289B and 289C. The ballad draws from the superstition that when sailors spy a mermaid, a shipwreck is imminent.

ONE Friday morn when we set sail,
Not very far from land,
We there did espy a fair pretty maid
With a comb and a glass in her hand, her hand, her hand,
With a comb and a glass in her hand.
While the raging seas did roar,
And the stormy winds did blow,
While we jolly sailor-boys were up into the top,
And the land-lubbers lying down below, below, below,
And the land-lubbers lying down below.

Then up starts the captain of our gallant ship,
And a brave young man was he:
“I’ve a wife and a child in fair Bristol town,
But a widow I fear she will be.”
For the raging seas, etc.

Then up starts the mate of our gallant ship,
And a bold young man was he:
“Oh! I have a wife in fair Portsmouth town,
But a widow I fear she will be.”
For the raging seas, etc.

Then up starts the cook of our gallant ship,
And a gruff old soul was he:
“Oh! I have a wife in fair Plymouth town,
But a widow I fear she will be.”

And then up spoke the little cabin-boy,
And a pretty little boy was he;
“Oh! I am more grievd for my daddy and my mammy
Than you for your wives all three.”

Then three times round went our gallant ship,
And three times round went she;
For the want of a life-boat they all went down,
And she sank to the bottom of the sea.

One of my favorite versions isn't a recording for purchase, but a homemade video on YouTube which I am embedding below. I enjoyed the simplicity of the tune and the variations it offered on the ballad itself. Here it is:

As for recorded versions available for download, I preferred The Mermaid Song by the Floorbirds.

Other versions you might prefer include The Mermaid by The Pirates of St. Piran and The Mermaid by Celtic Stew.

"

Fairytale Reflections (29) Sally Prue

Fairytale Reflections (29) Sally Prue: "

When Sally Prue’s first novel, ‘Cold Tom’ won the Branford Boase Award and the Smarties Prize Silver Award in 2002, it was clear that a wonderful new writer of folklore-based fantasy had arrived. ‘Cold Tom’ taps into many legends and ballads about the fairies - the Tribe, which lives on the common. They are cold-hearted, dangerous, feral hunters, pitiless to those who, like Cold Tom himself, are different. And they see humans as demons: ugly lumpen beings, hopelessly tied and enslaved to one another by a tangle of emotional bonds like vines.

It’s a powerful and startling image, and one of those moments only fantasy provides: when we step right out of the human world and see it from outside, like seeing the Earth from space. Cold Tom is only half elfin. His fangs aren’t growing, the Tribe rejects him, and the only place to run is the city of the demons. How on earth can he adjust to humanity and the ties that bind us?

Sally’s writing reminds me of Diana Wynne Jones who wrote books of otherworldly beauty – I’m thinking of ‘Power of Three’ and ‘The Spellcoats’ – as well as more homely and amusing stories for younger readers, such as the Chrestomanci books. ‘Cold Tom’ and its recent sequel (or more accurately prequel) ‘Ice Maiden’ are YA reads: chilling, haunting, sharp-edged. Here young half-German Franz, who has fallen into a pit on the common while chasing the elfin Edrin, finds a heap of elfin bones, and prods the skull:

This time there was no doubt: the white bone moved. More than that, it gave way, swiftly, bewilderingly, and before he could stop it his finger had gone right through the bone into the brain cavity.

He snatched his hand back in horror, but somehow, horribly, the whole skull came with it. Panicking, he tried to bat the thing off with his other hand, but those fingers sank into the stickily melting bone of the skull, too.

And suddenly Franz’s head was full of savage laughter, and glowing eyes, and dangerous darkness.

And singing.

Sally is also the author of a trilogy of books for younger, ‘middle grade’ readers: the Truth Sayer Trilogy. As Sally comments on her website: “You know how people are always going into a different world and then discovering that everyone speaks English? Well, what if they don’t?”

I love this. Young Nian is taken away from his family by the Tarhun, warrior priests, to be trained as a seer and Truth Speaker at the House of Truth on the Holy Mountain. Nian may have great powers, but he misses his family and finds the stern House little better than a prison. So he tries to escape. This sounds like the stuff of many other fantasy novels, but Sally’s sense of humour and strong characterisation distinguish Nian’s erratic career across the universes, landing in our own world – Earth – in the bedroom of a very ordinary boy called Jacob. Neither can understand a word the other says, and comic mayhem follows. In a way, it’s the same theme as the Cold Tom books: looking at our world from outside, seeing ourselves as others see us. The trilogy also encompasses a variety of thought-provoking ideas about the nature of time and space, and besides the comedy, there are some tremendous moments of imagination and terror: as in the second book of the trilogy, the March of the Owlmen, when the knife-sharp, two-dimensional Owlmen come slicing into the world.

So welcome to Sally Prue, who is going to talk about searching for fairyland and finding it (maybe) closer than you expected: in the mirror, out in the yard, around the back of the supermarket carpark. For as Franz thinks to himself at the beginning of ‘Ice Maiden’ – ‘This wasn’t a folk tale, this was 1939. There were no elves or fairies here, any more than there were wolves. It was impossible, completely impossible, there could be any kind of creature anywhere near him… And at this same moment something hit him violently in the back.’

THE ENCHANTED MIRROR

We didn’t lack books in my childhood home. I mean, we had a Bible, a Be-Ro cookery book, David Copperfield, Shakespeare, and, oddly, the collected poems of Walter de la Mare.

Mind you, of these only the cookery book was ever actually opened.

But we had a large blue set of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedias, too. I think they must have been my father’s. They were from the 1930s and extremely dull. Occasionally, though, the pages of dense text and murky photographs of the Queen Mary’s turbines were enlivened by brief re-tellings of classic tales.

Now, I must be honest here. As a child I had no taste. What I wanted from a story was, first of all a HAPPY ENDING, and secondly REALLY NICE CLOTHES. Ideally that meant princesses, but even a goose girl would do as long as her rags were elegantly tattered and her apron strings were blown into delectable volutes.

I very happily read all Arthur Mee had to say about Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and The Ugly Duckling (a great favourite: I was the only girl in my class without fair hair and so I was constantly cast as the witch in our singing games. But oh, I thought, perhaps one day...).

Those were important stories. They introduced me to beauty in art. They taught me that the values of my family were not the values of the whole world. They taught me to hope.

For the time being, though, I was young, and therefore enslaved and helpless. To make matters worse the land of the princesses was plainly very far away. I knew of no real-life princesses except Princess Anne, and she seldom appeared swathed in acres of bouncing chiffon, which was surely the entire point of being a princess.

(Actually, Princess Anne never appeared in acres of bouncing chiffon. I just couldn’t begin to understand it. Reefer jackets?)

Now, unfortunately, Arthur Mee’s stories were not very many, and not very long, and I soon began to suffer from serious princess-starvation. Looking back, I can see that in the man’s world of the 1930s Arthur Mee had been generous to include any princesses at all. They were probably as unappealing to him as the Queen Mary’s innards were to me. But there it was: all too soon a thoroughly satisfactory story like Snow White would be followed by something about Camelot or Olympus which were dull dull dull, with few happy endings and fewer princesses, and those there were dressed in either their nighties (Olympus) or their dressing gowns (Camelot).

I realise that so far I have proved myself to have been the dullest, least numinous sort of child (so lacking in genius that I was quite unable to make anything at all of David Copperfield, Shakespeare, or Walter de la Mare) but I’m sorry to say that things are about to get even worse, because for my seventh Christmas my Cousin Ann bought me a copy of Chimney Corner Stories by Enid Blyton.

Now, I don’t think there are any princesses at all in Chimney Corner Stories, and Enid Blyton isn’t really interested in clothes, either: there’s one really shocking tale about a doll who cuts up her lace coat to make some curtains for a dolls house, an act of madness of which the author seems, astonishingly, to approve.

Still, Enid Blyton’s stories are solidly constructed and I found them extremely satisfying. By far the most marvellous thing of all, though, was that in several of the stories the elves come out of fairyland into our own world. One elf gives wishes to ordinary children (and I was, as we have seen, a very ordinary child) and another (actually I think it might have been a goblin) is banished from fairyland for wickedly stealing hairs from caterpillars to make paint brushes.

Now that was truly astonishing, because it meant that fairyland couldn’t far away at all. Those elves and gnomes were coming and going from fairyland to my world just as easily as I left home to go to school.

Think of that! Snow White’s country was clearly a long way away (and once upon a time, as well) but these gnomes were emerging from their fairyland straight into contemporary England – a rather smug version of contemporary England which included servants and ponies, true, but recognisable for all that.

Not only that, but when I looked at the fairies’ clothes (always the clothes!) I saw that some of them were wearing bellbine hats. Now, bellbine grows along municipal chain-link fencing everywhere in England. Why, bellbine even grew through the hedge between my house and the plastic bag factory!

And if there were bellbine flowers, then perhaps...well, even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (as I learned from the children’s TV programme Blue Peter) had believed there might be fairies at the bottom of the garden.

I searched and searched among the bellbine, and occasionally I saw something, or just missed seeing something, or heard a mysterious rustling, which might have been a fairy. It was enough to keep my new hopes alive.

When I got to the junior school I had access to more books, and my horizons widened accordingly. I learned about the wardrobe, of course (my parents’ wardrobe contained not one single fur coat and perhaps that was why it proved a continuing disappointment) and later, I suppose by this time at secondary school, I learned about Herne the Hunter in Windsor Great Park, and the god (or goddess) Sul who lives in the hot spring at Bath.

I learned about a very local haunting, Harcourt’s Chariot, which rattles precipitously down the Back Hollow from Ashridge to Aldbury.

I learned about the Romans’ lares and penates which guard boundaries and households. I found out about the green men who have been hiding in the foliage around us for so long that no-one knows any longer where they came from or why they are watching us.

This intrusion of otherworldly beings into my own England was startlingly different from the stories of Camelot and Olympus, and different from the stories of the princesses, too. Herne and Harcourt and the green men were here, now, close as breathing, casting shadows on my back. Mount Olympus might be a real place, but it was far beyond my reach (I’m sorry to say that the furthest we’d ever gone on a family holiday was Lyme Regis).

In any case, to visit the Olympians you needed Hermes’ wings, or Iris’s rainbow: there was no way, even in my wildest fantasies, I was going to find Apollo mooching about round the back of a plastic bag factory. (I admit that nymphs seemed to get about a bit, but nymphs were like Star Trek security men: shallow in character and soon dead.)

I was realistic enough to know, anyway, that even if I could get to Olympus or glum Camelot then none of those grand people – Lancelot or Zeus or Morgan Le Fay or Hera – was going to be the slightest bit interested in me. (If Adele Geras’s marvellous stories of the Greek gods had been available I might have felt differently about this, but, alas, they were yet to be written.)

So that left me with Herne the Hunter and various ghosts, pixies and green men – none of them, frankly, either snoggable or the sort of people you could take home to meet your parents. My interest in fairyland wobbled.

But then one day a boyfriend said do you like folk music? and put on a record. It was a song about a real place, Carterhaugh, where it is so easy to pass from England to fairyland that the tale begins with a warning:

Oh I forbid you, maidens a’

That wear gowd in your hair,

To come or gae by Carterhaugh

For young Tam-lin is there.

Tam-lin. And suddenly there it was, opening before me: a handsome prince grown close and dangerous, stepping out of the pages of a book and onto the real earth of my own country.

Janet has kilted her green kirtle

A little aboon her knee...

And she’s awa to Carterhaugh

As fast as she can hie.

And who, frankly, can blame her?

Oh yes, and suddenly the roots of fairyland were growing out and penetrating into real life again, into my life, for Janet is no beflounced princess, but a woman of warm blood and hot desire who knows what she wants and is prepared to fight to get it.

Yes. I discovered I was now old enough to journey far – and fight for what I wanted, too.

Fairyland had grown, just as I had, and yet again, like an enchanted mirror, it was showing me not my own reflection but my heart’s desire. Over the years it had presented to me visions of beauty, hope, escape, romance, and in the end courage.

And I’ll tell you something. That boyfriend never got away.




Picture credits:
Sally Prue
Tam Lin copyright Dan Dutton
Princess Anne in The Courier
The Convulvulous Fairy by Cicely Mary Barker

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