Thunder-graves

This is a post from a sister-blog of a project I am working on. Derbyshire Myths and Legends has been running as an enrichment of the Summer Reading Challenge in Derbyshire (surprisingly enough!). By the end of the project I'll have done workshops in 20 libraries which have been wonderfully delightful and potty. Even by the slightly sideways standards of the stories we've been creating, the Storm Story with the Burned Girl that evolved all of a sudden in Creswell Library last week was exceptional. So without further comment, I'm going to post that story and some of its associated images. Follow the link above to see the rest of the project blogs and more pictures

Creswell Library

Thursday 28th August 2014

A Thunder-grave in the dark woods

“Walking with an umbrella during a tornado is not a god idea”*

But the girl went walking with her beautiful blue umbrella, anyway

She is buried in a thunder-grave,

Deep in the woods.

A lonely grave,

A single grave,

And there she brings

Thunder, lightning and storms inside the wood

But the edges of the wood are peaceful

And guard the world from her anger.

But one wild tornado escapes

And collects a bus full of panicking school children,

Spinning them round,

Ready to do them to death.

But the bus sprouts wings and 

As an aerobus with rocket boosters

Sails through the storm

To safety.

But the lightning strikes

A goblin house in the Old Widow’s Tree

And the goblin and the two fairies who live in a hole flee

don't trust the Burned Girl!

The storm chases them,

Winds to blow them, rain to beat them,

Even their strongest spell doesn’t help,

And they run and run,

Too wet to fly, too scared to hide.

Down to the lake

Where a girl sails her boat through the storm,

Over a lake horrible with giant waves.

She carries them through the wind and the waves and the rain to...

Who lives in the old cottage behind the gray fence?

There is a bridge there, too,

Over a river behind the house,

A bridge to an island where a rock hides caves.

And might offer a new home to the lost goblin and his fairy friends

“Beware of the person who lives in the house behind the grey fence.”*

* “The things my Mum used to tell me”, numbers 25 and 32

a brave girl who could sail a boat through a storm

By the end of the story, all the characters had taken cover in Creswell Library where they live to this day, hiding in the bookshelves

even the Burned Girl enjoys a good read

with many thanks to all the storymakers, artists and puppeteers of Creswell!