Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Faerieworlds Live From Home 2020

Faerie News 2020

Congrats Eugen Bacon on her book Black Moon (IFWG Publishing Australia): graphic speculative flash fiction. Preorder here

Celebrated author Sophie Masson launched a new website with a focus on her fairytale books, especially those inspired by France.

Ethereal electro-medieval band Dandelion Wine released their new album Le Cœur.

Most recent reading, recommended:

Shadowfell (first in a trilogy) by Juliet Marillier, in the genre of high fantasy: superb storytelling with powerful shapeshifting, balancing adventure with luminosity and emotive suspense. Her book of fairy tales Mother Thorn is due on Serenity Press soon. Her blog

The Swan Maiden (Blessed Bee Books) by Serene Conneeley: an Australian fairy tale, spinning on transformation tale types of selkies and swans, with knowledge of the Cygnus atratus, especially the black swan native to this continent.

[Praise for other books, e.g. the gorgeously illustrated fairytale series by Kate Forsyth & Lorena Carrington, or daring phantasmagoria of Eugen Bacon, is in earlier posts.]

Feature: Faerieworlds

Faerieworlds invited me to perform again! The 3-day Faerieworlds Live From Home spree of eco-social fundraising was full of joy, warmth, inspiration, mirth, transcontinental reunions and discoveries.

Where: Based in Oregon, USA, Faerieworlds is the world’s largest, longest-running fairy festival, established nearly 20 years ago. Amidst the pandemic, this was its first venture online: here

What: Musing in music, art, imagination, it’s a gathering of tribes who revel in costume to the call ‘Live your Legend!’: a ‘bonnaroo for Middle Earth’, a shindig for Elfland, a carousel of elementals.

Who: In 2020, the lineup features troubadours, dancers, storytellers, puppeteers, illustrators and other artists from around the world, from folk/pop/rock legends like Roger Daltrey of The Who, Don McLean, Donovan and the Frouds, to members of platinum German contemporary-medieval bands like Faun, Spanish faery siren Priscilla Hernandez, Woodland, RosaMundi [scroll for more!] and fascinating Scandinavians such as Martine Kraft and Songleilkr. Even a storytelling cook, Wotan!

I was proud to be among Australians including soulful Brother Angus and Wiccan siren Wendy Rule, whose new double album Persephone uncannily suits our era of hibernation. Her incantatory song cycle traces the ancient Greek deity’s descent to the underworld. Collect the eco-wallet & more

Keen to float in waves of incantation, to dream with marine life? Try Little Star, whose beautiful album Celestine is at Bandcamp.

Ready for a possessed Hurdy-Gurdy? Witness Guilhem Desq. How about gothic dream-pop? Jive to Abney Park covering ‘The Never-ending Story’. Activism, anyone? Casey Neill is doing great work with Black Lives Matter, while Hudost is helping districts affected by voter suppression. Its award-winning album Of Water + Mercy comes with videos & fundraisers for social action.

Whilst naming only a few participants, I loved every act.

Each artist gave something unique.

Full billing sheet: Faerieworlds

Links to artists’ sites: PORTL artists page

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Singer-storyteller in Faerieworlds, Marya Stark, inspired a new phrase: ‘singer-teller’. She has a new album entitled Sapphire, with a fabulous video. Details
To quote Marya, pictured in blue below:

‘I believe this music, celebrating the restoration of the balancing of the waters of life, is a nourishing remedy for the times we are in. I offer this labor of love as a healing salve, a song of remembrance of an inner-alchemy... ’ Her concept ‘emerged from a vision ... many years ago of a light sound sphere encoded with prayer and magic from another world, sent through time and lodged inside of the glaciers to sit for thousands of years... When the time would come, the thawing of the glaciers would release the sound codes of these original crystalline alchemies, awakening the sapphire prayer, and return clarity to the waters of life, supporting the thawing of the frozen heart of humanity to fully grieve, feel, and recollect the soul fragments to live integrally with the nature muses of earth. ’

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Below: Faerieworlders Priscilla Hernandez (Yidneth) from Spain & Kelly Miller-Lopez (Woodland, RosaMundi), Faerieworlds co-founder from Oregon & Billy Scudder the resident Green Man

Be sure to catch Priscilla’s new single ‘Surrender’ and subscribe to her You Tube channel or follow her on other sites, starting here. As I type, her latest tweet is about unicorns.

Most artists in this feature are at Bandcamp and/or Patreon. Keep faeries safe at home or solitary groves: support them online.

Priscilla’s imagery expresses custodianship of nature & grace.

Above with moss: Priscilla Hernandez

Below with leaves: Billy Scudder, resident Green Man of Faerieworlds

Kelly Miller-Lopez presented new songs from her solo incarnation RosaMundi at Faerieworlds Live From Home 2020. With sweet passion, she told us that the Latin for squirrels (her muses, whom she rescues and keeps as pets) is Skia Oura, which translates as ‘shadow tale’, relating to ‘fairy tale’. (Ok, so I’ve verified this: ‘Squirrel’ has been in English since the 14th century. It comes from the Greek ‘skiouros’ from ‘skia,’ meaning ‘shadow,’ and ‘oura’ meaning ‘tail.’) She sang of a boy from the trees with the forest in his eyes, and a Guardian of the Wood:

Pics above & right: Priscilla Hernandez (in Spain) watching Kelly Miller Lopez (Oregon) and me Louisa John-Krol (Australia) during Faerieworlds Live From Home 2020.

Below: Kelly Miller-Lopez piping in Woodland and singing in my set 2009 at Faerieworlds. Photos by Byron Dazey.

More about Priscilla’s music:

Yidneth

More about Kelly’s music:

The Woodland Realm

Below: Seasons of Elfland by Woodland,

an album on which we three united.

Available here

So... inspired by Faerieworlds, I assembled a digital album Wisp and Sentinel. This is one of several offerings I’ll be making for Faerieworlders between now and the 20-year Anniversary 2021. Its cover is this photo of me from my Faerieworlds Live From Home set, 2020. Available at Bandcamp.

Why Faerieworlds? Amidst strife and sorrow, it is worth pausing to refresh our souls. Rekindle kindred kin. Uplift our spirits. There are struggles ahead. Battles to save endangered forests, species, democracies. True faerie lore is not escapist. It’s about delving deeper - falling in love with the world. Renewing wonder. Tolkien gave us this metaphor: Ents fought for their forests, alongside Hobbits, Humans, Wizards, Dwarves and Elves, those guardians of the arts. Time to unite. Lately in our allied nations it’s been a struggle to preserve Civil Rights that minorities had only begun to enjoy, or at least glimpse. Now, kleptocratic syndicates try to split progressives into factions, in the playbook of ‘divide and conquer’. Fey spirit is more about gathering, forming circles, yes, rings.

How: Full day re-streams are now at PORTL. Let Faerieworlds be your welcome portal (pun intended) to a new way of gathering fey tribes.

A Mellow Yellow Hello:

Remember the classic ‘Mellow Yellow’, by Donovan? A pioneer of psychedelic folk-pop songwriting, he is an honorary guest of Faerieworlds Live From Home!

This spiel outlines how Donovan was friends with the Beatles, accompanied them on trance-spiritual explorations and taught them finger-picking techniques for songs like ‘Blackbird’ in The White Album.

That song has a sweet spot in my heart, for a friend in my college days taught it to me on the riverbank of her home, her hazel eyes speckled with sunlight; then decades later, a nephew learned to play it while recovering from cancer, and bravely performed it.

My own composition ‘Blackbird’ (co-written with hubby Mark Krol 1990s, after listening to Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’), released by French fairy-world label Prikosnovenie circa 2001 (on Ariel), features a string quartet. Someone uploaded it here. It is also in my Faerieworlds Live set.

Donovan has performed with Faerieworlds hosts Woodland, an honour I am proud to share. On the last day of Faerieworlds Live From Home 2020, he read poetry to us, sang with his wife Linda and held an oak sprig in his garden, sharing with us the wisdom of acorns.

Faerieworlds festivals bring imagination, art, interfaith and ecological respect to new generations. They are family-friendly. In three days at their 2009 encampment, I did not see any litter at all.

Through Faerieworlds’ Mythic Workshops this year, 2020, I discovered acclaimed storyteller & percussionist Aishya Sinclaire, whose book Brown Sugar Fairies I purchased from her website. I also recommend her blog.

Another reason to join the Faerieworlds community is to discover magical online vendors, who would once have spread across fields and groves in a sea of flags, stripes and rainbows.

Faerieworlds is a realm where innocence, beauty, hope, kindness, diverse spiritualities, varied instruments and zany zest for life can thrive. A world where we may still sway in the saffron of Mellow Yellow.

Thank you everyone for making it happen, especially our hosts Kelly & Emilio Miller-Lopez and Robert Gould. Special thanks to Molly Niffin and all the other fey volunteers.

Long live the Faerie Realm!

- Louisa John-Krol, 2020

Faerieworlds - Spheres article

Faerieworlds

From Summer green to fallen leaves,

Oh light the sylvan pyre,

For the day is red and ripe upon the branch

Verses quoted in italics throughout this feature are by Kelly Miller-Lopez, from her song ‘Shadows’ on the CD Seasons in Elfland by Woodland. I was honoured to be a guest singer on this album.

This article appeared in an Australian magazine Spheres, after my first performance at Faerieworlds in Oregon, USA, as an invited guest on the main stage, 2009, halfway through their establishment of nearly two decades. Their 20-year Anniversary is 2021.

Imagine thousands of guests in costume, sharing mythological knowledge, recipes and wares, weaving a beribboned pentacle and uniting in a Spiral Dance. Aromatic scents waft between tents: from Casbah teahouse to the Kava bar, your nostrils are assailed by vegan sushi, eggplant marsala, pineapple, Castle Kettle Corn, Turkish coffee and homemade chocolate with local berries. Your sensibility is flung, in eddies of enchantment, into one realm after another: Narnia, Earthsea, Middlearth, Elysium, Camelot, Wonderland, Woodstock; Knauf’s Carnivàle; or during Myth Maker fire rituals, that cult classic The Wicker Man (minus the sacrifice! – however, a band called The Wicker Men really is playing).

Strangers shake hands, embrace, or smile into each others’ eyes, perceiving mutual recognition that some explain by past lives, others by the collective vibe of a great event. Welcome to Faerieworlds! We are at Buford Park Range by Mount Pisgah in Eugene, Oregon, USA, 2009, for the world’s largest fairy festival.

As Eugene’s media sees it, Faerieworlds is ‘where goths dance with hippies’. Many more scenes grace the fair: folk-rock, darkwave, modern primitive, psychedelic punk, ambient, contemporary medieval; with environmentalists, vegetarians, vegans, folklorists, fantasy writers and pagans including wiccans, native healers, classicists, or fusions of the above. In one sweeping glance you’d see a shock of coloured hair, studs, boots and tattoos of dragons, beside flower children in garlands, middle-aged dads with pixie ears or wizard staffs, Pre-Raphaelites, ancient wise-women in flowing skirts, stilt-walking fauns, beach babes in starfish bikinis, teenage centaurs, magicians in top hats and green-men clad in leaves.

Myth Maker gives thanks to the elements and other resident spirits.

The summer’s gift, the fire in the wood

Sometimes a breeze rolled down the mountain through forests of fir and pine, to relieve the searing heat, lifting tent flaps, flags and banners. We first felt it during the Opening Ceremony: an invisible kiss, carried by sylphs of the air, or summoned from Ceridwen’s cauldron and the music of Woodland, while visitors, vendors and performers took each other’s hands in greeting, or raised their arms to the sky. We felt the forest had bestowed its blessing.

and the circle grows each time around for all within are spiral bound

Guests of Honour were Brian and Wendy Froud. Since childhood I’ve loved Brian’s book Faeries, now in its 25th Anniversary edition. Its co-illustrator, Alan Lee, went on to design sets for The Lord of the Rings movies. Froud joined Jim Henson on the pre-digital film classic The Dark Crystal, where he fell in love with puppeteer Wendy Froud. She handed her craft on to their son Toby, who was the baby in the film Labyrinth, starring David Bowie as the Goblin King. Froudian books include The Runes of Elfland, Good Faeries/Bad Faeries, Goblins of Labyrinth and Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairies. My first meeting with them was at Trolls et Legendes festival in Belgium where, as with Faerieworlds, we presented a video created by Brian and Toby for my music. Their imagery illuminates lightshows by Woodland, the folk-rock band that founded Faerieworlds.

Below: photos by Byron Dazey of me (Louisa John-Krol) with puppets & puppeteers at Faerieworlds 2009

Below: Woodland with my guest appearance, 2009

For there is a summer in each life,

‘Til the shadows ride the samhain wind

To a twilight celebration

Woodland’s hometown Eugene is no stranger to folk festivals. The Grateful Dead’s Oregon Country Fair, a sort of Woodstock attracting around 40,000 attendees in various states of consciousness or undress, dating to the 1960’s, is an American icon. Faerieworlds leapt to national attention when Fox News reported the outbreak of a ‘hippy virus’. (Apparently the notion of fairies urgently squatting in bushes amused O’Reilly’s gang, but was greeted with the quip, ‘we took our wings off’.) Ironically, as Faerieworlds hosts braced for an onslaught, membership soared; apparently for liberal Americans, anything Fox attacks is worth exploring.

Since its inception eight years ago, under stewardship of Woodland musicians Emilio and Kelly Miller-Lopez, the festival has expanded from 1,000 attendees to 15,000. Robert Gould of Imaginosis later joined. Together they employ more than 400 people. [NB: these figures were current at the writing of this article a decade ago.] Whilst marketing is based on the internet, its community is in tune with ancient methods and organic materials. Wood-turning, sculpture, puppetry and storytelling, call upon crafting long held by pagan cultures. In keeping with the aim for a soft carbon footprint, there was scarcely any litter: proof that with enlightened effort, large crowds may ‘harm none’. As hosts advised, ‘look and listen… you will see soaring hawks, ravens, owls and flights of geese, you may even hear the howl of a coyote. And as you dance under the stars and rising moon, remember… the wonder of nature that is the true essence of faerie. This is why we come together to dance and celebrate the turning of the seasons and the enchantment imbued in wildness.’

Never shall I forget faces glimpsed high in windblown trees, or flights of birds as we sang of them. Mysteries of a fairy field… the natural playground of Kelly Kelly Miller-Lopez, co-founder of Faerieworlds & Woodland: lyricist, singer, harpist, dancer & now soloist of RosaMundi.

She seeds dreams within her herbs,

And ancient grains of wisdom in her wine

Below: Kelly Miller-Lopez (Woodland) while I sang with them at Faerieworlds 2009; photos by Byron Dazey, USA

Recommended links for more info & updates:

Faerieworlds website

Faery Host band Woodland

Faerieworlds Live From Home 2020 at their new platform, PORTL

Author’s note: This article was printed in an Australian magazine, Spheres. I wrote it after performing on the main stage at Faerieworlds (solo & with Woodland) in America, following a shared billing with them at Trolls et Legendes in Belgium during 2009, all by invitation of the hosts.