Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Intimacy

by Gerard Houarner

I recently picked up another book of fairy tales – the Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar, from Norton. I have sizeable library of this kind of stuff and really don’t need any more material, but you know how it is – I still have my Bullfinch’s from the 60’s but I also picked up the latest edition, too, because it was….fresher.

The first section of the book features illustrations - Scenes of Storytelling - dating back to the late 17^th century. Most depict groups gathered around a storyteller in various home settings, some with spinning wheels in the background. The more modern illustrations focused the sense of intimacy by showing a mother and child bonding over a story

I was reminded of Native American storyteller figures, which in turn had me thinking of petroglyphs and cave paintings and Mayan and Aztec temple decorations and glyphs, some of which anthropologists believe were meant to be shared by fire light after taking hallucinogens.

And, of course, there are the campfire tales and songs, the legends recounted by bards for courtly audiences, the parables and lessons repeated in sacred spaces by priests for their followers and students.

Just as all this was percolating in my feeble brain, Linda and I were invited along for a Ghost Tour of lower Manhattan, conducted by Gordon Linzner, and sponsored by the Garden State Horror Writers Association. Gordon, besides being the former publisher of Space and Time magazine as well as a licensed NYC tour guide (yes, there are licenses for these things, and tests, as well – accept no substitutes or amateurs!), greatly enjoys the performance aspects of storytelling. So we wandered about the East and West Village for three hours as the sun set and night closed around us, hearing various tales of murder and mayhem by a guy in a cape and top hat, sporting a wolfshead cane, while hordes of young folks partied on around us, oblivious to the bloody ground on which they staggered. We had fun.

The associations eventually led me to the idea of intimacy, and how stories have always been a way for people to bond, both with the storyteller and each other, while receiving warnings and promises about life, and other cultural information, in the form of characters and their adventures.

I was reminded of how intimate not only hearing stories can and should be, but of the kind of focus humans sink into when engaged in the performance of a play, or watching a movie in a big, old-fashioned theater, or gathered in circle listening to music while surrounded by darkness. There is an intensity of emotion and connectivity (between story and audience, and among audience members) that transcends the kind of entertainment meant to simply pass the time. There’s a connection with the moment that creates a deeply satisfying experience, a memory that lingers past the normal expiration date of everyday life. Maybe, a bit of meaning spontaneously combusts in our fleshy shells, creating the belief that there’s a purpose to our lives.

Well, whatever.

There’s no getting away from how intoxicating communing with the arc of a story can be. Competitive sports is nothing if not a story, each contest a conflict complete with characters and a resolution, the stakes rising over the course of a game, a season or a set of trials until a champion emerges. Sadly, shopping and the consumer economy can also be looked at as a story, the hackneyed remains of primal hunting cave paintings.

Definitely, whatever.

I also remembered the rush I once enjoyed while reading Vance and Dostoevsky and Tolkien at various stages of my life, experienced only infrequently these days because there’s so little time to read and so much of it irritates me. There’s a powerful sense of intimacy, not so much with the writer but with the story, that roots the reader in his or her own imagination, transported there by someone else’s words.

What’s involved in this intimacy? Interaction. In the case of traditional, oral storytelling, there’s the sense of community, of being in a physical place and specific time, sharing an experience that is only partially rooted in the physical world. The real “magic” (and how I’ve struggled to avoid using that word – but I don’t want to google human neural activity and start talking about the chemicals we create in our bodies to transmit pleasure, either) happens in the head. Something happens, through the power of words or music or imagery, that elevates a bunch of people sitting around into a community sharing a common experience.

So one point I can drag out of this reverie that might be relevant to this blog would be the importance of treating public readings as more than an opportunity to mumble one’s way through one’s own story. There’s some “game” involved, theatrics, showmanship. A little training, perhaps. It’s worth the trouble to practice, to read aloud, to spend some time with a teacher, because a reading is an opportunity to widen an audience, if only by one or two folks. Maybe people might actually show up for conventions readings if a certain kind of reputation was built up. Call it a throwback to the old days of campfire tales. Not every story is going to work in such a situation. But a darkened bar, or even a painfully bright hotel meeting room, can still play host to a great experience for listeners who will want to know more about your work.

That’s an obvious point. More useful, perhaps, might be a question along the lines of what some others have talked about here and other places: where are the places people are going to for their stories? Where else is that sense of intimacy being created? Where are the new camp fires? Temples?

Okay, outside of professional wrestling. And maybe politics. Oh, yeah, and sports.

Heartening to me are the numbers being pulled down by young adult authors, beyond Potter. Yes, there seems to be a lot of dark romance involved, but there’s also a love of traditional story being nurtured, with characters and emotional throughlines and a use of the fantastic as metaphor for bigger, deeper concerns. Younger readers may have a lot more of themselves to give to what they read than adults, who are less distracted by hormonal changes and more involved with day-to-day survival. Whatever’s happening, there seems to me to be a very deep, intimate connection with the stories they’re reading. They’re immersed in their own “golden age” of writing. Future readers in training. Or, if not specifically readers, future seekers of stories beyond the stuff you get off the digital channels, the stuff that doesn’t involve too much interaction.

Games. They seem distant to me, locked into a certain kind of mode, stuck in the shallows or back currents of story, with a pulp a focus on action and setting, maybe not so much on character beyond a role necessary for the action of occur. Maybe I’m wrong, I’m just watching and listening to others play from the outside. I certainly haven’t been drawn to game play, which tells me something. I get bored. I can never get away from the fact that I’m playing in someone else’s backyard, and the options are very limited, and the visuals still look like cheap SciFi Channel movie CGI, and there’s nothing interesting for me to do. People tried to get me involved in Second Life, but seriously, I have enough with my First Life. There’s no real point for me in that kind of interaction, in that form of intimacy. I can’t even get into message boards. Obviously, I’m too old.

But there’s a hell of a lot of interaction in game play. Friends and family lose themselves in these things (when they could be reading my stories, or yours!). There’s intimacy, with others and with what’s happening in the gameplayers’ heads. And story.

I don’t know how to tell stories for this medium. I need a Photoshop program for reality and for what goes on in my head. A super typewriter. Bigger words. I’m thinking games which force players to change roles depending on choices made, which throw in plot changes from larger forces going on in the game’s background (higher levels), would be interesting. Of course, there’s commercial hell to play if the player is forced into unwanted roles. Not my problem. But there’s a hell of a lot of interaction.

Back to more traditional storytelling.

Podcasting is a blast back to storytelling roots – a human voice, telling a story, using a device that whispers the words right into your head. James Patrick Kelly won a Nebula for story “published” this way, and has an interesting deal with audible.com for podcasts of his stories. So in this multi-tasking world, you can have music coming through your ear buds, or stories.

There’s something called a cell phone novel in Japan, and they’re turning into best sellers.

So, the point? Hmm.

Rekindling the magic of storytelling through emerging technology. Saving the power of words and language in the face of non-verbal imagery. Renewing the bonds of community, humanity (hotlink to your favorite anthem here), and storytelling by collaborating with readers while still retaining personal creative vision (okay, yes, I’m going sci fi). Looking for the audience. Saving books. Telling stories.

Filling a spot on the blog with….whatever.

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