First Snow Lives On.

My husband read my passage on First Snow yesterday, and he asked a lot of questions:

“Did you get this ritual from somewhere?” I believe I invented it in December of 1984. There are friends of mine who now have their own rituals. Sometimes they post on Facebook and tell me they miss me. I miss them too.
“Do you celebrate it every year?” I’ve missed a lot of years. One time I was in the hospital and missed it. Some years we don’t get snow in November and December, and it seems too late if the first snow happens in February.
“What are the rules?” Funny you should ask:

There has to be enough snow expected to cover the grass outside — at least one inch.
You need one person minimum, and there’s no set maximum. However, as you can’t plan ahead of time, the number of participants is limited by who’s available. It’s harder to have guests as you get older or live in a small town.
You can either sit in the snow and cold, or bring a bowl of snow inside.
Participant(s) will toast with a beverage associated with wintertime. This includes, but is not limited to, eggnog, hot mulled cider, mulled wine, wassail, brandy, or blackberry brandy. Regardless of how many participants, there’s only one cup.You can fill the mug more than once. It’s a ritual; we don’t care about germs.
The cup is passed around in a circle. Each participant takes a sip of it and proposes a toast. The first toast is always “To the snow”. The last toast is usually very silly, as all the important things have been toasted to earlier. They get sillier more quickly if the mug contains an alcohol-based fortifying beverage.
The toasting ends when all the beverage is gone or all have run out of ideas for toasts. Or frozen to death.

Over the years, I’ve collected stories around First Snow. There was the year (ah! my college days!) when three of us decided to sit on the Old Stone Bridge in Champaign, a small arch over a creek, toasting the First Snow with a mug of blackberry brandy, swathed in an old sleeping bag — and in violation of park rules twice over, with the alcohol and the lateness of the hour. And then the cop showed up. I piped up and told him we were celebrating the first snow and this was hot cider. I babbled out the whole ritual to him. The cop looked down, likely incredulous, and instructed us to finish quickly. It makes me sad to think that if we had not been white college students, it could have ended badly.

The best toast ever was made by Jon Jay Obermark, on a balcony that bravely held eight people and a mug of cheap brandy (E&J, what else?). “To that star up there … and that star there … and that star over there!”

********

It turns out there will be a snow tonight in Maryville. A first snow for the season.

Richard and I will bring in a bowl of snow as the honored guest, and drink a mug of Irish coffee, my only alcohol for the year. Outside, darkness will press on the windows, and in the First Snow ritual, we will find the light in fellowship. The first toast we will drink will be to the snow; the second, to the people from our past and present, scattered all over the world.

“Through the years, we all will be together,

if the fates allow … “

The explosion of visits yesterday — I’m curious.

Yesterday’s post hit 173 readers, which is three times the average amount of reads I get for a post!

Thank you, everyone! Please come back!

I wish I knew who all of you were so I could thank you personally.

I wonder how many of you are people I know and how many people came to visit for the first time. I expect that one-third of you are regular readers, and that half of those are people I know. (Hi, Lanetta!)

That means 2/3 of you visited because you were attracted to the concept of graduation either through my Facebook (in which case you know me), Twitter, or search terms on Blogger, or because you were just bored. Or maybe you were an agent, but I only gave my blog address to one agent so far.

I have no way of knowing who you are, and as they say, curiosity killed the cat. Each of you has a story. Each of you has a reason to visit — whether it be “Because I’m graduating,” or “Because I was bored,” or “Because I’m a regular reader”, or “Because it sounded interesting,” or “Because I know you,”or “I have no idea”. Each individual reason has a story.

I wonder how many of you will be back to read this post. In a way, it doesn’t matter, because this IS the Internet, where we read anonymously and write anonymously, even if we’re writing nasty dreck on Facebook. For all the information-sharing, we don’t really know each other here.

But what if we started to?

An Excerpt: A Story about Stories

Day 6 of NaNoWriMo, and I want to get at least 2000 words in before I have to go to work, because it’s a long day and I need to get started soon. I’m at 17,000 words, up 7.000 words, so if I don’t get all the words in today, I’m okay.

An excerpt (remember this is rough draft time). In effect, what I’m writing is a story about a story:

As I drove down the highway, I thought about Hakeem’s and Bosco’s words — I couldn’t help but laugh at those two young men wanting to — what? Offer themselves up as husbands? Be my protectors? I seldom picked up on those kinds of currents. As role models, my parents gave me the gift of watching their near-perfect relationship, perfect except for my father’s belief that my mother kept a secret he couldn’t crack. However, I didn’t seem to fall for the occasional men who took me out for coffee and complimented me. I literally didn’t understand the process of “I take you out for dinner, you have sex with me.”

From there, I thought about Sonya’s words. “If you’re looking for the Alvar, you’ll have to look in the worst places.” Wasn’t that always the case with fairy tales? The Hobbits had to throw the One Ring into Mount Doom, a raging volcano. Little Red Riding Hood had to go through a dark forest and visit the wolf to pass through menarche, symbolized by the red hood. Would my quest follow the parameters of the Hero’s Quest?

I was not a hero. I was an academic without a job and without any useful skills except the ability to crack Schmidt locks — and other locks, albeit with the help of a lock pick. I was an anthropologist searching for the inevitable, unpublishable study, a study of the origins of a mythical people. If the Alvar actually existed, what would I do if I found them? If they didn’t exist and I found the human origin of the tale as if it was an urban legend, where would I publish my findings?

Did I chase the legend simply because my mother once told it to me in a bedtime story?

I pulled myself back to reality and saw a roadblock up ahead, just before Eau Claire. I slammed on my brakes, nearly skidding as I approached the barricade with three men, all armed with semiautomatic machine guns. When one of them walked up to me, his hand on the strap of the gun slung over his shoulder, I rolled down my window, hands shaking. “What seems to be the trouble?” I asked, trying to school my voice into calmness.

“Your papers,” the man, with the hard voice and face of the military, held out his hand.

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Of course I had identity papers. My parents had warned me that, if I had to bug out of town, that I needed at least a copy of my birth certificate and my drivers’ license. I had not been asked for them before this moment, and I wondered if I had hit a border to a newly formed country.

*******
May you find wonder in your day.

To My Readers — a virtual cup of coffee

All of us have excellent stories to tell.

The shortest story I’ve ever been told: “I was going to do my banking today. So I went to the bank, and it’s on fire.”

The short story best relying on imagination: “Remember when there was a bounty on coyotes in Missouri? My mom hit one and threw it in the trunk to take to the sheriff. Too bad it wasn’t dead.”

The best short story I played a role in: “I had a dream last night we were all late for the bank robbery. That was alright, though, because we were all zombies.”

I collect other people’s stories — the one about a friend playing war games in a park, who runs into some woods to take a leak at the edge of a cliff, only to look down and find himself exposed above a two-lane highway. The one about the hunter attacked by a rabid deer and the one about the woman who shot a deer while sitting on the toilet. My grandmother Iverson’s malapropisms and my great-great grandmother who could stop bleeding by the laying on of hands. Silly and clever and maladroit and mournful — I hold stories for people. And holding stories makes me happier than almost anything (except coffee).

I know all of you have stories of all kinds. I would love to sit with each and every one of you (assuming none of you are slashers or stalkers) over a cup of coffee (or beverage of your choice) and find out who you are from your stories.

I know this vision is against all the rules of the Internet, where we all read each others’ Facebook posts without remarking, and half the posts are reposts anyhow.

So, again, I’d like to hear your comments, and more importantly, hear your stories. (We’ll have to imagine the coffee.)

Here’s to you, readers!

Writing as Therapy

“I tell my story over and over in my head, over and over to my readers, struggling to make sense of it …”

— The Repentance of Nicholas, Lauren Leach-Steffens

I wrote the story from which this quote was taken some twenty-five years ago. The story was a Gothic tale of heinous deeds, sacrifice and redemption, or that’s what I told myself. In reality, the story was about an unreliable narrator who survived an attack by an incubus and suffered from Stockholm Syndrome, falling in love with her attacker in the aftermath. This scenario happens all the time, and is part of the reason it’s so hard to leave one’s abuser. It mirrored what I was experiencing at the time, and my denial. I will not post the story here because it glorifies Stockholm Syndrome.

Writing therapy, however, has legitimacy. Psychology uses the tool extensively as a therapeutic tool, although they utilize it more as writing sprints (short exercises) and journaling. However, it’s not a large leap from that to working out events and feelings in a journal to fictionalizing them, either directly or symbolically, through specific scenes and general themes.

Writing as therapy can yield bad results. There’s an often derided phenomenon called the Mary Sue/Marty Stu story in fan fiction, where someone inserts their fantasy of competence, fame, and winning the (insert desired gender of love interest here) into an existent world. It reads predictably ridiculously, defying characterization of other members — after all, they’re props for the fabulous main character — plot, and logic. (Note that many women in fanfic and science fiction have had their legitimate works derided as “Mary Sue” simply because others can’t imagine female characters as anything but the prize. I’m not talking about that.) For a glimpse of Marty Stu, watch the first movie in the Star Trek reboot. Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk takes over the Enterprise when he should have been smacked into a high-security military prison for trespassing, and the fun (?) begins. Every little thing he does, as they say, is magic. Credulity is stretched thin.

My favorite theme in my writing is therapeutic: ordinary heroes can save the world from the Apocalypse. I guess I write pre-Apocalyptic fiction. This likely comes from being a tween/teen during the Reagan Administration, where our president joked about bombing Russia on a hot mic and Russia and the US stockpiled weapons to up the threat. (To my Russian reader: If you’re old enough to remember, you remember this differently. That’s okay.) During that time I had near-constant nightmares where I was separated from my family as the sirens raged, and the only place I could find to shelter was a toilet stall. Because I have a sick sense of humor, think: flush and cover. I didn’t realize where this theme came from until this morning because the subconscious is a wonderful thing.

The therapy we do in writing is transformational. We create solutions, or wishes, or a worst-case scenario that moves people to act. We heal ourselves, heal our readers, and tell our story, over and over, struggling to make sense of it.

The Stories We Tell: Oral Tradition

Before the development of writing systems, storytelling was one of the only methods of communicating the wonder of the world. Storytellers would regale the gathered people with tales about gods, about successful or unsuccessful hunts, about their history. Someone in the next generation would memorize the stories so he could take the storyteller’s place around the fire someday.

The tradition continued around the world even after the invention of writing, with the Gaelic shanachie, family stories at holiday gatherings, sermons in churches all over the world. Even social gatherings have their share of swapped stories.

I grew up in a family with a rich oral tradition. My father’s side, a mix of Welsh, French Canadian, and Ojibwe, told stories about their lifestyle, which centered around the North Woods and hunting, reckless adventures growing up poor in Milwaukee, and a certain amount of bravado and subsequent error. My mother’s family told stories with word play and puns, with my grandmother serving as the straight man.

A hunting story on my father’s side:

Grandpa had decided to teach his sons how to hunt pheasant. “Boys,” he said, “What we do is line up in this field here, and spread out aways from each other. The dog’ll flush up a pheasant, then each of us has a try to shoot the pheasant flying by.

“Unless it’s a hen pheasant — they’re the brown ones. You’re not supposed to shoot hen pheasants. So if you see a hen, shout down the line so that nobody else tries at it. Got it?”

All three boys nod.

It was a bad day hunting — the hunting dog stayed listless and quiet. The spirits of the hunters drooped, because the pheasant was to be their dinner.

Suddenly the dog yipped, running toward a tussock. A pheasant burst out of the grass.

The youngest, my Uncle Larry, who was no more than four and wasn’t even armed, yelled “Hen” in a quavering voice.

The middle son, my Uncle Ron, at 7, again not armed, yelled “Hen!” miserably.

My father, age 9, kept his shotgun down and sighed, “Hen!”

Grandpa thought for just a moment, raised his gun and shot —

“Hen! Heh heh heh.”

The family had supper that night.

A story from Mom’s side of the family:

Seventeen-year-old Aunt Marie approaches Grandma with a proclamation: “I’m going to marry Wayne.”

“I forbid it,” Grandma snapped.

“Then I’ll elope,” Aunt Marie countered.

“You can’t elope!”

“You watermelon!”

(If you don’t get this, read it aloud.)

I have changed these stories by writing them down. I have tried to use the language of the people involved, but my writing techniques have crept in. In the spoken story, I could merely use tone of voice and gesture and not provided cues to emotion. However, these changes would have happened even in the transmission of the stories from generation to generation. For example, a Native American cautionary tale about white animals being sacred, one passed down in my family, has morphed into a story about a hunter shooting a white deer and being arrested by Wisconsin Conservation.

I have changed these stories by writing them down in a way that freezes them in time and place. When you read a written story like these, you read an “official” version of the story, and you will go back and read this again to get the story right. It has no way to adapt to the needs of the generations to come — a change in the settings, a change in the consequences. Grandpa will always be the one to shoot the hen. The elopement story will always be between a mother and daughter.

This is why, when someone suggests I collect my family stories and save them so others can read them, I am reluctant to do so.