Tales for Peace

We live in a fragile world. It´s surprising how easily things break… like balance, promises, our grandmother’s vase, confidence, health, friendship and of course… peace. Peace can so easily be torn apart, each fragment becoming a piece of a puzzle; a puzzle that, up to now, has never been truly put together completely. We could be realistic and think that it is impossible to reconstruct something if we do not have a clue as to how it should really look like… Fortunately, we can always find dreamers; using their imagination.

Tales for Peace materialized in 2014 as a proposal from the Pedro José Márquez S.J Library to promote creative writing and literary participation in the educational community at the Instituto Lux (the Jesuit School in León Guanajuato, Mexico). It was a simple idea: to write fictional stories that talked about Peace, then select some and read them aloud to preschool children. Pre-schoolers would then use their crayons and imagination to draw awesome illustrations for each of the selected stories. The result was published in an electronic anthology that we presented during the International Book Fair held annually in the City.Tales for Peace

Participation exceeded our expectations, especially since we offered nothing in return but the pleasure of sharing a story with others. Up to date we have three electronic anthologies available in the Library’s Website.

We are aware that peace is much more than just the absence of conflict or that “thing” we miss whenever there is war. Tolerance, inclusion, understanding, justice, compassion, environmental care and empathy are some of the faces Peace presents to us, and as teachers in Jesuit Schools it is our duty to help students recognize it in any of its forms. Now, more than ever, reflection and dialogue with one another are essential. For this reason, we thought necessary to make some modifications to the project this year… because sometimes stories are not written but drawn, because they are not always experienced by one single person, because it’s worth dreaming fully awake along with others… in a collective story-telling.Teacher Tales for PeaceDrawings Tales For PeaceCreative DrawingMexico Tale for Peace

Ignatian Spirituality is our common ground and Educate Magis offers us a window of privileged communication. We would love that you participate in this project, sending us your stories, your dreams of peace, so that they may be included in our fourth anthology and would love to find ways to collaborate on similar collective proposals with you. May the frailty of our world serve as a good excuse for us to imagine solutions. Let’s join efforts to put the pieces of the puzzle together… perhaps this way we´ll create a more complete image of a better world.

We invite everybody to learn how to participate here. This is a marvellous project. Don´t miss out!  
Deadline to send the tales: February 24th, 2017
Publication Date of selected tales: March 13th, 2017.