Giving Legends and Folklore a Kick

         Here’s my fourth and final post digging into the contents of my Work In Progress, a collection of short stories, poems, and art currently being launched by a Kickstarter campaign (already fully funded, but running for one more week).  Today’s subject is the other category of stories I’ll be including: Other.  This is the category where I’ve collected work inspired by everything from a nursery rhyme to a Shakespeare play, and Egyptian funerary lore to the Mona Lisa.

        The idea of legends and fairy tales from other parts of the world is straightforward, and there are also the traditional, well-known legends that didn’t quite fit into my other categories, such as Aesop’s fables and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.  But “folklore” is really an extremely broad category.  According to Wikipedia, “Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people.  This includes tales, myths, legends, proverbs, poems, jokes, and other oral traditions.”  Another definition says “folklore is informally learned, unofficial knowledge about the world, ourselves, and our communities, our beliefs, our cultures, and our traditions that is expressed creatively through words, music, customs, actions, behaviors, and materials. It is also the interactive, dynamic process of creating, communicating, and performing as we share that knowledge with other people.”  For my purposes in Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns I’m not taking it quite that broadly, and I’m sticking with work that was inspired by or reimagining the sorts of folklore that are either widely known elements of my cultural background, such as the Mona Lisa, or stories that may not be widely known but are legends that have been collected and retold, such as the Green Children of Woolpit.  Here’s what I’ve got so far in this section of my book:

Scheherazade (poem)

The fable of the Sun and the North Wind (art)

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (short story, art)

Ancient Egyptian Shabti (poem, art)

The Golem of Prague (art)

The Green Children (poem, art)

Mona Lisa (poem, art)

Oberon and Titania (short story)

The nursery rhyme Hey, Diddle Diddle (short story, art)

        I’ve also got a few other short stories that riff on traditional folklore motifs rather than specific stories: wicked witches, tricksters, and vegetable lambs and barnacle geese.

        As with the other categories, this line-up is still tentative.  I may create more short stories and poems, and I’ll certainly create more art.  I’ll also be looking at the balance of the book as a whole: how long it’s getting, whether each piece fits with the flow of the others, and so on.  This is the section that’s got the blurriest edges as far as what really fits the theme, but as with all the others, I’ve had a wonderful time using tidbits of story as my starting point, and then seeing where they take me.

        All of these stories - the myths, the fairy tales, the legends, the snippets of lore - are imagined by people grappling with the questions of life, making sense of the world, and then transmitting the ways they’ve made meaning.  When I reexamine and reimagine these same stories, I’m taking the places where past people’s answers don’t work for me, and creating stories that reflect my own sense of the world.  I’m also having fun simply spinning tales of wonder and magic.

        In fact, you could say that I’m having a ball, and the Kickstarter campaign, like Cinderella’s own enchantments, runs until the stroke of midnight (EDT) on Sept. 29.  I hope you’ll accept my invitation to the ball and check out Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns to see whether it looks like something you’d like to be part of.  I hope my stories will bring wonder to you, too.

[Pictures: details from The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon, by AEGNydam, 2025;

Shabti, rubber block reduction print by AEGNydam, 2025 (originals at NydamPrints.com).]