Indian Epics Spring 21

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash For this week, I decided to do a story lab instead of writing a story! I chose the learning about microfiction lab. I of course have been using the Tiny Tales books this semester, so I was already familiar with those. I started out the lab by checking out The New York Times Modern Love Tiny Love Stories . I had heard about this project but hadn't gotten around to reading any of them. I really enjoyed looking through those and realizing how powerful words can be, even just 100 or less of them. I have always gotten so caught up in giving a million details that it's hard for me to even imagine telling a powerful story like those in such few words. The other stories I really liked were the two-sentence horror stories on reddit. I could spend all day going through those, they are so fascinating and fun! I'm not sure if I will try microfiction myself, but I do know that it would probably be a really good exercise for me. As a journalist, our go...

Russell Graves I just finished reading stories 51-100 from the Tiny Tales from India book. Most of these were a continuation of stories about animals, groups of animals who were friends and saved each other from trouble as well as animals who tricked others, leading them to their doom. Near the end there were stories about the Buddha's past lives as animals. All of these stories have some sort of lesson to takeaway.  If I were to use any of these stories to retell this week, it would probably be story 85, The Deer and his Nephew. I thought this one was interesting because it seems like every deer should want to learn how to not get caught by hunters, but this deer was so prideful and did not care to listen to his mother or uncle and it ended up costing him his life. I feel like this is relatable for a lot of us, not necessarily in things that are life and death, but we get caught up in doing things our way or thinking we know the right way to do something and so we ignore what othe...

Pinterest For this week's free choice of reading, I decided to read the first 50 stories of the Tiny Tales from India book. So far, I'm really enjoying it, I like that each story is something new! The stories so far have been about animals, usually one tricking another and eating/killing them. I enjoyed the ones about the lions, tigers, jackals, camels and elephants most so far. I think if I were to retell one of these stories, I would choose story 8, The Jackal and his Brothers. In this story, a lion brings a baby jackal to his lioness that had just given birth to two lion cubs. The lion thought for her to eat the baby jackal, but instead she nursed it as her own and he grew up with the lion cubs. Eventually, she sent him away out of fear his brothers would kill him for being different. He ran away and found the other jackals. I would like to retell this story, and include a part later on where somehow the lions reunite with their jackal brother. I'm interested in whether ...