Unsettling Wonder has landed

No new chapter for The Black Dionysia this Friday as I've been taking something of a break from my routine this week. Instead of trying to post a new chapter I spent time on earlier chapters that needed work. For a while now I've felt that some of my chapters were just too long and needed to be subdivided. Also, my wife, who has been an enormous help with the editing process, had suggested a number of changes and corrections that I had to address. It kept me busy enough without worrying about a new chapter for Friday. I'm back on track now, though, and hope to have the first part of the next chapter online by Tuesday.

I also just received my copy of Unsettling Wonder. I've been looking forward to this first ever issue for several months, as the descriptions of the project intrigued me:

We craft and tell stories because we’ve stood on the uncertain edge between the waking world and our imagination, between enchantment and fear. And we remember other stories that help us build our own stories, scraps of lumber and fragments of narrative we gather together to make stories for ourselves. 

Unsettling Wonder is about going back to that place, that troubling, entrancing glimpse into story. Childhood affords us the first glimpse, but it is by no means the last. And the oldest stories—the fairy tales we met in childhood, the folklore and folk traditions that gave rise to them—can still be woven together for telling today. We want embrace and celebrate, re-imagine and re-invent, our folk traditions, the wild and variegated scrapheap of story and theme and motif that lies open to the magpie gaze of the writer.

The quality of the first issue does not disappoint. My only wish is that it was a bit longer. Even so, I haven't read it all yet. But what I've read, Claire Massey's 'The Woman Who Wore Frost Slippers' and Johnny Wink's poem 'Great Grey Moles', are excellent examples of the living tradition of fairy stories in action.