|
|
 |
What
is a Writer?
Forget it. Writers create their own certificate. Each alone, forges their own certification -- stolen moments sequestered to work on a phrase, a line, a letter, "the book." The awful anxiety when revealing "the work" to a friend, let alone the world. The nagging need to, "get it down" -- to capture or express thoughts, experiences, emotions, ideas -- in actual, specific words. A writer, writes. Like a silent signal, the trace of fever, the glint of hidden passion revealed, it will emerge. Oh it will! Beware, I tell you! Even your e-mails will subtly give you away. For they will read as if whoever wrote them actually cared for the words! Or, maybe it will emerge in your conversations; the language twists around upon itself in interesting patterns to form, not just concepts, but clear images in the listener’s mind. Too late. You’ve been spotted. You can’t run and you can’t hide. You’re already a writer. So you might as well let the beast out to have its way with you, your friends, family, and the world. You are sick, my friend, and the prescription is clear -- find some time each week, minutes or hours, it won’t matter which, and write. Aha. You are a writer.
If you want to write books for children it may also be useful to put a little time into clarifying your purpose or purposes, to establish your personal sense of direction. Many new writers attempt writing "children’s lit." in the hope that it’s simply easier. Certainly, it can be shorter. And, perhaps, in a sense, it is easier, just as haiku is "easier" than writing an epic. Easier, that is, if you have the mind for it, the intention, the eye, ear, and talent to make it work. In the columns to come I plan to share with you something of what makes a good children’s book, how to work with an editor, connect with the right illustrator, even, hopefully sell your manuscript -- things I’ve learned by the painstaking route of personal experience. But for now I want you to just ask yourself, "why do I want to write for children?" Watch your answers. Do you expect to make money or gain a degree of fame? Do you want to exercise a talent for cuteness? for myth? Do you have stories you feel must be shared, stories you know now or stories you grew up with or even, perhaps, heard as a child? Do you love clear, direct sentences and precise language? Does the propulsion of narrative call you? What, in short, is it that draws you to the joys and anxieties of the writer’s craft, specifically to the life of a children’s writer? One of my favorite answers to the question -- why write for children -- is from the Nobel Prize-winning author, for both adults and children, Isaac Bashevis Singer. I met Mr. Singer some 15 years ago, and for one weekend served as his host and his driver, chauffeuring him from speaking event to event, chatting with him about writing and vegetarianism (we were both committed non-meat eaters) at lunch and over dinner. His encouragement to me then -- a fledgling writer, -- was immeasurable. Here are words of wisdom from one of the master writers and storytellers of our time.
After meeting Mr. Singer I went on to write -- so far -- about eighteen children’s books. I have published with major, mainstream, huge publishing houses as well as with small, intimate presses. I have worked with and without agents, with new and with most-major editors, with first-time illustrators and with highly acclaimed, established ones. When I think of reviews and awards I’ve received and of why I write for children I think, first, of one review in particular. It didn’t appear in a U.S. journal and it wasn't for a book that did particularly financially well or one that even became well known -- though perhaps it is in Canada, where it was published. The review, appeared in the respected Canadian journal, Quill and Quire , and it praised one of my books for "saving childhood for children rather than sending children out to save the world." I’m proud of that. It reminds me of my own fundamental purpose in writing for children. Childhood wasn’t a sweet or sentimental time for me. But it was a time and remains a time in which the imagination flourished and the power of dream and wish are strong. I think that’s territory worth saving. So, find your purpose and let it inform your work. If it is to entertain, fine. If it is to empower, fine. If it is to have fun with words, bravo. If it is to pass on deep lessons, great. If it is to share a faith in childhood itself, in people, in animals, in nature -- terrific! This sense of purpose, this sense of your own delight -- for it‘s not grim purpose I hope -- will extend into your writing, into the book, so that it lives. It makes your story the one that no one else but you could possibly write.
As you clarify your purpose make sure you also take the time to make every
page, every sentence, every word count. (And remember this is especially
so in a children’s book where you have only a relatively few words
with which to do the job. It’s like poetry or a film. Ideally, every
word must have a function and fulfill that function well.) A good idea
won’t be enough. The road to hell is paved with them. Indeed, the
one negative review I ever got (so far), nailed me on that. The reviewer
felt I talked about the subject rather than making the subject itself
live. And that, too, I take to heart and pass on to you. The story lives
sentence by sentence. It’s in the details that your purpose takes
life. Be as specific as you can. Really see and really be willing to feel
what you’re writing about. Good children’s writing like all
good writing, creates specific and vivid images. Details reveal the depth
and accuracy of the imagination. This can be hard work, demanding work.
Rewrites, re-visionings will abound. Clear your desk and be prepared.
Children’s literature is a tough realm after all, and not just --
as we all know these days -- a tough market. You can’t get by here
just on good intentions, good looks (or illustrations), or good ideas.
They will help. But it’s in the sentence to sentence work, the line
by line work, the sounding out of words themselves that your story comes
alive. Someday, as you writhe with the effort, you’ll wonder why
or how you ever got into this. That’s the time to take out your list
of purposes and review it. Of course you did remember to write it down?
Why
Folktales?
My answer is that folktales, perhaps better called traditional tales, return us, not to the literal world but to the imagined one. They are doorways into a constant realm of universal dreaming through which archetypes may be embodied, characters and roles and life paths explored. They are old, as the psyche is old, as the imagination is; old and enduring. The patterns of cause and effect, good and evil which run through these old tales underlie all cultures, underlie even the current dream of unbounded technological accomplishment and success. Folktales, the unauthored, cumulative recasting of many generations’ experience explores the old, that is, fundamental areas of ourselves, areas so common they remain at the bedrock of our humanity. And because they are old, they are mature. Honed by centuries of telling and retelling they have become concise models of narrative, real building blocks of the imagination. Worn to the nub, all superfluity washed away, they retain a consistency of their own. In them only what needs to happen, happens. And yet, the promise of that happening fulfills our dreams. For what folktales give us, is a language of wish-fulfillment. In these stories we can make what we wish to happen finally happen. In the mind. In the imagination. We can see and feel core places that we may have to strive all our lives to bring into actual being. But in the folktale it is completed and we live and feel it, too, in the unique terms of our own images. A kind of promise of fulfillment, of a destined, some-day-to-be fulfillment is made temporarily real. In a Cinderella tale for example we can experience justice -- see good rewarded and evil punished. When was the last time reading the newspaper brought that? How could it? Our daily news is built on tales of injustice. That is the world. But not the world we wish for. Traditional tales put us into a real human world; not the literal one, but one we really wish might be. That wish is part of our truth as human beings. If we lose it we lose a deep part of ourselves, the very part, perhaps, that motivates our constant effort to improve society and recreate the world to accord with wish -- to bring into being a world of integrity and equality. Traditional tales keep the flame of such possibility alive. Fiction, however, turns us to the literal characters and places of the outer world. As for movies they do that always and completely so. The literal streets, cars, houses, pollution of our daily world are all there, as are the literal faces and mannerisms and voices of this or that character, this or that actor. But in folktales the smoke curls yet from the cottage beside the sea. There the fisherman’s wife still explores the parameters of greed through the grace of the flounder. The little parrot still flies through smoke and fire to fulfill the one little task she has envisioned for herself and the Rough-Face Girl, after torments, at last weds the Invisible Being. Ships set forth on the blue sea and the wolf prowls the green forest. The soul’s stories, the ones always needing to be enacted within the imagination, are brought to life. To retell them is perhaps as primary an act of the imagination as the constant repainting, by traditional peoples and, at one time, by all our ancestors world-wide, of cave walls and petroglyphs. It has the tone of ceremony. Folktales, traditional tales, are the eternal literature of humanity. They speak not to reason, logic, fact and that jumbled pile of one-time events we call history, but to the portals of dream. They speak to creative powers lying dormant and unrecognized, unconjured, unprotected, as devastated as wilderness; to wild territories of our own being. They speak to what is not, yet must always be. And they do it in language that is clear, finely honed, precise. Behind the words on the page one hears the echo of an actual, human voice. The characters, too, are simple and clear, the kind that a single narrator could have brought to life. They are the elemental beings of our own psyche -- the disguised yet spirited prince or princess, the tyrannical king or queen, the animal-helper, the wise old woman or man to name a few. Implicit in all such tales too, is the nurturing presence of human community and all the social contexts of told stories. The tales arise from a time when, if you wanted to hear a tale, you had to join with others and share the experience in common in a social, communal event. This is so entirely unlike the experience of reading a book as to be almost unimaginable today. When reading one can stop and start as one chooses. One can pick up one book, put it down, begin another. One remains always in control. The told tale reminds us of a more complete participation, in which the imagination and long-held, stable traditions and entire communities of people all joined in the act of restoring and being restored by, the tale. Still, why should we care whether the imagination is nourished or not? Isn’t it time to grow up? To get real and let all this old stuff go? Ah, but it is not out of logic and reason, as useful tools as they may be, that we actually create our lives but, rather, out of wish and dream. If the imagination is undeveloped how can a life be dreamed well? To dream, to imagine is the beginning of creating. We dream our self-image, dream our careers, dream our possibilities for love and family. Our maturation and inner growth is a kind of redreaming, a revisioning of possibility and reality. Out of these dreams our actual life unfolds. And more. The airplane, telephone, computer, all of it, everything not of Nature, began as a dream in the mind. Now it is real. Out of the imagination comes our real life. Traditional tales are food for this imagination. They nourish and develop it by getting us to see what cannot be seen outside the tale. They let us see the interplay of causes and effects. The king’s son wandering the earth returns the salmon to the water. The princess, lost in the wilderness, shakes the heavy apples down from the burdened tree, releasing the branches. From such kind deeds benefits will flow. How we limit this process by calling it simply, "values". In traditional tales we explore the dynamics of compassion and selfishness as well as other fundamental areas of our own nature. We become the good and evil characters, the animals, cities, forests and seas. They are our nature made visible as in dream. And things impossible to touch outside of dream can again enter our waking lives -- shadows, memories, aspirations, possibilities, a sense of connection to an old, true, always real world in which humans and animals do converse freely and the wolf is our brother, the raven our sister, the eagle our mother. Folktales are soul’s nourishment; are food. Without them we are never quite ourselves, never who we might have been. And they must be recast in words. Only then can they come alive in our own interior images, only then can they live, becomes us, enter our bloodstream, hearts and bones and empower our lives. The relationship between the human mind and folktales may be reciprocal. Perhaps the tales are a kind of wildlife of the psyche, capable of roaming, foraging and reproducing, of living their own lives, in a tentative way, without us. Perhaps they wander, in somewhat differing form, through plant and animal, and other non-human minds. Perhaps they were in the mind of the earth itself before other life-forms began. Perhaps, they predate, in their essence, the green earth itself. Perhaps, to them, mind is a doorway and body a vehicle for the reenactment of story. Then, do we imagine stories? Yes. But they also are the dream dreaming us. Could we live without them? As we could live without love, without the earth, skies, and trees if absolutely necessary. But such a life would be a kind of prison is, in fact, what we mean by "hell." If imagination is possibility, a starved imagination implies a pinched, starved, and diminished life; a trapped and truncated one. We suffer from lack of imagining. Which is why I choose so often to work with traditional tales. They teach us how to imagine. It is why they are the foundation of children’s literature. In childhood the imagination is such a primary sense it must be trusted. As children what do we know except what we observe and feel and imagine. The street beyond our door -- where does it lead? We imagine it. Where do our parents go, what lives do they live when they walk out the door? We must imagine it. We imagine mountains and seas, the moon and Mars, the past and future, the mind and life of a bug, a bird. As children we trust what we imagine because it is our primary way of knowing, a kind of intuiting. It is how the world comes to us. Perhaps it is the basis of what adults call, "faith." In part this is why the invasion of the imagination by expensive and so, exclusive, special effects as well as by heavily merchandized correlations of story and toys is so disturbing. It is a kind of literalizing of the imagination when we need to find and trust it most. If that doorway is closed too early a barrenness sets in. The places of the imagination with their own dark forests and clear ponds and our potential journeys there, never form. The newspapers abound with awful proof of such loss of interior, soul, possibility, and hope. There is an early, romantic poem of Yeats’ titled "To the Realists" which goes like this:
This was written in 1914. It seems terribly truer now. What can be done? Being limited by time, talent, vision and will, by culture and genes we each try to do the little things we can. One little thing is simply to let old tales live. The twenty-five hundred year old Buddhist tale of "The Brave Little Parrot" (which I recently turned into a picture book for G.P. Putnam’s Sons), suggests that little things can have large effects, effects which neither logic nor reason could predict. In that tale a little parrot struggles to sprinkle drops of water on a raging forest fire. It seems hopeless. Yet in the end it changes everything.
Is this a false hope? A foolish and naive one? Or are such whispers from
the imagination, faint embers of an old world buried in our childrens’
tales, among the few things we can still reasonably trust to light our
way, even today? King Goodness: A Meditation on the Meaning of a Story by Rafe Martin FromThe Hungry Tigress: Buddhist Myths, Legends, and Jataka Tales Published by Yellow Moon Press
Certainly traditional tales world-wide do dramatize values. In them specific
causes are shown to lead to complex effects that lead to further causes,
etc. But too easily tagged morals can also be the result of what happens
when told tales get put into books. They get flattened out, abstracted
from their live, oral-performance base and the "moral" takes
over from the live experience of hearing and seeing the tale. The story
of "King Goodness" has been with us for twenty-five hundred
years. I’d like to look at it here, simply as that -- a story and
see how it might serve its own meaning in ways that "King Goodness"
as philosophy cannot.
To summarize the tale: King Goodness is a good king. He is noble, fair,
generous, and virtuous. An vengeful minister asserts that the king’s
committment to goodness has left his kingdom weak and helpless; that such
committment grows from a fundamental incompetence and naivete. This hypothesis
is tested by another king in a series of raids into King Goodness’
realm. The raiders are captured. But when they explain that poverty alone
motivated them, King Goodness gives them gifts and releases them. Not
one is punished further for the crimes they have committed. Convinced
that King Goodness’s kingdom can be easily taken, the enemy king
invades. As the army advances, King Goodness exhorts his mighty champions
to refrain from violence. The army of the invading king wins easily. King
Goodness and his one thousand champions are brought to the graveyard and
are buried there, up to their necks, and abandoned to the jackals.
King Goodness remains alert and unfrightened. When the jackal king closes
in for the kill he grabs on with his teeth to the jackal’s ruff and
lets the terrified beast pull him from his grave. Then he frees his men.
Two goblins are in dispute nearby, each claiming the greater portion
of a corpse. Growing aware that a just man is in the graveyard, they go
to King Goodness and ask him to divide the corpse for them. After bringing
him his bath, clothes, and food from the palace they present him with
his sword. He splits the corpse perfectly into identical sections. In
gratitude the goblins return King Goodness and his men to the palace.
The false king awakes, sees King Goodness standing be the bedside, and
thinks it must be a ghost. In time the whole story of his liberation and
return emerges. The false king repents. "Even goblins could recognize
your worth," he admits, "while I, a man, could not. I am ashamed."
He leaves, pledging to use his considerable power to protect King Goodness’
realm. The evil minister is punished.
King Goodness has saved all people--those of his own realm as well as
those of the enemy king--from the horrors of war. Joy arises in his heart,
a joy greater than that which any victory in battle might bring. Sure,
now of the validity of his way, speaking from the ground of his own, hard-won
personal experience, he now encourages all the people to persist, as he
has done, in the ways of goodness.
Clearly the story, as the synopsis reveals, holds up an ideal, an exemplar
of a tradition noted for compassion and non-violence, to follow. But even
King Goodness must learn from his own experience in the tale. And in the
process of the story’s unfolding we, like King Goodness, also experience
the testing of goodness for ourselves and see, in the end, not its ideal
as an aesthetic but its functional power. We see that it works,
but that the roots of its strength and functioning remain on non-materialist
levels. Goodness requires faith. Through the unfolding of the narrative
we momentarily gain access to that faith and see, and so, come to trust,
that synchronicity can play an uncanny role, not just in story, but in
life. The process is experiential, not symbolic or didactic.
To review the story in greater detail: the tale begins with the birth
of a royal child who is impossibly, perhaps, monstrously good. To balance
the upsurge or excess of goodness an evil -- selfishness, callous, greedy,
vengeful--minister is introduced. Cast out for his abuses the evil minister
seeks revenge and a ruler after his own heart, one interested in the normal
perquisites of his role and office -- power and possessions; in taking,
not giving. Unlike King Goodness, this king’s only compunctions about
action are those of efficacy, not morals. If King Goodness is really weak
then it is legitimate to use force to take what he does not have the strength
to hold. This second king is the king of this world and its time-worn,
historic ways. He is the king of--with apologies for the image to our
reptile friends, of "normal," lizard-brained, self-interested
functioning.
King Goodness on the other hand embodies our potential for a more selfless
life. But can such goodness really exist in this world? Does such goodness
have a genuine place? Or is it a naive and childish weakness we must outgrow
or hide away to succeed as adults? Which is real? We’ll need to know
if we are going to live well even, decently, on this earth.
The story becomes a tool for testing of these two opposing visions, for
revealing their interaction and for clarifying not just what is ideal,
but what may be possible, even necessary. King Goodness makes a vow to
live by principle. "No violence," he says. And he demonstrates
his integrity in his dealings with the raiding parties. He shows true
Kingship--that deepest aspect of the psyche which penetrates to the realm
of causes and need not respond in irritation to the failures of the world.
So he protects even those who bring harm and shows them how to attain
a better Path in life. He is, potentially, a great King, one not lost
to the demands of ego and role alone but wielding power well. Yet he is
incomplete. For all his ideals he remains a danger to his kingdom.
Can his way work? Do such vows empower? Or do they limit and cripple
us? Without the willingness to rely at all on physical power he does appear
emasculated as a leader. His kingdom is vulnerable and all his warriors,
great champions though they are, caught by his command, unable to resist
and so are cast into the graveyard. Here is the world’s ordinary
view dramatized. Goodness is equated, as the evil minister asserts, with
weakness and leads even those who might have had power to failure and
destruction. It is the time of night, darkness, and absolute descent.
With the graveyard scene, failure gathers to a head and goodness seems
to have no possible hope in this world. It is the absolute bottom. King
Goodness, the true king, and his men have been buried up to the neck --
only their heads -- the realm of the thought they’ve lived by --
remain. And jackals are approaching -- a vivid image for the failure that
comes attempting to live idealistically, by vows! Perhaps there’s
also the suggestion that living by vows -- made just in the head -- can
bury us.
But King Goodness if naive until now, does not remain so. He is not above
tricking the jackal king and of skillfully using the jackal’s own
power to get free.
And there, at the darkest moment, at the bottom of the pit of the grave
of the story, with toothy old death creeping near lies a hidden Path,
a secret way. A key to the liberation of the kingdom appears. It is a
ritualistic, ceremonial memory buried in many narratives -- to live, one
must die. One must enter the grave of all one’s wonderful plans,
ideas, stratagems. With this, like, Dante, who at the very bottom of the
Inferno discovers that all has been simply upside down, buried in the
graveyard King Goodness begins to ascend. It is a simple turn. He uses
the jackal king’s own power to get pulled free.
There is a Zen verse about feeling one’s way in darkness along a
wall. There is a wisdom in "blindness," in having no plan or
scheme or overarching system in being nakedly exposed to the intimate
presence of each unique moment. Here is a bump in the plaster, here a
shred of chipped paint, here a ridgeline where the plasterer’s arm
wearied and the ripple in the wall remains to tell the tale. Each detail
now comes fresh to us and new and we must feel each one out, distinct,
unsequenced, intimately absorbed in its uniqueness. Without sight we have
no overview. But such blindness may be true seeing. No principles hide
the Real in a fog of mental abstraction. Joshu (Chou-chou), the great
T’ang era Zen Master, renowned through the centuries for his most
profound wisdom was once asked "Where is your mind focused."
He answered, "Where there is no design."
King Goodness descends in this manner -- he has no plan, only the determination
to live by his vows. And in this he finds his release entering--as do
the heroes and heroines of folklore worldwide--a universe in which things
happen in shape, in connection, in story. He has entered a deep,
synchronous place where, dead to the world, imposing nothing on what is,
he lets go and all begins to work with him. It is the entrance
into the supernatural.
The goblin, as it turns out, need a just and righteous man even as King
Goodness needs magic to restore him to the palace. Without the goblins
he has only his one thousand mighty champions and the necessity of war--a
just and rightous war it is true, but violent and bloody war, nonetheless--to
restore the throne. The only way seemingly open to him to set things right
would be through the very violence he had originally sought to avoid.
Without the corpse-eaters he would have to recant his non-violence or
flee, abandoning his kingdom once and for all to the possessive claims
of the more worldly-wise king.
King Goodness meets the goblins graciously and, surprisingly, they come
before him with respect. Instinctively these creatures of darkness (the
story actually treats them quite kindly; they seem no more evil than the
bacteria which bring rot and decay, recycling dead stuff into humus and
new life), begin working for him, providing him, out of gratitude, with
all he needs to regain his throne. Even in this realm of bones, blood,
and potential horror, he averts violence and brings peace. The goblins
are grateful. Trust has been restored between them. Like squabbling siblings
they simply wanted things to be fair.
The corpse and goblins appear at the moment King Goodness and his men
free themselves. "Buried" in this is some sense, I think --
we can at least play with this -- that the goblins are devouring the corpse
of King Goodness’ old life, of his last illusions and attachments
which this descent, in a kind of abbreviated story shorthand, signals
us he has "died" to, been purged of. He has climbed up out of
the grave, broken free of the hold of the earthly plane, left his illusions--including
the inability, perhaps, to see how goodness is itself action--behind.
At that moment, when the descent is completed, the goblins appear dragging
a corpse ready to be devoured and recycled. The descent is done.
There are ancient graveyard rites in India and Tibet in which spiritual
apsirants imaginatively offer the coprse of their own wrong views, of
their merely earthly life, of their material flesh, blood, and bones to
the night-walkers, the blood drinkers, the ever-hungry devouring ones--to
all, in fact, ghostly, suffering, hungry, incomplete beings. An ancient
rite of compassion here turns in toward the narrative’s need.
In the end the tale is the story of the initiation of the king. The false
king who rules by physical might discovers the power of true Kingship
conceived on spiritual ground--and bows in humility to the greater presence.
The world is restored, the true king’s power tested and confirmed.
The world is restored, too, to harmony; the lesser power which had sought
to usurp control, in the end must revolve rightly, that is, naturally,
around the greater.
But King Goodness grows, too, and, if he was naive to start, by the end,
is so no longer. He has learned to use his wits and to make use of circumstance.
And we--like the usurping king--have learned that vows have power, that
faith may itself be insight into the way things happen. There has been
a ritual descent into death and the graveyard and darkness. We meet the
blood-drinkers who dwell there -- and we meet, too, those who, while seeming
human, have lost their human vision and hearts. The goodness of the king
(we should call itmore truly, "Goodness," for it is not "goodness"
as opposed to "badness," as opposed to anything )--has
not guaranteed him an easy Path. He does however find, along with hardships,
unexpected connection, confirmation, and joy. The story dramatizes and
so, for the imagination, makes once again Real, an ancient Way or Path.
"King Goodness" is not simply a tale with a moral. The
nonviolent moral is not the full meaning of the story. The meaning
lies in our experience of the story as it comes alive, forming its complex
images within us. Traditional stories help us regain this territory. They
are the encodings of wisdom.
Woven
within and through the incidents and details of the twenty-five hundred
year old Buddhist jataka tale, "King Goodness," then, is a more
complete, story making "King Goodness" more than the ancient
advertisement for non-violence it might at first seem to be. The
Boy Who Loved Mammoths and My Writing Process 
hough many people know my picture book for young readers Will's Mammoth,
not many know how that story actually began. Those who have heard me tell
the original story have been amazed to discover that it's actually a complex
tale suitable for older children and even adults, not a story necessarily
for young children at all. And they ask, why did I change it to make it
a picture book? And would I someday do a story book (one with few illustrations
and lots of words) of the original version, the way I originally wrote
it, the version my telling is actually based upon? Over the years these requests
have piled up on my desk. So with The Boy Who Loved Mammoths, I've
at last brought out the story as I originally wrote it--with some terrific
illustrations by my friend Richard Wehrman. (You can also hear the way I
tell this story on the audiocassette Rafe Martin tells his Children's
Books.) Here's the afterword to the book in which I talk
about my writing process-Will's Mammoth--the picture book so
wonderfully illustrated by Caldecott winner Stephen Gammell--is almost
wordless. I decided when working on it that in the picture book we
could be inside the child's imagination. Seeing what he sees. The beauty
of a picture book is that it's very much like storytelling. Listening
to a story told, we don't see words in our minds but pictures. As I
worked on the picture book version I began to see images in a key, to
use a musical analogy, most appropriate for young readers. When work on
the book began I wrote out for Stephen Gammell everything I was seeing
in all the silent places of the story and then let him show us, in
his wonderful images, what Will imagines. At the end of the picture
book Will is asleep, yet he holds in his hand the flower given him
by the mammoth in his daydream. And the flower is Real! In my original, written version of the story Will discovers not a flower but the actual hairs of a mammoth in his hand. In the told version (there are three distinct versions of this story altogether -- the written, the told and the picture book), I have Will's father take those hairs to a museum where he--and we--discover that they are indeed truly real. I wanted to be sure that the child's vision would be upheld. In all three versions the ending is still pretty much the same. All are ways of saying that the child's dream, the child's imagination, has been REAL. For me it was like driving to the same destination by three different routes. We arrive at the same place in the end but the sights along the way are different. I enjoyed this process of re-imagining one of my own original tales and I still do. Such re-creations are very much part of the oral tradition itself. The Boy Who Loved Mammoths, both in the original and the later, told versions, and Will's Mammoth, the picture book which grew out of them, all themselves grew out of wishes and dreams which began when I was eight years old, growing up in New York City. My favorite place back then was a boulder in my neighborhood. When I climbed up on it--only good climbers could do it -- it came alive. It was a big gray boulder and in my mind it was an elephant. In fact, my friends and I called it Elephant Rock. It was shaped like an elephant, too, with a great bulge for a head, mounded shoulders, and a slope for the hind legs and tail. In my mind I can still feel the smooth, worn stone. In dreams my fingertips can still find the those hard-won, painfully learned tiny notches, ledges, and grooves in the stone (fingers there, knee press there, shift the other hand, hang by a fingertip so), which gave me the gripping points to leverage myself successfully up. I can still remember, too, deep in my bones, the"thump" as I hit the ground sliding back down. (The only way to get off was to slide down the"tail.") That boulder had been pushed to where New York City was later to grow up around it by the glaciers during the Ice Age. And it had been left there as glacial debris for at least 20,000 years. History unfolded around it. It had been part of the culture, I think, most especially, the child culture of that area since earliest times. Perhaps the earliest Paleo-Indian peoples had felt its power. Perhaps their children, too, as well as those of later Native peoples, had climbed on it over the thousands of years going all the way back to the time when mammoths still roamed. The adults in my neighborhood never knew that this was Elephant Rock--not unless, of course, some child kindly gave them its proper name and told them about it. Years later, when my children were growing up, I went back to my old neighborhood and discovered, on an early morning walk, that my boulder had been bulldozed away. That doorway into the imagination, into the dreaming of that specific place on the earth and to all that had happened there, into the life of natural things, my own life as a child, was closed. I felt real loss and sadness and I realized, too, that natural places, dreaming places, all around the earth are threatened daily. As we destroy them, we destroy the gateways to our own deepest potential for thinking, dreaming, imagining. I realized the only way I could pass this particular doorway on, pass on the experience of faith in the power of the dreaming, imagining mind which that boulder had given me, would now be through a story. That's where the story I've titled The Boy Who Loved Mammoths and later, Will's Mammoth, began. As a child I had often wished that I could see a live mammoth. So in the story, Elephant Rock of my childhood became the mammoth of Will's. I named the boy "Will," by the way, because he has the determination, the "will," to make his dreams real. Also two of my favorite authors were William Blake and William Shakespeare. In stories wishes can come true. This is in part what makes them so important. Things that might not, could not happen in ordinary reality do happen in stories. Stories allow us to explore, experience, and make real deep archetypes of wish and dream--universal patterns of challenge and fulfillment. The ending of The Boy Who Loved Mammoths with those hairs orof the picture book Will's Mammoth with the flower, are moments in which we all can remember the power of our own dreaming and imagining. 'In dreams begin responsibilities,' said the poet W. B. Yeats. So too all things we create in life begin with what we dream. The imagination, a realm of endless possibility, is the real foundation of our lives and accomplishments. In our culture we tend to discount this great power. So I'd like to mention something interesting that happened when I had finished writing The Boy Who Loved Mammoths more than ten years ago. In the original story Will is saved by a mammoth who stands over him keeping him safe through the storm. Well, one night I was in the car across the street from a local bookstore where my wife was buying a book. I was just sitting there watching the snow whirl down and I was listening to National Public Radio's evening broadcast. They were talking about a little boy who had wandered out of his house--it was in Wisconsin, I think--or Minnesota, someplace rural and cold. There was a bad storm. Search parties were out. They were sure that when they found the boy he'd be frozen and dead. A large puppy about nine months old from the boy's house was also missing--a big, shaggy puppy. They found the boy near dawn. He was lying on the snow, his shoes and socks off--but he wasn't frozen, not even frost-bitten. With him was that large, shaggy puppy. It had remained standing over him the whole night keeping him warm. In my mind I heard the Twilight Zone theme-music--do do do do do do do--I watched the snow falling past the windshield, brightly lit against the street lights. And I thought. "So it's true. I just wrote that story. I didn't know if it could really happen. But it can. It did." Not long after I also discovered that Inuit peoples have tales about mammoths. They say that a great shaman drove all the mammoths underground long ago. That's why their bones and sometimes their frozen carcasses are found in the earth--as if they were coming back up to the surface. These legends also say that one night each year mammoths can return to live on the earth. So Will's Mammoth and The Boy Who Loved Mammoths actually have a history going back much further than my own personal wishes and dreams. Sharing this story or these versions of this story ( as storytellers quickly learn there are many ways of telling any given story), is a way of sharing my faith in the importance of our essential human powers of wish and of dream--something every child knows. It's a way of saying that the imagination and its formal structures, stories, offer us a great gift--the restoration of our own Vision. I've come to realize that I'm essentially a dreamer, like Will. I've been talking about Will's Mammoth, a dream of mine, and how it developed from the wishes and memories of my childhood in many keynote addresses and workshops across the country for years. I touched on it a bit too in my book, A Storyteller's Story. It's a relief to have the original version out as a book now so both adults and children can see what the changes have actually been. And it's been interesting too in communicating all this to realize just how deeply the dreams of our childhoods can inform our lives -- our real, creative lives--as adults. Good luck in your own dreaming, in your own writing and storytelling.
Me
and Harry Potter  es, it is a
catchy title. But it is grounded in reality. It is true. I'll tell
you what I mean. I am now finishing my first young adult novel titled, Birdwing.
It is a mythic, adventurous, mysterious, and sometimes funny story which
has been bought by Arthur A. Levine. Now, who, you may well ask, is Arthur
A. Levine? Look at your Harry Potter books! Each one is an Arthur A. Levine
book. Arthur is my editor and is not only now the most sought after editor
in the world, but also the best. Why? It is simple, really. He
trusts his own heart and vision. When the first Harry Potter book was
being sold all the editors in the U.S. were offered it at auction. All
the other editors dutifully went to their marketing and accounting people
who told them, "It is British whimsical fantasy. It won't sell in the
States. Let it alone." Arthur stuck his neck out and bid the highest and
bought the book--and the series. It was a risky move that could have,
depending on the outcome, either made or broken him. Well, you know what
happened. When Arthur gives talks these days and is asked, 'How did you know
that Harry Potter would be so amazingly successful. (Actually
he tells me they also ask him that about my book, The Rough-Face Girl
as well--Arthur has been my editor since 1990), he sighs and says, "Don't
you get it? I didn't know. I just liked it." He told me
this over lunch a few months ago and I could see that it troubled him.
"How cynical Americans have become," he added. "Everyone is thinking only
of money and marketing. How few, today, remember to trust their own hearts"--which
is, after all, what writing and storytelling are really about-finding
our own images, trusting our own vision and hearts. Arthur is a great
editor because he continues to do this simple, but in our complex and
chaotic times, increasingly rare thing--he trusts his own heart. For me writing and storytelling are ways to empower each of us--writer,
storyteller, teachers and students together, to find our own hearts and
vision. We must each discover our own images if the story is to live.
The storyteller can only make sounds on the air, after all. The writer
only makes squiggles on a page. But the reader and listener SEES. Stories
in words remain the only tools, the only technology, we have, even today,
that can give us the gift of our own creativity, our own uniquely personal
images. They alone have the power to put us in touch with what our own
minds create and what our own hearts feel. Tv, movies, computers all make
us see the same things. Without stories in words we are, ironically, as
adrift as all those children's book editors who failed to trust their
own responses to the manuscript of Harry Potter, and, so, let a
golden chance go by. Now as to my novel. For me, part of the thrill of it is that Arthur
not only bought it, but that he bought it from a three-page proposal saying,
"This is a brilliant idea. I know you can make it work. I'm buying it." After that, to be honest, I became somewhat terrified. Can someone be
somewhat terrified? Doesn't terrified imply a complete and total
experience of overwhelming fear. Well, I found I could be somewhat terrified.
I still can. Gulp. Now I've got to actually write the book! Someone
is paying me for it! The dream had suddenly become hard reality. Though I had been thinking about the novel and jotting down ideas on
it for close to two years, I didn't start actually writing until this
March. As I began, flood-gates seemed to open and characters and scenes
poured forth. Characters emerged, took on their own voices, and began
to speak their truths and reveal their emotions. Scenes took form, each
claiming its own landscape--mountain, forest, or tundra--each with its
own skies, clouds, rivers, and animals and skies. Well and good. Then the truly hard moment came when I had to move from
the first draft to the second. It meant no longer moving along the now
relatively easy road of accumulating detail and bringing the work to a
polished fulfillment. Instead it required a difficult transition and deep
initiation. I found that to make the book really work as a novel, and
not just be a well-written sequence of events, I would have to abandon
a good portion of my initial inspiration--some of which I still held in
a kind of reverent awe. After all, where had these events and scenes and
characters all come from? Were they mine or were they the offspring of
some deep zone of the psyche? If so, should I dare mess with that? I found that I would have to. So I began the hard, gritty, risky, real
work of writing. Which means, rewriting. I had to begin the journey from
those sweet flashes of initial inspiration to those difficult, daily doses
of perspiration, the sweat and tears that, in the end, could alone ground
the book and make it live. Make it a read. I had to roll up my
sleeves and cut scenes that I truly loved but, which I now saw, didn't
contribute enough to the development of the story as a whole. It meant
moving scenes from one place in the story to another in order to increase
their contribution to the drama and conflict. It meant creating entirely
new scenes to deepen characters and plot. It even meant throwing away
the entire first four chapters and writing a totally new opening, one
that would draw the reader immediately and deeply into the unfolding tale,
make them want to read on and, at the same time, motivate the characters
themselves to really make things happen, rather than just allowing
events to take place. It was arduous, demanding, exciting work. I loved
it! The book is now through its fourth draft. Writing it has been like a
powerful, mythic journey, an exciting adventure, and a hard-won education
all in one. The characters and places of it have become real to me. It
has been like rediscovering places and people I always knew, only, until
I actually wrote the book, I didn't know that I knew them. I look forward very much to seeing Birdwing head out on its own into the world. I sense that all my previous books have actually been the apprenticeship for this one. I look forward to sharing, too, my deepened understanding of writing and writing process, gained day by somewhat terrifying day, over the course of these last six amazing, demanding, exciting, and very special months. Postscript: All that was five years ago. Countless hours of re-imagining, re-seeing, re-thinking and endless rewriting have passed since, and only now is Birdwing finally and truly done. So much for youthful optimism! But it is at last the book I hoped it would be. Watch for its publication in the Summer of 2005. Arthur Levine plans for it to have a stirring, dramatic cover. Meanwhile I am hard at work - two years into it - on my UFO, alien-abduction, motorcycle, and ancient Irish myth novel - The Spaceship of Impossibly Bad Dreams. Writing such long stories, discovering new terrains and characters, is a compelling journey deep into the imagination. Even the once dreaded anguish and toil of continual re-writing becomes a pleasure and an addiction, hard, once truly embarked upon, to give up. New territory continues to unroll before the mindĚs eye and, what is more, one's skills to communicate what one has seen become wonderfully honed in the process. So, for now, no turning back. But onward, to books yet to come!
"Tell Me a Story"  Rafe Martin creates entire worlds out of simple words, or, as he puts it, "sounds on air." He's not one to run around on stage during his storytelling performances, preferring to simply sit or stand in one place, using gestures or a change in tone to plant his audience --- of children and adults --- firmly in a different time and place. In the midst of a crowded auditorium, he makes you feel as though he's telling the story directly to you. Although his published work, which now includes 19 books, is based on native and traditional tales, he brings a freshness to the stories that enables them to speak to us today. Last winter, after a benefit performance Martin held for the Cobblestone School, I came away feeling like this is what people are supposed to do on cold winter nights: We're supposed to get together and listen to stories. Martin's the kind of guy you want to spend time with. I first got to know his work years ago when he told stories at the Rochester Zen Center, where he's been a member for 30 years. Our occasional meetings at the Zen Center grew into regular get-togethers at the Rochester home he shares with his wife, Rose. We'd meet in his office, which looked pretty much how you'd expect a writer's office to look: books everywhere (at least a few of them organized in some way), manuscripts in various stages of completion, a computer. But there are also small animal figures, Buddhist images, eagle feathers, and, more recently, photographs of Martin with his beloved motorcycle. Martin and I recently spent time talking about the role of the storyteller --- today and in traditional cultures --- and how he has approached storytelling throughout his 20-year career. What follows is a distillation of those conversations. City: When I first met you and got to know your work, it was as "Rafe Martin, Storyteller." But you're really both a storyteller and writer. Which came first? Martin: Actually I was a writer first, but then I kind of lost touch with it. It wasn't until I had children that I began to get into children's literature. I was looking for books for them and eventually I find things and I go, "Wow! This is really interesting stuff." I began to realize in reading aloud to them that what had been missing for me had been voice. I had forgotten that stories are transmitted with voice. It was like rediscovering this missing world, like a hidden door to a hidden room was opened and I began to get a sense that the telling of stories was really how they were passed on, and the power lay in finding voice and sharing stories. City: A lot of people think children's literature is really, well, kids' stuff. Martin: Children's literature isn't "kiddy." It's really about universal structures of the imagination. And in children's literature you can go directly to the myth; to imagination. I think the highest point of language is to get us to experience a sense of wonder. And what we call children's literature is one of the real refuges for that mature inner state. Wonder is not childish. It's a very mature condition to live through the bitterness of experience and to come out in a state of wonder, which mythic traditions tend to emphasize over and over. We think of traditional peoples as primitive, but this is a very serious mistake because they're dealing with states of awareness and imagination that are very mature. Children's literature and traditional tales are really records of wonder, which are not childish at all. Children have access to it but adults often don't. City: What's the difference between the story you've written down and the story you're telling? Martin: When you're telling a story it's like you're always in the process of rewriting, which is really neat. You'll never come down to a final text. That story will continue to grow and change until you die. You're changing it and it's changing you, it's a mutual relationship. Native peoples think of stories as living things, not a bunch of words on a page or thoughts in a person's mind; they're a living being and you kind of experience some of that when you're telling a story. City:Almost all of your work is rooted in traditional tales. Why is that? Martin: I think it's because they deal with fundamental configurations of the psyche. They're not just about a particular time and place. They've been worn down to the nub over thousands of years of being told and shared and moved from culture to culture. So what we're left with is the absolute core structures of the imagination. In traditional tales, it's not so much about the minds of the individual characters but the experience in ourselves. They'll be relevant no matter what the time is. City:How can they still be relevant today? Martin: You're dealing with issues every human being deals with, like impermanence and dignity in the face of the degradations of time. How do our actions affect ourselves and our communities? What is walking down the right road going to look like? And what is walking down the wrong road going to look like? This is all stuff we all know and we forget. We forget what makes life dignified and meaningful, and I think these old stories speak exactly to those questions that every person is born with. I've told the "Rough Face Girl," which is an Algonquin Cinderella tale, to inner city kids and in the beginning they had their arms crossed and were staring me down. In the end they were wiping tears from their eyes. City: How long do you think these stories have been around? Martin: I have a feeling that these patterns are as old as the human race. And that if you go back to Lascaux --- the cave paintings --- what we're seeing there are not just images but stories, and if we knew those stories, they'd ring familiar. I think we'd have narratives that would be oddly familiar. City: And what would those narratives be? Martin: I think they'd address: Where are we? Who are we? Where did we come from? What's our purpose? Why are we born? Why do we die? I think there's something very mysterious going on in narrative. In any story, you're dealing with a beginning, middle, and end, and somehow the patterning of the story makes sense. When you started out, you didn't know what was going to make sense. But when it's done, it makes sense. It's a model of our hope for life. Somehow, narrative is a statement of immense faith that in the end, the human story will make sense and each individual life story will make sense. City:Are there any modern equivalents to these stories? Martin: I have my doubts, which is why I'm drawn to traditional tales. They've worked for thousands of years. It puts a kind of food in the psyche that no other kind of story can. It's like a vitamin for the imagination, a building block. These stories tend to be about actions and consequences, thoughts and consequences. So if a child grows up with stories, and they've created those places and people in their own psyches, they know what good and evil are. So when they have choices in their life, they can actualize that territory and say, "This looks like that road and do I want to go down it?" If you don't grow up with those kinds of stories, then there's a missing place in the imagination, and we're always unsettled. City:So why this need for spoken stories? Why not just read them? Martin: First of all, spoken words are a realm of power. When you're telling stories, you're entering a realm of power, of life and vitality. Most of our communication is really not in words, but in tonal and gestural language that surrounds the words. Every telling of a story is in some ways the repetition of some ritual or ritualized awareness. Traditional tales deal with community. They always deal in the end with casting out selfishness, ill-humor, greed, cowardice... And they always seem to uphold courage, perseverance, good humor, and a kind of respect for living things. At the very least, the selfish and greedy get tossed out of the story. City:One role of the storyteller is to bring people together. Martin: Listening to a story is a communal act. When you think of the role of the storyteller in our culture, one responsibility is to keep a gateway open to the imagination. I think we're hard-wired to respond to live images in a very profound way. Traditional storytelling used to go on all day and night. It wasn't for children. Children were allowed in, but it was really a way to restore the values of the community. Imagine living with a certain group of people, depending of the land, and you're all hearing the story brought to life in told form. Instead of getting it in someone else's images, you're all seeing it together, and you need each other to be there to make it happen. You're each creating your own images in your own mind, which is a very mysterious thing. Storytelling is a realm where old and young, inner and outer, communal and individual, these worlds all intersect. City:It seems that people feel safe when listening to a story in a group. Martin: There's a magic circle --- magic in the sense of a ceremony --- where you're in a protected space. You can see the patterns without fear of what's going to happen. You see the good and evil unfolding, and in a good story it's somehow held in balance. I think stories give us access to our fullness as people. The good and evil characters are all going to be ourselves and our own possibilities. A story gives you a shape and a path to hold the good and evil in yourself in balance. Art is providing a protected environment that if you explored them in actual life, it'd be too dangerous or risky. It allows us to play those possibilities in the mind and see where they lead, and we come out knowing why we need to be decent people. City: Traditional tales differ from the usual fiction because you try to take people out of their everyday experiences. Martin: Right. It's not the world of bills, cars, or buildings. You're coming to an open place in the psyche, first of all. And second, they're simple states; not simplistic, but archetypal. In a way our minds have become so intellectually complex that it's harder to access these simple states except in times of extremity in our lives. Remember, these old tales are meant to be told over and over. You don't claim to understand them, because new things and new levels always appear. City: Many of the stories you tell and write take place in this region. Martin: You live in a place long enough, things begin to speak to you. I think some of the most mysterious, beautiful stories come from Rochester. They're Seneca tales. And no one seems to know them. No one who isn't Seneca, anyway. I felt like it was a responsibility to give something back to the imagination of the place I live. It's like spiritual ecology. You give something back. I felt I should know Seneca stories if I live here. And if I know them, I should share them. I was fortunate to be invited to tell stories at Ganondagan and part of that request was to tell a Seneca story in the longhouse there. Peter Jemison at Ganondagan supports what I do, and I'm honored by that. I think Native stories are important because children growing up in this place don't even know their own stories; those of the Americas. Also, Native stories remind us that all living things are connected. It's very important to know the stories that came from these hills, these rivers, these trees. These stories allow us to dream ourselves back into very old places in the psyche, places we're cut off from today. There's a healing power in them. City: Have you had any problems with Native groups thinking you don't have a right to tell these stories? Martin: No, not really. I've actually had a lot of support. The stories I may tell from other cultures aren't stories I've taken from another storyteller. They're not so much retellings as recreations based on stories published long ago which I found and was moved by, but came to feel hadn't yet brought the potential in the story fully to life. At least not for our time. I think if you respect the story and you love the story and you've researched it, then you should tell it; especially if you're working with children. One of the reasons I was originally invited to tell stories at Zuni Pueblo [in New Mexico] --- and I've been back for 10 years running --- was because they liked my books and the way I handled the story. All I can do is tell the story with the most respect I can. I try to live with a story for years before I tell it. In part, I think of the tradition of Zen practice. That was part of the Zen tradition: to take things from the culture and find another level in it. Old Zen guys used to tell folk tales and songs and turn them into something else. Some koans are drawn from old tales. City: You've been a Zen practitioner for something like 30 years. How has that affected your work? Martin: I don't think I could have become a storyteller or the kind of writer I am today without Zen practice. Not because it taught me anything specific, but because it took away so much else and I realized that was all I had left: storytelling. City:Beyond that, are there any similarities between the teaching of Zen and storytelling? Martin: The teaching is oral. I think that Zen is a part of the old ways. It's essentially an apprenticeship program to spiritual life. With traditional tales, you're hitting places in yourself that are really about you as a universal human being. So when you think of it from Zen practice, storytelling seems connected to an insight of emptiness. Everything is interconnected. City: Has working on koans, which are often called Zen puzzles, affected your storytelling? Martin: I think that it totally affected my storytelling in that I worked on stories as koans. The stories of the world are the koans of ordinary life. My job was to demonstrate the life of the story. Not to think or analyze. The real job was to embody it. That's why storytelling became so important for me. So much of it is gestural language, not about the words at all. It all began, in many ways, coming out of that oral tradition, from the old ways that lie at the heart of Zen. City: You've got this grounding in traditional tales, in the old ways of Zen, and now you're on this motorcycle going fast. Martin: It's going fast, yes, but more it's going. Motorcycling is getting out into the hills and the rivers and the sky and those things are the traditional elements of a story. I don't get that in a car. In riding, you feel the earth moving, shifting; the angles of the earth, the curves meld. You can feel the weight and spaciousness of the sky above you. Hawks swoop down. When I was a kid I really wanted to be a knight with a horse and a suit of armor and ride over the earth. With the motorcycle, you've got the helmet with the visor that flips up, armored gloves, boots, and you're riding your horse over the earth. It's very primal. It's an imaginative act and a very sensuous one. I tend to have good ideas when I'm riding. They may not always be the right ideas, but they're interesting. Plus you really have to pay attention. You let go of the ghost world, enter a primal world. Your mind full of stuff is that ghost world. When you're riding, you have to pay attention and that ghost world disappears. You're in a primal world again; the world of stories. It's an actual live, world. Rochester is a fantastic motorcycling area. You can be out on empty roads, gorgeous roads. Plus there's a sense of community. There are a couple of guys I ride with, all different backgrounds. But there's this sense... I don't know maybe it's kind of this primal hunting band, an old ways kind of sense of this group of guys traveling together over the earth. The only danger is that I'll forget about working because I like it so much.
Thoughts
on the Importance, and Necessity of Folklore
Looking
back over the last forty years of my thinking, writing, and storytelling
I see now that they have all been attempts to explore a question, well,
two questions, really, that have been both guiding and haunting me: "What
is folklore and why is it important?"
The more I think about it, the more I see that these are not simply questions
for me or even just for children, parents, educators and children's book
writers. Joyce compulsively explored these same questions. Shakespeare
was bound and beholding to them. Melville cut his teeth on them. I think
they lie behind the best of who we collectively and individually, are.
They are fundamental questions because they are intimately linked with
our human origins, with the nature of the imagination, and with the reality
of a human "interior" to the world.
There is no little man or woman inside our skulls giving directions.
In essence the human interior we live within, that realm of compelling
thoughts, attitudes, judgments-the ones we listen to, are guided by and
which shape our lives-is built of dreams, and those dreams seem to remain
astonishingly constant throughout human cultures and time. Those dreams
form, and are formed by, folklore. For in and through them we discover
the configurations of a human interior and its denizens-the good and evil,
the compassionate and selfish archetypes of the psyche. And we are shown
the consequences of choosing one road over another. It's as if we, and
the characters of folklore, are always standing at some crossroads in
a dark forest. Which road shall we take?
One road is built of kindness. In stories nothing is literal or physical;
roads are built not of brick and gravel and tar, but of thoughts and deeds
which, in turn, are themselves, built of and express underlying values.
But values in stories don't mean My values as opposed to Your
values. Rather, they simply demonstrate consequences, or cause and effect.
If I do this, this is likely to happen. If I do that, that is likely
to happen. What is it I want to have happen in my life-story? So,
one road, as I've said, is built of kindness, generosity, good humor,
and faith in human and animal and nature's own vast potential. Another
road is built of selfishness, cruelty, fear, ill humor, and little faith
in the potential of life itself to heal and sustain.
Folklore maps the territory, shows us the roads before us, and sets us
free to walk the roads we choose-after allowing us to experience each
road for ourselves. For, in stories, folk stories, all the characters
are so universal as to be not individual characters as in fiction, but
more generally recognizable aspects of our own psyches; characters common
to all. Which is why the one voice, of one storyteller, can carry and
reveal them.
So, somewhere, right now, in some form, Jack is stealing back his stolen
goods from the terrible giant, then chopping down the vine. Timberrrrr!
Somewhere, in some form, right now a girl sits by the cinders, unjustly
confined within ugliness, who will then be released to her own beauty-and
the world's.
Here is what Italo Calvino in his very convincing introduction to his
masterful Italian Folktales has to say about the realm now so foolishly
being cast aside by contemporary, market-driven publishing. I think that
no one has made the case for folklore more eloquently and concisely. Though
it is a longish quote I want to present it in its entirety here.
Now that the book is finished, I know that this was not a hallucination,
a sort of professional malady, but the confirmation of something I already
suspected-folktales are real.
. . . folk stories are the catalog of the potential destinies of men
and women, especially for that stage in life where destiny is formed,
i.e., youth, beginning with birth, which itself often foreshadows the
future; then the departure from home, and finally through the trials
of growing up, the attainment of maturity and the proof of one's humanity.
This sketch, although summary encompasses everything: the arbitrary
division of humans, albeit in essence equal, into kings and poor people;
the persecution of the innocent and their subsequent vindication, which
are the terms inherent in every life; love unrecognized when first encountered
and then no sooner experienced than lost; the common fate of subjection
to spells, or having one's existence predetermined by complex and unknown
forces. This complexity pervades one's entire existence and forces one
to struggle to free oneself, to determine one's own fate; at the same
time we can liberate ourselves only if we liberate other people, for
this is the sine qua non of one's own liberation. There must
be fidelity to a goal and purity of heart, values fundamental to salvation
and triumph. There must also be beauty, a sign of grace that can be
masked by the humble, ugly guise of a frog; and above all there must
be present the infinite possibilities of mutation, the unifying element
in everything: men, beasts, plants, things.
In other words we, our psyches, NEED folklore. Our psyches are
folklore. To lose folklore is not just to lose a few stories. It is to
lose a realm of imagination we need to understand our lives, and even
to survive.
I find it horrifying, an appalling dereliction of duty, that this very
realm is now being so rapidly abandoned by major publishers. Instead,
through the large chain bookstores, children are being fed the cute, the
clever, and the flashy celebrity title of a Madonna, or Jay Leno. Not,
I think, a particularly nourishing meal as far as children's literature
goes. Is there anything there that will stick to the ribs?
We have lost our soul, for the soul of all literature is the tale, whose
tradition extends infinitely back and infinitely forward and most importantly,
for all time is only NOW for the psyche, infinitely inward.
The imagination is fed, has been fed, for countless generations through
such folktales. Traditional stories are food for the soul.
Folklore is not kiddie and is not dated. Though it may go in and out
of publishing fashion. But that has nothing to do with its validity, vitality,
relevance, or importance.
Our culture has become fascinated, hypnotized with what is new. Give
us the latest this, or that; the latest craze, and we are happy, but only
for a shorter and shorter time. For technology increases the speed of
the surface, increases the potential for such one-night stands of attention.
It is not wrong or bad. It's just that this story we are telling ourselves
with technology has, along with its particular strengths of speed and
simultaneity, consequences, side-effects, and limitations, which may not
be what we really want. In the realm of narrative this can mean fascination
with the wizardry of the telling rather than with the strength of the
story. When this happens, causes and effects drown in a sea of marvels.
The story itself is lost at sea, the viewers cast adrift. The telling
then has no lasting meaning, its purpose limited to an hour and a half
of entertainment.
I am fascinated with what is old, not new. With what has endured. With
the places of roots and bedrock. With what is common to all. With what
is taken for granted and ignored.
The language of folklore is the language of our recurring dreams. And
nightmares.
The tales have an important role, even today. The imagination never ages.
Its needs remain ever-young. Just as we cannot outgrow our need for a
balanced diet, so too, we cannot outgrow our need for nutrition for the
mind. And the imagination as I've said, is not "kiddie." It is out of
our imaginations, out of our dreamed sense of self, that we create our
real lives. Dream that you can be a writer, a doctor, a pilot, a scientist,
a teacher and you have a chance of becoming that very thing. If you cannot
see it, form an image of it in the mind, the odds are, you will not, cannot
become it. Folktales are food for the mind. They allow us to form clear
images and to play with those images, gathering them into recognizable
shapes and patterns, helping us organize, to value-pattern raw experience
into a meaningful form, the form of a life that "works." They are maps,
not the territory. But without maps one cannot go far without becoming
lost.
TV relaxes us, helps us forget the days' burdensome decisions and tasks.
A necessary ally these days. In many ways it has become the folklore of
the time. Yet it does not do what true tales do-it does not restore us.
It does not open the mind to wonder. It does not create multi-leveled
images that you can chew on your whole life. (Aha, why that's like
when the youngest brother shared his food with the little fox!)
Traditional tales are the mind's restoration. Which is why artists throughout
the ages have returned to folklore again and again as the major source
of themes, of pattern, character, and structure. Traditional tales show
us the fundamental paths in life and they return us to a sense of faith
in not only our own humanity and creative powers, our essential goodness,
but also restore to us what is most missing today - faith in the powers
of the natural world itself. They remind us that all things live and communicate.
That trees and animals, stars and rivers can and do speak-for those willing
to listen. They reconnect us with a living world in which all things have
a mysterious and meaningful place. They remind us that it is only ill-will
that can close this world to us.
Is this a childish fantasy? Think again. It is exactly the world that
modern physics and ecological sciences are revealing to us today. In short,
as Calvino says, "folktales are real!"
So the old world of folklore carries truth that is adult indeed, and
which we ignore to our own peril. (In addition, when told or written,
there is an added benefit; the tales allow each of us to enter this old/new
truthful world in terms intimately established by our own unique image-making).
The child who grows up without access to this vision grows up imaginatively
mal-nourished. The sense of consequences, which underlies all values,
remains unclear. The map is not there, experientially. For in a story
we are not told what to believe. Rather, we experience the characters
within our own selves. All the storyteller gives us is sounds on the air:
the writer, only squiggles on a page. We are seeing aspects of ourselves.
Of our own interior. Folktales are the first true simulations and are
more interactive than any computer game. You become the mountains, the
rivers, the good and the evil. And you sort it all out experientially,
feeling it, creating it in your own images. Without this direct imaginative
experience, faith in one's innate human powers is never mobilized. The
felt connection with the living universe, which has brought each one of
us forth, remains dormant. Of course, family, schooling, often experiences
in nature (I spent most of my childhood in New York City up in treetops)
can and do provide core experiences which modify and expand this. But
the realm through which experiences of what we might call, for lack of
a better word, connection, have been passed down, perhaps for the
last half million years, generation by generation, has been folklore.
It is how such experiences of the human path of life on this earth have
been codified and bundled and made usable and re-usable. They give us
each roots. And in the experience of listening and reading, wings. Yet
with this generation for the first time in history, perhaps, that link
is being sundered.
These tales belong to all of us. They come from our ancestors world-wide,
showing us the fundamental values, the survival benefits of good humor,
courage, compassion and faith, The characters that have them triumph,
thought they may suffer and go through tremendous hardships before they
are affirmed by the tale. And the greedy and selfish and cruel are thrown
out of the story, do not survive, are not upheld by the narrative itself.
Simple truths, childish truths, perhaps, but it can still take an entire
lifetime before one can live them.
This has been the human view, based on hard-won experience through the
millennia. And though these stories were never intended for children (who,
after all, needs affirmation more of what constitutes good decision-making
than those in power, i.e., than adults?) still, children were always part
of the audience for these tales, always expected to have these maps and
encouragements to mature human behavior as part of their store of tools
for living; something to draw on when the going gets rough.
For it will. Get rough. For that too is a truth of life and of folklore.
The good may triumph in the end, but bad and painful things will happen
along the way. The tales are not naive. "Welcome to life on earth!" they
say. "Here's what it looks like. Here's what will happen. Here's the kind
of thinking and doing that will help you. These kinds will bring you down."
Folktales are part of the primer that every one of us, adult and child,
should be carrying in our pockets or backpacks as we set out on the road
of life. What a mistake we make when we, as a culture, fail to provide
our own children with the tools they will need. When the big bad wolf
shows up on our doorstep and the winds of impermanence begin to blow,
will we be living in a house of brick or of straw? The choice is ours,
each one of ours. I say, let's tell the tales and pass them on.
So, in my book, The Rough-Face Girl (Putnam 1992) I explore our
need for justice. Which is what Cinderella tales are really about. They
are so prevalent as patterns because they show what most people in most
places and times, do not see with their physical eyes. Justice. But the
truth is we yearn for it. Cinderella tales keep that flame alive. In my
recent novel, The World Before This One, (Arthur A. Levine Books,
Scholastic 2002) built of Seneca legends from my neighborhood, Rochester,
New York, I explore the nature of story and community and the ability
of the earth itself, the great stone beneath our feet, to tell us stories
that can change our lives. One of my favorite tales in that novel is one
about a boy and a monster bear. The boy triumphs over the huge and magically
empowered monster because he uses the greatest magic power of allóthe
power of his own mind awakened through a determination to help his people.
In my forthcoming novel, Birdwing (Arthur A. Levine Books, Scholastic,
2005) I explore the metaphor of the child who falls out of myth into this
world and can no longer fly, but still on the left side, the heart side,
has a wing. The image comes to me out of many years of apprenticeship
in the world of folklore and folk, or as I like to call it, traditional
tale. We all are born with a wing. Some hide it. Some cut if off, maiming
themselves to appear "normal." And some learn to live fully with their
wing just as it is, and so become truly themselves. And, when they do,
they save not just themselves, but the kingdom.
All of my work owes its greatest debt to the world of folklore. Why?
"Folklore is us." It cannot disappear or be disavowed anymore than can
our human nature and our deepest human dreams. But it can, sadly, go in
and out of fashion.
That being so, our job as teachers, educators, readers, and writers is
to keep the flame alive even as the pendulum of fashion swings back and
forth. Our job as adults, as always, is to pass what is important on to
the next generation. The forms of these tales, these tools, these immaterial
resources of the human spirit and imagination are as threatened now as
water and air, rivers and forests. Folktales are not being published as
they once were; those that are available are going out of print.
How lucky we are to still have them, as many as we do. My hope is that
the generations to come will share in our present still available good
fortune. Like everything else, it all depends on the choices we make today.
Kindness and courage, the old tales tell us, are true aspects of who we
are. The crossroads are before us. For our own sakes, and the sake of
those yet to come, let's take the good road.
Storytelling
and Writing Telling depends on "presence," "vibes," that indefinable something built
of silence, the body's flow, voice-tones and rhythms, as well as on words
and word-choice as they extend into the thrust and flow of narrative.
But writing? No voice, no tone, no gesture, no silence, no presence;
just squiggles on a page. Which is where many wonderful storytellers experience
terror. None of the old supports that move listeners sustain us
with readers. It's still storytelling, but suddenly it's like foreign
territory. What will help us cross the stream on a moonless night when
the bridge is broken? That's a paraphrase of a Zen verse I like very much.
You'll find it in commentary to koan # 44 in The Mumonkan, one
of the central training texts of Zen tradition. To turn it to our use,
it sums up that moment of transition into the unknown very well. How do
you step into a new realm when all your old systems are gone?
I'd like to try to touch on a few possibilities here:
First, with writing, the task may not be as bad as it first appears.
Words and what they create are still at the core. Then again, it may be
worse. To write you have to like sentences, to see each one as
a story in miniature. And to get each sentence to live can be a long,
arduous, repetitive, daunting task. You work and work, hoping all the
while that the damned thing won't turn out to be so many pieces sewn together,
a Frankenstein. And that is with every sentence!
Telling stories doesn't require polishing sentences. They never have
to get finalized. We don't even need grammar, really, only syntax. We
can stay loose, put English on the ball with a bit of voice voodoo, give
it an emotional twist, staying alert to our listeners' faces, eyes. Getting
them to get what we're saying and respond. It's the story that
matters, dummy! not sentences. Our job is to get it across.
It won't work with a blank page. No. The page wants perfectly
finished sentences. It stares back, horribly unwinking. It opens its maw
and hungrily demands, Feed me! Sensing it might swallow you if
you don't comply quickly, you start tossing it sentences like a zookeeper
tossing raw meat to a lion. Unnerving!
Also, in telling stories one can develop habits of going for the emotion
in the tale. We, and our stories, live and die by the audience's laughter
(in the right places) and tears. Because of this, told stories can get
set or "fixed" in an emotional way. Storytellers feed an audience's unconscious
need both for pattern and the breaking of pattern. These days, given our
overly tumultuous culture and times, audiences often unconsciously hunger
not to be roused or challenged, but reified, reassured, confirmed. Speaking
to that need, told tales can get stuck in sentiment.
But written tales, ones that will be read alone, in silence, are meant
to be re-read. So, while they will obviously need to touch our laughter
and tears, they also need sound structure, sturdy enough to withstand
repeated perusal. It cannot just be an emotional experience, not just
that good, old, immediate "zap" of the told tale making us laugh, cry,
or shriek with fright. Rather the shape itself has to be strong enough
to sustain re-reading through which the hidden, at first overlooked details,
and rich, subconscious layering and patterning out of which the narrative
emerges, can reveal itself. There's the slow, fine-aged wine-like pleasure
of the good read! Novels also will especially need complex characters
that voice cannot easily sustain, as well as vivid action, interior revelation,
vast locales, and complex, back-and-forth dialogue.
The written story does not need us, or our voices, or our bodies. It
demands different skills and tools than that of solo performance. Storytelling's
intimacy derives from the presence of the (usually) solo teller and the
simple tools of voice and gesture. Listening is an intimate yet, communal,
act. Conversely, while reading is (usually) a solo experience, that solitary
reader faces many characters, diverse lives, places, situations, and actions.
The two experiences are mirror images of each other.
Unlike a told tale, written work will unfold at the reader's own chosen
pace. And if the tale does not immediately draw the reader in and on,
the book will be put down. Live audiences are more patient. The audience
forms a social bond. They have come to hear. You almost have to dissuade
them from listening rather than trying to get them to come and stay aboard.
In children's literature the language must be direct, immediately accessible,
and the images vivid and clear. Above all, the writer writing for children
must be willing to speak to the imagination without equivocating. Children's
literature is not "kiddie." It is storytelling that speaks directly to
the imagination, the primary faculty of childhood and of all creative
life. In the long run this view will prove itself again and again. However,
these days, with large chain stores destroying independent booksellers,
the cute and clever work, and the easily sold "celebrity title" of a Madonna
or Jay Leno, have nearly wiped out that the traditional realm of the storyteller.
Children's book publishing is not for the faint of heart, and has become
not only less intimate and terribly commercial but, as one waggish insider
not so jokingly put it, "a bunny eat bunny world."
Picture books are close to poetry on one hand, and film on the other.
Think of the illustrator as your body and voice-tone. You only tell in
words what is needed to move the narrative forward. The illustrator SHOWS
all else. A good picture book is NOT words plus pictures, but pictures
and words that need each other, that cannot stand alone, and whose interaction
creates a third note, a harmonic which is the story itself in the mind
of the reader-viewer. Which in a nutshell is why you can't just take what
you say in telling a story and write it down and have a picture book.
You'll have too many words. The hardest thing in writing a picture book
is to take back your words and let the illustrator in, let the illustrator
show what you don't say. Acting dumb is the hardest thing in the
world for tellers and for writers. Saying less is harder than saying more.
But in this case it may be more "telling."
When I write picture books I never write them the way I tell them. I
have to think of the story as a book. And in creating the manuscript I
may add notes for the editor and illustrator saying what needs to be shown
if I am going to use so few words. I might even create a dummy to show
the relationship of language to the images to come, indicating which will
be two page spreads, which single page and so on. It means thinking the
story in another language, "in book."
Which is why writing is a constant process of re-thinking and re-writing.
More times than you want to count or admit. I began my novel Birdwing
five years ago. Arthur A. Levine, the publisher of Harry Potter has bought
it and will publish it this summer, 2005. I have dedicated the last five
years to thinking, writing, re-writing and constantly re-inhabiting this
one story. It has changed tremendously. Characters have died and new ones
emerged. Locales have shifted, chapters have vanished and ones I never
dreamed of appeared. In this living way it has become a simpler, stronger
tale. It has become something else, too - a book. Something that stands
alone, whose skeleton is formed of sentences, paragraphs and chapters,
not gesture, tone, and breath, and which speaks for itself without needing
my presence at all. It is not a told tale, but has become something else-itself.
As have I. For writing re-writes us, even as we re-write the story. And
writing what our culture much too vaguely calls "children's literature"
can be a way for us to reconnect with our own deepest and most universal
dreams. Read more at The
Scholastic Connection Children's
Literature
Read
Rafe's article that 'Speaks about Children's Literature' at Embracing the
Child, a site that salutes "Literature for Learning and Shared Reading".
home
about rafe
books
recordings
articles
awards
news
appearances
gallery
|
hat
is a writer? Or when is someone a writer? That’s how the question
actually appeared in my own internal thesaurus-dictionary for I had already
written four or five award-winning children’s books before it began
to dawn on me, "Maybe I can be a writer." And it took me even
longer to be able to actually say, "I am a writer." For "writer"to
me was such a charged, archetypal word. Like a mantle of gold, like the
white bronze poet’s rod of the ancient Irish bards, it seemed there
must be some special preparation, some sign, some certificate that makes
it clear, and shows one’s worthiness -- "Yes, you are a writer!"
Or at least, "Now you are truly a writer." After all, you need
proper certification to teach little children and to operate a motor vehicle.
Why not the same kind of healthy acknowledgment for the writer?
f you know your purpose you can stick with it, through thick and thin
and, in the midst of many dubious and criss-crossing pathways, more easily
choose the road that leads to fulfillment of your goal. If I know why
I must go from Rochester to New York City or Anchorage, Alaska or any
of the other places to which my schedule says I’m supposed to go,
it’s more likely I’ll get there -- whatever the route and the
weather -- if I am sure about why I need to make the trip.
ometimes
people ask me -- "Why are folktales important? Why should they be
shared, retold, recreated, put in books today? Are they just remnants
of outdated cultures, quaint and charming stories of little current relevance?
Why do you so often write recreations of folktales, anyway?"
t first glance the Buddhist jataka tale, "King Goodness" seems
to be nothing more than a propaganda piece for Buddhist values, specifically
for the virtue of non-violence.