TALES FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL
Dear lovely people/mice/whoever you may be,
We are chuffed, thrilled, delighted, excited, all the adjectives etc, to introduce our first issue of Tales from the Bottom of the Well. We received an unexpectedly large number of stories and poems for our 'Into the Woods' theme and we've whittled it down to our favourites for you to read. Thank you to everyone who sent us your work.
Forests and woods act as spaces which seem to breed stories and they are a top location in many of the earliest fairy tales and folk tales. We know most of these stories well. Children with poor sense of direction are often abandoned in the woods with nothing but bread crumbs in their pockets. There's usually a house made out of sweets which we would all love to live in really. Cats tend to be suspiciously human. Family relations are questionable, to say the least. It's pretty much a certainty that there'll be some wolves lurking around every corner. You can bet someone is going to be eaten soon or at least lose their head (sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically). These stories are almost always dark, grim (pun intended), violent and capture that fear (or desire?) of those most primitive spaces. They've always been a space in literature to talk about things you can't speak about, like a microcosm of everything that is taboo or outlawed in society. The laws of reality have no place in those early fairy tales, but those fantastic and sometimes just plain crazy tales hold a fractured mirror up to our own world. The woods were (and are) a boundless source of inspiration for writers and artists.
The submissions we recieved often echoed the darkness of those age old fairy tales, but also tended to turn away from that darkness. They carve new stories from the gnarled tree trunks, following new paths and sometimes just letting in some light to the unceasing darkness of the forest. Some of our selection are dark, some are funny, some are completely and utterly bizarre, but all of them deserve their space at the bottom of our well. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have done.
So get yourself a cuppa and a biscuit (or five, we won't judge you here) and get yourself comfy. Prepare for a lot of foliage . . .
Step into the woods to get to the bottom of our well and join us for some treacley tales.
(By this we mean, please click on the image below to view Issue One. Let's pretend you are actually stepping into the woods though. Weeeee! See. Fun? No. Well, okay, never mind . . . )
We are chuffed, thrilled, delighted, excited, all the adjectives etc, to introduce our first issue of Tales from the Bottom of the Well. We received an unexpectedly large number of stories and poems for our 'Into the Woods' theme and we've whittled it down to our favourites for you to read. Thank you to everyone who sent us your work.
Forests and woods act as spaces which seem to breed stories and they are a top location in many of the earliest fairy tales and folk tales. We know most of these stories well. Children with poor sense of direction are often abandoned in the woods with nothing but bread crumbs in their pockets. There's usually a house made out of sweets which we would all love to live in really. Cats tend to be suspiciously human. Family relations are questionable, to say the least. It's pretty much a certainty that there'll be some wolves lurking around every corner. You can bet someone is going to be eaten soon or at least lose their head (sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically). These stories are almost always dark, grim (pun intended), violent and capture that fear (or desire?) of those most primitive spaces. They've always been a space in literature to talk about things you can't speak about, like a microcosm of everything that is taboo or outlawed in society. The laws of reality have no place in those early fairy tales, but those fantastic and sometimes just plain crazy tales hold a fractured mirror up to our own world. The woods were (and are) a boundless source of inspiration for writers and artists.
The submissions we recieved often echoed the darkness of those age old fairy tales, but also tended to turn away from that darkness. They carve new stories from the gnarled tree trunks, following new paths and sometimes just letting in some light to the unceasing darkness of the forest. Some of our selection are dark, some are funny, some are completely and utterly bizarre, but all of them deserve their space at the bottom of our well. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have done.
So get yourself a cuppa and a biscuit (or five, we won't judge you here) and get yourself comfy. Prepare for a lot of foliage . . .
Step into the woods to get to the bottom of our well and join us for some treacley tales.
(By this we mean, please click on the image below to view Issue One. Let's pretend you are actually stepping into the woods though. Weeeee! See. Fun? No. Well, okay, never mind . . . )
©' The Treacle Well 2013