Target reached!
The bigger plan is very simple. More people have a book and more money is donated to...
Love and Loss: Tales from Imagined Lands Books
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom
Aim
I want to produce a beautiful cloth bound book that holds some simple, dark love stories and illustrations.
What is Love and Loss: Tales from Imagined Lands?
It's a collection of stories.
I didn't write these stories to start with. I created, composed, choreographed and shaped them using performance storytelling techniques through over twenty performances starting back in 2011.
"Delicate and visceral in equal measure" Fringe Review
They're inspired by traditional myth, folk-tales and legend - some are simple retellings and others spiral from a seed into a completely new story.
Each one tells of love and has moments of beauty but also great darkness
They're almost poetry now, using space on the page to try to represent the pauses of telling in performance.
And they have one gorgeous ink illustration each - commissioned 10 years ago - by the artist, Miranda La Mutanta.
Who am I?
I'm Kat Quatermass.
I work with people and stories, sometimes making storytelling performances. And sometimes turning those storytelling performances into collections like this one. I say sometimes, this is the first!
I also teach people to use storytelling to improve their presentations, and I work with people who use technology to understand the stories around how they use it, and make that technology more useful.
I work part-time, partly for chronic fatigue reasons, partly because I want to try and slip away into more liminal spaces. I'm planning a project of walking and volunteering as I walk. I hope it won't take the ten years to come to fruition that these books have!
The stories
The Star Lovers - a retelling, inspired by multiple variants of the classic folk tale particularly some from Japan and some from Taiwan
Cobalt and Silver - A fractured fairy tale - expanding from one of Grimm's shorter stories and twisting it into new shapes
Not Fade Away - a simple telling of the Echo and Narcissus story
And she made him out of Blubber - a new tale which owes its core to a very short Inuit story collected by Angela Carter, but takes on a different form exploring women's power and questioning reincarnation
A Thistledown Soul - a retelling of an Egyptian folk tale that is very well known in the USA, with some added elements
The Weaving Girl and The Cowherd - a retelling and mashup from this and other related tale types, again predominantly from Japanese and Taiwanese collections - also influenced by the Anime Ayashi no Ceres.
Illustrations and first lines from a 2011 performance in Buxton
What does your contribution fund?
It will be used in 3 ways.
A large part will go to fund the production of the books that are included in the rewards. They're a memento of something ephemeral, so they're silver cloth bound, small, landscape shaped, hand numbered and signed.
It'll also help me put an amount towards Dreamfired Walking where I plan to walk the paths of the UK, volunteering as I go -the journey will begin in 2022 or 2023, depending on the whims of covid, the weather, and me.
Finally part of the funding will be given away as charitable donations.
More about why I'm making charitable donations.
This is to acknowledge the source of some of the stories, in lands and communities that have been harmed by colonialism and where my decision to work with inspiration from their traditional tales is in some ways a form of cultural appropriation.
The charities are:
- The Inuit Art Foundation
- The Taipei Women's Rescue Foundation (Taiwan)
- FACE Children in Need (Belgian NGO working in Egypt with high local staff representation and particularly local female staff representation)
Confession to LGBTQ+ friends
These stories are a bit on the heteronormative side.
They were created for my first storytelling show, and I didn't feel ready to take on the work of queering, or uncovering the queer in the folk tale, myth or legends I was working with. I've lived as a straight, cis woman and only really as that. In truth I'm probably a genderqueer bisexual - but only at a level that is so far from being part of my day to day experience, that I really didn't feel that I had the right to take on that work in a show that was exploring how I felt about love. I like to think that if I'd done more storytelling over the last ten years, I'd have got braver about that, and that I might do in the future.
I'd also like to think that there's so much compelling darkness and bleakness in the love in these stories that you might excuse the lack of representation, but I totally understand if it makes them less interesting to you.
The publishing
This is not a "please help me raise the money to get a publisher to take me on" crowdfunder.
This is pure self-publishing as a memento of a project.
Running it as a crowdfunder does 2 things financially:
1 - it helps me produce just the right number of books and saves me having to pay out my own funds up front
2 - it allows people who want to support my creativity who can't afford the cost of a book to get some postcards instead, and still make a small contribution to the overall project
The collection will only be printed in small numbers - to meet the crowdfunder rewards. It feels more fitting to me for a show that was ephemeral.
The printers are Inky Little Fingers.
The Book Pool
Lots of the rewards feature the ability to put a book "into the book pool" - this will be used to give out books to people who want them but can't afford the donation level, and also to give books to literacy projects, women's refuge's - other places where access to unusual literature is likely to be limited.
International Shipping
The reward tiers include UK shipping of the book. If you need a book shipped internationally, then you do that by adding a donation. Each reward that needs International Shipping paid separately has an option choice (after you select the main reward) which tells you what level of donation to add to cover shipping.
This project successfully funded on 24th November 2021