May 15, 2017

The Shadow Builders is one version of the legend of Karagöz and Hacivat (pronounced KAR-a-gerz and HA-jee-vaht), the beloved characters of Turkish shadow puppet plays, supposedly based on real individuals. According to this version of the story, they were masons who loved storytelling and merriment, and paid a price...

Apr 24, 2017

No, it's not a sequel. It's not a fractured fairy tale. It's not something that we just made up. It's part of the original Three Little Pigs that normally gets omitted -- you might say that people are accustomed to hearing the Reader's Digest version. This "lost" segment features another example of the rule of three,...

Mar 19, 2017

Old Joe and the Carpenter is a moralistic little yarn about two neighbors who are initially friends, but get into a small quarrel that escalates into full-scale estrangement until a wise stranger intervenes. The story is set in the Appalachian region of the U.S., which encompasses parts of more than a dozen states...

Feb 27, 2017

The Robin is a nature origin story from the Inuit people (commonly called Eskimo) of the far north. We thought it would be appropriate for the end of summer and the first hints of spring.

We come to you from Mesa, AZ. Having spent the past month in Arkansas, we started our annual pilgrimage west. At Holbrook, AZ...

Jan 22, 2017

Aladdin and the Lamp is one of the many popular tales from the collection commonly called The Arabian Nights, though its more proper name is The Thousand and One Nights. It's an anthology of many folktales from many countries, and going back many centuries. Although generally these stories originated in Arabic...