Wife’s Letter
A tale which shows the power of the written word
I met this tale in Angela Carter’s invaluable collection, The Second Virago Book of Fairytales (ISBN 1-85381-616-7). There it is called The Letter Trick and is given as a tale from Surinam.
While leading a workshop in Ethiopia, I was delighted to find a version of the same tale from the Afar region: The Sex Change.
The story was recorded in April 2011 at seitenweise bookshop, Dormagen, Germany, in a performance arranged with the vhs Dormagen. Unfortunately I did not notice that the camera was placed close to a spotlight which hummed – causing a slight background noise.
Disclaimer
The video clips here are all amateur quality, shot in various theatres.
Their intention is just to show the range of my storytelling and give a flavour of a live performance.
Permission is granted for use in non-commercial educational contexts.
The videos are © Richard Martin.
Professionally recorded CDs and DVDs are available here.
Go here for tales to watch
Go here for a list of all tales included on this site
Go here to receive an e-mail notification when new tales are added
Permission to tell outlines my views on copyright
For those who are teachers: Telling stories in the classroom: basing language teaching on storytelling