Early this week I signed a contract to teach high school English next year while I'm completing our state's certification process.  One of the school's teachers unexpectedly resigned; I was invited to apply for the job, interviewed and was hired.  Classes begin on the 21st of August.  I am thrilled, concerned, lost, calm, confident and convinced of my own insanity all at least three times every five minutes when I think about what I've just signed on to do.  Mostly, though, I am happy.

One of the classes I've inherited is a first semester folklore class.  The school has a set of folktale anthologies edited by Jane Yolen, Favorite Folktales from Around the World, which I plan to use, but I want some kind of explanatory text, some general explanation and guide to folklore, especially since folklore encompasses so much more than just narrative.  The second semester class will be a mythology class, and I'm toying with the idea of ending the folklore semester with a unit on hero legends and then beginning the mythology class with a unit on hero legends that also incorporate deities (e.g. first semester may end with Arthurian legends, and second semester may begin with Greek and Roman hero legends).

What I would love is some help.  I do not have many LJ contacts, but I know many of the friends I do have are in contact with lots of people who may be able to suggest folklore/folktale related texts (whether in book or website or some other form) that I could consider or might find helpful and that high school students would find accessible.

Any recommendations?

I am all ears. 

It is drawing nigh unto two in the morning, and here I sit (again) in front of a computer screen.  Outside the windows the wind is winding itself up, scattering my papers across the table behind me and throwing small twigs from the trees into the yard.  Soon full storms are supposed to erupt.  Not to worry, the weatherman tells us, the tornadoes that are likely to form tonight should be small ones.  Both girls were downstairs moments ago complaining of the heat.  When I went to check, they'd turned off the fan and closed all the windows upstairs.  No wonder.  I opened the windows, plugged in the fan and tucked them back in, reassuring them that I'd come shut the windows again when the rain begins.

I hated closed windows as a child.  My attic rooms were always hot and stuffy, the indoor silences thick around my face, stifling.  I needed wind across my skin and the sound of peeper song and insect chant to lull me to sleep, reminders that the world was a bigger place than my bed, my little room, my parents' house.  Some of my favorite nighttime memories are of sleeping outside under an open sky and waking to watch the treetops dance wildly as the wind picked up, and faint rumbles and flashes of distant light in the west announced the approach of more powerful weather.

I grew up attending stuffy churches with shut windows, but the faith I somehow stumbled into anyway remains.   I don't know why I still believe, given the effort I've undergone to abandon that faith and the often excruciating difficulty of the journeys I've had to make to reclaim it.   Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the story rings true to me with a deeper truth than fact alone.  Like fairy tales, it carries things I need to survive: adventure, beauty, strength, hope, a wind that blows from beyond the edge of the small world I've known, a wind that throws my life into crazed disorder and makes breath possible.

Faith and Faerie, I've been told, are incompatible.  One cannot believe in both miracle and magic.  One should not open windows in the wind.

Phooey.

 I have an inordinate fondness for fairy tales and mythopoetic literature. This evening I've spent several hours at SurLaLune, pouring over annotated fairy tales and their histories, not to mention many, many absolutely gorgeous illustrations. It's an incredible site.

If anyone knows of a graduate program that focuses in on mythopoetic lit or fairy tale lit or literature of the fantastic, drop me a line. Until then, here are thirteen reasons to love fairy tales.

1. Magical powers.

2. Wise women.

3. Brave princes and princesses.

4. Unbearable suffering.

5. Perserverance.

6. Long, flowing hair. (Yes, I know it's terribly girly, but...I'm a girl!)

7. Scary monsters. (See here. If you get this joke, I will write a poem for you of your very own.)

8. Small children being eaten.

9. Good overcoming evil.

10. Forests and thickets and rivers and lakes and thorns and flowers and mountains and castles and cottages.

11. Otherworldly kingdoms.

12. Talking beasts.

13. Journeys of the exterior and interior.

With two blogs already, I hardly need another one.  Still, a Livejournal account could be handy, especially with several of my friends already blogging here and now the new Goblin Fruit message board which will hopefully take off soon.  I'm intrigued with the webzine and have been quietly wandering about some of the blogs of its contributors here at LJ to get a feel for them.  Many of this issue's poems were haunting in either lyric storytelling or in sheer language use, and a few packed that double whammy that makes me say on a sharply indrawn breath, "I wish I'd written that...except it's so great just to be reading it!"  This doesn't happen often for me.  That such lightening struck more than once in a single issue tells me I've found something special.