friday's fable: house hunting

Before I begin, I have to apologize for the delay in posts and the lack of an itinerary or, really, any sort of indication of the travel portion of this blog. Even when a trip is only through the pages of a book, life still manages to derail it. So the first destination is still a bit of a ways off and I won't post an itinerary for the blog until I'm certain of that date. However, these Friday fables will be an editorial feature going forward. Allons-y!

A good friend of mine is considering buying her first home after years of renting. She also may, or may not, be dying of a combination of the plague and organ failure; we're a bit unsure. However, in the process of her coughing up a lung and me trying to provide support and medical advice from several states away, we started to talk about house hunting. She found a condo she liked, there was a discussion of neighborhoods and what's really important in a home.

Baba Yaga's Hut

[image from? please contact me if it's yours]

Baba Yaga, a Slavic folklore figure, is an opium smoking, child-eating, fairy godmother type, who is also the proud homeowner of a cabin with chicken legs. More often than not, she's the villain and vanquished at the end of the story -- not that it stops her from appearing again -- but it's hard to deny the, ah, 'charm' of her home. For one thing, all the comfort of the house with the potential to pick up and go of an RV. And if her oven has seen more children than apple pies? Well, at least it's large enough to do all the holiday cooking.

The real magic, though, of Baba Yaga's hut is as a place of transformation. You can cross the threshold -- that's the easy bit, after all -- as anything. A child. A novice. An adventurer. But walking out? You can't leave the same as you came in; Baba Yaga forces a change, a challenge that you have to overcome and you carry the scar when you leave.

If you leave.

an introduction and a forward

Octoberknows is a travelogue of fictional places, cities and scenes only found in stories. This is a space intended less as a review and more as a walk through -- a tour, but without the relentlessly cheerful guide pointing out things of interest that are, without fail, absolutely uninteresting. 

Well, probably without the cheerful part of that description, anyway. 

But it's literature as seen from where it's set and with the expectation that a good book is like a destination, one that invites visitors and is never seen the same way. And so, this is not a guidebook. 

There will be exactly sixty-six places featured in this blog this year from a wide range of literature (a word that, in this case, means anything with words in it and some things without any words at all). There will also be scheduled distractions and meditations to keep company with the random ones. 

I hope that this space, whatever else it is, will be part of your itinerary.