Topic Brainstorm: Pirates, ghost stories and more

Looking through the topic ideas and some more of the previous topics, I found four that I might be interested in for a Storybook project this semester:

1. Ghost stories

I've read about OU ghost stories before, and I like the idea of retelling them as folklore. I think it could also be interesting to focus on true stories at OU, and retell them from the perspective of a journalist or maybe as journal entries from a student at the time who's telling his diary about the gossip or strange events he happened to witness at school that day. I think Jeff Provine's book, as well as other resources from OU, would be helpful to use in my research on this.

2. Woman pirates

I spent a little bit of time scrolling through the Wikipedia page for women in piracy, and I liked the story of Sadie the Goat. It could be fun to imagine her backstory: How did she get to be this rough gang member who head-butts her victims like a goat before she mugs them? The story of her losing her ear is also pretty weird, so I think that could be reimagined. Or, maybe Sadie could talk about her daily life as a pirate in short journal entries she keeps. I don't know much about Sadie the Goat — I had only heard of her through this assignment — but the Wikipedia page listed good references for information about her.

3. Shakespeare

I think it could be fun to reimagine some of Shakespeare's classic stories like Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Othello or A Midsummer Night's Dream from the perspective of a journalist trying to cover the affairs. It would be particularly funny to do that for A Midsummer Night's Dream, since the story is absurd. I've read each of those four plays, so I have some familiarity with each of the stories, though I'd have to review some of the details for this project.

4. Creation myth

I read several creation myth stories through the Creation Stories from around the World book. It might be interesting to retell some of them as a global study of how the world came to be according to different cultures. It could also be interesting to use different cultures' myths and combine them to explain a complete picture of the world — for example, use the Wichita story of the Moon and Morning Star along with the story I read last week about how the man in the moon came to be, and combine them so that they occur in the same universe.

Union of the Sun and Moon. Photo by Wonderlane on Flickr