Our Literature Study Announced: FOLKTALES

We are happy to officially announce that our literature study for 2014-2015 will be (drum roll, please!) FOLKTALES from around the world.  We will be celebrating many wonderful stories, both written and oral, within our classrooms and throughout our whole lower school.

Liza Goodell, a professional parade puppet designer, will be helping us with the puppet part of our literature study.  Here is her website with  information about her background and examples of some of her amazing artwork.  http://www.lizagoodell.com

One of our main books will be The Rough Face Girl by Rafe Martin.

"Why Folktales?" 

on the meaning of stories and the art of storytelling

Below is an excerpt from an article by Rafe Martin, author of The Rough Face Girl

This article originally appeared in the January 1999 edition of Storytelling Magazine Sometimes people ask me—“Why are folktales important? Why should they be shared, retold, recreated, put in books today? Are they just remnants of outdated cultures, quaint and charming stories of little current relevance? Why do you so often write recreations of folktales, anyway?” My answer is that folktales, perhaps better called traditional tales, return us, not to the literal world but to the imagined one. They are doorways into a constant realm of universal dreaming through which archetypes may be embodied, characters and roles and life paths explored.  They are old, as the psyche is old, as the imagination is; old and enduring. The patterns of cause and effect, good and evil which run through these old tales underlie all cultures, underlie even the current dream of unbounded technological accomplishment and success. Folktales, the unauthored, cumulative recasting of many generations’ experience explores the old, that is, fundamental areas of ourselves, areas so common they remain at the bedrock of our humanity.  And because they are old, they are mature. Honed by centuries of telling and retelling they have become concise models of narrative, real building blocks of the imagination. Worn to the nub, all superfluity washed away, they retain a consistency of their own. In them only what needs to happen, happens. And yet, the promise of that happening fulfills our dreams.  For what folktales give us, is a language of wish-fulfillment. In these stories we can make what we wish to happen finally happen. In the mind. In the imagination. We can see and feel core places that we may have to strive all our lives to bring into actual being. But in the folktale it is completed and we live and feel it, too, in the unique terms of our own images. A kind of promise of fulfillment, of a destined, some-day-to-be fulfillment is made temporarily real. In a Cinderella tale for example we can experience justice—see good rewarded and evil punished. When was the last time reading the newspaper brought that? How could it? Our daily news is built on tales of injustice. That is the world. But not the world we wish for. Traditional tales put us into a real human world; not the literal one, but one we really wish might be. That wish is part of our truth as human beings. If we lose it we lose a deep part of ourselves, the very part, perhaps, that motivates our constant effort to improve society and recreate the world to accord with wish—to bring into being a world of integrity and equality. Traditional tales keep the flame of such possibility alive.