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This is Deb Reese's incredibly useful website:

American Indians in Children's Lit

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And of course now I have to include this video of Maati Baani performing a spiritual folksong with words by Kabir (one of the great holy men of India of all time, revered by Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims); Maati Baani are singing here with Mooralala Marwada (who is in the other video), a folksinger from Gujarat. See the YouTube page for lyrics.

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Banjara - Maatibaani ft. Mooralala Marwada

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I mentioned Maati Baani is my favorite musical group from India (I love ALL their videos), but I wanted to share this one because of the CREATIVE way they use the sounds of farming itself to help make the music, along with the gorgeous cinematography: Saccha Mitr (True Friend).

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Saccha Mitr - A Salute To Our Farmers by Vodafone India | Maati Baani | #MaatiBaani

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Here is a mashup of Vidya and my favorite Indian musicians of all time, Maati Baani. Summer Love. (Vidya's in LA, Maati Baani in Mumbai.)

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Summer Love /Eri Aali : #MaatiBaani ft. Vidya Vox (Choreography by Kings United & Karmagraphy) |

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I learned about this because I really like Shankar Tucker the clarinet player, and Vidya has also done amazing mash-ups (she is like a YouTube superstar). Chaiyya Chaiyya. Sam Tsui has become a pretty big star too! Here's the original film song.

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Chaiyya Chaiyya / Don't Stop MASHUP!! - INDIA EDITION ft Sam Tsui, Shankar Tucker, Vidya

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I love this mashup! Her voice is so amazing! Thought you’d like it too!

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Mom & I Cover Creep By Radiohead (she is a classical Indian singer 🕉️)

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This is one of my favorite publishers; I have so many of their books. They have a strong focus on storytelling and also on folktales! One of my favorite authors who publishes with them is Margaret Read MacDonald; she's fabulous! August House Publishers.

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Aaron Shepard is my favorite readers theater person; his website is full of free stuff that he shares. He does BOTH stories AND readers theater, and like some other authors I really like, he sometimes does both a prose story and a readers theater version of the "same" story. He has several readers theater books; they are excellent. I learned a lot from him! I have a recognizably different style than his, but his style is just great. No criticism of it; I just have a different emphasis (more dialogue, less narrator: no surprise, right?).

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Here's the readers theater piece that I wrote with my friend Heather (English teacher in Germany). We've done some playwriting together too! She's a contributor to this educational magazine online: MindBrainEd.

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I loved Grant Snider's Substack today about goals-as-pinatas!

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Ideas for a game!!!

RIDDLE WIZARD

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Of course I had to add the StorySproutz landing page to the Padlet!

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A friend of mine just told me about this movie today: I'm going to go see it next week (I got a ticket for Monday). The trailer is GORGEOUS!!! Flow: trailer.

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Heartbreaking news this week about the Internet Archive: they have opted not to bring the publisher lawsuit to the Supreme Court. Sigh...... but I am glad that the Authors Alliance speaks FOR ME in this lawsuit and in other important legal issues. Unlike the (awful) Authors Guild, who support the publishers, Authors Alliance cares about the issues I care about. It's free to join; I highly recommend it! There website is full of great information: Authors Alliance.

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And here is a piece where Stephen Krashen outlines his wonderful perspective on language learning: COMPREHENSIBLE INPUT.

Which is exactly how Latin and Greek are NOT taught, alas. More from Krashen here.

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I love how this Brian Eno documentary is DIFFERENT every time it is shown! More about it at NYTimes review via this link.

Here is YouTube trailer.

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Krashen's approach to language-learning, based on "comprehensible input," is my favorite way to think about readability and easiness of reading. This is an essay he wrote about phonics (20 years ago!), rightly pointing out that some phonics can be helpful but, especially with English, trying to teach a 100% phonics-based approach, as some people are now advocating, is NOT a good idea. But, sad to say, phonics is once again in the ascendancy. More from Krashen here.

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Readability tests pretend to be objective, but of course they cannot be: reading is a deeply subjective experience, and reader interest/motivation is the single biggest factor. Familiarity with the subject matter and vocabulary is also important. But it's also the case that sentence length and word length are factors, and those are measured in the Flesch-Kincaid: more at Wikipedia.

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This beautiful poetry comic by Elizabeth Haidle arrived in Grant Snider's substack newsletter: such a beautiful little poem by Ezra Pound and lovely art to go with it. She has a book out that might interest you: DRAWING IS... Your Guide to Scribbled Adventures (it talks about drawing as being, growing, and becoming inquisitive. It also speaks to the tools and craft involved on the path of being an artist). It's coming out in May. I pre-ordered so it will be a fun surprise when it arrives in May (I'll forget by then ha ha).

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So I finished! A day early even! I've done NaNoWriMo every year since I made a book for my dad back when he got sick and I started doing 100-word stories, so that must be back in 2019. But this is the first 100-word project I've done here in Austin (last year I did chain tales, and the year before that I did readers theater)....... so I am super-happy to be back working on 100-word stories, whoo-hoo!!!

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I added a riddle slideshow to the sidebar of the Riddle blog! I don't know if I can embed it here or not, but I'll try...

Yep, it looks like it embedded here, although it just loads a preview; the actual slideshow doesn't play. I wonder why they haven't come up with an auto-embed code. It was easy to embed in the blog!

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What do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common?

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Since I've been working on NaNoWriMo, that's got me thinking about Grant Faulkner, the master of the 100-word story, and the director of NaNoWriMo for many years... although his stories are very literary. He wrote a whole book about "brief forms" but didn't really do anything much with brief folkloric forms like fables and jokes and proverbs. Go figure! But it's still a really nifty book with lots of great examples! The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story.

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Doing the riddle posts for today, I realized that the BEST THING I can do in the comments on each riddle is to suggest ways that this riddle can be the basis for other riddles (because that is the nature of folklore, right? it is inherently reproducing!)... now I need to go back and add a little "improvise" note to each of the 30 earlier riddles I already posted. Now the goal in selecting riddles is not just to pick riddles I like, but to also think about how every one of those riddles can be the basis for ANOTHER riddle. Here's an example: Why is there always a shortage of honey in Brooklyn? (I took a screenshot of that one above)

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I added a random riddle to the blog sidebar. :-)

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I've done 2 days of riddle posts, and I think this blog project is going to be a keeper: Riddles from Around the World. It is fast and easy to do this, and I have heaps of riddles to choose from. I like the fact that I can do more commentary and create more hashtags to interlink the riddles as patterns and repetitions emerge.

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Death of the Follower and the Future of Creativity

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Death of the Follower and the Future of Creativity

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This is the SXSW presentation by Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon about how algorithms are “killing” followers for creators.

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Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web with Jack Conte | SXSW 2024 Keynote

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This is the PDF tool that I use instead of (evil) Adobe: SEJDA.com. It's what I use to create PDF anthologies that I upload to the Internet Archive, like this one that I did last year for new books entering the public domain: Tales of 1928 ... and I will do the same for books in 2025!

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Here's the latest video from Stephen Malinowski who makes the amazing visualizations for classical music... there are hundreds of these at his YouTube Channel. Usually they are on black background, but I like this light version! Here's a more typical dark one: Scarlatti.

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One of the most amazing websites on the Internet! TVTropes is all about what folklorists call motifs and tale types, but in the realm of popular culture. It's fabulous! They even have RANDOM TROPE :-)

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Here is the very old but incredibly useful website from Dan Ashliman (German folklorist, specialist in Brothers Grimm) which has a large selection of tale types, and each page has examples drawn from different cultures: Folklore and Mythology

Electronic Texts.

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Here is that wonderful online learning site that my friend in Malaysia told me about:

ScienceIsWeird.com

I spent a serious chunk of time poking around here, and I was so impressed. Check out their origin story, and here's what they rely on:

an obsession with how learning really works

trial-and-error experiments

hundreds of great books

untutored wonder

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VERY HELPFUL. This article provides an overview of sources... although the most important materials are as yet unpublished. I looked to see if the Finding-list of Philippine Folktales with summaries of thousands of stories had been scanned and made available, but alas, it has not... but for your purposes, the available sources will be enough, no worries.

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WOW: open access from University of Hawaii! Here is a motif index for Polynesian (including Hawaiian) folktales. See the awesome bibliography also. Motif indexing is more detailed than tale types as you can see, because it is about the individual elements of a story, not the whole story itself (some stories involve LOTS of motifs; some stories might have just one). Anyway, ENJOY! This is a seriously incredible thing. I can't believe I never knew about this one... but when I googled: boom! There it was!

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I set this to have the posts appear at random (except for this post, which is pinned), but you can see a list of new posts (no images alas, but you can click on the item TITLE and it will take you to the Padlet post showing the image or video or PDF, plus the text; the feed updates every hour or so). Plus there is a Search feature! You should be able to both comment on and add posts too. :-)

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So it turns out East Asian covers ONLY China, Japan, and Korea... but it's still super-valuable, with almost 500 story types and tons of bibliography. Plus what a great sign: the first story is... a CHAIN TALE. So my goal is to work on this for the next few weeks, digitizing the bibliography and reading through all the entries. I don't know what your research process is, but I am all about spreadsheets, so as I create spreadsheets corresponding to this book, I will share them with you. I love Elswit's work! Here is here website: SharonElswit.com

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I was listening to this tonight when I went walking! There's also a gorgeous live performance here. And here are the lyrics.

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Sigur Rós - Hoppípolla  [Official Music Video - 4K]

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Scoop Nisker passed away just this year... I miss him! He was a Bay Area powerhouse! Crazy Wisdom is a genius book. You can find out more at his website, which is still up and running, thank goodness: here is the Books page.

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I loved this new cartoon from Grant Snider!

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Idries Shah was one of the most important conduits for Sufi stories, especially Nasruddin stories, into the West. The Idries Shah Foundation makes all his books free to read online; see his chapter about Nasruddin in The Sufis for how stories of "foolish wisdom" are vital to the Sufi project (just scroll down to the "read for free" button). Shah published several collections of Nasruddin stories too!

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This is a PDF of the collected tales and parables of Ramakrishna; I retold a lot of these as 100-word stories; here are my tiny Ramakrishna parables. More about Ramakrishna at Wikipedia.

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I took a course with Jeremy Lent (website) via the GAIA Institute, and what a great guy! I was such a fan of him as an author, and now I am a fan of him as a person too. My favorite book is the one that does human history, west and east: The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning