How I spent (the first part of) my summer vacation

Go to Sleep, Gecko! a Balinese folktale retold by Margaret Read MacDonald, has a message that is oft-quoted in our house: "Some things you just have to put up with." I heard geckos for the first time this past week when I was in the Florida Keys for a wedding. I smiled when I heard them. However, I was not smiling when I attempted my daily walk, only to come home with scores of mosquito bites. Geckos eat mosquitoes, but the mosquitoes ate me. I got some relief when we sailed out on a pontoon to arrive at a sandbar:



What you don't see in this photo: dolphins, tiny starfish, intricate coral, stingrays, herons, and fish that dive out of the water.

While we were in the Keys, we visited the Hemingway Home and Museum. Bede, Lucia, and I enjoyed exploring the grounds of Ernest Hemingway's last residence. Bede and I were comforted to learn that this was the only residence where Hemingway had his own separate writing space (in other words: No Whining about our lack of writing space!). I read a lot of Hemingway between college and graduate school, and while I didn't care for his novels besides For Whom the Bell Tolls (The Old Man and the Sea was a novella, and well worth the fuss), I enjoyed many of his short stories. A Movable Feast is a favorite too, though one has to keep in mind that Hemingway did not write that memoir with a critical eye. It's fun to read for all of the name-dropping.

A piece of mosaic at the Hemingway house:



I have jetlag. Like Gecko, I'm going to Go to Sleep.

The Sun Sisters: a short story

I really like the story called "The Sun Sisters" (full text). It's a Chinese story collected in Margaret Read MacDonald's Three-Minute Tales. I haven't yet told it, but I hope it becomes one of my stories. I'm a fan of stories that have to do with the creation and manipulation of textiles. Coincidentally, I read this story right around the time Lucia asked me why she wasn't supposed to stare directly at the sun. I was glad to have a story for her.

Eric Wolf interviews Margaret Read MacDonald

Eric Wolf of The Art of Storytelling With Children has a podcast interview with Margaret Read MacDonald, which you may find here. The interview is called "Telling Across Language Barriers" and focuses on the challenges and rewards of stories told in different languages, including American Sign Language. Check it out! I really appreciated the sections that addresses what MacDonald calls, "hit and run folklore," which showing up in a community for two weeks and saying, "I'm going to collect your stories!" MacDonald says that people often think she's going around the world collecting stories, when she's actually going around the world sharing stories. Later, there's a section about getting permission to tell stories. While the implication is that one should always tell stories respectfully, MacDonald says that the stories of Native American tribes and Aboriginal groups of Australia belong to specific groups, but that "I've been nowhere else in the world where the stories have not been passed freely. Everywhere else I've been, people are just, 'Oh,please tell our stories! Why don't you tell our stories? We have wonderful stories!'" Listen to the whole interview for the proper context, though. There are some good questions and thoughts about ethics and ways of proper attribution.

An earlier post I wrote addresses some of the issues of telling stories from different cultures. You may find it here.

Margaret Read MacDonald and my daughter

On Saturday, we were all revved up to see Recess Monkey at the central Seattle Public Library branch when we found out Margaret Read MacDonald was telling stories at Island Books. Lucia enjoys the music of Recess Monkey quite a bit, but she has a connection with Margie (as the great Dr. MacDonald introduces herself), and opted to attend the storytelling event instead. Lucia drew a picture of Aree and her friends wearing layers of dresses, based on the Thai story The Girl Who Wore Too Much. Here is the picture:




Margaret Read MacDonald told some of her favorite stories from the picture-books she's published, including The Squeaky Door and The Old Woman and Her Pig. My favorite picture-book by MacDonald is Fat Cat, illustrated by Julie Paschkis, and it was to my delight that when MacDonald unveiled her new book, a British variant on the Beauty and the Beast story called The Great Smelly, Slobbery, Small Tooth Dog, Paschkis had provided the drawings once more.

What I wish you could see are the end-papers. Paschkis drew different plants to symbolize the emotions that develop in the story, and the end-papers have illustrations of these plants plus their symbolic meanings. I cringe to see how this book will be bound for library copies, as beautiful end-papers are often spoiled by the necessary steps to process books for public use. Is this a clever marketing ploy to get people to buy copies of the book for their own collections? It works! I bought a copy of the book for my godmother, but I think I may have to reconsider the notion that I don't need a copy for myself. Lucia concurs.

Almira and the Robbers (in Felt)

After my last storytime gig, I decided that my Jack and the Robbers story needed sprucing up. I made some flannel-board figures:


Jack is now Almira (my princess finger-puppet) and the cow traditional to the tale became a camel. The robbers in the story are never specified, but I've made them three animals known for stealing: a raccoon, a rat and a crow. Those 6 colorful blobby things are bags of gold.

Margaret Read MacDonald once said that, after she taught this story in a seminar, one of the teachers complained that Jack and the animals were taking gold that actually belonged to other people. The teacher decided to change the story so that Jack and the animals brought the gold to the police before heading home.

Hiss! Boo! Grumble. In other words: please don't try to make a two-dimensional folktale into a three-dimensional contemporary fiction story. If I ever encounter the objection to the travelers' claims of the gold, I will explain sweetly that Almira went out to seek her fortune. What the audience didn't know beforehand was that the very robbers they met had stolen Almira's fortune before our story began. When the animals scared the robbers away, Almira merely reclaimed what was rightfully hers.

Twenty-Five Things That Make Me Happy

A Wrung Sponge asked readers to write down twenty-five things that made them happy. Sure thing! I’ll list my items in groups of 5.

Five children’s books:

1) Constance—Patricia Clapp
2) The School for Cats—Esther Averill
3) Daughter of the Moon—Gregory Maguire
4) Dinner at Alberta’s—Russell Hoban (illustrated by James Marshall)
5) Henrietta’s House (UK)/Blue Hills (USA)—Elizabeth Goudge

Five folktales:

1) Why the Tides Ebb and Flow— retold by Joan Chase Bowden
2) The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle— retold by Margaret Read MacDonald
3) Two Of Everything— retold by Lily Toy Hong
4) Lazy Jack— retold by Joseph Jacobs
5) “Talk” (i.e. "the talking yam story")—from The Cow-Tail Switch, retold by Harold Courlander

Five finger puppets:

Five camp skits:

1) JC Penny (In my outdoor education class, I saw this skit as "Thom McCann.")
2) Good news and bad news
3) The Man and the Coffin
4) The Most Horrible Thing in the World
5) Moon Trip

Five songs to play on the guitar in the key of G:

1) City of New Orleans
2) Orphan Girl
3) Lavender’s Blue
4) Can’t Let Go
5) On the Sunny Side of the Street

The Fisherman's Wife and the Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle

This evening, my friend Isidora and I had special post-birthday drinks at my favorite neighborhood bar. I’ve known her since third grade, but when she moved to England, we wove in and out of contact for years, and did not meet again until the summer of 2002. We now live in the same city. I am used to thinking of her as the artist and myself as the storyteller, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that she had once told the folktale, ”The Fisherman and his Wife,” in a classroom setting. However, when Isidora visited the classroom afterward, she overheard references to the story from the teachers along the lines of, “Now, class, remember the fisherman’s wife! Be content with what you have, and don’t ask for more.”

I brooded upon that for awhile. That interpretation never sat well with me. I finally realized that what was wrong with the Fisherman’s Wife was not so much wanting more, but not being grateful for each gift she had. The final insult was hubris in wanting power over the rising and setting of the sun. The Fisherman was culpable in that he did not set proper boundaries. The Fish, too, kept giving and giving, growing more irritated all the time, but still giving.

For the record, I prefer the more humorous version of this tale-type, made popular by Dr. Margaret Read MacDonald,”The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle.” Self-recognition is much clearer when levity is part of the instruction. It is much too easy for me to look upon the Fisherman’s Wife with contempt. The Old Woman in the Vinegar Bottle, however, is another story. I look upon her with recognition.