I live in Saskatchewan and enjoy hiking in the prairies while musing that bison, deer, and cattle (and any other grass munching creatures) live directly on top of what they love most: their food. I try to imagine how it might feel to constantly be surrounded by what I love to eat. For me, I’d […]
Last night I dreamed that a long-awaited companion arrived to take me to the other side of the world where we would live in comfort, without fear or want, for the rest of our lives. Unfortunately, we were running late to meet the train, and just as the doors were about to close I realized […]
I have found myself dwelling on the color blue and the way our planet’s elemental hue, the most symphonic of the colors, recurs throughout our literature as something larger than a mere chromatic phenomenon…1 The color blue is the chimera of the visible light spectrum. It is everywhere and nowhere. The most popular color. Yet […]
“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” —Carl Gustav Jung Once upon a time there lived, on […]
My love of fairy tales includes those to which I might, as a feminist, be ashamed to admit—Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Snow White. Simpering damsels? Victims rescued by a prince? I don’t think so. Their wildness, wisdom and strength cannot be denied. It is sometimes called the ‘woman who lives at the end of time,’ […]
In his TEDSalon NY2013 talk, “The Unheard Story of David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell posits that the long-held belief that the Biblical tale is a “metaphor for improbable victories” is false. Any reader able to place the story in its proper context will see that when the Philistines put forth their champion, the giant Goliath, […]
Let us now praise Walt Disney. I mean that in all earnestness. The man was a genius. I don’t mean his art or animation—though, of course, that is praiseworthy enough, and worth another post just to examine it, by someone much better qualified than myself. What I praise here are his stories. More particularly, the […]
I’ve been waiting all my life for a truly satisfying retelling of my all-time favorite fairy tale, “Vasilisa the Wise,” and Katherine Arden has delivered it in a novel that combines history, fantasy, and folk magic. The Bear and the Nightingale brings Vasilisa, here called Vasya, into contact with Morozko, Russian folklore’s brutal Winter King. […]
On April 26, 1986 reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in northern Ukraine exploded, throwing up enough radioactive material to contaminate much of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe. Thousands of people were evacuated from the 30 km Exclusion Zone, abandoning homes, schools, entire villages, and a way of […]
“According to Hindu belief, a thumb-sized being known as the innermost self or soul dwells in the heart of all humans and animals.”1 Hans Christian Andersen’s “Thumbelina” is believed to be an original tale, inspired by “Tom Thumb.” The tiny girl is not heroic in the sense that Tom Thumb is; he battles an ogre, and […]
