Breezes from Wonderland: A Forum for Folklore, Children’s Literature, and Storytelling

The Boston Globe reports the death of Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill. I don’t think many locals imagined that Brother Blue had ever gone by any other name–he had become the spirit of storytelling, keeping traditional tales alive in a lively, street-smart way. I envision him now as one of those beautiful butterflies he wore when he told stories, and I feel sure that he is fluttering in the breezes of southern climes right now, returning north next summer in his new incarnation as the soul of storytelling. His last tale was a love story, told to his wife.
We will miss his broad smile, his warmth, his generosity, and his love of good stories.
 http://www.boston.com/news/local/breakin…

NYT, 6/15: Colum McCann writes movingly about meeting his grandfather at a nursing home in London–”for the first and last time.” Only when McCann read Joyce’s Ulysses later in life did he really get to know the grandfather, who “emerged” from the novel. McCann quotes Nabokov on storytelling (see below), but he draws some conclusions that move us away from the point made in the passage. Isn’t Nabokov telling us how words can turn into wands, transforming the ordinary into something exquisite, incandescent, and unforgettable? McCann tells us instead about how we can enter story worlds, breathing their air and inhabiting their reality.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/opinio…

Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.