Fantasy And Imagination — My Stories
When I learned how to use the computer to write stories it thrilled me. Using it vesus the old typewriter made it indeed very easy. No paper, corrections are fast, and for me the most important feature: spell-check. Since my native language is German, it took me a while to be able to write in English, reading and listening was much easier for me.
To this day I stumble sometimes, some of the phrases might seem a little bit odd to you my dear reader. But take it as a charming oddity and as my style. In my artwork I have always tried to create a style out of some deficiency that I believed to have had, developed a distinct look with it and made it my very own.
In these stories you will find events partly from my real life, partly fancy flights of my imagination, often they are married. I hope to find the time in the future to write down some more. I have illustrated the stories with some embellishments and images to underscore them. I hope that you will find them enjoyable, I sure did while creating them.
Creating Stories
Fantasy has been my lifelong companion. Within this site I have finally found a way to write some of my fantasy stories down. I used to go into the woods in my native Germany and sit in my favorite secret spot, hidden away from view. I could only get into this moss carpeted spot by crawling on my belly under some old pine trees to reach it. In the middle of this sun kissed hideaway there reigned a big granite boulder, left there by the massive glacier that covered this area in the ice age. This boulder became my chair to sit on and dream.
In this moss covered room of mine I also created some art works, only for me to see. I collected shiny and colorful wrappers of candies and chocolates. Many of them I found on the streets, and I admit that I picked candies according to their wrappers to be useful to my secret work.
These little colorful pieces became the jewels in my images. I took off part of the moss sheets very carfully as not to kill it, dug some shallow indentations, lined them with patch works of the wrappers to create images. Those I covered with sheets of broken glass that I had found along the way and then put back the rich dirt and moss over the glass. I marked these secret jewels of work with little branches that had their tips colored with a dot of paint. I did not want to step on them. I created a whole new world in the wonderfully aromatic forest ground.
Now and then I took off the moss again and looked at my little pieces of shiny art. I told stories with them just the way I do now. I got lost so often in my mind that I missed the setting sun and had to run home through the dark forest. All sorts of imagined dangers lurked there then, but I always made it and my mother could just wonder what I had been doing. It was my secret. Only my small diary that I filled with the smallest imaginable code language did know. This is the first time I have told this story to the world. And it does seem like a story now—almost.
This sun-lit secret room really seemed to have been a home in a fairy-tale. I often imagined for the fairies to sit on the ferns that lined the trees, for the mushrooms to have doors to go into and visit the gnomes that lived deep in the roots of the trees.
Sometimes a visitor came by: a porcupine with long quills. I often fed it raspberries in the fall and mushrooms that I harvested from the bounty in the forest. I brought slices of apple for it as well. We had a nice friendly talk and then it went off again. It was my only guest. I called it: Igel, which is the German name for porcupine.
The stories are for children and adults alike. I am a very grown up person with a child residing within me. Over the years I have nurtured that child and you will be able to detect it in my work or see it dancing in the pages of this site. I take delight in details of observations. It is second nature to me and I use these very details in my descriptions in words and imagery.
A Perfect Day
A story about a wonderful day I spent in the woods by myself, doing the thing that I love most about the forests in my native Germany. At heart I am very much a loner, so I have fond memories of days like these. This was a long time ago and those days seem almost not real any longer. The world I live in now is very different from the forests of my youth. Click the gray link above to read the story.
December 1952
One December I remember particularily well. It was a time full of hope and growth. We had just started to live almost normally after WWII in Germany. The future was there to count on again. The horror of the past still was palpable everywhere we went, and where I lived, so close to the "Iron Curtain", we were always ready to jump and flee.
It never left our minds, this preparedness to save our lives, we had not much else anyway. I was born right after the war had ended, but my parents transmitted the fear through their stories. That we saw all the maimed people around us, the ruins and bomb craters did not ease our minds. We were sober children. And in this context this story is told. Click the gray link above to read the story.
Walking Trees
Do trees walk? Somebody thought so. Kitty Girl captured the events of a very traumatic time for our small family. She had difficulty holding the pen with her paw, but she managed just fine as you will see. Click the gray link above or the links below to read the story.
The Diary
A little thought about people and their ways. How in the end what you think and do might mark you on the outside. Or will it? Click the gray link above or the page links below to read the story.
Lily
A beautiful young mermaid was built by a young man on the beach. She turnes magically into a young woman.
Pink Cotton Candy Tutu Girl
Have you ever met a girl made of spun sugar? No? Here is a story about just such a delightful person: Pink Cotton Candy Tutu Girl.
