Easton Fables, 2016

unpublished children’s book

The Easton Fables are a collection of surreal short stories that I wrote together with a group of primary school children from the neighbourhood of Easton in Bristol. The fables are accompanied by new string games invented by the children, during a series of workshops I led at their school, in which I taught them how to play Cat’s Cradle. The games create an accessible but abstract platform to inspire storytelling, using these deceptively simple structures to draw on the children’s own experiences of difficult topics such as war and migration, as well as everyday life at school. In the stories we see how they grapple with the power relations between adults and children and express fundamental needs of safety, peace and happiness in a complex, confusing and often threatening adult world.

Easton Fables was made for a public art project commissioned by Foreground and Bristol City Council.