{"id":54,"date":"2021-02-03T22:53:12","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T05:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/metcalfe\/?p=54"},"modified":"2021-03-08T09:06:53","modified_gmt":"2021-03-08T16:06:53","slug":"good-and-the-not-good-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/metcalfe\/2021\/02\/03\/good-and-the-not-good-story\/","title":{"rendered":"[1.5] Good and The   Not   Good   Story     :        A Retelling"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ewspZvc4TZs\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><strong>Commentary<\/strong><br \/>\nI 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.angelfire.com\/md\/LittleFlute\/first.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">what I think is the original by Leslie Silko<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> 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. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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\u2019s story had ended and where King\u2019s retelling also left off. The story was let loose and that was that. I shared my first draft with my partner and he said, \u2018that was good! I mean\u2026 it was not <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">good.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> I mean I didn\u2019t know it would end so badly.\u2019 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!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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\u2019s 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\u2019s what I did. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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&#8217;s and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=BMkb1C3H5XU\">Roy Henry Vickers&#8217;<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Thanks for listening.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;<\/p>\n<p>Works Cited<\/p>\n<p>Silko, Leslie. &#8220;Long Time Ago.&#8221;\u00a0<em>Little Flute,\u00a0<\/em>Angelfire, https:\/\/www.angelfire.com\/md\/LittleFlute\/first.html. Accessed Feb. 3, 2021.<\/p>\n<p class=\"title style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer\">Vickers, Roy Henry. &#8220;Roy Henry Vickers: Peacedancer (NFB\/Cedar Island)&#8221; <em>Youtube, <\/em>uploaded by Henrik Meyer, Sept. 29, 2019. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=BMkb1C3H5XU. Accessed March 8, 2021.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83522,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/metcalfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/metcalfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/metcalfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/metcalfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83522"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/metcalfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/metcalfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/metcalfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions\/93"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/metcalfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/metcalfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/metcalfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}