"Folktales"
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”
Maya Angelou
As an author and playwright, I’m primarily a storyteller. In this newsletter I will address the importance of storytelling in the form of folktales. I owe much gratitude and am indebted to my forefathers who a century ago challenged a great ocean to leave their motherland to create a destiny in a new land. Who along with their meager baggage, also took with them a treasure chest of folktales and stories they held within the depths of their minds, hearts, and souls. I’m a first generation Italian/ American, who spent my formative years listening to the family elders sharing their folktales and journeys through life in the hope of passing on the art of storytelling to future generations.
Folktales are a community’s traditions, customs, and cultures whose importance is to understand ancient beliefs and rituals from a spiritual and material perspective. Folktales help us escape our material repressions imposed upon us by a materialistic and narcissistic society; they are also pedagogic devices that reinforce moral character and wit. They also play an important role in improving our mental health and well being by their ability to explain, empower, stabilize, and elevate the life of a believer from a mundane existence to one of essence imbued with external meaning that renders an inner emotional and spiritual response. Folktales connect us to our cultural past by acting like a time machine taking us back to our cultures and personal heritage to the land of where we whence came.
Contemporary society would like to believe folk tales are a thing from the past and even irrelevant. However, the powers of folktales are alive and well today, despite the advent of modern literature, since folktales are unique and different from other forms of literary fiction.
This work is dedicated to all our ancestors who had shared their folk wisdoms and customs with us when we were children, and whom we are humbly indebted to.
Existentially,
Rich
