Tell me your story.

I know you’re reading out there, and I know that you don’t like to respond, and so I’m asking this rhetorically: Tell me your story.

Now, think about yourself as a protagonist in a novel.

Do you appear as the same race, the same gender as you do in real life?
What are your strengths (real or imaginary)?
What are your character flaws?
If you have superpowers, what are they?
How do you present to others, and is that the real you?
What are your weaknesses?
What would people remember you for?

Tell me your story now.

Both of these, the real and the imaginary self, are your stories.

Potential

More than anything, I think the thing that inspires me when it comes to writing is the potential a story has. The potential to be read or heard, the potential to speak to someone’s condition, the potential to make someone laugh.

This is more important to me that simply writing for the joy of it. For me, the joy is from a human interacting with the humanity of my stories. My love of stories predates my love of writing, coming from a family where both sides excelled in their kind of stories. My dad’s family told hunting stories with a sense of slapstick and absurdity, except for the Native American tale about sacred white deer disguised as something my Grandfather had witnessed. My mother’s family loved wordplay, and very often my grandmother served as the “straight guy” a la vaudeville who would set up the play on words.

When I write characters, I want to bring them home for dinner and have a dinner party. When I write themes, I ask myself if they will entwine into my readers’ lives and change them. When I write plots, I think of my family stories and how they walked me into surprising places.

It’s good for me to think about why I write.

The situation is that I don’t have much patience. Much perseverance, but not much patience. Oh, well, I forgot to get that when I grew up. I’m trying new things now, like maybe small press even though I will be lucky to get 100 readers, and Wattpad, which is the massive marketplace of ideas with no curator.

Find me on Wattpad — you have to subscribe, but it’s free. Read my story collection as it develops. Say hi. Feel moved to interact with me.

Wattpad

And if you want to write me? lleachie AT gmail.com

Sacred things we have lost

Music used to be a sacred thing, a living thing. In Bali, the instruments of the gamelan, imbued with the spirit of the Gamelan which lived in the big gong, were treated with respect. The gamelan performed concerts in the village square, on street corners, with no divide between the musicians and audience. Connection between audience and performers was immediate and unmistakeable.

Storytelling used to be a sacred thing, with the shaman or the shanachie telling mystical stories and tales of their people while sitting surrounded by listeners. The oral tradition lent itself to changes in the way the story was told, tailoring it to the news of the day, the needs of the listeners. Respect flowed from teller to listener and back.

Dance used to be a sacred thing, with a select group of the villagers, and sometimes the whole village, dancing in a communication to the gods, dancing in joy, dancing in sorrow.

These forms once were people’s entertainment, their TVs and MP3s and concerts. The difference was that the experience of earlier peoples wasn’t that of consuming entertainment passively and choosing with a flick of the fingers which was worthy. The audience celebrated skill, true, but they didn’t depend on the curators to know what to choose — the bestseller list, the popular vote, the movie of the week. They didn’t need to — they were part of the performance, and that was more exhilarating than the large venue concert.

We try to meet our curated heroes today, with backstage passes and autograph sessions and photographs, in a way of trying to make ourselves sacred or at least special. It is not the same, because they are on the stage high above us. We are not part of the creative process. We don’t become something bigger than ourselves, even for a moment.

*******
I grew up in the world of small performance. All the local Girl Scouts and their petty, squabbling leaders gathered yearly for four weekends of Singspiration, where we learned folk music from Blondie and Comanche, despite the attempts of the petty leaders to shut down the annual event because the leaders were presumed a gay couple.

I wrote poetry for my teachers to read and gained a loyal following of three classmates in high school. I later wrote a song about the frighteningly intense jock John Elliott, who died in a car crash right after high school:

John told me he would marry me/right in the middle of Civics class/I guess I never believed it/you had to know how I was/a girl who lived inside her coat/startled at shadows, wrote poetry/that Marsha and Tammy read to him/but I never wrote a poem for John …

I knew several talented storytellers, most of them in my family. My father’s side, a jumble of Welsh, Ojibwe, German, and French, told hunting stories with decidedly Celtic humor twists and one story I’ve been told was a Native American teaching tale updated to 1940’s Wisconsin. My mother’s family told stories that almost invariably featured 1) bad puns and 2) my grandmother as the vaudevillian “straight man”.

I grew up to write poetry, songs, short stories, and essays. I would occasionally put the poems and short stories on PLATO, which was an early predecessor to the Internet. PLATO was much more interactive than today’s Net, and we PLATOites made it a point to meet each other in person. I won 6 bottles of lovely dark ginger beer for one of my stories, which also caused a good chunk of the male readers to say “(*gulp*) I better check myself.” People noted what I wrote in that small world. I’ve also had poetry published locally and one essay in a liberal religious journal.

My first novel (the early draft of Gaia’s Hands) happened not because I wanted to write a novel, but because I kept writing short stories to explore the meaning of a dream I had (which, if you need to know, was about a sexual encounter initiated by a much younger male stranger.) Then, when I found I could get through the NaNo prescribed 50k words, I got innundated by inspiration — more tales flowing from Gaia’s Hands. I wrote what I knew — academia, emotional beauty, the banal evil of greed, green things, semi-communal living arrangements, Gaia, Buddhism, Shinto — in other words, a world within this world where the misfits live.

My novels don’t sell within what is called “the marketplace of ideas” — that is, the mass production of the arts. In fact, I am not a “seller” — I am a storyteller. I want to reach people and make them laugh, make them think, assure them that they’re not alone. I don’t believe this will happen in the selling of Big Entertainment.

But yesterday, an acquaintance of mine (Hi, Jeanne) told me she really enjoyed reading my campaign for Gaia’s Hands. This felt more gratifying than I was prepared for, because she spoke my language — in the aesthetic of small performance, we connected.

Dear World and the Transformational Story

Reflect on a personal story about who you are, who you were, who you want to be:

Write phrases about yourself free-writing
Pick a phrase and tell a story about it
Tell the story to someone else
Review the notes they’ve taken

Find a phrase in those notes that tells your story.
Have a portrait taken with you “wearing” your story.
Share the portrait with others

This is the basic model of how Dear World helps you find your story.

I’ve been thinking about this in terms of storytelling and why we tell stories. Yesterday, I taught about open-ended questions in Case Management class. Open-ended questions do not use words like who, what, where, when, why, how, how many, or how much. Rather, they tend to take a form like “Tell me about …” and variations. In other words, they ask the client to tell their story, which gives the case manager the information they need to help the client and, perhaps more importantly, provide the client the opportunity to tell their story, often traumatic and sometimes sordid, to a nonjudgmental, safe party. It becomes an affirmation of the person, perhaps the first they’ve ever gotten.

I see similarities in the two processes above, case management’s open-ended questions and Dear World’s script for finding stories. The idea in both is for the listener to be a facilitator, and not a shaper, of the story. I see differences in the processes above, mostly dealing with the shape of the final message — one a narrative in a report, one a media-friendly portrait.

How can I get your stories?

You see, I want my readers’ stories. I want to listen to them, to acknowledge them. However, we’re on a social media platform where I write and you read. Most people don’t even comment on blogs (Hi, Chris! Hi, Lanetta! Hi, Lynn! I love you!) because they come here and read quickly, just like everywhere else on the Net. So for me to ask for your stories seems too much to ask.

Tell me who you are in one sentence.

You don’t even need to tell me your name.

I’m listening.

Writing prompts and Storytelling Circle

I started a tradition among a group of friends when I was a graduate student in college called Storytelling Circle. We didn’t do it more than a half-dozen times, but the process created not only interesting stories (if a bit disjointed at times). but profound insights. I tried to write down one of the stories from memory, but the magic of the story was in the telling, and it didn’t seem as mystical as it did in the darkened chapel of Channing-Murray as the six of us sprawled on the floor in a circle facing each other.

I put the idea of the storytelling circle in a book, Apocalypse —

AAAGH! I can’t find my copy of Apocalypse!
Richard, thank goodness, says he has a copy of it. Let’s try this again …
(Half an hour of stubborn technology later — )

*******

That evening, after dinner, the residents set up a large semi-circle three rows deep facing the risers. David Beaumont sat in the facing seat, Allan’s walking stick in his hand.

“The rules of a storytelling circle are as follows. First of all, it’s not necessary to follow someone else’s story; you tell the story that’s within you. Second: When you feel you’re done with your section of the story, hand someone else the stick. Or if someone feels moved to speak, go up there and ask for the stick. Third: If someone hands you the story stick, you can either take it or pass it on. If you really don’t want the stick at all, you should probably sit outside the semicircle.

“I’ll start the story, as I’m in the hot seat.” Mr. Beaumont made a show of settling himself into the seat, then looked at those assembled. Most of the collective had attended. “Once upon a time, as people say, there was a woman, an average woman. She was neither beautiful nor homely, not tall nor short, not fat nor thin. She was, in all ways, ordinary, or so she said — Jeanne Marie Beaumont, you sit down right now!” David Beaumont chuckled and chided his daughter, who waggled a finger at her father, then sat down.

“Anyhow, before I was rudely interrupted by my impudent daughter … ” Mr. Beaumont, with his excellent timing, waited through the group’s laughter. “This ordinary woman had only one thing special about her — she could cook. She could cook fabulously. She could have been the chef at any fancy restaurant in Chicago, or even New York City.”

“Woo hoo, Mary!” hooted the kitchen crew to their leader. Mary ducked and smiled.

“Our cook, let’s call her Sheila, thought this wasn’t a very handy skill if one wanted to, say, change the world. And she wanted to change the world. Or at least her little corner of it. Because — “

David Beaumont stood up slowly, then stepped off the riser and walked around and around the semicircle a few times. He handed the stick to Larry Lindenwood, and sat in Larry’s seat after Larry vacated it. Dr. Lindenwood stepped up the riser and settled himself.

“Everyone, deep down, wants to change the world. It’s the nature of man. Everyone wants to remake the world in their own image. That image might be fascist or capitalist or communitarian, green or materialistic. In Sheila’s case, however, she wanted to — “ Dr. Lindenwood stood up and reached over to give the stick to Celestine Eisner, who stepped up to the chair in her dancing gait.

“Sheila wanted to make the world beautiful. She put a lot of time into thinking about what a beautiful world would look like. After all, some people think steel skyscrapers are beautiful while others think forests are beautiful, and some people think that Picasso’s beagle in Chicago is beautiful even though some people think it’s a rusty piece of scrap metal. So what did it mean to have a beautiful world? After much thinking and thinking and thinking, she decided — “ Celestine skipped over to give the stick to Micah Infofer, the nine-year-old son of Sarah and Brock. Micah ran up to the stage and plumped himself down in the folding chair.

“Sheila decided that beautiful meant color! Why did barns have to be red when they could be purple? Why weren’t there any red-and-white striped houses? Shouldn’t trees have colored streamers hanging from them? She was really getting into this, and then she thought — “ Micah ran back to his mother and handed her the stick.

Sarah Inhofer strolled to the chair, stick in hand, and sat down. “Sheila, as we’ve said before, was a cook. She didn’t know how to paint a house purple or put colored streamers in trees, even though she could see in her mind what they looked like. She could, however, make incredibly pretty cookies. She could make cookies that looked just like flowers, or bunnies, or all sorts of amazing things. So that is what she did. Violet bunnies and blue roses and polka-dotted cats and plaid tulips and … all sorts of amazingly pretty things. She sold them at a lemonade stand to try to make money toward making the world even prettier. One day …” Sarah abruptly stood up and walked toward Larry Rogers.

“Aw, no, lady,” Larry groaned as she approached him.

“You don’t want to play?” Sarah put her hands on her hips.

“Well, okay.” Larry Rogers took the stick and clomped up to the chair. “One day, there was this guy, let’s call him Steve — “

“Larry?” Stephan Olasz glared at Larry. “Be careful what you say.”

“Sure, buddy,” Larry grinned ferally. “No problem. Steve stopped by the lemonade stand and looked at Sheila’s pretty cookies. ‘Hey, those are really pretty cookies, ma’am,’ Steve said. ‘I think I’ve got some sheep that would go good with those cookies.’

“’Mutton and cookies?’ Sheila asked. ‘Eww.’” Much of the room agreed vocally with Sheila’s assessment.

“’Naw, Sheila, I’ve got rainbow sheep. They’d look great in the same corner of the world as your cookies.’

“’Ohh,’ Sheila responded. ‘We need more things in the world than cookies and sheep. We need purple barns and red and white striped houses and trees with streamers tied to them.’”

“’I got some friends,” Steve said.

“’Really? You have friends?’ Sheila marveled.” Stephen stood up and glared at Larry again. ”I guess it’s my time to hand off the stick — “ Larry ambled down and handed the stick to Ty Gordon. Ty unfolded his lanky limbs and sauntered up to the chair, then chuckled as he sat down.

“Well,” Ty began, then paused. For a long time. When the laughter subsided, Ty began again. “Everyone knows you can’t save the world with two people. Or perhaps you can, because Sheila’s lemonade stand brought together quite a few people. Builders who built purple barns and striped houses, people who tied streamers in trees, and even farmers who raised violet bunnies. The polka-dotted cats moved in on their own volition, because cats do that. Enough people who did enough different things that they could make their corner of the world colorful. And so they did — “ Ty leapt out of t
he chair and handed the stick to Luke Dunstan, who peered curiously at it, then stepped ceremoniously up to the chair and sat down.

“However,” Luke said ominously, “some people are jealous of those blessed by creativity. One such person was a man named — hmm … “ Luke paused, because Archetypes struggled to create.

“There’s already a Steve, so —“ He stood up, and strode over to Adam, who took the stick with a fey grin and glided up to the chair.

“There was a man called Zhengfu,” Adam began as Allan commented, “Did you look that up in the Chinese dictionary?” Adam looked down his nose at Allan, then smiled and winked at him, the smile transforming his Asian features into something quite lovely. “Zhengfu felt threatened by anything he could not understand, and he could not understand this town — for it had grown into a town — that had exploded in a riot of color and music — yes, they held impromptu accordion concerts on festoon-strewn street corners and classical concerts in the park under the trees. Even the cats held concerts, and avant-garde aficionados attended their concerts. But Zhengfu thought to himself — “ Adam grinned at everyone, and then swiftly delivered the stick to Allan. “Your turn, sweetheart,” he whispered loud enough for everyone to hear.

Allan sauntered up to the chair, sat down, and paused for a moment. “I must stop Christmas from coming! But how?” Much of the room howled with laughter, although most of the Archetypes and Nephilim seemed puzzled at this. Adam and Lilith laughed loudest, because they had been on the run Earthside for millennia and had caught on to popular culture catchphrases.

“I’ll explain it to you later,” Lilith reassured her father, Luke.

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Just as Allan handed the stick to Alan Sutton, Eric stood up. “I don’t want to alarm anyone,” he said in his dry basso voice, “but I just saw about five people with guns approach the gate.”

Death and the Writer

Death drapes itself in all sorts of drama — who has died, how did they die, who did they leave behind, how did those left behind feel, and the overarching mystery of whether there’s life after death and what it looks like. (I know I just told you instead of showing you, but this is an essay and not prose.)

I just attended Richard’s aunt’s funeral. Norma died of cancer which she had battled for several years. She died at 79 and left two stepchildren and numerous nieces, nephews and grandchildren. This I learned from the priest who gave the eulogy.

The family practiced Missouri Synod Lutheranism, which meant they had no doubts that Norma would go to heaven to be with her Maker, because Lutherans are covered (despite their total ineptitude) through baptism. This I learned from the funeral service.

Nobody cried, but many commented on how beautiful she looked in the open coffin. Everyone caught up on how everyone else was doing before the funeral.

After the internment, the crowd reconvened at the local chicken joint, a meal paid for by the deceased.

I wrote this as an observer. Not so much drama, right? Imagine this as the backbones of a story …