sam j

“Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.”
― Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

“Inherent in retelling is – at first – destruction. Breaking down from the inside out. Suggested is respect but what is really there is vengeance, violence, retribution, the allure of denigration.”
― Daisy Johnson, Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

“traditional tales are neither so simplistic nor so predictable. They give generous space to the subaltern voice: to the powerless, to the poor, to girls and wives, even to animals, all those creatures who need to find ways not only to survive in this difficult world, but to live well in it, despite the dark forces ranged against them. These stories compel, seizing our attention with their strangeness while at the same time speaking clearly to shared themes of human existence. They explore huge questions: of love and loss, and of the conditions under which we do our everyday work and how we might thrive in it. They patrol the shadowy borderlands between life and death and they tease out our hopes and fears for our children. They demand we consider issues such as migration, asking who belongs here, who can make a home here, who can find the strength to begin all over again in a strange new land – and who might have been here for much longer than you think. Folktales pick fights about disability and aging, about women and men, and, crucially, they hold out to us the environments in which we live – our much-loved British countryside – and show how it might slip through our fingers.”
― Daisy Johnson, Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

“Myths hold the echo of collective emotion, whatever they reveal of events.”
― Amy Jeffs, Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain