Storytellersunplugged

by Gerard Houarner 

For the recent World Horror Con in Salt Lake City, Utah, I was placed on two folklore panels. This happened on the con’s first night, back to back, after twenty hours of travel and the usual greetings, reunions, time adjustments and hotel issues that come with these gatherings. Much more con and travel time has passed since, so my brain hasn’t been able to quite hang on to every detail. However, I thought that just the idea of this kind of discussion was valuable and I’ll try to share a few scribbled notes and recollections.

This was the first time I’d been on such panels or even seen them at a horror con. I’m sure it’s a more common panel theme at fantasy/sf gatherings, or maybe I haven’t been around for a while. Usually I’m called on to discuss the merits or faults of gore or violence or the extreme, with occasional forays into the process of editing or writing. I was really happy to be a part of this discussion because I often reach into myth for story structure and ideas, and I’ve hit on folk magic and trickster tales for a number of stories.

Certainly horror as a genre, intertwined with supernaturally inspired thrillers and suspense fiction, has grown from folk tale seeds – vampire, werewolf, zombies, ghosts, etc. (even though the influence these days seems to come down to writers second hand through movies and games). Legends and folk tales are the foundations of the fantastic and the dark.

I also had just finished an interview focusing on folklore/urban legend questions before attending WHC, so there’s something in the air. Perhaps, in the visually/viscerally overloaded/overwhelming multi-media environment in which we find ourselves, creators and even members of the audience are looking to connect with the deeper meanings and emotional contexts behind flashy effects and over-the-top story ideas.

The first panel focused on Horrific Folklore (Horrific fiction has always drawn from folk tales and legends – what is it about folklore that touches our psyche?), moderated by Steve Rasnic Tem, w/Yvonne Navarro, Michael Potts (professor and budding fiction author) and JoSelle Vanderhooft (poet and Stoker nominee).

Aside: Steve contacted all of us ahead of time with some questions and asked for suggestions for further lines of inquiry. Then he showed up and introduced each of us himself, having researched our backgrounds. I was already in awe of his fiction, and now I’m stunned by his thoroughness as a moderator. There’s a lesson for panel moderators….

Anyway, one of the discussion threads focused on how intensely grounded most of the writers on the panel were in folk tales from their native regions. Most were from the South, and when coming up with ideas relied to varying degrees on stories and characters they grew up with in their particular towns and counties.

Being a city boy from an immigrant background, I was at a disadvantage in terms of conjuring stories from local legends, but I suppose I filled that emotional childhood void by gravitating to myths. I did get a sprinkling of “old country” stories from the family gathering dinner tables, but alas, a lot of that was told in old-country Breton, the language of adults in my upbringing.

There was talk as well of family specific folk tales carrying fears, attitudes, traditions within the clan – the audience reacted strongly to this idea, offering up their own experiences in hearing about and keeping family specific stories about ancestors or heirlooms.

Steve talked a bit about a book he’d brought along, The Silver Bullet and Other American Witch Stories, an old collection that came out of a WPA project gathering regional legends. You can often find these kinds of tales collected by enthusiastic locals in chapbooks at town bookstores. Tour guides like my buddy Gordon “Space and Time” Linzner in NYC and site specific cemetery/ghost/haunted tours are another way to tap into source material.

A couple of scribbled comments: folklore handles death in ways other forms don’t (JoSelle’s work being an example), and folklore gives narrative structure and meaning to family lives. They explain mysteries.

There was also Steve’s fundamental observation that people will believe anything (just look at the lore and legend that evolves from politics). He was focusing more on the odd connections that are made between doing a particular thing to get a specific result, and how those connections are passed on as fact (Von talked about burying something – and now I can’t remember what! – to help sell your house).

There was also a very interesting ethical issue brought up in the use of cultural folk tales in modern stories, illustrated by the example of a tribe refusing to let an author transcribe the tales they’d shared because they belonged to the people of the tribe and were not meant for outsiders. Certainly many religions have “secret rites” and levels of initiation, with private stories meant to carry on particular lessons and beliefs.

The second panel, Urban Legends as Fodder for Horror Stories, included Hank Schwaeble, Steven Shrewsbury, Nate Southard, with Weston Ochse as moderator.

Second aside: “Moderator” – yeah, right – I arrive seconds late and the bunch of them say I’m supposed to moderate, like I don’t work every day in a psychiatric hospital and can’t handle warped reality, so I play along and have them introduce themselves and ask a question and make some comments, and in pretty short order the lawyer among us is taking over as lawyers do and the panel is flying.

Afterwards someone from the audience congratulated me on a well-run panel, so I’ll take that as strange little convention panel folktale to pass along to others as a warning – always be first at the table at the front of the room, and don’t trust three guys with last names all beginning with “S” when they’re teamed with another guy whose last name sounds like the name of a tree.

Anyway, the panel debated the meaning of urban legends, as well as the relationship between urban legends and folklore. I thought folklore had a more cultural context and mission in terms of communicating beliefs, values, history, knowledge over generations, while urban legends (a term which irritates me because these “modern” legends are not necessarily “urban”) were more recent, and associated with the mysteries of technology and modern living (alien abduction and alligators in the sewers). College campuses were identified as a huge vector for transmission of these viral legends. I thought The X-Files was pretty much an encyclopedia of urban legends, from conspiracies to aliens to toilet monsters.

Science is the new magic? Well, maybe pseudo science, like the uncorroborated “facts and findings” that worm themselves into the heart of personal financial or health or even governmental policy decisions.

As with the first panel, this one was very well attended with a free flow of thoughts between panelists and audience. Once again, most of the writers were passionate about grounding their stories in some kind of folklore, either “real” as in the kind to be found already circulating out in the world, or made up for use in the story.

I suppose in a publishing world where procedurals, serial killers, detectives and criminal suspense seem to be taken a bit more seriously and are perhaps more popular because, of course, they are “realistic,” I found it refreshing to return to primal metaphors for human darkness. Certainly the roots of modern storytelling are in the campfire explanations offered by the first masters of language to listeners eager to understand both the mysteries of their existence and the night sounds coming from just outside the circle of their flickering light. The experience renewed my hope that not all things supernatural and mythic are destined for the scrap heap.

By the way, hi to the SU crowd I ran into at WHC – Mort, Richard, Brian, Deborah – and sorry I missed Alexandra and Cody (I think I missed you guys, though maybe I just don’t remember because, well, like I said, con and travel time, etc — and what happens at these conventions stays there …right?).