I’ve published four books, and my fifth is due out in October, but I think of mysef as first and foremost a storyteller - by which I mean that I tell stories, rather than writing them down. I tell folk tales, fairy tales, myths and legends. I share stories with children and adults, indoors and out, in both formal and informal settings.
Bold Girls
I don’t learn stories off by heart. I know the framework of each one, and tell it in my own words. I always think it’s a bit like a jazz improvisation in music. You know where you are going to end up, but you choose your own way there. This means that I can shape the story to the setting and the audience, so the same story can be told in different ways to children or adults. Or a mixed audience. Who doesn’t like listening to stories?
One of my hopes, when I came back to live in rural Wales in 2001, was that I would find time to write, alongside my storytelling work. And, thanks to my wonderful publishers, The History Press, I have had the opportunity to do just that. In 2010, I was invited to contribute a book to their comprehensive series of County Folktales. Then in its infancy, it now represents almost every county in the UK, with each volume written by a storyteller who either lives in, or comes from, the county which is the subject of that book. The History Press wanted to capture on the page some of the freshness - and, let’s face it, the quirkiness - of a told story, which is why they invited storytellers to create the series. Why not search their website for the volume about where you live?
https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/local-history/storytelling/
After writing not just one, but two books of county folktales, the first for Denbighshire, where I live, and the second for my next-door county, Wrexham, both in North East Wales, where I have made my home, I was bold enough to suggest a new venture to my publishers. Nicola Guy, Commisioning Editor, proved that she has a moonlighting role as a fairy godmother. She advocated for my crazy idea to her colleagues at the press, and a new series was born. Called Ancient Legends, in each book one long legend is explored and retold at length, in a slim and beautifully presented volume. Welsh and Irish legends, stories of King Arthur, and the tale of Robin Hood all feature in this series.
Soon after this, The History Press decided to create a companion series of folktales to match the County Folktales series, this time retold for children. So I set to and wote Folktales of North Wales for Children, illustrated, like all my books, by my partner Ed Fisher. Ed is a talented artist who grew up on the North Wales coast and is the fourth generation of artists in his family. At the present time, some of his History Press illustrations are on view in a exhibition of the best of Welsh Illustrators, at Wales’ largest Arts Centre, in Aberystwyth.
Our next book, due out in October 2019, is a collection called Folktales for Bold Girls. It is a collection of traditional stories from around the world which feature heroines who are not princesses, fairies or goddesses, but little girls of the same age as our target readership, 7 to 12 years old. Ed has illustrated it by drawing portraits of girls in the age range of the book. They are all girls we know. Some go to our village school, a small school with less than 50 pupils. Some are the children of friends. My granddaughter Amber is featured on the cover! All the girls we asked are confident, lively and bold!
Although, in many ways, girls and young women have more positive role models than ever - who does not admire Greta Thunberg, for instance? - there is still a huge amount of socil, media and peer pressure on them to be sweet, docile, obsessed with their looks and afraid of body shaming.
Disneyesque narratives of princesses languishing in towers, waiting to be rescued by handsome princes, feed this trope from an early age, though to be fair to Disney, even they are now coming up with more sparky heroines: Elsa from Frozen is a great favourite of Amber’s!
However, I believe it is still important and timely to ensure that they have lots of role models, in both their real and internal lives, to reassure them that they can be whoever they want to be, and that all possibilities are open to them.
There are many folktales which offer alternatives to the traditional ‘princess in a tower’ stereotype, but they are not so well-known. This is what inspired me to retell and publish them in Folktales for Bold Girls. I hope that many little girls will see themselves in the stories, and want to be, and carry on being, bold.