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Prologue: Why Folktales? Milbre Burch Oral storytelling is the original immersive technology. ­ Human beings have used it to communicate knowledge about the world around us to make or strengthen or sever ties to recall the lineage of our ­ people and our posi- tion in that lineage for millennia. ­ After all this time, our brains are hard- wired for narrative. Story is the conduit through which we take in, remember, and recount our experiences and their meaning in our lives. And ­every story begins with place. Why? ­ Because, by and large, ­ human beings grow up located within concentric circles of place and culture. Our bodies are the first landscape that we know, and the landscape is usually encircled by ­family (or what stands in for it) by neighbors and community members in urban, suburban, or rural environs by state, region, nation, the world. Our location in ­those concentric circles shapes the stories we hear and, thus, our lives and our vision of what life should or could be. The stories we are told throughout our lives are meant to teach us how to be ­human within the par­ameters of the place and culture of our birth. ­ These lessons concern not only how to “behave” in acceptable ways, but also how to survive in a sometimes hostile environment. In time, we may hunger for other narratives than the ones we have heard or lived, and it’s up to us to seek out ­ those chronicles for ourselves. The world is full of stories that can expand our experience, our perspective, and our vision of what’s pos­si­ble. Many of the narrative truths we are exposed to or seek for ourselves can be found in folktales told orally (or read aloud) from one generation to the next around the globe. Folktales take many shapes: myths, legends, fables, and fairy tales or won­der tales. ­ These stories from the oral tradition speak to us in meta­phor, inviting us to dream alongside the story’s protagonist. In ­ doing so, we venture into an imaginal realm in search of the wealth of knowl- edge that awaits us beyond the limitations of a single lifetime or a single point of view. That shared dream—­sometimes called the story-­listening trance—­unfolds between the teller’s lips and the listeners’ ears. When the story has ended, the listeners return from the story realm to the pre­sent day. At that moment of return, we are often changed, just as the protagonist has been, by the prob­lems that needed solving, the challenges faced, and the joys and sorrows encountered within the story. The ­imagined story—­along with ­every other narrative we encounter that has moved us in some way—is stored in the same part of our brain that stores our own lived