The Art of Retelling
Thoughts about retelling classic legends: Don't get too hung up on details from other versions. Take the grounding, universal aspects that are laced through all of them, the spirit that makes it worth telling yet…
Tag: Storytelling
A Meditation on Meeting Souls Gone By
I’m the kind of person who must “meet” people. It is the only way I can know them, living or dead. I must feel their presence on some level, or I cannot hope to truly…
Telescoping Hope: The Role of Stories
A story is a telescope, bringing the distance within arm’s reach. So often, the lives we lead seem long, perhaps uneventful, twisting and turning from one instance to another, usually before we have time to…
A Fireside Tale
They say this was elvish land once. Hollin, it's called on the maps but folks round here ain't much into maps . . . too busy scratching life out o' this cursed thin land. Course,…
Give Me the Words: A Bardic Rhapsody of Winter Feasts
Give me the words, let them form. The stories that course through my mind, weaving like star-light knotted into pitchers, pouring out the Milky Way across the onyx sky. Give me the words that…
Once Upon an End: A Short Story of Truth and Tale-Telling
The End. He had reached the End of the world… and even come back from it. There he had expected to find monsters with torturous tentacles splayed on cliffs, or perhaps bleak beasts of shadow…
The Stories That Matter: Teaching History with Catholic Principles
My earliest memories are hinged upon the love of stories. In time, I discovered that the same story-driven essence present in tales that enraptured me as a child was the undergirding of history, and it…
Storytelling: A Ritual of Change
It seems that, while last semester’s coursework and circumstances brought me to think a lot about the notion of home and identity, this year is, instead, placing a focus on story telling. It could, perhaps,…
Every Word So Employed: George MacDonald and the Theological Imagination
Introduction In this essay I offer a constructive definition of the imagination for George MacDonald: The imagination is a faculty that perceives and appropriates transcendent beauty in sensible form. This definition of MacDonald’s imagination sees…
A Bard’s Prayer
Let me catch the flame, Golden, glittering, glaring, So my fingers may glow as I hold the pen. Let me taste the wine, Sweet, smooth, sumptuous, So my speech may be seasoned when I tell…