Materia Vitae

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....

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.