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?

Storytelling with Folktales - Our next meeting

Once upon a time...

Join us for a meeting on Friday, April 19, at 6:30 pm at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Fee Lane in Bloomington.  We'll be talking about storytelling with folktales and sharing some stories.  IF you would like to share a story as part of this meeting, please email the coordinator at the Guild address.

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.

Divafest - The Storytelling Stage

You know we love those Divas, especially when one is our own Stephanie Holman....

Yes, this year Diva Fest  in Indianapolis features a Storytelling Stage.  Here's an opportunity for you to hear original stories told by four wonderful women on Sunday, March 10, from 2 - 5 p.m.

The program will be at Indy Reads Books, 911 Massachusetts Avenue, and tickets are $12.00 at the door.

Stephanie will open the program at 2:00 with three of her original stories, collected under the title "Move It or Lose It."   We know listeners will enjoy the ride!