Puck Stories 101

What happens when you tell bedtime stories to kids that pay too much attention?

This.

Let’s start with some background. A simple Google search will reveal that Puck is a minor folklore character, not really much more than a mischievous house sprite. A little more will show he was a booger of a trouble maker in William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Some of you may know the name through the animated series “Gargoyles”, where many of the characters from Shakespeare’s plays, along with other various folklore characters, were featured prominently and became major players in the biggest plotlines of the series.

I’ve always been more fascinated with the clever and tricky characters. Odysseus, Reynard the Fox, Anansi, Coyote, Tom Sawyer, Jack (beanstalk and giant-slayer)... y'know, the usual suspects. So, when I went to tell my Baby Bears “from the heart” stories (their words for “not out of a book” but ones I make up just for them), I needed a good main character to rely on and these guys were always my favorites. Choosing an immortal spirit made it easy to insert them into any time and any place.  Some of the stories are lifted straight from old mythologies with him inserted into heroic or pivotal roles. Some are based on folklore where he’s just kicking the ball into play and letting the story play out. When I started to run out of viable material for that, I employed the Mythological Kitchen Sink method and started taking bits and pieces from anywhere and doing my best to weave them together on the fly.

As I continued to tell more stories, new characters emerged. Fair Folk for nearly all occasions, of course. A generic fool to make mistakes and learn lessons. An unlucky hero to stumble through different adventures. After a while, I decided these characters needed stories of their own. While this may be a collection of “Puck Stories”, they’re not always about him. Sometimes he’s there in the foreground. Other times, he’s sneaking in disguised as something else. Sometimes, he’s just hiding in the background where no one will even notice him. But if he’s there, it’s always to move the story along.

I decided to start writing them down, partly to share, partly to document them for my Baby Bears should they like to tell them to their kids, and partly to keep the stories straight since, once they got old enough, they began to call me out on my mistakes.

This series of stories is the result of the telling, writing, retelling and rewriting of what began as something to tell my Baby Bears to help them fall asleep.

Hopefully, you’ll stay awake through it all.