ByKristiana Willsey

Kristiana Willsey is a folklorist who lives, writes, and teaches in Los Angeles/The Internet. She collects quotations (but not attributions), the artifacts of short-lived hobbies, intense fictional crushes, degrees, and cat hair.

  1. Hunger Is the Beginning of Every Folktale

    ByKristiana Willsey

    in Writing

    Hunger is the beginning of every story. It might not be the most literal sort of hunger, but there is always something wanted, what the folklorist Vladimir Propp summed up as “lack.” There is something missing--to get the shivers, to find a lost brother, to make a solemn princess laugh, to have a child-- and by the end of the story, that absence is satisfied-- the lack is “liquidated.”

    If the

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