Selkie quote by David Thomson

Gaston Bachelard quote on Keys

Glass in Fairy tales

Here is a thought, that was meant to be part of my talk on Sunday at the Fairytale conference. But in my nervousness I forgot it.

Autumn musings; fiction, poetry and colour

Autumnal embroidery in silk and cotton floss on calico.

Well it is no surprise that I love Autumn, I take the same kind of photographs every year, I regularly use Autumn leaves for bookmarks and find leaves from past Autumns well pressed in-between pages every year.

I have done my Autumnal re reading of Kim Wilkins' Autumn Castle, such a perfect read for the season and one of my favourite books ever.

The Autumn Castle has a quote from a poem of Kate Forsyth's, another favourite author (Her poems are published under her maiden name, Humphrey).

"So pure and cold the wind breathes. It pares the flesh from the bones of the land - finds at last the essential shape" Autumn, Kate Humphrey.

Kim Wilkins also includes her own translation from a few lines of Hohenburg by Georg Trakl.

"There is nobody at home. Autumn fills the rooms;
Moonbright sonata
And theawakening at the edge of the twilit forest."

This quote reminded me of another, one that when I read it thought... Yes, that's it exactly! Unfortunately all I remember is that feeling and not the quote. Frustrating. Searching my memory I managed to narrow it down to a Charles de Lint novel but despite searching 'on the google' I couldn't find it (turns out I should have remembered the American and Canadian use of the word Fall).

So I started re-reading 'Jack the Giant Killer' and then 'Memory and Dream' and at last I found it.

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it - the whole story doesn't show."
                                                                                                        -Attributed to Andrew Wyeth.

I had read Memory and Dream in a previous Canberra Autumn, where I was feeling incredibly nostalgic. Canberra is planted with many European deciduous trees, reminding me more of German and English Autumns than any Sydney season could give. I was pondering on why I love winter trees (I mean why would a person prefer bare branches to glorious green?) and the Andrew Wyeth quote drew me to an answer. It is that brimming sense of potential, of becoming, of promise. The tension of the moment before the action happens. I love being able to see the 'bone structure' or bare architecture of the tree branches... I guess that is why all my glass pieces have bare branched trees.

OK Autumn gush over!

Well not quite. The trees in my garden, which I take pictures of constantly at this time of year have inspired me to a small embroidery. Yellow and grey are such a great colour combination, that I kept seeing the tree branches and yellow leaves in stitches. So I have started, the background calico is an old piece (20 years) of stitch testing. When I first went to pattern making college, our first lessons where of threading an industrial sewing machine to a timer and practicing sewing a straight and even line. As you can see mine are a little wavy, but I think it works great as a background giving a suggestion of landscape. The calico has a lovely soft texture 20 years later!

Silk and cotton floss on calico sewing machine stitch samples

Writing quote of the day

This rather long quote is most of the last paragraph from J.C.Cooper's 'Fairy Tales: Allegories of Inner Life'.

"The tales meet the deep-seated psychic and spiritual needs of the individual as myth does for the race; both follow traditional lines and obey universal laws of symbolism. Through them runs the constant motif of man’s struggle to find his true worth, his inner self, his place in the universe. The themes deal with creation, paradise lost and regained, the union of the opposites, initiation, the conflict between the powers of good and evil, the meaning of life, a meaning which can vary from the moral and social to the psychological or the mythological and spiritual according to each person’s interpretation and needs.

But, psychological or spiritual, the chief motif is that of initiation and integration, the transformation of man himself by himself with supernatural aid, the transition from the mortal to the immortal in the ever-recurring cycle of birth, death and rebirth until that, too, is transcended and he can live happily ever after."





Cooper, J. C. Fairy tales: Allegories of the Inner Life. (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1983) 154.

Writing quote of the day

In his chapter "The Utopian Function of Fairy tales and fantasy" Jack Zipes explains to us through Ernst Bloch's theories on hope...

"these intrepid heroes show the holes in systems of domination through which small people can slip to liberate themselves and gain their ends. Their goals are socialist and utopian in nature in that they assert the potential for humanity to be on it's own, nor dependent on a system, on phantom gods. The individual moves into his or her own, undergoing metamorphosis while gaining strength from the gifts of other beings. The building of the self and the other world is essentially a communal project."

Jack Zipes. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (rev. ed.). New York: Routledge, 2002, 169.

 


I feel like shouting hurrah at the end of that...so HURRAH!

Writing quote of the day

This is the quote I am using to set the scene for my paper...woe betide you examiners who think fairy tales are nonsense!

"The scholarly world discovered the folktale in the 19^th century. Before that time there was little serious interest in the phenomenon of oral tales, which were generally viewed by learned persons as a form of amusement proper to simple or uneducated persons, or to children, none of whom had much to teach the rest of us. Accordingly no one thought long about the nature of such stories, no one wondered about how old they were or where they came from, no one asked what they meant to their tellers and listeners."


William Hansen. Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University press, 2002) xi.

Writing quote of the day

“The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.”

Walter Benjamin. The Story Teller. p11.

Writing quote of the day

I had real trouble finding the correct source for this one. Usually you will find it attributed to G.K Chesterton, but this one is Neil Gaiman paraphrasing Chesterton, and because Neil does it so well it has become the 'real' quote.

“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

Writing quote of the day

“Inevitably they find their way into the forest. It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always large, immense, great and mysterious. No one ever gains power over the forest, but the forest posses the power to change lives and alter destinies.”

Jack Zipes. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. (2^nd ed.) New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002, 65.

Writing quote of the day

"The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth."


Marina Warner. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. London: Random House, 1994, 225.

Writing quote of the day

"If there is one ‘constant’ in the structure and theme of the wonder tale, it is transformation."

Zipes, Jack (ed.). The Oxford companion to fairy tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, xvii.