Month: January 2019

I am three years old, and home is a big red house. Home is the purple bedroom where my brother and I play games and read stories before bed. Home is being the one who gets to sprinkle cheese on every time we make pizza. Home is hide and seek and putting my brother in the laundry hamper. Home is eating rhubarb on the porch and waving when the garbage men come on Tuesdays. Sometimes home is tantrums and time-outs, but feeling safe after.

When I am seven years old, home is reading Harry Potter with my mom at bedtime. Home is playing with my brother, combining his train sets and my dollhouse to make huge scenes in the basement. Home is staying late at the playground after school, and jumping into my mother’s arms when she comes to pick us up. Home is playing soccer twice a week even though I don’t want to, because my friends are doing soccer too. In winter, it’s sledding in the park and building quinzees in the backyard.

At Christmas, home is my family in Ontario. Home is sitting by the fireplace and drinking hot chocolate and laughing when my grandmother tells us sugar isn’t good for you, but brings cake to every meal. Home is getting to open one present on Christmas Eve this year because that’s what my cousins do. Home is listening to my mom sing while her brother plays the guitar. Home is music and

In the summer, home is the East Coast. We stay with my grandparents and run through red sand. Our cousins play games and we race through farmer’s fields across the street and look for foxes when the sun is setting. My grandmother shows me how to cook. Home is big family dinners, home is little silly games my Aunt (A beloved teacher) invents on the spot and commits to. Home is having a room specially decorated for when we arrive, and it’s crying when it’s time to leave. Home is knowing we’ll go back every year.

When I’m ten, home isn’t the big red house anymore. When we move, I hug each wall in the house and say thank you to it (Marie Kondo’s got nothing on me!). Now, home’s a big blue house with lots of windows and my own room. Home is expanding. Home is being able to run across the street to the neighbours and playing in the park nearby. Home is “Come home when the street lights come on” and “make sure you stay together.” Home is bouncing on the trampoline 500 times because that seemed like an impossible feat. It is the kid across the street with bright red hair and freckles, and her little sister that follows us when we go to get Slurpees. It is coming home when I feel awkward in a new school, taking off the uniform, and telling my mom about my day. It is an awful haircut and braces.

In high school, home is still the big blue house, but home is also evenings spent joking with friends and planning everywhere we’ll travel to when we have enough money. Home is sitting in pyjamas until noon on Saturdays while my family and I read, but it is also eating lunch each day with the same people and writing inside jokes back and forth when we don’t want to pay attention in class. Home is rereading Harry Potter on bad days. Home is the smell of chlorine from work. In twelfth grade, home is splitting apart as my friends scatter around the country and I drive to Vancouver. Home is the big mountains I leave behind.

In Vancouver, at the start, home is far away. Home is not my dorm room. Home is not the beautiful forests and mild climate. Home has -30 windchill and I’ve never missed it until now. Home is short phone calls and big care packages, and home is distance. In Vancouver, the only place that feels like home is the ocean. Over the years, this changes. Home is still across the Rocky Mountains, and I migrate back each summer like a bird. But slowly, home is also a quiet friend in my second-year courses, home is my double major and the group of people I volunteer with, and roommates that make me. Watch bad TV. Home is bonfires at wreck beach and late nights at IKB. Home is two places, sometimes even more.

Six months from now, home is a mystery. I do not know where I will be or where my friends will be, or what I’ll be doing. But I will have the ocean, and phone calls, and inside jokes and future plans. Home is an opportunity.

A photo from my most recent drive to Vancouver.

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I realized while writing this that Home doesn’t have a specific meaning to me right now. I tried to write it in a vignetted style to match my own fragmented definition, so I hope people will bear with me on this slightly experimental approach. I am excited to delve further into this topic!

 

Works Cited

“How to Build a Quinzee Snow Shelter.” Boy’s Life, boyslife.org/outdoors/outdoorarticles/2992/how-to-build-a-quinzee-snow-shelter/. Accessed 27 Jan 2019.

Stuever, Hank. “Marie Kondo brings something besides her famous tidying skills to reality TV: Gratitude.” The Washington Post, 30 Dec 2018, washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/marie-kondo-brings-something-besides-her-famous-tidying-skills-to-reality-tv-gratitude/2018/12/30/7f806e7a-0ad1-11e9-88e3-989a3e456820_story.html?utm_term=.a0a8aa322e97. Accessed 27 Jan 2019.

I have a great story to tell you about how evil was brought into the world of a young girl.

Little Girl once knew only one home. Her home was the valley, and the valley was safe. Her home was encapsulated on all sides, tucked into the landscape like a bowl. All around stretched tall, steep hills; too steep to climb, although many had tried. The valley provided all they needed; a clear, clean river, space to grow food and catch fish, with dozens of pink, purple, and red berry bushes, large trees for fruit and climbing, and tall grasses play in. The days were warm and mild, and the nights were punctuated only by the sounds of distant crickets and the quiet murmur of the river.

Each morning, as the sun peaked over the valley’s high walls, Little Girl’s mother took her by the hand and they walked barefoot along the river, collecting food for breakfast. They would walk as far as the Great Tunnel, where the river’s mouth met a long, dark hole in the mountain’s side that stretched endlessly far away into the dark. The village elders had covered the Great tunnel with leaves and branches, hiding it softly.

Each morning, when they arrived at the Great Tunnel, Little Girl would ask, “Mother, what’s on the other side of the tunnel?” and each morning her mother would say, “The tunnel leads to secrets and tricks. It is not safe, you must stay here.” Little Girl always nodded, and they ran together back home to share their breakfast.

One evening, when Little Girl wandered down the stream alone. Her mother was helping their neighbor, who had fallen that morning. She told Little Girl to collect some food for their supper and bring it back before dark, but Little Girl had gotten distracted, searching the river’s banks by the Great Tunnel for flowers to bring back with her. As the sun began to set, Little Girl reached down for a bright yellow flower and heard a soft voice on the wind.

“Hello” it said. Little Girl jumped up and looked around, but saw nothing. She began to run away, when the voice spoke again:

“Where are you going? I want to tell you three stories. Come and move these branches for me.” The voice whispered, and the leaves covering the tunnel brushed forward in the wind. Little Girl pulled the leaves aside and peered into the tunnel; she saw nothing.

“If you tell me a story, I can make it real. And then I will tell you a story, and you will make it real,” the voice said. Little Girl smiled. She told the voice about the flower bouquet she was picking for her neighbor, and the food she was sent to collect. With a gust of wind from the tunnel, the river reversed and a basket full of fruit, bread, and a bouquet of flowers floated towards her. Little Girl giggled. Then the voice took his turn and told of darkness and storms, which thundered over the valley. Little Girl was frightened, and told a story of fireflies that lit up the sky and pulled back the sun, and strong wind that blew the storms away; so it happened. The voice in the tunnel spoke about her neighbor and told a horrible story of injury and illness. Little Girl countered with a story of prosperity and watched as the river sent baskets of food to her village, as the trees grew bigger, and as she heard music coming from her village as they celebrated. The voice grew frustrated; he spoke of drought and sickness, of war, and fighting, and death; around her Little Girl saw the valley wither. The river sucked away dry. Armies rushed through the tunnel’s dry surface, charging and screaming and wielding weapons. Little Girl shouted, “It’s too scary! Take it back, take it back!” but the voice answered, “Once a story is told, it cannot be taken back. It is loose in the world.”

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I found this exercise surprisingly challenging. I used to enjoy creative writing when I had more time (although I would certainly never claim to have been particularly good at it), and returning to this assignment reminded me of how difficult it can be to communicate the thoughts in one’s head onto a page for others. I wanted to capture the way stories can be powerful and potentially dangerous, which is true even in the narratives we craft for and of ourselves, and for this theme to be clear in my writing and verbal telling of the story.

The author John Green is adamant in saying he believes that “Books belong to their readers“; similarly, I found myself wondering how my story would be interpreted on this blog, and even more so in my telling of it to others. I found telling the story to others to be multifaceted, and oddly insecurity-provoking; I wanted people to like my story, but I also wanted it to feel authentic. When there were parts my friends had questions about, I wondered if I should change the story or my telling when I told my next listener. It made the process feel both deeply personal, and oddly collaborative–which of course is how we learn from stories in the first place.  I am happy to have had the opportunity to write more, and imagine more, but am also interested in the way in which this process is collaborative with Thomas King, as well. So many ideas contribute to storytelling and inspirational, potentially even in ways we don’t recognize and understand (like the fallibility of our own memory). To imagine storytelling as anything less than collaborative seems incomplete.

Works Cited

Duncan, Suzanne. “The dark side of storytelling.” TED. 12 Jan 2016. Lecture. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SUIiF-ifIM. Accessed Jan 22 2019.

Green, John (@johngreen). “Books belong to their readers.” Feb 1 2014, 6:03PM. Tweet.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (CBC Massey Lectures) . House of Anansi Press Inc. Kindle Edition.

Ludden, David. “Why You Can’t Trust Your Memory (Of Anything).” Psychology Today, 20 Mar 2016, www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/talking-apes/201603/why-you-cant-trust-your-memory-anything. Accessed Jan 23 2019.

Photograph of Valley of the Flowers. Wander the Himalayas, 5 Important things to consider before undertaking Valley Of Flowers Trek, 12 June 2016, https://wanderthehimalayas.com/2016/06/12/5-important-things-to-consider-before-undertaking-valley-of-flowers-trek/. Accessed Jan 23 2019.

Explain why the notion that cultures can be distinguished as either “oral culture” or “written culture” (19) is a mistaken understanding as to how culture works, according to Chamberlin and your reading of Courtney MacNeil’s article “Orality”.

To define cultures as either oral or written creates a false dichotomy in which the superior concept of communication is separated into two distinct forms, with written communication often perceived as more elite and legitimate than orality. Courtney MacNeil suggests this divide denies the “possibility for an equivalency between printed and spoken word,” distilling the roles of communication, storytelling, and dialogue into a simplistic categorization. This false hierarchy reduces the complexity of stories and their role in transmitting knowledge, identity, culture, and establishing/solidifying relationships. This divisive model is preceded by a history of Eurocentrism that diminished the value of oral-based cultures through insidious colonization and systemic eradication of oral cultures via forced education in European language systems, especially in English (within Canada, this is salient in discussions of residential schools and their strategies for eradicating indigenous language use). In this conceptualization, orality is reduced to an inferior form of communication instead of being acknowledged as one of the foundational tools for human experience, relationships, and knowledge-sharing, constantly interdependent and engaged with other forms of communication and with the written word.

Cree children in a Saskatchewan residential school (“Language Loss” 2017).

Courtney MacNeil argues that our very definition of orality provides competing understandings of its function, existing both as a medium and as “existing in competition with other media forms.” She writes that the “framing of orality as a ‘preference’ or ‘tendency’ encourages its place within the paragon of the printed and spoken word, and suggests a single-sensory conception of media – that orality exists in a dialectical relationship with literacy, and that communication is a “competition between eye and ear,” drawing attention to the ways in which this viewpoint isolates communication forms instead of positioning them as interdependent upon each other.

To view orality and literacy accurately, we must instead begin to view them not as competitors, but as two components of the larger goal of communication. As Chamberlin writes, there is nothing inherent to spoken or written language that superposes one form over another; both are invented by humans, and are meaningless without the act of collective communities deciding to believe in them: “Building shape and meaning is what we do in our stories and songs. They are built on the arbitrariness of words and images, which is to say they are built on sand; but they are rock solid as long as we believe in them” (8). Chamberlin fundamentally argues that separating oral and written cultures is ineffective because it ignores their shared interest in beliefs, culture, and legacy. He points to the ways in which written language has been co-opted to try and remove the stories and voice of a collective people, as if “one could alter the way they thought and felt,” (18) and suggests that oral cultures “are imprisoned in the present…[and] understand the world in magical rather than scientific terms” (19). The view Chamberlin criticizes ignores the fact that oral cultures have engaged with symbolic representation through pictures, art, maps, woven cloth, beaded garments, hairstyles, clothing, and music throughout history (Chamberlin 19), just as MacNeil suggests modern technological advancements blur the line between dialogue and writing, and add new media to the way we capture stories, through video, radio, film, and, although not addressed by MacNeil, podcasts. These modalities transgress the dichotomy between writing and speech, and in doing so, redefine the way we understand storytelling.

Personally, when reading MacNeil and Chamberlin’s perspectives, I found myself considering podcasts and radio in terms of oral and written culture. Podcasts are a rising media form and walk the line between a very personal experience for the listener, where the story feels almost dialogic, and the necessity of podcasts to be written, edited, scripted and designed to be heard by multiple people. Moreso, many podcasts allow the listener to seek out multimedia forms on websites where individuals can expand on points with hyperlinks, images of featured guests, and discussion forums that allow for a sense of micro-community and expansive learning. I think multimedia forms and podcasts are a modern example of the “unclassifiable” communication forms referenced by Chamberlin and MacNeil.

Works Cited

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

Janke, Dwayne. “What Residential Schools Did to Aboriginal Languages.” Word Alive, Jan 2017, wordalive.wycliffe.ca/stories/what-residential-schools-did-to-aboriginal-languages. Accessed Jan 15 2019.

“Language Loss.” Stolen Lives: The Indigenous Peoples of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools, Facing History and Ourselves, www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/chapter-4/language-loss. Accessed Jan 15 2019.

MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality.” Uchicagoedublogs, The Chicago School of Media Theory, 2007, lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/.

Olamide, Ayedun. “Oral Traditions.” Academia, pp. 1-24,www.academia.edu/32464481/ORAL_TRADITIONS. Accessed Jan 14 2019.

Hi everyone!

My name is Charlotte and I’m in my graduating year in a double major in Psychology and English Literature. I’m looking forwards to working with all of you!

When I think about Canadian literature, I think of writing that is vast, diverse, and difficult to define. Even our most prolific writers, like Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Yann Martel, L.M. Montgomery, and Thomas King, explore a wide variety of topics, themes, and styles both within their own works and in comparison to each other. One criticism of Canadian Literature that I’ve heard in the past is that, as a consequence of our multicultural, geographically large country, there is not one congruent or consistent, identifiable genre within Canadian literature. One approach to this has been to study Canadian authors; however, this can even be further divided – we have Asian-Canadian writing, indigenous works, historically Canadian fiction, novels set in Canada, novels written by a Canadian but set elsewhere, among other classifications. I’m interested to see how our course approaches the ambiguity of who claims ownership to our land, stories, and literature when the boundaries are often so hard to define.

Our course seems to be tackling this notable challenge by focusing on the relationship between Canadian writing, Canadian space, place, and land, and the  association between stories and literature. I’m excited to explore, in particular, some of the ways place and history impact ownership of stories – particularly through our focus on indigenous writings and the corresponding transition between story mediums.

I expect the course to be an integrative, innovative, and collaborative way of exploring not only the content of Canadian literature and stories, but also the modalities, contexts, and methodology through which they are communicated and transcribed. I’m hoping the course will be an opportunity to open myself up to authors I may not have previously read and to provide a space to learn more about indigenous works and how individuals are working to reclaim what it means to study and write Canadian Literature in new contexts. I’m also hoping to expand my understanding of how Canada’s cultural and sociological histories have decided whose stories we have favoured as legitimate Canadian literature, and what can be done to diversify this understanding in the future.

I’ve included a photo I took Calgary below; Calgary is the first place I learned to understand what it means to be Canadian and the first place I learned to identify as “home”; I’m excited to continue broadening this understanding with all of you.

Works Cited:

“What Makes Canadian Literature Canadian?” Research and Innovation, University of Toronto, 11 Nov. 2009, www.research.utoronto.ca/what-makes-canadian-literature-canadian/. Accessed 9 Jan 2019.

Smith, Russell. “Why do we struggle with what makes Canadian Literature?” The Globe and Mail, 11 May 2018, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/why-do-we-struggle-with-what-makes-canadian-literature/article15536056/. Accessed 9 Jan 2019.

Whitehead, Joshua. “mâwacinikân: Moving Indigenous literature to the front in 2018.” CBC Arts, 19 Jan 2018, www.cbc.ca/arts/mawacinikan-moving-indigenous-literature-to-the-front-in-2018-1.4493517. Accessed 9 Jan 2019.