Atmo – Assignment 1.5

I have a great story to tell you. It began long ago before the world was full of hate and distrust. Well it was long before humans. Atmo who was an entity without mass had been growing tired of floating from universe to universe, planet to planet when it came across Earth. At this time there was only early life and so it decided it might as well see where this life goes, like he had done many times before.

After patiently waiting, humans evolved. However, Atmo hadn’t remained patient. Many years had passed and the entity had grown isolated, desolate, and resented the creatures for taking so long. Atmo had planned on providing the newly formed beings with love, forethought and compassion but it changed its mind after a couple hundred million years had gone by. Waiting.

As the first humans were beginning to develop and expand the population, Atmo made a visit late one evening. Atmo floated up the river to a small enclosure that housed the new creatures. It walked up the beach and gazed down upon their sleeping faces only to be reminded of the innocence that it had wanted from the beginning.

So now Atmo was torn about what to do with the creatures. He had planned on killing them and then moving onto the next planet but that had also grown tired for him. What would another planet get Atmo? Atmo was about to attempt something it had never done before with any other life forces.

Atmo decided not to kill this creature but instead to instill it with both love and hate, forethought and impulse, compassion and resentment. It created the good and the bad in all human beings because Atmo wanted to watch the creatures kill themselves. Atmo did sometimes laughed to itself and wondered if the creatures wished it would take the story back (King 10).

Storytelling is something I feel I do a lot in my day to day yet hadn’t really realized that when I asked a few friends and family to listen. Most were surprised by the content as it is totally different from the usual stories I tell. One commented that it was just weird and obviously fictional. I explained a bit about what the class was about and a few things fell into place in terms of what King and Chamberlin were discussing in terms of stories becoming part of our lives. I certainly felt very passionate towards Atmo and its desire to destroy the human creature while my listeners were not quite as caught up in the story, at least that is what it felt like.

However, I was just surprised that I came up with a story that made some sense related to how evil came about. I struggled with that. It took me some time to even consider what I might write about but then I just managed to sit down and wrote it in about 20 minutes. Once it began flowing, it became like a story that filled itself in and worked itself out. I barely had to put much thought into it however, I do admit, one listener did make the ending better with regards to wanting to watch the creatures kill themselves. This tells me that ideas for stories are always great when bounced off others.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories. New York : House of Anansi Press, 2011. Print.

 

 

 

 

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ColleenFish

Works in Mental Health and Addictions as a rehabilitation worker with Vancouver Coastal Health. I enjoy yoga, biking, watching supernatural TV series and reading.

2 thoughts on “Atmo – Assignment 1.5”

  1. Hi Colleen! I found it interesting how you stated that “stories are always great when bounced off others.” as I feel that this is an essential quality present in the practice of orality. As we have learned earlier in the course, when reading a novel in the most typical sense, the reader is often a passive element in the story. In this relationship the writer is in charge of conveying the story to the reader, and the reader’s job is to interpret the story of the writer. Thus the relationship becomes very one sided.

    However orality allows the reader to become not a passive interpreter, but also serve in influencing how the story is later told to new listeners. When you said that one of your listeners actually made your story better I realized that nothing would stop that listener from retelling your same story, with emphasis on certain elements that may have stuck more of a chord with him/her.

    So my question is that as a storyteller yourself, how do you think you can deal with this kind of fluidity inherent in oral storytelling, while still retaining the initial message from the original story that you want to convey (which is in this case to be careful of the stories you tell)? What techniques can you actually use when telling a story out loud, in order to deal with this particular issue?

  2. Hi,

    Sorry I took so long replying. I ended up getting sick and now struggling to catch up.

    I honestly am not sure how to answer your questions. I suspect people have considered this many times before especially those who live within cultures that focuses on orality rather than the written and so I suspect they would have much better ways of managing fluidity inherent in oral storytelling. My instinct tells me there isn’t much you can do and that is part of the risk you take when wanting to convey stories that retain the initial message. Not sure if you played this as a child but it reminds me of the game ‘telephone’. One person tells something to another and that person tells it to another and by the end of the line, the final message is completely different from the original. While playing this game, people do their best to stop the message from changing but it still changes so is there a way of preventing the message from being changed when relating oral stories, perhaps repetition of the original story over and over again rather than telling the story once and then moving to another may assist in preventing the changes.

    Given that oral stories have been maintained for many generations in various cultures around the world, I suspect they had to learn the original story and retell it as is before being allowed to transmit the story onto the next generation. A sort of control over the telling of the story by the elders, if you will. However, I am not part of those cultures and therefore, this is just my theory of how stories may have been maintained. Of course, my story didn’t have this control and in fact, I embraced the changes made.

    Thanks for your comments, they certainly made me wonder how oral stories are maintained over generations due to the fluidity that might result.

    Colleen

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