Inspiration

I have always adored fairy tales and in college, was able to explore them to a certain extent in a terrific woman-centered study: Angela Carter (the inspiration behind my blog title), the Brothers Grimm, and the underlying propeller of fairy tale creators - the folk tale. So long ago, the original fairy tale - the folk tale - consisted of gore, deceit, you name it. I was going to try and recreate some of my penned research from college, but upon revisiting my college essay on Angela Carter's "The Erl-king," I've decided to cut and paste here. Maybe rereading something I wrote at a creative time in my life will inspire me to make new:

To understand the original goal of the literary fairy tale — pre-Angela Carter — one must grasp the concept of the oral folktale. Folklore is determined by culture, and although the basic stories and themes remained the same, whoever was reciting the tale held the power to manipulate, dramatize, sexualize, twist comedic or squeeze the gore into the tale. Details resided in the narrator’s mind and tripped out of that mouth over the air and into the listener’s ears. Within the oral folktale lived the chronicle, the myth, the legend, and the fable, and out of the oral folktale grew the literary fairy tale. Sometimes called the oral wonder tale, these tales were similar to fairy tales in their climactic structure and memorable characters. Some of the folktales differed from each other, such as the myth, which typically attempted to explain the beginning of humankind or some natural phenomenon by way of a story with supernatural occurrences. In the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, people began to write down these oral tales, and they slowly began to form the modern day literary fairy tale. One specific author writes the fairy tale, and this allows for its difference from the oral folktale, in which many individuals compose the tales as they tell the stories to family and friends, dragging it in the dirt then rinsing it off to make it new, a new unit through composition and re-composition.

Rereading this brings a few things to mind: college (or forced construction) and employment (or forced deconstruction). College has the ability to provide students with a comfortable environment in which they can explore, think, talk, argue. The classroom proposes a place in which to do something, but outside of the classroom, where are we? Looking for comfort, looking for the "right place" in which to express ourselves, and taking initiative to build that kind of network is difficult (fingers pointed at me). I've returned to my favorite medium: writing. And it's taken me a good long post to get to my point-I'm going to write to rediscover creativity that I feel has trickled out of my body and down the street and into the gutters since I've been working 9-5 jobs that merely utilize my organization skills. Writing to enliven a flow of thoughts, emotions, and to see the animation of architectural sketches.