Moles Story-Telling Group: 2008

These are the stories, for what they are worth, that I have written so far for the Moles Story-Telling Group during 2008.

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Date	Chairperson	Theme	My Story
January 22nd	Robert	The Turning of the Year (in verse)	The Turning of the Year I have composed the story in strict meter and rhyme. It deals with the theme of the passing of the old and the coming of the new at several different levels.
February 26th	Pat	The Island	The Island The idea of an island that floats in the air comes, of course, from Swift's "Gulliver's Travels", but the story is also influenced by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "Le petit prince". The basis of the story, however, is in fact: in the 1994 Marathon des Sables, an Italian officer, Mauro Prosperi, lost his way during a sand storm and wandered lost in the desert for nine days, losing 18 kg of body weight, before he was rescued by a nomadic family.
March 25th	Peta	The Challenge	The Challenge The story is a retelling of the ancient myth of the challenge between Athenè and Arakhnè. In telling the story I used the trochaic tetrameter used, for example, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem 'Hiawatha'.
April 29th (postponed from the 22nd April)	Ann	Villains	Three Villainous Villanelles I could not resist the notion of using a villanelle for the topic 'villains'; the two words are indeed derived from the same late Latin word: villanus = "of or pertaining to a country estate or farm." A 'villain' was, originally, a serf who, though not a slave, was bound to his lord's land; then, the word came to be used by urban dwellers to denote any low-born, base person and hence, the modern use of therm. 'Villanelle' is the French form of the Italian 'villanella', a rustic or country song; but the modern use of the term derives from a poem about a turtledove by Jean Passerat (1534 -1602) titled 'Villanelle'. The form is short, only nineteen lines long, consisting of five tercets and one concluding quatrain. I have written three 'villanous' villanelles, the third adding a new dimension while at the same time relating back to the first two.
May 27th	Des	Contrasts	Contrasts This is a good deal shorter than the prose stories I have submitted in the past, as for various family reasons I had less time than normal to spend on writing a story for the "Moles". This piece is inspired by my visit to Kraków and Oświęcim (Auschwitz) in 2000. This piece, though based on my own personal experiences, contains echos from "The Auschwitz Poems" (The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1999; ISBN 83-85047-77-8) which I bought when I went there.
June 24th	Sylvia	Disappointment	Disappointment It's difficult to say where this story came from. The short, opening paragraph came into my head as I thought about the topic. I thought I knew how the story would end. I was wrong. Once I got past that opening paragraph the story developed a life of its own, which I followed. The result is quite different and, I think, better than what I had expected.
July 22nd	Jo	Misunderstanding	Misunderstandings As I would not be present at the meeting, I kept my contribution short for someone else to read. It is a poem in acephalous anapaestic tetrameters about Cornelius Trimm, "A nice enough fellow, but frightfully dim."
No meeting during August
September 23rd	To plan & rehearse the 'Arts Alive' event next month.
October 28th	'Arts Alive 2008.'
November 25th	Ann	Summer Memories	Summer Memories The first summer I remember - the summer of 1945.
No meeting in December: Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year!