The Mother Goose Letters

By Karen Clavelle and Bob Haverluck

The Mother Goose Letters comprises the annotated correspondence between Mother Goose and her cohorts in Britain concerning migration to the Canadian Prairies. The letters reveal both her attempts to wheedle her fellow nursery rhyme characters to settle in the Prairies with her and their mixed responses to her plans. Responding to a cease and desist command from No. 10 Downing St., M. Goose categorically makes her case for the out-migration and re-migration of her stories. She supposes they will continue to live if she gives them leave to change as time, place, and experience dictate. She is, after all, a runaway Mother Goose.

In print for the first time, The Mother Goose Letters presents scrupulously collated research in the form of hitherto unseen letters and previously unknown revisions of the best-known Mother Goose nursery rhymes and fairy tales. These collected works are used as the framework whereby a story of modern day immigration can be told.

• Language: English
• Publisher: At Bay Press
• Release date: Mar 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781988168791

Karen Clavelle

Karen Clavelle, poet, writer, playwright, educator. Her work has been published in Border Crossings, CVII, Prairie Fire, and the At Bay Press Fiction Annual, Secrets and Lies (2017). Long interested in small (chapbook) presses, Karen is the founder of atelier78 press and a founding member of the enigmatic and somnambulant pachyderm press.

Book preview

Cover: The Mother Goose Letters by Karen Clavelle, with illustrations by Bob Haverluck. The image shows a hand-drawn colored image of the mother goose with curly hair writing with the help of a goose beak on a sheet of paper. She is holding an inkpot in her left hand. The handwritten text reads: Mother Go in uppercase.

Advance Praise for The Mother Goose Letters

"The Mother Goose Letters are a perfectly irreverent and amusingly sinister act of reclamation. Mother Goose herself seems to know where a few of the bodies are buried in the prairie landscape. Mythologies and folktales clash with wit and candor in Karen Clavelle’s strange collection that has one questioning where memory and invention collide."

— GMB Chomichuk, award-winning writer/illustrator of Midnight City, Infinitum, and Super Pulp Science

With deft wit and a keen sense of political and personal satire, Karen Clavelle brings nursery rhymes and fairy tales home to the prairies, and the result is a riot of invention. These re-visions and sly commentaries reveal anew what has been right before us all along.

— Warren Cariou, author of Lake of the Prairies

"Folk and fairy tales are among the most loved forms of literature. They can be told and retold in infinite variety to accommodate new social or moral lessons.

As an academic fairy-tale, Karen Clavelle’s The Mother Goose Letters belongs to the tradition of literary criticism. It is ostensibly an incomplete collection of letters gathered by one Mary MacGregor in preparation for her academic thesis. The letters, written by Mother Goose to a handful of her well-known fairy-tale personalities, reveal the irascible nature of Mother Goose and the comic peccadilloes of her characters.

All of the stories and characters have been translated into the Canadian landscape and culture, where they survive brilliantly."

— David Arnason, author of The Best of All Possible Worlds

The Mother Goose Letters

A hand-drawn image of a young girl with a defiant look, standing with her hands by her waist.

The Mother Goose Letters

by Karen Clavellewith Illustrations by Bob Haverluck

logo: At Bay press

WINNIPEG

The Mother Goose Letters

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2018 Karen Clavelle

Illustrations copyright © 2018 Bob Haverluck

Design by Matthew Stevens and M. C. Joudrey.

Layout by Matthew Stevens and M. C. Joudrey.

At Bay Press logo copyright © 2018 At Bay Press

Published by At Bay Press , November 2018.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without prior written consent of the publisher or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

No portion of this work may be reproduced without express written permission from At Bay Press.

Library and Archives Canada cataloguing in publication is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-988168-12-8

ISBN 978-1-988168-79-1 (EPUB)

Printed and bound in Canada.

This book is printed on acid free paper that is 100% recycled ancient forest friendly (100% post-consumer recycled).

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

atbaypress.com

for Vicand our family,but especially forJay, Georgia, and Giac

Contents

Foreword

To the Editor

Little Red Ridinghood

Rhyme and Reason

Humpty Dumpty

Wee Willie Winkie

Mistress Mary

The House That Jack Built

The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe

Jack be Nimble

Little Jack Horner

The Queen of Hearts

Old Mother Hubbard

Simple Simon

The Muffin Man

Charlie Charlie

Little Miss Muffet

George Peorgie

Jack and Jill

Three Blind Mice

Dr. Foster

Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater

Tom Tom the Piper’s Son

Old King Cole

Jack Sprat

Little Bo Peep

Three Men in a Tub

The Three Little Pigs

Jack and the Beanstalk

Part 1. Jack Sells the Crow

Part 2. The World at the Top of the Beanstalk

Part 3. The Goose Restores the Rain

Part 4. Crow and the Drum Song

Part 5. The Caged Bird

The Correspondence

Afterword

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Mother Goose has forever lingered in my imagination, but not always in a particularly benign way. I recall images of her – a memorably frightening old woman wearing a peaked, black, wide-brimmed hat as the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz (who also scared me witless) – riding a goose. The goose distressed me only slightly less. The old woman and the witch from another page in the same book provoked shuddering terror in the fearful child that I was. Before I could fall asleep at night, the book would either have to be out of sight or removed in case it caused more tears after a nightmare. As for the other characters, many were monstrous in the nights of a child.

A boy putting a cat down the well, a woman chasing mice with a butcher knife, a boy running away with a distressed pig under his arm (and being beaten for it), or a boy making girls cry by kissing them (and then running away when the other boys came out), a mother whipping her children before she put them to bed without supper, a man who would keep his wife in a pumpkin shell, or another who went to London to buy his wife – the words and illustrated images were the stuff of nightmares. There were other wondrous troublings to ponder: birds baked in a pie coming out singing, little boys made of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails (snips for scissors, something of little consequence, but sinister for puppies, not to mention little boys!), and girls made of sugar and spice and everything nice; a cow jumping over the moon, a dish and a spoon running away together – strange bedfellows. The list goes on. Mercifully, the offending book eventually disappeared; not so the memories of it. Happily, Mother Goose and I did not cross paths again until she turned up in a reading list on a university syllabus, where she appeared in the renowned collections of the Brothers Grimm, Iona and Peter Opie, and Andrew Lang. Now, the tales light my imagination.

Mother Goose’s tales and rhymes have been collected, examined, analyzed, classified, theorized, and challenged ever since they emerged. Mother Goose herself has been traced to fictional and historical figures from the eleventh through to the eighteenth centuries in the United Kingdom, Europe, and America. Who she is – Mother Goose, Mother Bunch, Mère l’Oye, Berthe la Fileuse (Berthe the Spinner), Berthe de l’Oie (Goose-Foot Bertha) – and to whom she belongs remains uncertain.

Scholarly accuracies seem best abandoned in the tales’ re-tellings, but palimpsests remain. Because Mother Goose is centuries old, she continues to appear in word and image derived primarily from the British and/or European past. Mother Goose of The Mother Goose Letters operates on the Canadian Prairies. This Mother Goose moves fluidly in a time of accelerating