It's folktale week

18 to 24 November

Dear readers,

Did you know that it’s #Folktale week? All week!

Folktale week (not to be confused with World Folktales & Fables Week, which is in March) was invented by the artist Debra Styer, and (started off as) an Instagram art challenge. This year is the seventh year of the challenge.

The concept is very simple: Debra (the host) provides daily single-word prompts (see below) and, during Folktale week, you are invited to share your responses to these prompts. Of course, this was created as an online sharing activity for visual artists, but it’s also a wonderful activity for writers, poet, and other wordsmiths as well.

If you choose to engage in Folktale week, either offline or as part of the online community, you can either honour and celebrate classic and traditional tales or create your own folkloric work based on the following prompts:

Folktale week infographic by Kaly Charles

If you’d like to find out more about the artists who created and host Folktale week, and how to engage with the project on Instagram, you can go find them on Instagram at folktaleweek. If you’re a lover of beautiful, strange, and magical folklore art, you’ll find that both the work posted this week, and the archive of works shared during #folktaleweek over the last seven years is truly inspiring.

One of my favourite #Folktaleweek pieces, created by Margaux Kent in response to one of the 2023 #folktaleweek prompts (Sea). You can find Margaux Kent on Substack @ Resounding little voices

If you didn’t participate in past #folktaleweeks, you might also find one of the past lists of prompts a wonderfully engaging and playful seven-day writing prompt.

Why not use this year’s prompts (or the prompt set for a past year, or a mash-up of several years!) to create a brand new poem, short story, play, or other wondrous piece of writing?