Author name: Elizabeth

A family story can begin with almost nothing: a recipe, an argument about who arrived first, a photograph nobody has […]

The riders seem to arrive from another kind of light. John Duncan’s The Riders of the Sidhe, the image accompanying

Main image: Witches being hanged, b&w plate from Gardiner, England’s Grievance Discovered in Relation to the Coal Trade, 1655, Public

A root resembles a small human being. In an illustrated herbal it grows arms, legs and an alarming voice. The

The moon we know through science is not quite the moon we carry in stories. One is a physical body

The sea gives a story somewhere to hide what cannot be seen from shore. A voice travels over water; a

Main image: Three Norns & Yggdrasil Lorenz Frølich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons A tree can be a landmark, a

Stories do not merely tell us what people have done. They ask what a person ought to do—and what happens