STORYTELLING
"The
Well of the World's End"
This is a fairy tale I have told frequently. This little
film, made and sponsored by Toronto Metropolitan University's Chang School of
Continuing Education, is meant to demonstrate some of the principles of
oral storytelling. The film is used in the online version of
theTMU course "Fairy Tales and Fantasies"; however, the Chang
School has also posted it on YouTube.
The Storytelling Project
During
the COVID-19 pandemic, all the courses moved online, including my
spring section of the fairy-tales course, which I originally taught in
the classroom. Therefore, I couldn't do my usual thing of telling a
story in every class. I thus put together a little collection of oral
tales from my cultural background. Many of my students have since
joined in, though I can't link you to their videos, most of which are
unlisted. At any right, here are mine. The sound of "The Three Little
Pigs" is a bit quiet, but the rest should be fine.
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WEIRD STUFF THAT NEEDS FURTHER EXPLANATION
Bad Poem a Day
In
the summer of 2015, I apparently developed the need to write one bad
poem a day and post it on the Internet. The blog was run by my thinly
veiled alter-ego, Cecily Q. Cauliflower, a self-avowed bad poet
who embraced her talent for terrible verse and wished to share it
with the
world. Cecily has retired, but the blog lives on.
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Kem's Utterly Merciless Guide to
Essay Writing
I
started this blog out of sheer frustration when I was a TA. I
keep
threatening to go back to it, but I can never quite find the time.
Basically, Kem's
Guide
attacks essay writing from the perspective of a semi-fictional
pissed-off English instructor who rants madly at her readership, albeit
often in the nicest possible way. Is there a word for
"viciously
bullying people into demonstrating their intelligence, which they
obviously have, instead of taking the lazy way out"? 'Cause
that's
sort of what I do as Kem. A number of
instructors use the Guide
in their classes, so there's that.
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Japes for Owre Tymes
This
one is...strange. One day, for reasons I cannot really
explain, I
decided to start translating newspaper comics into Middle English.
My
justification was that they were so archaic already that they almost
worked better that way. The blog had its fifteen minutes of
fame
amongst medievalists and comics affictionados, but it simply
took
too long
to put the comics together every day, and I finally had to let it go.
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