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"Changing the Narrative and Finding the Gold": A Conversation with Dr Tamara Pizzoli

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photo by James Maiki  Children deserve the best art, because they understand and appreciate it the most. Tamara Pizzoli   Last week, I had a joyful conversation with Dr Tamara Pizzoli , founder of The English School House , and author of a number of stunning books for children, including T he Ghanaian Goldilocks , winner of the silver eLit award for digital excellence in multicultural publishing. From Texas but based in Rome, Tamara is a long-time educator and mother of four. To create her fairy tales, which flip and challenge our expectations of both race and gender ( The Ghanaian Goldilocks is set in Ghana and is about a little boy called Kofi, whose hair has been turned golden by the sun), Tamara works with world-renowned artists, including Italian master painter Elena Tomassi Ferroni . Their working collaboration has resulted in books which are both stories for children and works of art. These include O f Gods and Goddesses: Deities of Ancient Rome , which
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Coming Home to Story: An Interview with Lisa Schneidau

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In the first of a new series of Story Conversations, last week I met with storyteller and ecologist Lisa Schneidau, to hear a story about a blackbird. With and around the story, Lisa and I talked about folklore, ecology, imagination versus anthropomorphism and the nature of making a home. It is very difficult, in today's increasingly urgent world, to justify a space for luxurious, awe-struck, fantastic imagination. It is difficult, as we become more and more aware of the toxic, anthropocentric warping of our Western viewpoint, to comprehend how our old tales, in which it is blissfully easy to have a conversation with an obliging animal, can have anything of depth to say to the profound divide between us and the wild world; both in terms of respecting its otherness and acknowledging the enormity of our destruction of it. And yet we still need story, and we still have a sense that holding a space for wonder can make a difference. I was delighted to have a chance to discuss all
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Sleeping Beauty and Strange Rest

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Image Copyright: Sam Cannon What does it mean to stop? For the last six weeks, I’ve been holding a story space (Zoomwise) for people to reflect on their experiences of this Now. One of the stories we’ve been wrapping and unwrapping is the story of the stop. Now, as governments across the world, advisably or inadvisably as you may think it, begin to start things up again, I wanted to share with you some of our conversation. What has it meant to stop? Let me start with a fairy tale for, as Sabrina Orah Mark has recently reminded us, fairy tales are key for making sense of this vitally new, vitally horrendous, transforming and transmogrifying world. Before lockdown began, I and a group of friends were working with the story of Sleeping Beauty. We are in a Storytelling Choir, which means that we spend months diving deeply into a story before recreating it into a shared performance. But with Sleeping Beauty, we were paused already, before we were paused by corona virus.
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Materia Vitae

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Materia Vitae is a journal dedicated to the explorations and tellings and retellings of folk and fairy tale in the contemporary world.  Focused on ecological and material conversations, it is a space to explore the intersection between real and imaginary, and unpack the binaries between the petrified possible and the living fantastic. Here to open conversations about wild stories, the format of Materia Vitae will be about both creating and conversing, publishing imaginary works by contemporary fairy tale artists and explorers, alongside conversations with them about their creativity and their possible lives. Read more at Wild Story Commons . If you'd like to contribute a conversation, please get in touch. 
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