A fine conclusion

Looking for a fine Irish tale for March and found this wonderful ending to a tale:

"And in troth, girls and boys, though it's a diverting story, I don't think the moral is good; and if any of you thuckeens go about imitating Anty in her laziness, you'll find it won't thrive with you as it did with her.  She was beautiful beyond compare, which none of you are, and she had three powerful fairies to help her besides.  There's no fairies now, and no prince or lord to ride by, and catch you idling or working; and maybe, after all, the prince and herself were not so very happy when the cares of the world or old age came on them."

 

The old storyteller

"He was beloved by all, and most of all by the children;
For he told them tales of the Loup-garou in the forest,
And of the goblin that came in the night to water the horses,

...And how on Christmas eve the oxen talked in the stable,
And how the fever was cured by a spider shut up in a nutshell,
And of the marvelous powers of four-leaved clover and horseshoes,
With whatsoever else was writ in the lore of the village."

from Evangeline

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Brave people

“Sometimes, when you listen to a story, you get a new idea of what’s possible in the world.  I don’t mean just strange customs and faraway places – though you can learn a lot from those.  What I mean is that you can get a new idea of what’s possible for you –something you never thought of, or you never saw very much in real life.

 When I’m scared, I like to think about the brave people in stories I know.  And I think, Maybe I could be like that.”

--Susan Fletcher

Do you wonder about fairy tales being "updated?"

Sometimes tellers feel that they mustn't change an old fairy tale.  Here's an interesting take on that from the book Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked.

"...one important thing...that most scholars failed to acknowledge until recently -- is that fairy tales change.  In fact, fairy tales have remarkable mercurial properties.  They adapt to the weather, to local fashions, and to the mindset of each new teller and audience.

They record regional cuisines and local hairstyles -- and of course, more important things. ... they catalog not only broad elements of human experience but also the particular details of each day and age.  They express our collective truths, even as these truths change beneath our noses.

And part of their magic lies in the fact that as they do they provide not only a glimpse into our present concerns but also a record of our past."

--Catherine Orenstein

On sharing stories

“There are many different worlds inside a city.  The world of the rich and the world of beggars.  The world of men and the world behind the veil.  The worlds of Muslims and of Christians and of Jews….

All the worlds touch at the bazaar.  And the other place where they touch is in stories…..

If we don’t share our stories—trading them across our borders as freely as spices and ebony and silk—we will all be strangers forever.”

--Susan Fletcher,

in Shadow Spinner.

Why we need more words for "Green"

"As for the use of words -- they are for the storyteller what notes are for the musician or colors for the artist.  A good, well-rounded vocabulary is a rich possession.  It is out of words that storytellers create those pictures that captivate the listeners; for it is through the medium of pictures that the story is told and gathered in by the listeners.  Words should be strong, of simple meaning; they should have color and that quality which arouses the imagination."

Ruth Sawyer,

in "How To Tell a Story"

Campfire stories

"While it is possible to have a story session, even a "Campfire program" without a real campfire -- build one if it is at all possible.  Who can help but feel a mystical sense of awareness when staring at the flames of a campfire?...

"The end of the campfire, after the embers have burned down low, is the perfect time for telling a scary story."

from: Campfire Stories...things that go bump in the night, by William Forgey, M.D.

"CALLING ALL CHARACTERS OF STORY"

"Together we can save Story and find a happy ending for us all"

 

Another book that reminds us of the importance of telling the old fairytales -

otherwise, how will readers know who the characters are?

For Memorial Day: War Stories

"... the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.”

 “Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

 

 “In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.”

“And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”

 

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.”

― 

all quotes from Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

"Fairy-ridden"

     "I can see her face, fairy-ridden.  I can hear the soft Irish burr on her tongue which made the words join hands and dance, making a fairy ring that completely encircled me.  I can hear her begin the tale of "Wee Meg Barnileg," knowing it already well myself, and feeling the stinging mortification of Meg's own behavior, which might well have been mine.  But Johanna pointed no moral and drew no application.  There was the tale -- I could take it or leave it; and always I took it."

Ruth Sawyer in The Way of the Storyteller

More thoughts on folklore

As we get ready for our meeting on Friday, here's another idea to think about.
Many tellers who tell folktales get the stories from books like this:

 "During the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, these myths and tales were collected by scholars and others who recognized their beauty and their importance in describing the Native American view of the world.  They wished to save them for others to enjoy before Anglo-European culture buried them forever."

"How are we to understand these myths?  Certainly not as "just-so" stories about the way things were, or as scientific explanations of the natural world.  They are allegories or parables that attempt to explain what it means to be human in an often unfriendly world.  Some tell how people should act and how to obey the customs of the tribe.  Others simply describe the way this are or how they came to be.  Some stories are regarded as sacred; others are not. All of them give tribal members standards to live by."
 (quotes from the Preface)

How does someone who is not from the original culture that told the story go about transmitting it to others?

Getting ready for our meeting

Since we will be discussing folktales at our meeting on Friday, April 19, here is a classic collection:

And a comment from the translator:
"Why, in English, were they called fairy tales in the first place?  For, despite a considerable population of devils, witches, goblins, and elves, there are, strictly speaking, no fairies in these stories.....
The reason is that when the tales first arrived in England, such "absurdities" were thought to be fit only for children, who were distinctly second-class citizens at the time. ... And since the tales were addressed to children, they were termed fairy tales and , by and large, gift-wrapped in a fairy-tale style that was supposed to appeal to children.
In the present century, however, and especially in the last few decades, the Tales for Young and Old....have, with no change on their part, become more and more modern..."

Do you think folktales still speak to adults?

Listening to the tale

"Filling up blank sheets of paper is, indeed, not the same as the sound of your own voice shaping a tale as it wells up out of your memory and as your own fancy plays with all its twists and turns.  And the best part of it is that finally by some mysterious process you find that you are listening to the tale yourself as much as the listeners around you."

Richard Chase, in the preface to Grandfather Tales.
Illus by Berkeley Williams, Jr.

"...somehow it works."

    "Let me explain something.  In some ways, nothing can be more preposterous than telling stories.  You think up some odd little ideas.  You make some noises with your tongue and mouth. You share your dreams and ideas with other people -- your listeners.  Everything I've told you about Jack Storyteller is true, yet the truth doesn't make his story any less preposterous.  The same for any other story.  Yet somehow it works.  The dreams spread from your mind to theirs.  The sounds you make, the stories you tell, release the dreams into the world."

     "One last thing.
What matters most is that you live your own story to the fullest and that you tell it well.  Make sure you fully develop your main character.  Fill the tales with lots of other characters -- men, women, children, even animals --who tell their own stories.  Make your listeners laugh or cry...or even sneeze.  Have lots of twists and turns in the plot, but not too many, before you reach your final resolution.  Then, when the day is done, you can feel confident that your characters have been fulfilled, your craft mastered, your story well told."

from
Storyteller
by Edward Myers

Jack Storyteller

  "At that moment Jack reached an insight, one he never forgot: a bee in a story could tickle worse than a real bee.  He realized, too, that a story peach could be sweeter than a real peach, a story flower more fragrant than a real flower, a story song more melodious than a real song.  What existed in a story could be more real than what existed in the world.  And by reaching this insight, Jack understood the true power of his art."

-Edward Myers

The purpose...

"But the purpose of stories was to take the ugly, terrifying truths with which one must live and turn them into brave and beautiful ideas one might love..."

Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory in Crown of Vengeance.

"Mise-en-abymes"

"People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire.  There'll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.

   Some such stories are themselves about the telling of others.  An odd pastime.  Seemingly redundant, or easy to get lost in, like a picture that contains a smaller picture of itself, which in turn contains--& so on.  Such phenomena have a pleasing foreign name: they are mise-en-abymes.

  We have just had a story of a story.  Tell it yourself, again, & story of a story in a story will be born, & you will be en route to that abyme.  Which is an abyss."

"Letting Characters Listen"

"Most storytellers quickly learn that giving characters voice – whether expressing inner thoughts aloud or speaking to other characters in the story – enlivens a telling and provides opportunity for vocal variety. But how many of us allow characters time to listen?"
-from an article by Mary Hamilton

Come learn from Mary Hamilton in our workshops on July 21!

You're a natural..

"...That's how I remember things, anyway. I remember stories.  I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story.  And the dots that don't fit into the story just slide away, maybe.  Like when you spot a constellation.  You look up and you don't see all the stars.  All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are.  But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.  Hassan told me once you think like that, too --that you see connections everywhere --so you're a natural born storyteller, it turns out."

from An Abundance of Katherines by John Green.

Stories have changed...

“Stories have changed, my dear boy, " the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad.  “There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue.  Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case.  There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings.  The quests lack clarity of goal or path.  The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are.  

And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise.  Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead.  Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl.

 And is not the dragon the hero of his own story?  Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act?  Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey.”

From : The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern