Storybook Favorites, in which I get to revisit some old friends!

This was a fun assignment for me to do because of course I have fond memories of every single Storybook. What I did was to pick my favorite of the two items that showed up at random each time I reloaded the page.

So, the first Storybook I visited was Project Runway: Indian Epics Edition. This is a great example of someone who chose a different web platform (most students use Google Sites) to achieve her vision. The design element was really important, and so she used Wix to be able to feature the "runway" fashion images side by side with her stories. She also included a story about a historical woman, Noor Jahan, in addition to the mythological Ganga and Ulupi, which I thought was really cool (a lot of historical figures really are legends in their own right). I am still amazed by this project when I look at it now; it's really beautiful, which is just what this topic needed to be.

The next one I picked was Ladies in the Stars. This project shows that you can do gorgeous things with Google Sites too. And yes, from these two projects so far, you can probably guess that I really like the idea of using the Storybook Project as a way to re-tilt the stories in the direction of women's voices. By dealing with stories recorded in writing over the past 2500 years, we end up with a lot of stories told by men for men, since men controlled much of the access to writing for that time (but not completely, thank goodness!). In Storybooks for these classes, though, each writer has the freedom to work against that tradition, filling in the gaps and bringing out the women's voices (any voices, all the voices!), as here in this project. I remember my favorite stories were The Queen and the Princess where we get to hear from both Cassiopeia AND her daughter Andromeda. Powerful stuff!

(screenshot of Ladies in the Stars)

And then for my third choice, I was really excited when Legends of Fire came up!. This is an old Storybook, done with the old style of Google Sites (which is very clunky compared to the new Google Sites)... but what matters the most, of course, are the stories, and the stories in this Storybook are so cool! The idea is that there are four old dragon hunters talking together and sharing their stories: Deathly Dealings in Scotland ... Nagas, Guardians of the Gods ... Seven Heads from Hell ... Blood, The Natural Shade of Red. Dragons from around the world, and the men who hunt them. Intense! I was really glad that the Naga serpent-gods of India are part of this project too.

And of course I am excited to see what Storybooks people will create this semester. I already know what the focus of my project will be: chain tales. That's a style of storytelling used in countries around the world, and it is especially popular in India. Since I know there are hundreds of chain tale stories out there, my challenge will be figuring out how to narrow it down to just a few stories.

I'm also going to enjoy using Google Sites; there are a lot of beautiful student websites from the past few years where I can learn some good tricks to use at my site too. :-)