Spooky Campfire Tales | Free Book
About the Author
Author Biography - Sandy Schlosser
Some of my first
memories are of my father reading me the Chronicles of Narnia.
He had the most annoying habit of reading only one chapter a night. I
remember learning to read as quickly as possible so that I could sneak
ahead in the book to find out what happened next.
I am not
sure exactly when I began to write. I told myself stories constantly
as a child. Games of "Let's pretend" quickly built themselves into
full-length stories that my friends and I would act out. I am afraid I
never grew out of "let's pretend"; I could entertain myself for hours
writing stories in my head. One of the first stories I wrote down was
for a class in seventh grade. The teacher had our stories evaluated by
a published author. Unfortunately, my story (a spooky Halloween tale)
did not even merit a mention. Rather crushed by this event, I gave up
on the idea of training to be a writer and went on to receive a music
degree from Houghton College. Oddly enough, I wrote my first
full-length manuscript during college for a friend who also liked to
write stories.
It was after college that I began taking
classes in writing from the Institute of Children's Literature.
Encouraged to write articles for magazines, I became intrigued with
folklore and the retelling of folktales. Most of the children's
magazines were publishing folktales, but I noticed that these were
either retellings of well-known stories or folklore from other
countries. Where, I wondered, were the old American folktales that
used to entertain our ancestor's children around the fireplace (and
sometimes their parents gathered at the tavern bar?)
I
began working as a part-time freelance writer after graduating from
the Institute of Children's Literature in 1996. By this time, I was
hooked on folklore. When I started doing in-depth research on American
folklore, I found an incredible wealth of stories, dating back to the
origins of America. The majority of these stories are unknown today.
So I started retelling folktales, hoping to preserve a wonderful
American heritage that is disappearing.
By this time, I
was pursuing my masters at Rutgers University. One of my final
projects was to build a web site, preferably in a topic area that was
not covered on the Internet (talk about a challenge!) I noticed
immediately that there were no web sites that allowed students and
teachers to find folklore from all fifty states. That was when
AmericanFolklore.net was born.
Today, I continue to
collect and retell folktales from the United States of America. I also
spend time answering folklore questions from students and teachers who
have made their way to my web site. My favorite e-mails come from
other folklorists. We practice the old tradition of seeing who can
tell the tallest tale. After reading my story on Wind (One Michigan
wind was so strong it knocked a mountain over into a valley. Folks
woke up the next day to find themselves living on a plain.), a
Canadian enthusiast told me about a British Columbia chap named Jake.
Seems the wind blew Jake's old dog up against his garage wall one day.
The wind blew so hard and so strong that the hound dog starved to
death before it quit. Jake had to scrape the poor old dog off the wall
with a shovel. Finding that the wind had pushed the hound's shadow
right into the surface of the wall, Jake buried the poor dog under the
shadow and wrote his epitaph on it--"Doggone."
- Title: Spooky Campfire Tales | Free Book
- Author: Steven
- Created at : 2024-10-22 00:34:06
- Updated at : 2024-10-27 03:47:34
- Link: https://novels-ebooks.techidaily.com/210694084-9781493076642-spooky-campfire-tales/
- License: This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.