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.
“Fairy tales can be told and retold in infinite variety to accommodate new social or moral lessons. In The Mother Goose Letters, 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 are a perfectly irreverent and amusingly sinister act of reclamation.”
– GMB Chomichuk, award winning author/artist of Infinitum and Cassie and Tonk
“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
This book was made with the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council.
