As I start this final entry, I must reflect on the fact that some of these connections are entirely personal and rooted in my own experience/privilege/etc. Then more of it will come from Jane Flick, and the rest from a kind of communal shared knowledge – that of the Western Canadian community I’m from.  

“There were color bars on channels two, four, and eleven, static on channel twenty-eight, and a Western on twenty-six” (GGRW 180).

The first things Charlie comes across on the TV are the colour bars. For those who didn’t have this experience, colour bars were hard not to come across. Many television stations did not have late night programming and would display colour bars (and a tone) late at night. There, in the world of the book, King exposes Charlie to colour – separated, delineated, before he taking him into the world of the Western. King gives us first the test pattern, where the colours all co-exist on the same screen, but divided (if formatted correctly – none of the colours should bleed into each other).  Then static. A moment of change: a white noise, a blur of sound created. Finally, the Western. There was a chance (and perhaps King is allowing us this knowledge) that in the static the colours could have been blended together. If we look at the colours in the (what feels to me a very 90s sensibility) where they each reflect a different race, then in the black and white static there are two options: one, the lack of colour can subsequently only separate the colours further; two, that the static allows the colours to melt into one another and no longer have clear delineations. Through the Western though, we realize that the former has happened; the Indians will fight they cowboys and they will lose, because if they won “it probably wouldn’t be a Western” (GGRW 193). The Indians will always be separate in the sharply defined world of the cowboys.

Another allusion King makes, is the separation between Charlie’s past and future – simply in the naming of his companions. Portland (his father) is his past, wrapped up in the image of the Hollywood Indian; Alberta is his present (and potentially his future – certainly where he wants his future to go). One named after an American city, the other for a Canadian provence. Both given a separate location geographically, and growing in size. Portland (locationally) is smaller where Alberta is large and expansive. These two people both lay a certain amount of claim to Charlie during different periods of his life, and spatially they reflect it.

On the drive down to Hollywood – Portland amuses Charlie with stories of the people he left behind. Many of these names need to be spoken aloud to hear the phonological link that King is drawing attention to. It wasn’t until going back through Jane Flick’s work that I gained the allusions that King was trying to make. Sally Jo Weyha (GGRW 182) does sound like Sacajawea when said aloud, indeed most of these names (as pointed out by Flick) reflect early discoverers or explorers, most of which were connected to early colonization in the Americas (Flick 157).

When Charlie and Portland arrive in Hollywood, things are not the same as when Portland as successful there before. He is told as much by C.B. Cologne; the C.B. standing for Crystal Ball (GGRW 181). Certainly something that a mystical, fortune-telling named person tells Portland about all of his old pals that have died suggests a more literal interpretation of C.B.’s name. He is not just named after his mom’s favourite perfume (GGRW 181), but literally for a connection to the other side, a knowledge of death.

The final connection that I will talk about is about the cars. Charlie is driving his underdog Pinto to go and see Alberta. For those of you that don’t know this – a pinto (in addition to a compact Ford) is also a breed of horse. A rather beautiful one as well.

They are also quite a typically Western looking horse, on the cover (I’m sure) of at least a couple Louis L’amour novels. Pinto’s are distinguished by the blending of colour of their horsehide, they need a certain amount of colour differentiation to distinguish them from a solid coloured horse (that may have sections of another colour – usually along their forehead). King ties the car to something perhaps Charlie is dealing with himself, the blending of a certain amount of white culture vs. that of his ancestry. The co-existence of both colours, both backgrounds, on one man.

Works Cited

“Biography” The Official Louis L’Amour Website. Internet Trading Post LLC, n.d. Web. 10 Aug. 2015. <URL>

Elybaster. “KING TV5 Seattle – Test Pattern 1980s” YouTube. YouTube. 04 March 2011. Web. 9 Aug 2015. <URL>

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999): 140-172. Web. 9 Aug 2015.

Ink it up Trad Tattoos Blog. “Post 108995610661.” tattoome.tumblr.com.  Tumblr. Web. Accessed 9 Aug 2105. <URL>

ItsWolfeh. Elsa, Pinto Horse. 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia. Web. 9 Aug 2015. <URL>

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: HarperCollins P, 1993. Print.

3] What are the major differences or similarities between the ethos of the creation story or stories you are familiar with and the story King tells in The Truth About Stories ?

When approaching any creation story, I must take a minute (of course immediately after writing those words I then stand up – pour a cup of coffee, switch seats and settle in – a literal and figurative minute), because creation stories to me (even our own scientific story of creation, the Big Bang), always feel a little dissociative. They always seem to be out of my language: they are expressing ideas that I can barely grasp. It seems, at times, I can barely hold onto the size of the world, for a new discovery can make a city that feels so small seem, once again, endless. In elementary & high school, they showed us a video from 1968 to try to put the size of life on this earth into perspective, I’m sure others of you have watched it: The Cosmic Zoom. (The National Film Board of Canada produced that 8 minute bad boy). So, I would say that I have an understanding of that concept. Of the largeness of this specific galaxy. However, to then take that concept and apply it to how the UNIVERSE began – that is just so beyond my understanding. Like I can look at renderings of the big bang and say “ah, yes, I understand” but it has this largess behind the idea. So much so that thinking of the big bang (hell – even thinking about dinosaurs) feels like thinking about the surface of the moon being like cheese.

All of that is to just put into perspective how other worldly and bizarre all creation stories/myths/etc seem (to me). Fundamentally, I can believe them but not without this separation between my existence and these ideas. Simplified: all stories of creation feel like myths to me, even if I know that they are “fact.”

Tom King really plays with these ideas of creation in Green Grass, Running Water. They exist in two planes, one foot at the start of life on earth, reflecting all creation, and another foot in the recent past, showing the shadows of all of the issues that effect us still. He weaves pop culture representations of Indigenous people throughout these stories. Importantly, King does not name the Indian women after the Native sidekicks – instead, he gives them the names of the leading men (and they are usually men). They are given positions of “white” authority; however, in all of their tales, their renaming of themselves does not affect the militaristic reaction that they are received with.

Call me Ishmael, says Changing Woman.
Ishmael! says a short soldier with a greasy mustache. This isn’t an Ishmael. This is an Indian.
Call me Ishmael, says Changing Woman again.
All right, says the short soldier. We know just what to do with unruly Indians here in Florida. And the soldiers drag Changing Woman down a dirt road. (GGRW 225)

The authority of the names of these white, leading men still does not give them the authority to walk their own path. The idea of being both Indian and Ishmael is impossible, the two are mutually exclusive to the soldiers, to the enforcers of controlling standards.

This inclusion of contemporary pop-culture is one of the most dissociative ideas for me in relation to his creation myths. The constant root to the present is hard for me to then reimagine as a “creation” story; however, it certainly does reflect the contemporary effects that these stories and names and characters still have on us. The idea that these past-pop culture icons can still evoke righteous principles, even with their outdated morality is both frightening and important to remember.

Works Cited:

Curious Curious. “Cosmic Zoom (High Quality)” YouTube. YouTube, 02 Sept 2008. Web. 8 Aug 2015. <URL>

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: HarperCollins P, 1993. Print.

Wallace and Gromit. “A Grand Day Out – Landing on the Moon – Wallace and Gromit.” YouTube. YouTube, 30 Apr 2015. Web. 8 Aug 2015. <URL>

5]  In her article, “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel,” Blanca Chester observes that “the conversation that King sets up between oral creation story, biblical story, literary story, and historical story resembles the dialogues that Robinson sets up in his storytelling performances (47). She writes:

Robinson’s literary influence on King was, as King himself says, “inspirational.” When one reads King’s earlier novel, Medicine River, and compares it with Green Grass, Running Water, Robinson’s impact is obvious. Changes in the style of the dialogue, including the way King’s narrator seems to address readers and characters directly (using the first person), in the way traditional characters and stories from Native cultures (particularly Coyote) are adapted, and especially in the way that each of the distinct narrative strands in the novel contains and interconnects with every other, reflect Robinson’s storied impact. (46)

For this blog assignment I would like you to make some comparisons between Harry Robson’s writing style in “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England” and King’s style in Green Grass, Running Water. What similarities can you find between the two story-telling voices? Coyote and God are present in both texts, how do they compare in character and voice across the stories?

In Green Grass, Running Water, author Thomas King allows for the segments in the novel between the four old indian women (and coyote) to feel dialogic and have elements that seem inherent to speech and not necessarily to writing.

Where did all the water come from? says that GOD.
“I’ll bet you’d like a little dry land,” says Coyote.
What happened to my earth without form? says that GOD.
“I know I sure would,” says Coyote. (GGRW 38)

The dialogue where Coyote isn’t either apologizing or asking questions, usually promotes Coyote to be of a single track – overlapping and responding to his own speech and less reactive to that of the other characters. This is a characteristic that is often associative of speech and not of narration in a novel. In this passage, Coyote also seems to have knowledge before and beyond the characterized “GOD”, perhaps associating this God characterization to knowledge that isn’t connected to the stories being told by the old Indian women. This puts Coyote into a position of knowledge beyond that of western omnipotence. It is no surprise that shortly after in the story god has a new adjective, “that backwards GOD” (GGRW 39). God’s intentions or stories are directly in contrast with those of the four women.

Certainly, for me coming into contact with this story after reading Harry Robinson’s, Living By Stories, the character of Coyote had more authority than usually associated to a trickster character. One of my first interactions with the trickster was through the stories of Anansi the Spider. Often Anansi would fall into trouble and have to be saved by one of his sons (all that had a specific talent to help their father with. In these tales, although intelligent, the trickster often was in need of rescuing or alternatively, got others into terrible trouble while dodging their own confinement through intellect.

The Coyote depicted by both Robinson and King seems to represent something greater, for King certainly, Coyote needs to be guided much more than necessary. Through this King reasserts the interruptive dialogic feel into his narrative. Although Robinson does not have this same style of interruptive text, the pacing is similar in his text as it is in the segments of King’s book dedicated to the old Indian women. King often uses dialogic interjections like “oh, oh” (GGRW 39) or the narrative “you know” (GGRW 38) or “you get the idea” (GGRW 269) at the end of sentences. These kind of dialogic elements to the writing really help it become something that feels spoken as opposed to simply words on the page. The words spoken by Coyote and the old women are vocalized in my brain, where the more through-line story exists outside of me, on the page.

Robinson reflects similar vocalized patterns in Living by Stories, the slang like, “and was just forced, like.” (LBS 75); this in addition to replicating an oral grammar gives the whole story the sound of someone’s speech as opposed to a cut and dry narrator. Robinson also retains the “you know” (LBS 77) intermediary interjection and a very verbal pattern of “so, because”  (LBS 76) to start a sentence. All of these speech replications tie the language of Harry Robinson to a similar speech used by King’s old women. Although Coyote and God are very differently reflected, they really have a similar feeling because of the language used to describe them.

Works Cited

“Anansi the Spider (1972).” Picture Books Review. Blogger, 16 Jan. 2013. Web. 1 Aug. 2015. <URL>.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: HarperCollins P, 1993. Print.

Robinson, Harry. Living By Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. Print.

Since I was a kid, I have spent almost every summer working on a farm in the Okanagan. It was once a travelling theatre company, but at the end of the 70s they settled on a few dozen acres in the Spallumcheen Township. Despite only being there for a month or so, once a year, all the artists living and working there feel an ownership towards the lands during their time there. We are temporarily in this place, but for those of us that respect and love its location, we take it home with us in our hearts.

When I was 19, Harry, the technical director died in his sleep.

I found out over the phone walking through Stanley Park to the beach; I was on the greyhound the next morning. I arrived at night – the actors were rehearsing on set in the distance, they looked like figurines amongst the magnitude of the stage setting.

Even when all I wanted to think about was myself; how I felt, who I needed to see and talk to; the location we were on made all the people that I wanted to see at the mercy of their environment. They all came back at different times and as I greeted each person, I witnessed a vast display of grief, from almost jocular hellos to hugs that lasted minutes.

It was a tough summer, after opening the show we then planned a funeral for a person who had been our touchstone for years. He was who everyone took their questions to, the person who would make molehills out of mountains. We had his funeral at the farm, maybe 200 meters from where he had died. And we told stories. His daughters told stories about their dad as he was when they were kids, their own children running through the fields behind them chasing dogs and crickets. His son and the musicians on the show played the last songs that Harry had listened to the night he died. After we had told our stories his children got into his beat-up pick up truck, his coffin lying on a bed of pine branches, to drive his body to the funeral home. Three failed attempts to start the thing later, the truck started and they drove off on the bumpy country roads.

The few of us left had nothing to do, so we sat waiting for dinner on the porch and told the stories that weren’t so appropriate for the funeral. The carpenter that had offered to build his coffin told us that he had built it about 3 inches to short the first time. Writing this on a blog it’s hard to express how funny this story was as he told it. He was cursing and laughing, tears at the corners of all of our eyes. Of course Harry’s coffin was too small – it was a big joke on us that the one time the carp didn’t measure twice it was for his buddy’s G**D*** funeral. There we were, doubled over with laughter, tear stains on our checks from crying through the Okanagan dust, while the carpenter is shouting, “I couldn’t even f**king bend his knees enough to get the lid on!” That night, we sat around a (fairly) controlled fire and people smoke and drank and told more stories, rude stories, heartfelt stories; some people were missing from our ranks – still not quite ready to change tenses in their stories.

Half of us had been coming to this place for over 6 years (some for over 20), the other half had been there for only a couple weeks, but we were, all of us, permanent and temporary in the space. In a month, only the Artistic Director would be left, leaving the grief we had shared, the warmth of these stories, alone in the dirt and dust of these 80-acres that were our home, for a time.

When it comes my personal ideas of home, there is a sense of shared experience that creates a space rather than a permanence of location. Still, when I see people from that summer, there is a sense of home in their hellos. All of us were so fragile then, so easily broken and as a group we rebuilt ourselves together.  I’ve experienced death closely since then, but I’ve never again had the same community, the same home to rebuild myself within. That summer, almost a decade past now, allowed an ownership towards tragedy I’ve yet to experience again; we built the coffin; we hosted the funeral; we dug a grave for his ashes and the things he had left behind; we said goodbye.

It was hard for me here to tell this story without naming the people in it, in order to respect their grieving practice and their anonymity but as I wrote, I felt compelled to give a name to the person that brought out our stories, to Harry.

-J

Works Cited

“History.” Caravan Farm Theatre. The Caravan Farm Theatre, 2012. Web. 05 June 2015. <URL>

Gladstone, Amiel. “Harry van der Schee.” Theatre for People Who Hate Theatre. WordPress, 23 Aug. 2008. Web. 4 June 2015. <URL>

How chaos came into the world…

First – there were two worlds.

The first world was one of colour and chaos.

The second world was blank. It had edges and limits… The only people in the blank world were two siblings: Twins.

One was strict,

and the other was loosey goosey.

Together they would create the world during the day, and at night it would be erased.

They did this for a long time, until one day – they found some colour. After years of thin lines the twins decided they wanted to see some colour in their world.

The loosey goosey twin painted first, long strands of green that developed into an outlandish tree.

The second twin painted a tree that stood strong, tall and lush.

That night the twins slept and overnight the trees grew their own personalities.

The twins were surprised that their trees hadn’t erased during the night, but they liked the trees and their new personalities, so they weren’t too worried. The twins were excited to have the trees to talk to, and the trees were excited about existing in this blank world. The twins went to sleep that night easily, knowing tomorrow they would have new friends.

The next morning the trees had attached to each other. The colour, it seemed, liked to grow and attach things together.

The twins decided they should add in a stream for the trees. The strict twin started with the stream,

and the loosey-goosey twin didn’t like that so much.

The loosey-goosey twin wanted the water to be different from the tree, so the twin let blue bleed in.

That night – the water filled out to be a whole ocean.

When the twins woke up they loved the ocean and wanted to create something to keep it company so they added a bit of sky.

The sky grew bigger and looked so lonely that the twins made it a nightlight so it would have some company while they slept.

While they slept, something happened…..

The nightlight grew.

The twins awoke to see the nightlight growing and growing…

Soon, the trees could no longer see anything but the nightlight.

The twins were worried about the nightlight – it was spreading so quickly… would it know when to stop?

The light surrounded them, and it didn’t have the balance they were used to… it seemed to them without both sides. And it got closer…

Before it touched them they made a barrier,

and it worked… for a bit… but the barrier didn’t want to keep the colours out, the barrier wanted to join in. So it began to spread. 

and it spread…

Until everything was covered. And the twins were left in a new world, different from the one at the start.

The twins would cover this layer in colour, and again and again until they had built up the layers of the earth.

I started painting this story thinking I would tell about evil entering the world, but as I painted I liked the colour more than I liked the blank world I began with so I changed my story to reflect that fact.

The twins were borrowed from the other story in The Truth About Stories (King 18). I was enamoured of the balance they brought to Charm’s story and I wanted to have the same balance. The colour then was less evil, but more chaos, building the world beyond their control. The idea that there was no created “evil” was one that I wanted to get across, but just like the witches story – when something affecting and chaotic is introduced it cannot be erased.

Thanks for sticking around – would love to hear your thoughts!

Work Cited

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003. Print.

Words. Chamberlin talks a lot about language, in particular the strangeness and wonder of how language works. Stories, he says, “bring us close to the world we live in by taking us into the world of words” (italics mine,1).  He describes learning to read and write as learning “to be comfortable with a cat that is both there and not there”  (132). Based on Chamberlin’s understanding of how riddles and charms work, explain this “world of words.” Reflect on why “words make us feel closer to the world we live in” (1). (Paterson)

While pondering how to start this week’s post, I was sitting at my desk at work looking at the list of shows in the rEvolver festival being presented at the Cultch. Last week, a fellow student spoke about the importance of naming; live theatre often relies heavily on show names to carry the weight of value for the show. Instead of a trailer or visuals, festival theatre relies on the few sentences in a brochure and word of mouth to secure audiences. This year, the festival has a show called Hell of a Girl: A Cowboy-Noir Opera, the write up for the show describes it thusly, “Hell of a Girl is a fresh take on the Orpheus myth, set in a timeless world with cowboys, nymphs and demons, and told through 26 original songs” (Hell of a Girl). I’m not going to lie – the description sold me; I grew up on folk and country music and black and white movies. (It was the 90s though, I swear!) So naturally, between the title and the description (or the naming and the definition) they had aroused my interest. Through a similar sense (of enticing old interests), the bits of J. Edward Chamberlin’s If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? that really resonated with me were his writings on cowboys and their language.

Grand Canyon

In his chapter “Doodlers,” Chamberlin muses on the lasting image of the cowboys, “maybe the appeal of cowboys has more to do with that conflict between wandering and settling down, and between the useless and the useful, than it does with their B-movie fights with the Indians” (35).  Certainly, cowboys exist in a space of inbetweenness, they are both free and yet bound to a location. In most imaginings they exist in the American plains, roaming throughout, but locked into that landscape. In my opinion the appeal of cowboys comes from the nostalgic freedom associated to them. Real cowboys exist in a time before fences and restrictions, a time before technology changed how we communicate. Communication for cowboys also exists in an inbetween space: in order to calm the animals they sing their speech, creating their day-to-day lives into an almost operatic state of being (Chamberlin 37). Their daily communication lands somewhere between the exaggerated performance space and conversational reality; therefore, in phenomenological performance theory, they exist in both the frontside (ie. their singing, hollering and performative elements) and backside (is. the cowboys themselves, behind the mask). In this way, their adoption of foreign terms into their “lingo” can be seen as another aspect of their performativity. As true cowboys they are self governing, their language must also exist solely for their usage, adapted and created for their tongue.

Cowboys worked and played with language, as they worked and played with everything else, creating a lexicon of technical terms lovingly twisted and translated into cowboy lingo: criollo was applied to cattle and horses as much as to people of mixed blood; reata migrated to “lariat,” vaquero to “buckaroo,” and dar la vuelta (wrapping the end of a rope around a saddle horn) to “dally”… (Chamberlin 37)

Words were the cowboys way of connected them to their world, or in Chamberlin’s terms, to make them “feel closer to the world [they] live in” (1). Their word creation almost has a sing-song quality to it, existing as an extension of their performance. This specific vocabulary creation was not new to the cowboys and is still used contemporarily; it’s easy to apply language creation to academic jargon that is used almost exclusively in academic circles, or like the lingo found exclusivity in most cliques or professions, e.g. performers, coders, lawyers, cops, teenagers, etc.

At this point I feel I should link back to the reasons I started my blog post talking about a new musical being created in Vancouver, because these nostalgic attachments still affect contemporary creations. Artists create with both one eye on the past and one on the future. We look at this pictures of epic expanse like the Grand Canyon and grazing horses, and feel desire or a connection to the freedom a wandering cowboy’s life represents. Their creation of lingo for their way of life exists with us still, through tradition and nostalgia, and we get often so lost in the dream of the epic past that we gloss over the statement that criollo was used synonymously for both cattle and people of mixed blood (37). The associative images surrounding naming can be passed down in their friendliest form, but these names still carry weight and the world they were born in.

Once, when I was little and swore in front of my mother, she said to me, “you can’t say it until you can spell it.” I wish at times she had asserted the same for words that fell casually into my vocabulary, that I shouldn’t say them until I know the history they carry.

Work Cited

BassClef707. “Brief Encounter (final scene).” YouTube. YouTube, 24 Feb 2007. Web. 22 May 2015.

Brenn, Moyann. “Horse.” Flickr. Yahoo!, 27 May 2011. Web. 22 May 2015.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.

“Festival About.” Upintheair Theatre. 16 Apr. 2013. Web. 22 May 2015.

Franey, Evan. “Introduction.” Liminal Space between Story and Literature. WordPress, 15 May 2015. Web. 22 May 2015.

“Hell of a Girl.” The Cultch. Web. 22 May 2015.

MinistryofStabbing. “Stan Rogers – The Maid On The Shore.” YouTube. YouTube, 26 Oct 2010. Web. 22 May 2015.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 1:2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genres May 2015. WordPress. Web. 22 May 2015.

Spolar, Steven. “Tom T. Hall – That’s How I Got To Memphis.” YouTube. YouTube, 15 March 2011. Web. 22 May 2015.

“The Cultch | Vancouver BC Theatre, Dance and Music.” The Cultch. Web. 22 May 2015.

“Dead Horse Pt First Light #2 — 9/2004.” Flickr. Yahoo!, Sept. 2004. Web. 23 May 2015.