Fiction and Folklore: A Match Made in Reader Heaven
Icy Sedgwick shares her love of folklore and how it's enriched her creativity My love affair with folklore started with a small book from a Northumbrian castle. It was more of a pamphlet, really – a handful of pages in a cardboard cover, stapled at the spine. There was a whole series of them that I went on to collect. Each one contained tales of ghosts, fairies, monsters, and ghouls. Heinous murders and bloody revenge stained some of the stories, while the others glittered with the promise of magic. Make no mistake, these were not the cute fairies of Disney, or the "wise Fae" so beloved of the Mind Body Spirit crowd. These were the fairies that struck bargains and made sure you read the small print. Perfect reading for a pre-teen, wouldn’t you think? Whether I've been conscious of it or not, folklore has rippled through many of the short stories and novels I've produced. Except my first western, but what are westerns if not modern myths? But this post isn’t abo