The Villagers, is a collaboration with author Derek Owens who wrote a collection of fables inspired by my series of the same name. This series consists of thirty-seven of my original hand-cut collages. Published by Animal Heart Press in 2022.

"A feat of fabulous creativity." —The Independent Book Review 

"A brilliantly imagined and transportive collection of surreal bedtime stories."  — Kirkus Reviews

"A physical wonder, gorgeously produced."  —Ancillary Review of Books

A master of disguise tries to seduce the sun... A fishwife is serenaded by a severed head... A lunar king appeals to the people of earth one last time...

the story…

In fairy tales and fables, beloved characters often remain nameless throughout their stories, thus inviting us to don their slippers. We get transported to their enchanted realms, no longer as ourselves but as central characters within the tale. As a child I was always curious about the supporting cast residing within those magical spaces; what untold stories might they have to share? This was the inspiration prompting me to create a series of hand-cut collages entitled The Villagers. Upon their completion, they rested in the drawers of a flat file, waiting patiently—until one day during the pandemic Derek Owens chanced upon them in the village square, we call Instagram. Now freed from the shadows, they can finally share their stories. Even I could not begin to imagine the tales they were ready to reveal.

—Caroline Golden

take a look inside…

  • table of contents

    Thirty seven villagers await your acquaintance. You are formally invited to enter this enchanted everwhen: an eclectic gallery of whimsical souls; a chorus of voices fanciful, dark and strange.

  • the itinerant

    “This in of which you speak…

  • the creature

    “Before his true identity was revealed…

word around the village square

 

“With The Villagers, Owens and Golden have created four books in one—a fablage: A book of dangerous fables, and a book of unsettling collages; a set of works engaged in a carefully orchestrated conspiracy, and a procession of texts and images that refuse to acknowledge one another. In this out-world, the ‘villagers’ are us.”
— Michael Blitz, author of Jon Stewart: A Biography and On the Surgeon’s Knife

“The Villagers inhabits a very special world of fantasy. Derek Owens’s fables are exquisite in their freshness and originality. Their interplay with Caroline Golden’s slyly enigmatic collages makes this book a must-have for any ‘cool’ library. The Villagers is a valentine to visual phenomena, dancing in the moonlight with the written word.”
— Stephanie Brody-Lederman, author of He Doesn’t Walk Funny; He Wore Corrective Shoes

“It is hard for a creator to maintain the depth of vision required for the visual and written works contained in The Villagers. Hard to create artwork and written fables filled with nooks and crannies and textures and layers flying up to heaven with its “celestial choirs” and down into the depths of the “singsongy” sea. But Caroline Golden and Derek Owens prove themselves up to the task. This book is the result of both creatives’ heavy lifting and light touch. The result? Pure enchantment. The reader often feels that she has stumbled upon some universal truth, a gravitas, only to find the text and artwork skittering trickster-like into dry wit, humor (both light and dark), a guffaw or a quick punchline: “So I ate my twin brother. In the womb. It happens.” Frankly, I’ve never read anything quite like this.
Each brief chapter is about a different resident of a fairy tale village. But this is more than a mere collection. Overall, there is a sense that these villagers are relational and familial. Not a “solitary entity but a collective, a hive mind, channeling one voice.” You can read this book front to back or choose a chapter here and there. The cumulative effect will be the same: The discovery of a book that is effervescent, wise and at times deeply poignant as it explores the human condition. But just try to catch this comet of a book by its tale. You’ll be in for one wild ride. Through “networks of circulatory systems within systems of systems.”
This is a masterful work. Haunting and artful and deeply accomplished. I highly recommend it.” — Nancy Dunlop, author of Hospital Poems

“Golden’s images and Owens’s words result in alluring tales and caricatures from both core and fringes of a marvelous village, though what you’ll see here exists far away from any sort of normal taxonomy of a town’s citizenry! If you want to observe a place outside realms anywhere on Earth, yet simultaneously including practically everything Earth does, read this book.”    —Christopher Funkhouser, author of Prehistoric Digital Poetry and Contributing Editor at PennSound


Though populated by otherworldly personages and almost-human entities, this is no freak show. Instead, The Villagers is an amazing amalgam of vision and voice. Caroline Golden's collages are not afraid of being grotesque and not ashamed of being at the same time quite charming. And Derek Owens' accompanying fables take us off to places where childhood fantasies meet the fractured worldview of the eupeptic dreamer. At its best, his prose evokes Nabokov at his most sumptuous and Borges at his most oblique. This is surrealism in the truest sense of the word: not mere bizarrerie, but three dozen glimpses of that greater plane of existence which contains both the waking and sleeping worlds. —Th. Metzger, author of This Is Your Final Warning!!, Shock Totem, Big Noise on the Astral Plane

“The dazzling collages of Caroline Golden meet the splendid modern fables of Derek Owens in The Villagers, a sublime collaboration where the mystery of who inspired whom is part of the magic. Wonderfully strange and strangely wonderful, the worlds that The Villagers open are deep and contradictory: startling yet safe, sparkling yet darkling. With truths that only the surreal can reveal, and insights into human foibles that only fables can provide, Golden and Owens waltz their readers from dream to waking and back again. A keep-on-your-nightstand book to treasure.”  — Molly Peacock, author of Flower Diary and The Analyst: Poems

“Derek Owens constitutes an intractable independency which you may find on the map of the imagination somewhere between the Duchy of Donald Barthelme and the Principality of Jorge Luis Borges. One’s passage through these landscapes has been rendered yet more hallucinatory by the collages of Caroline Golden, who has done for Owens what Magritte did for Belgium. Her portrait-like images are at once cozy and disquieting, playful and grotesque, like a set of Toby Jugs acquired as souvenirs on a holiday in the world of the dead.”
— Jacob Rabinowitz, author of the Beat generation memoir Blame it on Blake

Though populated by otherworldly personages and almost-human entities, this is no freak show. Instead, The Villagers is an amazing amalgam of vision and voice. Caroline Golden's collages are not afraid of being grotesque and not ashamed of being at the same time quite charming. And Derek Owens' accompanying fables take us off to places where childhood fantasies meet the fractured worldview of the eupeptic dreamer. At its best, his prose evokes Nabokov at his most sumptuous and Borges at his most oblique. This is surrealism in the truest sense of the word: not mere bizarrerie, but three dozen glimpses of that greater plane of existence which contains both the waking and sleeping worlds. —Th. Metzger, author of This Is Your Final Warning!!, Shock Totem, Big Noise on the Astral Plane