Old Stormalong, The Sailor Folk Hero of Massachusetts: Image
Topic 1: American Avengers
As I had spoken about in my Reading Overview post, I'm very interested in learning more about westernized American folklore and myths. That same post will also clue you in to the fact that I love stories of heroes. Stories like this are as old as time and are present in every culture known to man, and I think it would be interesting to understand the stories and myths of my own country. Here's Audacity: American Legendary Heroes by Frank Shay would be my main point of research and information on the topic. This book includes stories of heroes from all different regions and cultures of the United States, making it a very well-rounded jump-off point for a project. With the rise of superhero culture in our country, I think it would be interesting to go down a more comic-book flavored route for this project, with "issues" for each character that present different art styles and visuals.
Topic 2: Mythical Monsters of the New World
Tall tales of larger-than-life heroes are great and all, but a haunting ghost story told around a campfire can be just as compelling. As someone who loves the horror genre, I feel that this topic would also be right up my alley, and it would be fun to hear more about the basis of some of America's stranger superstitions. I've heard of Bigfoot, Mothman, and Chupacabras, but with how many different regions and cultures there are in our country, the repository for tales like this is deep. This post from the Folklore Thursday blog should serve as a good introduction, but more research will definitely be required. For the retelling itself, I was thinking of creating a scenario where the reader is trapped in a choose your own adventure story set in a horrific zoo containing these many terrible creatures, who have all escaped. The reader must navigate the zoo and escape safely. If possible, I may create this as an audiobook with dialogue options for the reader to interact with other characters.
Topic 3: Some Combination of the Two?
This would probably be the most ambitious topic among the four, but I also think it would be very interesting to combine the two aforementioned topics in a story fashioned in the style of a tabletop game. I was inspired by the Spring 2018 storybook project, Dungeons and Decisions, and I think it would be fun to recreate this style of storytelling, where the reader chooses one of the American folk heroes from Topic 1 as their character to "play" in this game where they would face off against the mythical monsters from Topic 2. This would be much more challenging to create, as I would need to make very many branching parts and create enough spotlight for both the hero and the monster so that the reader would know all stories in full by the end of the adventure. However, if I simply cannot choose between the a topic, this will be my fallback plan.
Topic 4: The How and Why of the Frontier
I will admit that this topic is on the bottom of the totem pole compared the the topics listed above, but it would still be a fun project to learn about, as it is the topic I know the least about. "How stories," like those written about in Mother West Wind "How" Stories, by Thornton W. Burgess are interesting because they offer insights into how different cultures view the natural world around them. I'm not entirely sure how to write about this topic in as interesting of a style as the other topics, but it still makes it on the list for the learning opportunities it provides.
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