Commentary
I really enjoyed this process. I write quite a bit of poetry but I rarely write stories like this, so it was an interesting adventure. I struggled at first to figure out how to change the story. I tracked down what I think is the original by Leslie Silko and this definitely informed my writing. Once I landed on this creature called Good and the nature imagery, my poetry mind was running and the rest came together quickly.
My original version ended after the voice told its terrible story and the crack in the earth closed up. This seemed to be where Silko’s story had ended and where King’s retelling also left off. The story was let loose and that was that. I shared my first draft with my partner and he said, ‘that was good! I mean… it was not good. I mean I didn’t know it would end so badly.’ I thought about this for a while and kept getting stuck on the idea that this story (and my first version in particular) almost held the message that stories are evil. I felt that the intended message was that stories are powerful, or even that stories are dangerous. But not that stories are evil!
So I figured that Good, being so good, would likely want to do something about this. And I figured that the only thing to do would be to offer other stories into the world. I wondered if this ending seems sappy, or if it indicates a discomfort with a more harsh and realistic ending. But I also felt that Silko’s story and my process of retelling felt very relevant to our world and my life. And I want to write hope into my story and our story. So that’s what I did.
I did something that was new to me for this project. I have a theatre background and lots of experience memorizing text, so initially I had planned to just memorize it. However, thinking about our focus on oral storytelling and inspired by Thomas King’s and Roy Henry Vickers’ ease and authenticity in storytelling, I chose to do this a new way. I worked to avoid word-for-word memorization. Instead I wrote down my story in bullet points and then I just started speaking it. I spoke it to myself in the car driving to work a few times and in the shower. And the great thing was that it was a bit different each time. It grew and developed more nuance than the original text held. It felt more like telling story than speaking a chunk of memorized text.
Thanks for listening.
——————————————————————————————————————
Works Cited
Silko, Leslie. “Long Time Ago.” Little Flute, Angelfire, https://www.angelfire.com/md/LittleFlute/first.html. Accessed Feb. 3, 2021.
Vickers, Roy Henry. “Roy Henry Vickers: Peacedancer (NFB/Cedar Island)” Youtube, uploaded by Henrik Meyer, Sept. 29, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMkb1C3H5XU. Accessed March 8, 2021.
Hello Laura!
Thank you so much for your version of the story! The pace and delivery of your story made it feel like a combination between a fable and an epic – it was very impressive! I particularly liked your choice to have the story of evil told by a disembodied voice; the vague, unknown identity of the witch who told the story is such a key point in King’s summary of the story, and even more pronounced in the original (and thank you for sharing that!!), so your choice seemed exceptionally appropriate. I can definitely see where the original version could have been interpreted as warning that stories are evil – particularly given this is a story about how evil came into the world through a story. I like your choice to include a message of hope in the form of other stories; I was just discussing the parallels to Pandora’s box in Cayla’s version of the story (https://blogs.ubc.ca/caylabanman/2021/02/03/the-creation-of-evil/), and I’m reminded of Pandora again here. You mentioned changing the ending after your first telling of the story to your partner – do you think this could be included in the ways in which the listener can affect the telling of a story?
Hi Magdalena,
Thanks for your comment – sorry it’s taken me so long to reply. I hadn’t thought about this added ending as being related to the listening affecting the story! I think I hadn’t considered this because I considered that first telling to be a rough draft, as opposed to a first telling. But I think that is absolutely part of the listener/teller relationship because if my partner had had a different reaction I would likely have considered different adjustments. How interesting!
Laura,
Wow, you are a natural!
Your story was so visually exciting and thoughtful! I can’t wait to hear more of your work!
I can also tell that you made yourself really familiar with your work. I think your story was quite a bit longer than mine, and I still felt quite overwhelmed trying to learn my own story by heart.
I also liked how your story not only had the problem of evil coming into the world, but also the ‘solution’ to evil (if you can call it that), and that solution being the very same thing that brought evil in the first place. Where my own story stopped the way Thomas King’s retelling stopped — where evil came into the world, and we should be careful of our stories — yours goes a step further to say that yes, we have a responsibility to not share our dangerous stories, but we also have a responsibility to share stories that help us heal.
So often we feel the need to approach these lessons as there simply being a good moral and a bad moral. Either the lesson that is learned in the story is how to be a good person, or the lesson that is learned is what happens to bad people. But by exploring how this problem of stories can create evil in the world can also help us make the world better, you have shown that this fear of stories comes from a false dichotomy. That stories are not only good or bad, and they don’t only have positive or negative lessons. They teach us so much more!
That is a truly profound approach and I am grateful to have listened to your story today. I wish that I had the same forethought as you when writing my story. Thank you.
Hi Zac,
Thanks for this comment – sorry it’s taken me so long to reply.
I’m glad you enjoyed my story. Thanks for your kind words!
You said you wished you had my forethought when writing your story and this struck me as an interesting sentiment in our study of how stories are such adaptable changing creatures. I completely get your comment in the context of an assignment that had a deadline for posting. But in the context of oral storytelling, your story could still continue to shift and change. In fact, due to the online nature of our assignments, you actually have the ability to still adjust your assignment even after it’s been posted. I’m not at all saying you should do this! But I think it’s interesting how totally impermanent and changeable our stories are! And how they could continue to shift and change based on our readings of other stories.