Thomas King relates a story in his Massey Lectures The Truth About Stories that he in turn received from Leslie Silko in her book Ceremony. I have taken this story and I have changed it. I’ve made it my own. And this feels like a crime. Stories are important. They are powerful and engaging, and they hold something about a culture that cannot be reached by any other words. I want to acknowledge that regardless of the changes I have made to this story, this story is not and will not be entirely my own. And the changes I have made also makes it something significantly different from the original. Passing on these stories is important, because stories have power, but how you use that power is consequential. For a prolific indigenous writer to pass on a story from another prolific indigenous writer, the story and the power that it creates may hold its integrity. But for this retelling to come from someone else, I acknowledge that this can only be done with the respect and understanding that these stories deserve, and I hope that despite these changes I have still done them justice.
So.
I have a great story to tell you. I heard this story once, about how evil came into the world. You’ll never believe what happened. There was no gift from the gods, no magic box or magic tree that someone was told not to touch. It was just the spirits of the world, coming together to tell their stories to each other. You see, way back then, that was how the world was made. The spirits tell their stories to each other, and when they listen to each others’ stories, what they tell become a part of the world. The spirits saw that there was no water, and so they told each other the stories of great lakes, and rushing rivers, and trickling streams, and vast oceans, and just like that the world was not just land anymore. The spirits saw that there were no trees, so they told the story of great oaks and pines, drooping willows, and blossoming cherry trees, and just like that, the land was covered in forests.
Now, to these spirits, they knew that the only audience that they had were each other, and for a while that was great! After all, having your stories listened to by other great storytellers feels good. But after a while, they got bored of telling their stories to other storytellers, they wanted others to see their stories for the beauty that they held. So, one day they decided to tell the stories of People so that they had an audience that could witness the stories that they had made in awe.
And at first the People loved the trees and the water and the many other things that the spirits had told into existence, but before long they were bored of the same stories of the land.
And so the spirits decided that they needed to get together and think about how they could give this gift of stories to the people of the land so that they, too, could appreciate the world that was created with them. One spirit told the story of powerful emotions such as romance and relief and humour. Another spirit told a story of adventure and strength and duty. Yet another spirit told the story of discovery and invention and creativity. All the spirits shared in their stories, and as they did this, the people were given a deeper understanding of the world and each other.
But one spirit did not share. This one spirit listened to all the stories and thought about what they all meant. When the other spirits asked them to share, at first they did not, not knowing what good their story would do. But eventually they did, and they told the story of suffering. Of emotions such as greed and anger and jealousy. Of pain and of hardship. And of Death.
When this spirit finished their story of all of these horrible things, the other spirits sat in silence. They basked in the horror of what had just happened. One spirit said, ‘no,’ as if in answering a question ‘no, thats not what we are doing here. This story won’t help the people understand our work.’ The others agreed and they watched as the people began to experience pain and anger and distrust.
‘Your story was powerful,’ the other spirits said, ‘but you have to take it back. Call your story back.’
But, of course, it was too late. Once you have told a story, you can never take it back. So, be careful of the stories you tell, and the stories you listen to.
My story is quite a bit different from the story that Thomas King tells. I also feel that it is more different from his version (or Leslie Silko’s) than the various versions of Turtle story that Thomas King tells are from each other. There is a reason for this. I honestly had no intended to go so far off the beaten track as I started writing, but I was still conscious of it as it was happening. I wanted to tell the story in my own voice, and because of that I needed to change the characters of agency. I know some folks who practice witchcraft, and while I don’t think that Thomas King’s story paints witches in a particularly bad light, it was just not likely that I would be telling a story involving witches in the way that they were portrayed. So, witches needed to change, but the problem was that regardless of the human characters I selected I couldn’t come up with a feasible reason why they would be telling these stories to each other. So I decided to use a blank slate, “Spirits” and let people fill their own understanding of what that meant into the role that they play. As the purpose of this story is to express that these stories have power, I decided to make that power tangible in the form of a short cosmology.
I really enjoyed writing this story. I love writing, and this was a wonderful way to write a story that had already had a specific meaning, and pour a little bit of my own meaning into it as well. The narrative of stories having power has been one that has stuck with me for quite a while so being able to amplify this narrative in what I wrote felt like a great opportunity to let loose a little bit.
After I had written what I wrote, and fought the urge to make further changes, I enjoyed several hours of practicing my story, and it brought me back to a feeling of engagement in story that I hadn’t felt since high school Drama classes. Being able to review the story that I was going to tell to the point that I could recite it by memory made me feel even more connected to the story that I wrote, and made it even easier to uncover layers of meaning almost intuitively. That feeling of connection made the story feel even more like it was mine, and something that I had brought into the world.
And I really enjoyed telling it to people. It felt powerful to have something that I had a hand in creating and watch how that affected other people.Telling the stories to others was nerve wracking. I am usually a bit of an improviser when I go up in front of crowds, so it took some effort to remember to stick to the script without literally reading what I had come up with. It clearly takes great skill and an abundance of practice to be able to recount an important story from memory.
But the also story felt final and centred in the moment in a way that written word does not: there was no going back, and no editing. As I presented my story to family over Zoom, it created an artificial separation between the storyteller and the audience. Zoom has the feeling of speaking through a tunnel, and it made it a little bit difficult to gauge peoples’ reactions to what I was saying. But even with this barrier, telling the story felt like a form of meditation.
Despite how proud I was for the work that I put into this story, and the affects it seemed to have on others, I also felt guilty about telling it. Perhaps I took the importance of my own voice too seriously as I wrote it. There maybe wasn’t a need to rewrite to the extent that I had, and I could have found another way to portray the storytellers within it. But I made the decision that I made when I started writing, and as a result I took a story that wasn’t mine and made it into something that feels entirely different. And despite this, because of the work that I put into it, it felt equally disingenuous to scrap what I had done and write something closer to a story that Thomas King would tell, as if that was the only way to share a story.
The power that stories hold had absolutely affected the way I felt about this particular story. The guilt I felt in changing the story is recognition of power, and recognition of how I might be carefully walking a line of privilege. While I don’t think that retelling or even changing a story is inherently bad, deliberately changing the way that it was told and the context within it still felt wrong, and I can only express this feeling of ill-ease as being a way that this power manifests. Like being handed a loaded weapon, while meaning no harm.
Stories feel sacred to begin with, and something that you should not mess with if you can help it. But reciting the story had an immediate quality that kept me locked into the zone in a way that written word just doesn’t compare. And the feeling of putting the words out there had a feeling of ownership and finality that made me more connected to the story than when I had simply written the words down.
The power that storytelling holds is abundantly clear to me after this experiment, and despite my conflict I feel empowered to engage with it again.
4 replies on “Blog 1:5 :: Storytime”
I very much enjoyed your story! I was reminded of my own – in my story too there is the idea of language and story itself “shaping” the physical world. This brings to mind Edward Chamberlin’s introduction for “If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?”, where he writes of stories telling “people where they came from, and why they are here” (2), and how they shape our truths, with the “reality of our lives” being “inseperable from the ways in which we imagine it” (2). Stories provide morals, beliefs, truths in themselves through which the world is shaped – your literalization of this “shaping” is wonderfully told.
You also have this idea of “boredom” in your story that I have in mine as well – of how “before long they were bored of the same stories of the land.” In my story, the people are growing similarly bored, jaded, of hearing the same stories time and again, and their downfall is to beg a stranger to tell them new stories. It’s fascinating how stories always seem to circulate such similar themes and ideas in ever-evolving and unique ways. It seems the flaws of our stories’ peoples were their lack of appreciation for the stories they already had. Through this flaw arrives the moral of being careful of the stories one listens to.
And great point about the “artificial separation” created by Zoom storytelling – do you think you, or your audience, or perhaps both yourself and your audience, would have had a better appreciation for your story had there been no screen separation? Or perhaps, did this separation in fact create a new form of connection – apart but not apart? Do we come to appreciate new forms of human connection and story *because* we’re so physically separated?
Leo,
Thank you for your kind words!
I think I was quite influenced by what Chamberlin was saying, and much of Erika’s commentary, about stories being ceremonies of belief (2) shared between storyteller and listener, where both are engaged in their shared understandings. I wanted to try to capture some of this by having the spirits create something together not just when they tell stories, but when other spirits listen to them. I’m not sure if you feel the same way, but it would seem that this was also quite influential to how I wrote about boredom. To me, I wasn’t just trying to say that the people were bored of the same old stories. Like you said, they lacked that appreciation for the stories. They became bored because they weren’t able to engage in the ceremony of belief — they had no creative power over the stories that they encountered. They had to learn how to make stories for themselves before they could understand how to be the audience that the spirits needed. Until you pointed this out, I hadn’t realized how much I incorporated my rushed understanding of Chamberlin into my idea of stories. Thank you for making note of that.
There is a certain awkwardness that comes from zoom. I think over the past year I’ve gotten a lot of exposure to Zoom with group hangouts and work, but there is a noticeable bottleneck to how much information you can get at once. There is a lag in people’s responses; there is a limit to the number of voices we are comfortable hearing at once; there is a complete lack of spatial awareness. I do think that my audience might have had a better understanding of what I was doing if speaking to them in person, and not on their screen. We are so used to ‘hearing stories’ off of the computer screen from movies and YouTube videos and podcasts and whatnot, where we can take in information, but don’t think about how we would respond to it, because for the whole history of this medium there has been no need to. Technology I think has a latency affect, and our understanding of how to engage with mediums such as Video has not had a chance to adapt very much since they have become this two-way street.
Maybe as we get more comfortable with these new forms of technology and we begin to utilize the real-time impact that these technologies are capable of facilitating, we will begin to see a hybrid form of connection as you suggest.
Hi Zac,
I found your story to be very interesting! I too felt empowered when telling my story, I felt proud to share what I had come up with. I feel very lucky that I was able to share my story with my parents in person, so I found hearing you describe your telling of the story over zoom as “speaking through a tunnel” to be very captivating.
A question I have is, do you think you were more confident in telling your story over Zoom as there was a separation between you and the audience than you would be in telling your story to the same people in person? Was there any underlying relief that came from the sharing of your story via the internet?
Hi Aiden,
Thank you for your thoughts!
That was very lucky to have that opportunity to tell your story to family. I also managed to tell the story to my partner in the same room, and the differences were definitely clear to me. I think I was much more confident telling the story in person than I was over Zoom. I think I was pretty wary of Zoom to begin with, because I have quite a bit of experience using it to communicate with others, and am familiar with the ways that that communication can break down.
I might need to hear some ideas about what might be better, because I don’t feel like there were any benefits of Zoom. It was better than sending the text out there into the world and hoping that people read it and share their thoughts, but it is a very artificial medium, and I feel like the best it can hope for is “almost as good” as in-person. I suppose some benefits might be with being able to communicate with a bunch of people at once, or that people might be able to respond to me by text as I tell my story, but at the time I didn’t make use of these features of Zoom.