Continuing our “Authors Remember Their Grandparents” series (you can read the first post, featuring Andrea Cheng, here) we are happy to bring you a piece by writer and storyteller F. Isabel Campoy, whose many books include the wonderful Tales our Abuelitas Told: A Hispanic Folktales Collection. Pay a visit to Isabel’s website to explore her wide-ranging work in every genre imagineable – poetry, song, theatre and non-fiction as well as her many picture-books and fiction. Read also Isabel’s Personal View We, Latinos written for PaperTigers in 2007.

Abuela Francisca

I praise humor. And wit. They are more than shades of character. In my balance they are virtues, cornerstones of a personality. I sometime boast that I inherited both from my grandmother, just to see if she would drop for me a few grains from Heaven. The salt and pepper of her soul.

One of the most frequent questions I have to answer from children when I visit their schools is precisely about her. “What does the F. mean in your name?” they ask me. And I say, “Abuela.” The tradition in Spain to name the second baby girl with the mother’s mother’s name, produced a vibrant generation of Franciscas in my family. There were all kinds of nick names to distinguish all seven cousins named Francisca. Paqui, Quica, Panchita, Paca, Fran. Because my middle name is Isabel, all throughout my childhood people called me Paquibel, and when I decided I was a grown up lady, I left my grandmother’s initial in front of Isabel as a lighthouse, to watch for me, to alert me of the new horizons. And I became F. Isabel.

She was convinced that I could love to embroider. Those were the times in which a girl started to prepare her treasure chest when she was still a child. To keep me sat by her side, she would tell me stories from folklore, changing the landscapes, the characters, and the words as she saw fit to prove her point. Red Riding Hood was lured by the wolf because at siesta time, when she was supposed to be embroidering her initials in the white sheets for her wedding bed, she instead insisted on going to visit her abuela.

My grandmother Francisca gave me the F. of a fabulous treasure of stories to retell to children. The F. of a fantastic vision of what’s important in life. She gave me the F. of family to honor, friends to love, and fascination to foster freedom in the mind of children.

F. Isabel Campoy

Narrative forms have the potential to inspire, sustain and heal us, and traditional folktales have a special healing magic for children. Witch and monster stories like Baba Yaga and Heckedy Peg show how to get through the dark woods of life and suggest that there are helpful beings along the way. Kelly Herold (of Big A little a) writes on “Baba Yaga Heads West” in the September issue of The Edge of the Forest. The Elves and the Shoemaker illustrates the practice of generosity. Talking Eggs, a traditional Louisiana Creole Cinderella tale, demonstrates the eventual triumph of good over evil. In the Uncle Remus stories, underdogs like tar baby and the rabbit outfox the scary fox himself. Native American coyote tales offer tales of connectedness with the natural world. In our stress-filled lives, these stories provide steadying information and wisdom.

For folktales from Asia, search the wealth of the PaperTigers website, or go directly to interviews with authors like Debjani Chatterjee and Demi, who have written stories based on folktales. For faves of Asian kids, here’s a review of a collection of folktale retellings. And for Hispanic folktales, check out Tales Our Abuelitas Told.

PaperTigers welcomes your feedback about this important form of literature for the child within each of us.