Find the Love & Loss: Tales from Imagined Lands crowdfunder HERE: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/love-and-loss

Some of you may recall our Valentine’s day episode this year, The Black Prince, with our guest storyteller Kat Qautermass.  The Black Prince was part of a collection of stories which made up Kat’s 2011 storytelling show, Love & Loss.

Kat is currently running a crowdfunder to turn Love & Loss into a cloth-bound hardback, complete with illustrations, as a memento of the show, and to raise donations for a story volunteering project, and several charitable organisations.

Kat writes:

I didn't write these stories to start with. I created, composed, choreographed and shaped them using performance storytelling techniques through over twenty performances starting back in 2011.

They're inspired by traditional myth, folk-tales and legend -  some are simple retellings and others spiral from a seed into a completely new story.

Each one tells of love and has moments of beauty but also great darkness

They're almost poetry now, using space on the page to try to represent the pauses of telling in performance.

And they have one gorgeous ink illustration each - commissioned 10 years ago - by the artist, Miranda La Mutanta.

The stories included in the book are:

The Star Lovers - a retelling, inspired by multiple variants of the classic folk tale particularly some from Japan and some from Taiwan

Cobalt and Silver - A fractured fairy tale - expanding from one of Grimm's shorter stories and twisting it into new shapes

Not Fade Away - a simple telling of the Echo and Narcissus story

And she made him out of Blubber - a new tale which owes its core to a very short Inuit story collected by Angela Carter, but takes on a different form exploring women's power and questioning reincarnation

A Thistledown Soul - which Kat told on the podcast as ‘The Black Prince’ - is a retelling of an Egyptian folk tale that is very well known in the USA, with some added elements

The Weaving Girl and The Cowherd - a retelling and mashup from this and other related tale types, again predominantly from Japanese and Taiwanese collections - also influenced by the Anime Ayashi no Ceres.

Find the Love & Loss: Tales from Imagined Lands crowdfunder HERE: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/love-and-loss