The Scottish Play and the Welsh Wizard: Witches in Punch Cartoons
From its beginnings in the 1840s until the late twentieth century it was Shakespeare’s Three Witches who inspired the majority of cartoons featuring witches in Punch.
Exploring Folktales: Achieving Improved Ego Identity and Recovery from Trauma
This piece will present and focus on the benefits of two specific psychotherapeutic tools — archetypal genograms and mythological based art — via which mythology as spirituality can be used as an outlet to help the healing process of people with abuse and other trauma related emotional difficulties.
The Grotter & the Strange History of Shell Grottos
Shell grottos have a certain murky ambiguity to their history and folklore. This for me made them all the more enticing to use as the basis for a ghost story in my tale, ‘The Grotter’ in Nyctophobias. Especially with my roots as a Whitstable native in Kent, where grottos are still primarily lit once a year as part of the Oyster Festival celebrations. These grottos are usually stacked in a ‘beehive’ style pyramid, held together with wet sand and illuminated by a short candle.
Folk Tales For Bold Girls
My new book is intended to inspire all the little girls who admire women like Michelle Obama, Lucy Bronze, Malala Yousafzai and Jacqueline Wilson.
Folk Tales for Bold Girls is packed full of my own retellings of folktales from around the world, each one telling the story of a little girl — not a princess or a goddess, but a little girl the same age as the target readership, between 7 and 12 years old.
The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales
Like many people, I thought the Grimm brothers had lived long ago & travelled around Germany collecting stories from old women hunched over spinning wheels.