Lesson 1:3

Lesson 1.3 Introductions to Thomas King and Story

Topics

  • Review of blog questions
  • Student commentary on blogs
  • Introduction to Thomas King
  • Storytelling: taking the story out of the text

Learning Objectives

At the end of this lessons students will be able to:

  • Initiate and maintain online discussions with your classmates
  • Make some comparisons between Chamberlin and King’s understanding of how story works.
  • Explain what happens when you take the story out of the text

Lesson Description

This lesson has two parts. We begin with re-visiting our questions in lesson 1:2 and end with a reading of Thomas King’s first chapter in The Truth about Stories. Because this is a two-part lesson, there are also two small assignments required.

Assignments:

Assignment# 1:4/ Please see due dates on the Course Schedule 

Students are required to read two student blogs and post a significant and relevant observation or question in the comment box of each blog. By significant I mean; the comment offers a new insight or a new example from the text that will enlarge the original answer, or a question with some measure of complexity, or a criticism supported by evidence from the Chamberlin reading or another scholarly source.

Assignment1:5 Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

Your task is to take the story about how evil comes into the world, the story King tells about the Witches’ convention in Chapter One of The Truth about Stories, and change it any way you want, except the ending. You can change to place, the people, the time – anything you want. But, your story must have the same moral – it must tell us how evil came into the world and how once a story is told, it cannot be taken back.

First, learn your story by heart, and then tell the story to your friends and family.

After you have told the story a few times,  post a blog with your version of the story and some commentary on what you discovered about story telling.

Required Readings

  • Instructor’s Blog
  • Two Student blogs.
  • King, The Truth About Stories, Chapter One: You’ll Never Believe What Happened Is Always a Great Way to Start.

Required Viewing & Listening

  • 2003 CBC Massey Lectures, Thomas King, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas.
  • Interview with Thomas King (October 2009) by Jordan Wilson. This webpage includes a video file and a transcript of the interview: http://canlit.ca/interviews/21

Lesson 1:3 Introduction to Thomas King

A good way to learn more about Thomas King and his thoughts on how story works, is to listen to his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Follow this link to CBC Ideas website, http://www.cbc.ca/ideas . We will also read the published version of this talk, but I highly recommend listening as well as reading. Another good source for learning more about King and his place in Canadian literature is found on the Canadian Literature website; Another Interview with Thomas King (October 2009) by Jordan Wilson. This webpage includes a video file and a transcript of the interview. Follow this link: http://canlit.ca/interviews/21

You can also refer to King’s biography on the University of Guelph’s website, where King teaches with the English and Creative Writing Departments.

Telling Stories

“There is a story I know. It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle, and each time someone tells the story, it changes” (emphasis mine, Thomas King, 1). So begins a book full of stories. As we’ve seen from our observations in lesson 1:2, once a story is written down, it loses this kind of ability to change. As King puts it, “the printed word after all, once set on a page, has no master, no voice, no sense of time or place” (154).  As you read the five stories that King tells in this first chapter, reflect back on what Chamberlin says about how words “bring us close to the world we live in by taking us into the world of words”. With King we begin to reshape that notion a little. In King’s tradition, stories create the world and imagination is reality, or as King puts it: “The truth about stories, is that that is all we are” – simply, “we are the stories we tell ourselves” (153). In one sense, this understanding of story nicely conflates Chamberlin’s eloquent axis of contradiction between imagination and reality; the contradiction that he urges us to recognize as a false choice. In another sense, if stories create the world, than does it follow that every story is a creation story?

King begins with stories about his mother and his father, personal stories that he says are of no interest to anyone but him and his brother. These stories, he says, are really about “how stories control our lives” (9). This power that stories have over us, can be dangerous. To exemplify this point, King tells us Lelsie Silko’s story about how evil came into the world with a story. This is one of my favorite stories. People everywhere love to listen to this story: a story about a story too horrible to tell. Next, comes a creation story: the story of Charm and all the water animals working together to create a world. A recounting of Genesis follows this charming story, but told in a very different voice. With these five stories, King offers us a few different challenges. One of the challenges is to grapple with the storyteller inside a text. King brings our attention to this paradox in a few interesting ways; one of these is the way he begins every chapter with the exact same paragraph – it never changes.

King offers us an interesting intersection to explore, an intersection where the storyteller and text are travelling together. Perhaps this particular intersection needs to be conceptualized as “a roundabout”? At any rate, in order to explore what is happening here, we are going to take the storyteller out of the text and see what happens. After all, King invites us to do what we will with his stories, “just don’t say you never heard that one” (29).  So, this is your second assignment for this lesson, and it is not very difficult, I do it all the time. We are going to take the story about how evil came into the world.

First, you’ll need to change the details to suit the time and place of your telling, and then memorize your story by heart, and then tell the story to friends and family.  Begin with, “I have a great story to tell you.” You can change any element of the story; the setting, the characters, the era, but you cannot change the ending. In the end, you always have to be careful of the stories you tell, and perhaps more importantly – the stories you listen to.

When you are finished, post a blog with your version of the story and some commentary on what you discovered.

 Works cited:

Chamberlin, J. Edward. “A New History of Reading: Hunting, Tracking, and Reading.” For the Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Brathwaite. Ed. Timothy J. Reiss. Trenton: Africa World. Print. 2001. 145-164.

Erin K. Edwards, David A. Wiley. “Online Self-Organizing Social Systems: The Decentralized Future of Online Learning. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, v3 n1 p33-46 Spr 2002.  Web. April 04 2013. http://opencontent.org/docs/ososs.pdf

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

MacNeil Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory.  Uchicagoedublogs. 2007. Web. 19 Feb. 2013

Stuart Glogoff. “Instructional Blogging: Promoting Interactivity, Student-Centered Learning, and Peer Input.” Innovate 1 (5). 2005. Web. April 04 2013.