"Before I was a house, I was a baby chick, cracked loose from an egg," she announced, reaching to the front of the box and opening the doors.Īt one point in the evening, she brought out a Baba Yaga puppet, who sat on the roof, talking to a little skeleton hanging on the backdrop.To better cover the various aspects of the subject matter, this article has been split into one main page and several subpages. She stepped behind it and opened the door, so her face peered through. With her is a box made to look like a house, with blue window shutters, cut into lace-like patterns, and a little door in the roof. On the day of her book launch, Nethercott stood on a dark stage in an old barn, crickets chirping outside. "I couldn't let Isaac and Bellatine have all the puppetry fun, that just wouldn't be fair," she laughs. So she collaborated with artist friends to create her own traveling puppet show to bring her folktale to life at bookstores around the country. Retired cabinetmaker Gilbert Ruff built the theater box that GennaRose Nethercott uses in her own traveling puppet show, pictured here on the day of her book launch.įor her part, Nethercott may have finished writing Thistlefoot the novel, but she's not done playing in this world just yet. "When there are things that are too painful or too taboo for people to discuss directly, they would rather invent this really whimsical, fantastical, almost outlandish story in parallel," she says. That is, after all, one of the roles of folklore in people's lives. It was important for Nethercott that her book be, at its heart, an adventure. "I drew from Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories and Sholem Aleichem's short stories of Tevye the Dairyman, who we know from Fiddler on the Roof and these kind of cheeky, almost teasing voices," Nethercott says. At times solemn, at times playful, the house speaks to the reader like a storyteller to a crowd gathered around a campfire. Its voice guides the reader through myth and legend – and the day in history when Gedenkrovka's well was poisoned. That's thanks in large part to Thistlefoot, the house, who narrates the tale of Baba Yaga, the birth of the house itself, and the creation of Baba Yaga's two daughters with a pastry. "I think being able to indulge in joy and play is the best way to learn and to heal and deal with more difficult topics." And that story gets dark and heavy at times, but it isn't dour. Isaac and Bellatine must learn the full story of what happened to their ancestor in order to defeat a sinister figure that pursues them. So many of us came to this country as refugees generations back and don't necessarily know the full story." Nethercott says that while her book is specifically a Jewish diaspora tale, "I think it speaks in a larger way to many of our familial stories. Folklore allows us to tell stories too painful to discuss directly "They have no idea why they have them, and it's through learning where those came from that they're able to heal," she says. For Isaac, it's a constant, itchy restlessness that keeps him on the run for Bellatine, a supernatural ability that terrifies her. The siblings in her book each have their own inherited quirks. "I mean, it always helps to have an understanding of why we are the way we are." "How much of our own little tics and anxieties and questions are something that we've inherited," she muses. Still, writing the book helped her recognize herself a little more. Nethercott burst into tears after finishing one particularly difficult scene. These chapters are brutal, and writing them was an intense experience.
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