IF YOU DON"T KNOW YOUR PISKIE FROM YOUR BUCCA. by Sharon Tregenza

Many years ago, fairies, piskies, and goblins of all sorts lived all over Cornwall. Everyone knew it and were in awe of them. The young people appealed to the fairy folk for everything. To be helped in their work, to get love draughts and to know their fortunes.

As a child, I searched for piskies basking on a moor stone or listened for the sound of a bucca's pickaxe down the wells and mines. I was sure I caught glimpses and heard knocks even if I never actually caught one of them.

But today, sadly, most of this is regarded as superstitious nonsense.

But for the enlightened, the search goes on. To help in your search next time you're in Cornwall here's a guide to the difference between a piskey and a bucca.

The Piskey (Cornish pixie)

A tiny mythical creature that inhabits the vast Cornish moorland. They look like little old men and dress in the colours of the earth - especially green. They live mostly in small hovels and if they live around your home, they can reward you with good luck. If you try to get rid of them though, they'll turn vindictive and make your life a misery. 

The Bucca (Cornish knocker)

About the same size as piskies. They live in rocks, mines or wells. They work all the time, digging and sifting throughout the year. They dress like miners and steal unattended food and tools. They say the knocking sound these creatures make, act as a warning of an impending cave-in. 

They alerted miners to danger so they could leave unsafe tunnels. The miners, in return, would leave part of their pasty for them.

So there you are. I hope this is helpful. Good luck with your fairy folk hunting. 😀

www.sharontregenza.com

 

A Jar of Pickles and a Pinch of Justice by Chitra Soundar

If you were expecting a blog by me, Savita Kalhan, then I apologise - but you are in for a treat today. Chitra Soundar, author of fabulous tales and beautiful picture books, is my guest blogger. I was very fortunate to be able to attend Chitra's book launch where she held the children - and the adults - spellbound with her tales of Prince Veera and his friend the farmer's boy, Suku. Chitra is also an oral storyteller, and she really did bring the magic of her stories to life for us.

A Jar of Pickles and a Pinch of Justice by Chitra Soundar, illustrated by Uma Krishnaswamy

My second book in the Prince Veera series, published by Walker Books, are reimagined stories from my childhood folklore.

Growing up in a joint family in South India, without a TV until I was 16, oral stories, comic books and the radio were my vehicles of imagination.

The stories that lodged in my brain, not just for their wit and deviousness but also the brutal justice and fairness, were the Raja Birbal and Tenali Rama stories. As an adult, I did elaborate research on these historic legends to find out why they were cast as the heroes of these trickster tales.

Raja Birbal was a poet, a soldier and a good friend of Emperor Akbar, an open-minded, intellectual Mughal ruler in 16^th century India. Even though he was a Hindu, Birbal became the Mughal emperor’s confidante. He was trusted so much that his house was allocated inside the perimeters of the emperor’s palace, where it still stands today in Fatehpur Sikri, outside New Delhi.

Tenali Rama, also a poet, a few decades earlier in the 16^th century, was a courtier of the South Indian king Krishna Deva Raya and became a court jester. The court jester lightened the tense moments in the King’s cabinet especially as they planned resistance towards the Mughal emperors. Of course nowadays a potential ruler might also take on the role of a court jester sporting orange hair and bad jokes.

As a child whose life lessons came in folklore form, I devoured these stories and often pondered about their wisdom. As a grown-up many of these stories are still my touchstones for evaluating the right from the wrong.

When my editor at Walker Books invited me to tell stories from India, these were the first stories I went to. I wanted today’s children, wherever they are, to learn the magic of using ingenious pranks to teach lessons in fairness. Hence they became “child-centric” with new characters rather than the stories of two ancient courtiers from the 16^th century.

So I created two boys, one the son of a king, Prince Veera, and other the son of a farmer, Suku. Their worlds collide. Their perspectives fuse. The prince gets to understand the ways of the common man and the farmer’s son gets a perspective of how justice can be a difficult job.

Writing about the first title in the series, A Dollop of Ghee and a Pot of Wisdom, Ian Eagleton, a consultant with Just Imagine, says “... an excellent basis for discussion about what is right and wrong and the decisions we must face as we grow up.”

The second book A Jar of Pickles and a Pinch of Justice came out in October, this year, with more stories that table the debate between right and wrong.

I have been telling these stories to other children ever since they left me in-charge of younger cousins during summer holidays. Recently I’ve been telling these stories to children in junior schools. Their outrage at injustice and their passion to defend the fairness is inspiring. They love these stories not just for the “exotic” setting of a make-believe kingdom of Himtuk, but also for the choices Prince Veera and Suku had to make to bring justice. The pranks are a bonus.

While fairness is the central theme of the stories, outwitting the unjust mean villain is half the fun. And of course, I haven’t forgotten to add Indian street food and sweets dripping with ghee, and quintessential Indian village life full of donkeys, elephants, and superstitions.

So if you fancy a time-out from the potential Armageddon, that is the US Presidential elections filled with the debate of right vs. wrong, may I recommend “A Jar of Pickles and a Pinch of Justice”?

Click HERE for more information about Chitra Soundar.

You can follow Chitra on Twitter - @csoundar

“Winter Is Coming”: Favourite Books for Long, Dark Nights by Emma Barnes

Not for children!

The days are dark; night creeps in early; there is frost in the air. 

I'm not a fan of winter. (I always get that frisson of dread whenever the Starks declare “Winter is Coming” in George RR Martin's Game of Thrones.  And I don't live anywhere near any Wildings.) Partly that's because British winters are grey and damp, rather than snowy and crisp. But while the reality of crawling out of bed on a dreary, dismal morning doesn't grab me, winter in children's fiction is a different thing.

Snow. Woods. Wolves. A crackling fire. Stark leafless trees. Shadows everywhere. This I enjoy.

Real life adventure

Laura Ingalls Wilder's childhood, in a log cabin in the deep forest of Wisconsin, always gave me the same winter glow. There really is no better winter read than The Little House in the Big Woods. (Ma, bundled up against the cold, whacking a bear that she thinks is a cow. Pa playing the violin during the long nights. Christmas, when Laura receives her beloved rag doll, Charlotte.)

Unless, that is, you prefer The Long Winter, where the township is trapped by blizzards, the train lines closed, the Ingalls family are using a coffee mill to grind out their last handfuls of wheat and slowly everyone begins to starve...

Classic Fantasy

That sense of threat is also there in The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Ostensibly it's the fantasy “Dark” that is the danger, but much of the menace comes from the weather itself: the snow that falls and falls, the numbing cold, the village community that is slowly being cut off so that finally everyone has to take refuge in the old manor house.

I've always felt that Susan Cooper must have read another winter classic, The Box of Delights, as a child – for there are all kinds of echoes, most of all in the particular blend of English landscape and history, magical threat and snowy weather. Who can help a shudder of anticipation on reading that cryptic warning “The wolves are running...”

Urban snowscapes

Yet winter doesn't have to be about deep woods and rural landscapes. As a very small child, I was transfixed by Ezra Jack Keat's The Snowy Day, which uses an urban setting to explore the feelings of fascination and wonder of a small child confronting something as amazing as SNOW. It's something about the simplicity and immediacy of this book that makes it so effective.

It brings home the fact that children's books still, often, ignore the urban landscape. The Snowy Day was, apparently, inspired by Keat's childhood neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York. (It also has the distinction of being one of the first American children's books to feature a black lead character. That was in 1964. Decades later, diversity, or lack of it, is still a hot issue.)

Narnia

In general though, winter seems to be about magic, rather than real life, for children's authors. Maybe it's because it reasserts the power of nature – of snow, storms, the biting cold – in a way that makes us feel less sure of our human technology, more aware of the power of our natural surroundings. In the depths of winter, it is easier to believe in supernatural forces. Perhaps we feel less in control, more in touch with the past, more in need of help?

The excitement, magic and danger of winter is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When spring comes, it marks the beginning of hope and the end of the dark magic. And yet CS Lewis draws every drop of excitement from his winter setting: the fun of sledges, the terror of wolves, the wonderful warmth of hot chocolate or of snuggling in a fur coat. (Even if you don't approve of fur coats, you can still enter into the Pevensies' enjoyment of them.)

 Fairytales

This link between winter and magic seems so strong that it even percolates into adult literature. Most mainstream adult fiction keeps its distance from the magical, but the bestselling The Snow Child combines the setting of Alaska and a pioneering couple determined to make a life there (almost Laura Ingalls Wilder in its way) with a traditional fairytale fable, when they meet a child who seems strangely at home in the icy landscape, and surely possessed of magical powers.

A Russian folk tale is the inspiration for the story, and is just one of those included in the classic collection Old Peter's Book of Tales by Swallows and Amazons author Arthur Ransome.

The Snow Queen, the most wintery of fairytales, is still going strong of course.

 And in case anybody doubted the combined power of fairytales, princesses and snow, Frozen is a recent reminder of their continuing appeal to the child's imagination. (Visiting schools for World Book Day, I've met  dozens of little “Elsas” and “Anas”.)

My Winter Tale

illustration by Emma Chichester Clark

Wolves, forests and fairytales were all at the back of my mind when I wrote my book Wolfie. Even though it is a contemporary story (with a helping of fantasy), about a girl called Lucie, and her adventures at home and school, as winter closes in the atmosphere becomes mysterious and magical.

The feeling I aimed to create is brilliantly evoked in this illustration by Emma Chichester Clark.

New Titles

Its fascinating to see that even in these days of central heating and cars chauffeured by mum and dad, where bad weather might seem just a passing annoyance to children glued to screens, winter has maintained its magic charm. The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell and Frost Hollow Hall  by Emma Carroll are two recent books which use winter – and its motifs of snow, woods, magic and wolves - to work their magic.


 I'm planning to curl up with one or other of them when the long, dark nights draw in.

What is your favourite winter read?








------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Emma's Website
Emma’s Facebook Fanpage
Emma on Twitter - @EmmaBarnesWrite

Emma's Wild Thing series for 8+ about the naughtiest little sister ever. (Cover - Jamie Littler)
"Hilarious and heart-warming" The Scotsman

 Wolfie is a story of wolves, magic and snowy woods...
(Cover: Emma Chichester Clark)
"Funny, clever and satisfying..." Books for Keeps

Fabled Beasts And Mythical Creatures: Jigsaws and Shape-shifters, by Lari Don

Centaurs and kelpies, mermaids and selkies... Why are we so fascinated by animal / human mashups? And not just us, now, but most cultures, in most places, since the start of (once up on a) time. The Egyptians had animal-headed gods. The Greeks were happy to slice almost any animal in half and stick it onto a matching bit of human. And most cultures have shape-changer stories.

Why are we fascinated by these impossible creatures and their stories? And what are the differences between our need to have people shift into animals, and our need to have people who are also part-animal?

I was privileged early this month to do a launch event for someone else’s book (I know that’s a bit unusual, but I stepped in at the last minute when unforeseen circumstances meant the real author couldn’t be there.)

Kate Leiper's beautiful selkie

So I was on stage, waving A Treasury of Scottish Mythical Creatures, showing Kate Leiper’s gorgeous pictures and reading Theresa Breslin’s enchanting words, and chatting to school kids about selkies. I asked if anyone knew what a selkie was. One pupil said, “It’s a half-seal half-girl.” And I said, “Very close!” then explained that a selkie is sometimes a seal and sometimes a girl, rather half a seal stuck to half a girl. Which we then realised would look a bit like a mermaid...

Which made me think about the similarities and differences between two very distinctive forms of animal / human mix and matches.

There are the shape-shifters, the sometimes-human sometimes-animals: the werewolves, the kelpies, the selkies, the kitsune, the frog princes, the lion women and hyena men...

And there are the jigsaw-ed beasts, made up of bits of people and bits of animals, but always the same shape: the mermaids, the minotaurs, the centaurs, the satyrs...  (The Greeks were masters of these mix and match monsters, but you find a few in other cultures too.)

So what’s the difference between them, and why do we love (or need) to tell stories about them both?

I believe that shape-shifters are fascinating because they could be right beside us, right now. You can’t tell whether the person sitting beside you on the bus in the morning will be a wolf creeping up behind you tonight...

But shape-shifters are often vulnerable too, depending on the rules of their magic. I love Kate’s picture of the selkie, because she has buttons down her tummy, to show that the sealskin comes off when she becomes human. And if she loses that sealskin, she can’t become a seal again. So in Scottish folklore there are a lot of very disturbing and frankly abusive selkie wife stories about a fisherman getting himself a reluctant wife by stealing her sealskin.

It’s not just female selkies who are vulnerable. I tell a story about a werewolf who needs to wear his own clothes to become human again, and is trapped as a wolf when his trousers are stolen.

So, shape-shifters can be vulnerable, and also very easy to hide inside a crowd. This makes them very useful in stories!

And shape-shifters allow us to imagine having different powers and skills. Flying, running, jumping, swimming. It’s probably the opportunity to imagine a human sensibility inside a body with an animal’s capabilities and limitations that attracts me to writing about shape-shifters.

Also, perhaps, shape-shifter stories allow us to explore ideas about what is ‘animal’ inside people, and what is ‘human’ within animals. (What is worthy of compassion, respect, understanding, perhaps? Though, of course, we shouldn’t just extend those to humans... )

But what about the jigsaw-ed beasts, the composite creatures? What about the half-horse half-man, or half-woman half-fish? What do we get from them?

I love writing about these creatures. I love their imagery and their power. The main baddie in several of my Fabled Beast novels is a minotaur, and the sidekick hero in all of them is a centaur. Mainly because I love the idea of a creature that thinks like a human being, but has the power of a large animal.

Perhaps our desire for that mix of agency and strength is why we don’t have a lot of compelling stories about half-worm half-girls or half-mouse half-boys. Thinking practically, if nothing else, the animal has to be big enough for the join at the neck or waist to seem plausible...

But while I love to write about the mix and match monsters, they are perhaps less generally useful and universal in stories than shape-shifters. Mainly because they’re a bit obvious. I’m fairly sure that wherever you’re reading this blog, you’re not sitting next to a minotaur. (Though it’s nearly Halloween, so I might be wrong...) The jigsaw creatures can’t hide among us as easily as the shape-shifters. They are less likely to be our friends and neighbours.

However they are very useful for creating monsters made of things we understand and recognise. (Minotaur = bull’s head + man’s body. There, you’ve got the picture in your head already. That kind of shorthand is very useful for an oral storyteller.) Also, I find centaurs are great for kicking doors down.

What else do you think these animal / human fabled beasts and mythical monsters give us, when we’re  inventing, telling and remembering stories? I’m sure I’ve only mentioned a few of the ways they're useful and important to us as we imagine and create...

But whatever niches they occupy in the ecosystems of our story world, I love writing about the shape-shifters, and the half and halfs...

I’ve written about them from my very first book, and I’m not going to stop now. There are centaurs, fauns and minotaurs, working with or against werewolves, mermaids and selkies in my Fabled Beast Chronicles. There are kelpies and various winged shape-shifters in the series of novels I’m working on now. I’ve also written a whole collection of shape-shifter stories, Serpents & Werewolves, including many of the myths, legends and folktales which inspire my novels.

So now, having mused about why we love and need these fabled beasts, I’m off to write a scene discovering how much faster my heroine can run with paws rather than trainers...

(And if you think Kate’s selkie picture is fab, you might be interested to know there’s an exhibition of her artwork at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh from 4th December until 9th January.)


Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than 20 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers.
Lari’s website 
Lari’s own blog 
Lari on Twitter 
Lari on Facebook 
Lari on Tumblr

Adapt At Your Own Risk - Clementine Beauvais

This is one of my French books, La louve, fabulously illustrated by Antoine Déprez:

When I say 'fabulously', I mean it in both senses of the term: they're brilliant illustrations, but they also reproduce very well the fable-like feel and texture of the story. La louve is an original story, but it is what is generally called a literary fairy tale - a new story made to feel like it's a classic folk or fairy tale.

This might be why, when La louve recently appeared in the White Ravens list at the Munich International Youth Library, it was described as 'a retelling of a Russian folkale'. To my knowledge (and that of my Russian friends), it isn't. There are many folk and fairy tales around the world that involve transformation, wolves and curses, but this one isn't a retelling of any one in particular.

After La louve, however, the publisher, Alice Editions, has asked us to work on a second opus which would be an adaptation or reinterpretation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I immediately agreed, because I've been fascinated by that weird tale for a long time. So I started to think about how to do it. The idea was not to retell the tale, but rather to write an original story inspired from, or reactivating or reimagining, the tale.

I soon realised it was an enterprise fraught with interesting peril. First I thought I’d focus on the rats, perhaps make the main character one of the rats. But immediately, a problem emerged: the glacial contemporary political and ideological connotations of a narrative that involves hordes ("swarms"?) of rats "invading" a village, spreading an illness, being thrown out, and drowning. The portrayal of a population identified as parasitic, swarming the streets of a nice little traditional village and taken away to die - in the water - in exchange for money, has a very unpleasant ring to it; or at least, it should, to anyone who’s even vaguely concerned with what’s happening in the world today. You'd have to be the most candid person on Earth not to realise.

A simple retelling of the story just about gets away with those connotations, because the literal explanation proposed by the story - the plague - works sort of fine, and you can sort of turn off the metaphorical reading. But with an entirely new story, you can’t claim innocently that you don't mind that extra layer of meaning. It just invites itself, whatever you do. 

So of course you can play with these political connotations, and turn the story on its head, getting the rats to be the good guys in the story; the misunderstood, the oppressed and the silenced. You can even write an interesting story where the plague is an invention of the humans to create suspicion against the rats. You'd turn the story into a politically committed tale, preaching compassion towards a marginalised group.

Yeah. But it's a really tricky thing to pull off, because in this roman à clefs you're still identifying a group of people as rats - whether or not you're arguing that it's someone else's vision, that's pretty dangerous.

I know Art Spiegelman's done it. I'm not Art Spiegelman though.

In other words, I couldn't see a way of adapting the Pied Piper of Hamelin story without grappling with the metaphorical political implications. And while I'd be happy to do that in another context, it absolutely wasn't what I wanted this particular book to be. It was supposed to be like La louve: intemporal, slightly frightening, low-key and poetic. Not political. 

So I took the story differently. I decided to get rid, so to speak, of the original tale, by putting it in its entirety on the first page. The story begins with a young girl whose grandfather tells her the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. And then the story starts, seemingly unconnected to the tale. But it loops back onto itself... and connects, at the very, very end, with the very, very first page.

Dealing with this adaptation, I felt like I'd spent quite a while, at least a month or two, thinking about how to catch it, a bit like you would observe a scorpion thinking of the best way to pick it up without getting stung, and getting it to do what you want it to do. Coincidentally, the YA book in French I'm currently working on is also an adaptation. And there again, I spent many train rides looking out of the window, thinking of how to catch that particular scorpion.

I'd be curious to hear your stories of adaptations, retellings or reimaginings of classical tales or novels - I'm sure there are many around, as it's quite a common thing to do. Do tell! 

_____________________________________

Clementine Beauvais writes in French and English. She blogs here about children's literature and academia.

Tracking Down Unicorns - Lari Don

I’ve spent the last month trying to track down a unicorn. You probably won’t be surprised to discover that unicorns are hard to find!

I’m currently pulling together the background research and references for a collection of horse stories (a companion to Girls, Goddesses and Giants, and Winter’s Tales.) And I want to include a unicorn, just like I want to include a centaur, a kelpie and a hippogriff. But the unicorn is proving the hardest to track down.

I keep glimpsing the perfect unicorn story, but never actually finding it. I keep finding hints of a Ukrainian story about the unicorn refusing to go on the ark with all those other smelly animals, which is apparently why unicorns aren’t exactly common these days. I like this little fable, and I want to include my retelling of it in Wild Horses, Wings and Warriors.

But in collections of myths, legends and traditional tales, I always put information at the back of the book about where I’ve found each story, with a genuine trackable source.

sources in my collection of Scottish tales Breaking The Spell

And though I keep glimpsing the unicorn story, though I keep seeing partial hoofprints, I can’t find a source that isn’t gossip, rumour or hearsay.

Google doesn’t help. The same few lines are repeated on lots of different sites, but all the sources seem to be copying each other, like a circle without a starting point. And even proper books - old dusty books, hardback books, books in the library - lots of them mention the same story but even they don’t give an actual source.

And in a slightly unlikely twist, when I mentioned my quest to my best friend, she pulled from the back of her amazing brain a SONG about the story I am hunting for, and sang it down the phone to me. Which was fun, but not really what I was looking for…

So, how much should I care about sources and provenance? All traditional tales have been made up, by someone, some time. Does it matter where I found them? Any book I use as a source, however old, will still just be one version of the story, captured at one moment. You can’t point at a particular version of an oral story and say – that’s the original story.

Even so, I think it does matter. I like to feel that anyone reading a collection of mine can go back to the sources I used and discover more about the story, perhaps find their own way of telling it and perhaps find out more about the culture the story came from. I’m retelling these old tales, not creating them myself, and I want to give credit to the sources that inspire me.

But this particular story seems to be, like the unicorn itself, very hard to find. Elusive. Frustrating. Perhaps non-existent.

I’ve never had this trouble in any other collection, with any other story. Perhaps it’s only unicorns that are impossible to track down…

a helpful child drew me a unicorn!

So should I just shrug and think, it’s only a story, and stop worrying about it? Or should I make a virtue of the fact that finding the unicorn is uniquely impossible? (It does feel quite appropriate!) Or should I keep looking? Should I keep hunting the unicorn, with my telescope, my seven league boots, my map saying ‘here be dragons’ and my compass with the needle pointing to Once Upon a Time…

I think, for now, with the deadline for Wild Horses still more than seven leagues away, I will keep hunting for that unicorn.

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 22 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers.
Lari’s website 
Lari’s own blog 
Lari on Twitter 
Lari on Facebook 
Lari on Tumblr

Heroines are not just for girls! Lari Don

I’m very wary of being a “girls’ writer”. I am a girl, or I used to be, and both my own children are girls. But I don’t write for girls. I write for readers. I write for readers like me who enjoy adventure, tension, riddles, magic, defeating monsters and solving problems. Some of those readers are girls, some of those readers are boys.

However, I’ve always been a bit concerned that so many kids’ books have a boy as the protagonist and a girl as the clever sidekick. So the main characters in all my novels so far have been girls (usually with a male sidekick, though not always a human male sidekick) and as far as I can tell, from emails and signing queues at book festivals, boys enjoy my novels just as much as girls.

But now I’ve done something a bit risky, for someone who doesn’t write for girls. I’ve written a book of heroine tales.

Most of my fiction is inspired by old myths and legends (that’s where my familiarity with magic and my long list of monsters who need defeated come from) and I love telling old stories too. I especially love telling Greek and Viking myths. But most of the best known monster-defeating myths are about boys and men. About heroes. And if girls appear in those stories at all, they’re not even the sidekicks. They’re usually the prizes.

“And the man who rids of us of this dragon will win half my kingdom and my daughter’s hand in marriage.”  

I don’t like giving girls away like sweeties. So one day, I changed a Viking dragon myth.

Standing up in front of a class of 10 year olds, I let the dragon eat every single one of the princes and warriors, and encouraged the princess to kill the dragon herself then refuse to marry anyone. It went down very well with the audience and I enjoyed it at the time, but I felt absolutely rotten afterwards. I felt like I’d ripped the heart out of the story.

So if I wasn’t prepared to alter stories quite so radically, either I had to tell all these hero myths without any balancing heroine myths, or I had find some authentic heroines. So that’s what I did. Once I started looking, I found dozens of them: Inanna the Sumerian goddess, Durga the Hindu goddess, the ballad of Li Chi, Tokoyo the pearl diver, unnamed girls in folktales from all over the world. All defeating monsters or solving problems. None of them waiting for some bloke to rescue them.

I started telling these heroine stories. And kids loved them just as much as they loved Theseus and the Minotaur, or Assiepattle and the Meester Stoorworm. Boys loved the heroine stories, just as much as girls had loved the hero ones.

To be honest, I doubt any of the kids were counting the number of boys and girls in the stories. It was probably only me who was worrying about the cumulative effect of the imbalance of heroes vs heroines.

And now comes the risky bit. I’ve just put my favourite heroine tales into a book. But it’s not a book for girls. No, it is not. It is a book for anyone who enjoys adventure and quests and magic and defeating monsters.

So I was delighted when, at my first public event with Girls, Goddesses and Giants earlier this month, several boys turned up, and they enjoyed my retelling of a goddess defeating a demon just as much as anyone else. And they bought the book. One 11 year old boy read most of it on the way home on the bus.

So boys can enjoy books about heroines too. (Whew!)

I’d be interested to know other writers’ and readers’ opinions on whether there are too few strong girls in the well-known old stories which inspire so much of our contemporary culture, whether that imbalance is a problem (for boys as well as girls), and if so, how we address it.

And in the meantime, I’ll keep looking out for more authentic heroine stories. But I still don’t write books just for girls…

nb - I’m away from my computer for a few days (scheduling posts ahead of time is a great thing!) but I'll respond to any comments as soon as I’m back online.

Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than a dozen books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers. 

Lari’s website

Lari’s own blog

Lari on Twitter

Lari on Facebook

Lari's book of heroine stories, Girls, Goddesses and Giants, was published earlier this month by A&C Black. 

 

Hard Times for Romanian Witches – Michelle Lovric

Is anyone else enchanted by the Romanian witches behaving badly after being told that they have to pay 16 percent income tax? Are there any other writers out there now cursing themselves because they never managed to work such a relevant, emotive and morally satisfying storyline into one of their own children’s books?

For anyone who’s been sweltering under a cold stone the last 31 nights and missed the news – Romania’s economic crisis has inspired the government to cast a wider net for taxes. The witches have been caught up in it, as have the astrologists and fortune-tellers. According to the new decree, Romanian witches will now be obliged to do paperwork as they eek out (forgive me) their living: to itemize and produce receipts for their services, which include telling the future with corn grains, curing bad habits, casting love spells and preparing amulets against curses. A Romanian witch – known as vrăjitoare – usually charges around 10 dollars a consultation, though the fees can escalate dramatically once a client is hooked.

Romania, home of the Dracula legends, is steeped in superstition. Every village allegedly has its own witch. Only recently were witch adverts banned from Romanian television. Witches still advertise extensively in the newspapers. The New York Times reports that President Traian Basescu and his aides wear purple – believed to ward off evil – on certain days. The dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife apparently employed their own personal witch. Perhaps fear of witchly reprisals is the true reason why the original tax proposal was voted down last year.

But Romania’s recession has deepened. Needs must, and on January 1st the new tax law became official. Witches must own up and pay up, and even make pension contributions to the state now.

And like any fairytale witch worth her worts and warts, the Romanian covens are reacting with spleen, acrimony and the dark arts. It’s time for the tax man to be afraid, very afraid.

As the old joke goes, ‘What do you say to an angry witch?’
The answer: ‘Ribbit, ribbit.’

Some of the Romanian witches have threatened to throw poisonous mandrake into the River Danube. Others plan to cast spells on the government and the president, using ingredients including cat excrement and dead dog.

How will it all end? Will the tax-collectors be afflicted with boils? Will the Minister for Finance turn into a newt? Will the witches knit a tax loophole for themselves out of cat-fur and snake-gut lubricated with frogspawn? Will the witches file their tax returns written in invisible bat blood? Will the Romanian jails fill up with tax-dodging witches? Will Romanian accountants cook their books in gigantic cauldrons?

One intriguing aspect of Romanian witchery is the use of the ‘nine-times-married-knife’ that has been secretly hidden in the pockets of new husbands by their brides. Such knives are used to prepare concoctions of basil and frankincense. Will the nine-times-married-knives end up embedded in the flesh of those who passed the offending decree? I’ll bet those gentlemen are not enjoying reading their horror-scopes at the moment, and wondering whatever possessed them when they decided to tax the witches. ‘Why oh why,’ they are thinking, ‘didn’t we go for the quangos and the libraries like that nice Mr Cameron in Britain?’

We’ll probably have to wait until Midsummer to find out what happens. That’s the most potent date in the Romanian vrăjitoare calendar.

In the meantime – even if I can’t own this story, I’m a writer, am I not? So I can PRETEND that I do. And it’s a truth universally acknowledged that someone else’s book is always far easier to write than one’s own. I’m currently haunted by a scary deadline, so my current displacement activity involves fashioning notional plot refinements for the Romanian Witch Tax Hex File, confecting new Romanian witch tax jokes (‘A vrăjitoare walks into Inland Revenue and says ...’), deciding who’ll cackle the audio book, designing the website and the app, and scripting the You-Tube trailer.

As a priority, I’m looking for a title.

All suggestions are welcome.


Michelle Lovric’s website

MOLLY WHUPPIE AND ME

I am lucky enough to be able to slip out of my “author talk” mode during school visits and tell traditional stories. One of my personal and most enjoyable favourites is bold, brave Molly Whuppie.

If I was truly academic about my telling, I’d know when I met her or which parts of the telling came from where and when, times a hundred. Was she among Andrew Lang’s tales read long ago? Certainly I knew the story well before meeting Kathleen Brigg’s great collection. And how much of my version echoes Alan Garner’s wonderful re-telling? Or does the perspective I see in my head during the escape scene echo that of Raymond Briggs' illustration?

The truth is that I don’t want to go back and look, because I have my own Molly alive in my head, shaped by many tellings.

Molly is a kind of female Jack, who manages to keep her two mean-spirited sisters and herself both safe and sheltered in a bone-crunching ogre’s castle overnight.
However (and it's the however that counts) there’s a truly chilling scene where Molly nips out of the overnight bed she’s sharing with her two sisters. Swiftly, she switches the three necklaces of plaited golden straw the ogre had given Molly and her sisters last night at dinner with the bright golden chains he had placed around his own three strange daughters necks.

When, moments later, the ogre comes in to the dark chamber,and feels for the damning chains of straw, it is his own three daughters he takes away, down to the cellar.

Now I do not tell this tale often or to young children, or to children I have only just met, or without other tales of different moods before or after. Molly needs the right moment, as well as an awareness of what is going on in that schools life at the time, and any horrific news stories that are high profile at the time. Sometimes with younger children, I make it clear that the ogre just locks his daughters in the nasty dark cellar. But it is a shivery moment, and always needs handling with care and concentration.

The horror is partly diminished by the later scenes, because not only does Molly get her sisters safely away and eventually married off, but she also returns three times to steal the giant’s treasures. Molly is not anyone’s simpering heroine, but practical and brave, and there is no mention of her being beautiful.

Molly Whuppie wouldn’t be classified as a tale of real life but I can’t tell the tale without acknowledging the deep human feelings within it. Molly is real but she isn’t “real life.” So Molly cheers me immensely when I worry about not being able to write pink kitten stories, or wacky stories about underwear, or gritty urban drama.
I need the cloak of the past to give my best writing its feelings and shape.

Where and when do you find or place your best-loved stories?


Penny’s latest book, A BOY CALLED M.O.U.S.E is out now. (Bloomsbury)
www.pennydolan.com

Note: The triple theft scenes in this tale are woven through with the ogre calling a something like “Woe betide you, Molly Whuppie, if ever you return again.” To which Molly replies “Twice more, thrice more I’ll come to Spain”, a refrain which suggests that at this tale was current when Elizabeth I was on the throne, facing a Spanish invasion.

Serendipity - Celia Rees

I'm not superstitious. I walk under ladders, I stroke black cats when they cross my path. No, I'm not superstitious except when it comes to my writing. I carry amulets, I get very upset if they disappear. I don't tempt fate with loose talk about what I'm doing and I believe in serendipity. I have this in common with my friend, Linda Newbery. Her book, Lob, is on the Guardian children's fiction prize longlist, and richly deserves its place. She explains in an interview: Following the Walking Man, guardian.co.uk 9th August, 2010, how this book was inspired by seeing a man walking the roads between her home in Northampton and Oxford where she was working. He appeared at different points in the book's life: on the day she proposed the idea to her editor, the day after she handed in her typescript, her last sighting of him was at a bus stop in London. She called him Lob. I remember talking to her about this before the book was published and telling her that I used to see the same man, or one of his tribe, walking the main road between Birmingham and Coventry. I said I'd look out for him. Linda keeps a look out, too. She carries a signed copy in the glove compartment of her car, ready to give to him when she sees him again.

I have to report a sighting. The day after I read her interview I saw him walking up Putney High Street, swathed about with bags of different sorts, pushing a trolley, making his way between the shoppers and the buggies. Putney High Street was the old road to Portsmouth and that was the way he was heading, out of the bustle of the town, up onto the ancient heath. I hope it's a good sign for Linda.

I have my own examples, which is why I could identify so closely with Linda and her walking man. My latest novel, The Fool's Girl, was inspired by Shakespeare's play, Twelfth Night, and has Feste as a character, the Fool of the title, The first time I had to talk about the book in public, in Cambridge on a warm spring day, I saw this street performer on the way to the venue. My own serendipity. I can't pass a street performer now without giving him or her some money. Feste would never forgive me.

I'm hoping that serendipity is still working for me. On the day I was thinking about writing this blog, I went to the library and on the notice board there, I saw a flyer for something that was a clear message about the book that I plan to write next. I'm not going to say what it is, because that would be tempting fate.

Green Incarnations - Ellen Renner

It’s one of the most powerful images in British folklore: the head of man who seems to be made of the very oak leaves from which he peers. But who is the green man? Herne the Hunter, a British version of the horned god Woden, with his wild hunt tearing across the night sky? Or the Gaulish deity Cernunnos, transformed in Wiccan mythology into the Holly King and Oak King? Herne makes his first literary appearance in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, but many writers have been drawn to this story of death and rebirth. I’ve recently read or re-read four children’s books which adapt the myth in different ways and for different age-groups.

Lob, by Linda Newbery, a beautifully illustrated book for newly confident readers, introduces the concept of the green man on its most basic and positive form. A green man for gardeners, Lob is a nature spirit of growth and regeneration. Newbery uses this theme to tackle the important subject of death and loss. A young girl learns to cope with the death of a beloved grandfather, while the green man who inhabited the old man’s garden must renew himself and find a new home. It is a story of hope and continuity.

Bereavement is also the theme of the Sally Nichols’ Season of Secrets, intended for slightly older readers. Nichols uses the Wiccan myth of the Oak King and the Holly King, twins who wax and wane with the seasons, taking it in turns to hunt and be hunted, to die and be reborn. This cycle of life and death is literally played out before the eyes a child mourning her newly dead mother. One wild night, Molly is caught up in the hunt and befriends the dying Oak King. In Season of Secrets Nichols addresses the dark side of the myth with directness and honesty. She balances loss with joy as we journey with Molly towards the inevitability of change and the necessity of growth.

A book I regularly re-read is Dogsbody, by Diana Wynne Jones. In her version, Herne is hunted and devoured by his own dogs in a never-ending ritual. There is a melancholy edge, a deep sadness to her portrayal of a being both hideous and beautiful. A creature of the dark, hidden away inside its mother Earth in a modern world which neither remembers nor wants it. A being ‘cruel and kind at once’, who longs for freedom for the wild magic which is his essence: ‘My ancestors came out by day and didn’t frighten or puzzle people. I want to be the same.’

Here light and dark are not simple good and evil but existence and its opposite. Light is ‘the movement behind movement ... the stuff of life itself’, while darkness is that which cannot alter and derives its power from ‘things as they must be’. In this story Herne is stronger even than the luminaries; he possesses the power of death, the passing of time, which in the end must overcome the very stars themselves.

Last year I was delighted to discover the complex and intriguing use of the huntsman myth in Katherine Langrish’s Dark Angels. Her embodiment, Halewyn, is a far cry from the Oak King. He is a trickster, a manipulator; always predator and never prey. He is less to do with seasonal cycles than the darkness of the human soul for, as he says: ‘Out of all Creation, only men and devils know how to be truly wicked. Isn’t that so?’

Halewyn’s mythic origins are not clear cut: is he Herne the Hunter, the Welsh Arawn or the Lord of Misrule? Is he the King of the Elves, a demon or the very Devil himself? He seems to be all and none of these things, as Langrish draws on rich and various sources from folklore and myth. Here we find the payment of a living soul to hell every seventh year, as in the legends of Tam Lyn and Arawn, combined with a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice.

The book begins and ends with the wild hunt. A mortal wolf hunt prefigures the final climactic scene, where Halewyn sprouts Herne’s antlers and leads his Wild Host over the edge of the world itself – the Devil’s Edge.

Langrish’s huntsman is the darkest of all these portrayals, mercilessly trapping a human soul every seven years to seize and carry down to hell. This is the fee which allows for his existence and that of his kingdom of rejects and misfits: ‘The mad old beggars on the roads, they’re my people. The cast-off children nobody wants. The babies abandoned in ditches. The guilty, the lost, the wanderers, the refuse of Heaven’. But even here there is ambiguity, for Halewyn is a devil with a sense of humour and in the end metes out a wickedly apt justice.

Four very different books written with different ages and audiences in mind, but four rich incarnations of the green man which I have greatly enjoyed.

Serendipitous Oxfam - Katherine Langrish

A few weeks ago, Susan Hill launched an attack in the Spectator on Oxfam bookshops which she felt were posing unfair competition to independent new and second-hand bookshops.

I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't agree.  It seems to me that selling books for charity is no different from selling clothes for charity.  If I buy a skirt from an Oxfam shop, it’s always an extra, not something I’d set out to get.  It’s like beachcombing. You don’t go into an Oxfam bookshop looking for something specific: often you don’t even find anything you remotely want. But if you do find something, it’s totally serendipitous. You end up with a book you had never heard of, never dreamed existed, and could not possibly have found elsewhere. This – if you are like me, anyway – will not affect your other book-shopping activities.

Here’s an illustration. A few weeks ago, I noticed that Wantage Oxfam had a number of books about folklore displayed in the window. Of course I went in to look, because folklore is one of the subjects I’m passionate about, and I came out with a wonderful book by Duncan Emrich, published in 1972, called ‘Folklore on the American Land’ – which I blogged about here. (Do go and look, if only for the proverb about owl-shit.)

Besides this there were other titles which cried out to me and so I succumbed to a book of Japanese folktales, and a book called 'Patterns of Folkore' by Katharine Briggs, some Bantu myths, a scholarly two-volume set called ‘Peasant Customs and Savage Myths’, and a Norse saga I hadn’t come across before - and then, when I got them all home (hugging myself with glee) I noticed that some – by no means all, but several – of these books had the rather beautiful name Hélène La Rue inscribed on the flyleaf in elegant, sloping handwriting.

So I was curious. So I looked her up on Google. And this is what I found.

Hélène La Rue (born 1951 and died 13 July 2007), was a musician, musicologist, and curator of Oxford University’s Bate Collection – a wonderful collection of musical instruments dating from the medieval times down to the present. She was also a staff member of the famous Pitt Rivers Museum, the one dedicated to ethnography, full of curiosities. (This was the one my daughter, as a child, used to walk around with hands held up like blinkers to protect herself from the next appearance of a skull, mummy or shrunken head. I remember best the huge Pacific North-west totem pole, the models of ships and river craft: and the atmosphere, as of dusty Victorian collectors still hovering ghost-like in the wings.)

According an obituary written by her friend Mary Dejevsky, Hélène was a warm and delightful lady: “As a student, she appeared elegantly old-fashioned, and not only because she went up to Oxford in the aftermath of the wild Sixties. She retained a fondness for hearth and home that owed much to the intimacy of her French-Canadian background. And while she seemed quiet and shy, among friends she displayed a wicked sense of humour… cheerfully batting around ideas with the best of them, from current affairs and politics, through abstruse points of theology, to medieval music and the purpose of strange objects she thought just might once have served as musical instruments.”

Do the sum, and you can see she died tragically early. She sounds like a wonderful person, whom I would love to have met and talked with, though most likely, even though I live near Oxford, our paths would have never crossed. And at some point, some friend or family member had to perform the sad task that will have to be performed for all of us at some point – and dispose of the books that she had so lovingly collected. Oxfam must have seemed a good option and a good cause. And perhaps some person would buy and value them and love them.

I’m glad that person was me, and I’m glad that, though belatedly, I found out something about the owner. I hope she would be glad to think her books have found a good home. Viva Oxfam…

Woods - Sue Purkiss

Yesterday, I took our dog, Jess, for her usual morning walk. Instead of going up over the hill, as we usually do, we cut along the bottom, through a small wood. There's a special little clearing here - special because at this time of year, cowslips grow there. A little further on there is a patch of primroses: unusual in this part of the Mendips.

It was early morning. The sun shone through the trees and it was very quiet, very still. Something stirred in the undergrowth - a bird probably, or maybe a rabbit or a fox. Nothing remotely threatening.

As I walked on, I thought about another wood - well, not a wood, a forest: far away on the other side of Europe, in south east Poland, on the other side of the Carpathians. We were there last summer. The hills are much higher than the Mendips; when you climb up through the forest, you reach alpine meadows where great clumps of deep blue gentians grow, and mountains curve and dip like blue and lilac waves.

The forest is spreading. There used to be more villages in these mountains, but the villagers were forcibly removed in the war, some to Russia, some to other parts of Poland. Their homes have crumbled now, their fields and gardens are part of the woods.

The trees are tall, so light falls in columns. Some of them have a fierce kink at the bottom of their trunks; this is caused by heavy snowfalls when the trees are young. As far as you look, there are trees, dim into the distance. The path is wide, but if you strayed, it would be easy to lose your way. You could wander for miles and not see another soul. If you went up hill, of course, you would eventually come out into the open - but a small child might not think of that.

There are bears in these forests, and wolves. Real ones. We didn't see any, but we saw their leavings: paw prints and droppings, pointed out to us by Olek, the forester who was with us. He's a hunter, too. He cares for the forest creatures, but sometimes he shoots them.

This was the forest of the Grimm brothers' fairy tales: the forest of little girls in red cloaks, of gingerbread houses, of wolves, of huntsmen who may be heroes or villains, of beasts who may once have been men. Perhaps too, it's the forest of picture book stories where small creatures have great adventures, where the Gruffalo could be just out of sight, where safety is a cosy cave with a warm bed and a welcoming candle.

It was a shock to find out that it is a real place.

The Wild Hunt and the Flying Monk - Katherine Langrish

 

Because we are getting a new puppy (tarantara!) we recently drove over to Malmesbury, Wiltshire, to visit her.  Malmesbury is a sweet little hillside country town with the remains of a huge medieval abbey.  And I mean HUGE.  It was founded around 676, built and rebuilt, and by 1180 possessed a 431 foot spire, easily beating Salisbury Cathedral. So it was pretty catastrophic when, circa 1500, the spire was struck by lightning and collapsed; and then the west tower also fell down fifty years later and – well, what’s left is impressive but nothing compared to past glories.

For a small place, Malmesbury has a colourful past. A gravestone in the churchyard commemorates the death in 1703 of a barmaid called Hannah Twynnoy who was killed by a tiger: 

In bloom of Life

She’s snatched from hence

She had no room

To make defence

For Tyger fierce

Took life away

And here she lies in a bed of Clay

Until the Resurrection Day.

The tiger belonged to a travelling circus which parked in the inn yard.  Like Albert in ‘Albert and the Lion’, it seems that Hannah could not resist teasing the animal - with fatal consequences.

A luckier and much earlier Malmesbury character was described by the chronicler William of Malmesbury, a monk of the abbey who wrote several books including a history of the Kings of Britain up to the Conquest.  It is this book in which he details the magnificent escapade of the flying monk.  Some time in the early 1000’s, the monk Eilmer of Malmesbury flew something like a primitive hang glider off the top of one of the abbey towers:

“He had by some means, I hardly know what, fastened wings to his hands and feet, so that he might fly like Daedalus, and collecting the breeze upon the summit of a tower, flew for more than a furlong (220 yards).  But, agitated by the violence of the wind and the swirling of the air… he fell, broke both his legs, and was lame ever after.”  Enthusiastic despite his injuries, Eilmer declared that he knew what had gone wrong: his glider needed a tail. He was probably right. And he wanted to have another go, but his abbot – who must have been a long-suffering and enlightened man to allow him to try in the first place – utterly forbade it. 

My book ‘Dark Angels’ (‘The Shadow Hunt’ in the USA) is set in the late 12^th century, and I spent months researching the period.  I wanted to know as much as I could about ways of life in a monastery and in an (already old-fashioned) motte-and-bailey castle.  I wanted to immerse myself in the stories 12^th century people told and sang, and the legends they believed in.  There was no better place to find this out than from the medieval chronicles themselves.  They are irresistible once you get going, full of colour and vigour and human emotions.  Take an example from the Peterborough version of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, the progressive year-by-year account of important events which was kept and copied up with some slightly different variants from 1042 to 1155.  The thing to remember is that the Anglo Saxon Chronicle was written in the vernacular – in Old English, not in Latin. Hence the name. This meant that after the Norman Conquest, as far as newly appointed Norman French abbots were concerned, the Chronicle was effectively written in code.  These abbots could read Latin and French; they couldn’t read English.  So for the year 1127, the monk writing the chronicle is free to say exactly what he thinks about his new abbot, Henry of Poitou, who has been appointed by the King: 

“Thus miserably was the abbacy given, between Christmas and Candlemas, at London, and so he [Henry] went with the king to Winchester and from there he came to Peterborough, and there he stayed exactly as drones do in a hive.  All that the bees carry in, the drones eat and carry out, and so did he…”

So far, vivid enough – but this is merely the lead-in to a piece of vituperation which has become famous as an account of one of the earliest apparitions of the Wild Hunt in Britain!  Our anonymous but angry chronicler continues: 

“Let it not be thought remarkable when we tell the truth, because it was fully known all over the country, that as soon as he came… then soon afterwards many people saw and heard many hunters hunting.  The hunters were big and black and loathsome, and their hounds all black and wide-eyed and loathsome, and they rode on black horses and black goats.  This was seen in the very deerpark of the town of Peterborough… and the monks heard the horns blow that they were blowing at night…

“This,” our chronicler concludes darkly, “was his coming in – of his going out we can say nothing yet.  May God provide!”

In other words, the Peterborough account of the Wild Hunt is informed by the Peterborough monks’ hatred of their new, foreign, and greedy abbot.  It’s a splendid piece of mud-slinging, which has preserved an even more splendid bit of folklore – and yes, it did find its way into my book.   



For more stories visit my website at www.katherinelangrish.co.uk  or my blog: Seven Miles of Steel Thistles