storytelling | laura leif

To Make it Through the Smallest Space, To Make an Open Door

Story Form Examined

I was raised on thinking which understands story as everything: as both a method and an underlying force of sense-making. This force determines the shape of perceived reality, as well as all interactions and actions taken in relation to it.

Loving and relying on Le Guin’s essay as both a methodology and a mode of critique, it seems prudent to examine story, as the subject of this critique, a bit more closely. My practice is about collecting or connecting to things that call to me. It is also, quite strongly, about making spaces and contexts for these things, once collected, to come together in some way: a carrier-bag style of storytelling, openly defined. If a story is something to be listened to, I want it as openly defined as possible.

I maybe also suspected that to exit the dominant form I might have to go through it, instead of around, especially as I am coming from, and through this essay interacting with, the dominant culture. I might have to turn the arrow into a bag, then turn that bag upside down, preferably into the murkiest of swamp puddles.

What follows is an account of how I came to understand these processes as viable.

What is Story For?

I did a lot of research on story, and to be honest, a lot of it was pretty boring. The personally useful bits I picked up and put into my pocket are these:

1) A healthy human psyche needs to navigate between feeling like the world is graspable, predictable, and stable, and encountering situations where those assumptions are invited or required to change. Psychologist D.W. Winnicott called these states “rigidity” and “unintigration”, respectively, the latter sometimes also poetically spoken of as a kind of falling and falling. A bit of falling is needed to adapt to change, as new information challenges previously held notions.

Winnicott measured a healthy psyche by a person’s ability to engage genuinely with others, be creative, and to play (“Home”, pt. 1, ch. 1).

2) Art, creativity and play have been identified as useful tools in helping people to navigate these kinds of shifts in perception. A recent study found that information received artfully was significantly more likely to influence changes across personality traits then the same information delivered dryly (Djikic et al). This may be especially useful when considered alongside recent studies which observed subjects guarding previously deep-held beliefs similarly to how they would their physical bodies. Subject were seen to defend their initial beliefs more strongly faced with opposing information, even if that meant discrediting facts, scientific method, or expertise (Kaplan et al).

Winnicott thought that the arts served an important role in helping people to safely experience falling, being led into the shifting space then out again (“Home”, pt. 1, ch. 3).

3) I also recommend the CBC Macey lecture series “The Truth About Stories”, delivered by indigenous writer Thomas King, on the subject of why story matters, and the ways in which changing the story might change ways of thinking and being in the world. For example, King talks about how in indigenous storytelling, good is not pitted against evil.

“Evil and good are not so much distinct and opposing entities as they are tributaries of the same river,” King writes. “There are other ways of imagining the world, ways that do not depend so much on oppositions as they do on cooperations, and they raise the tantalizing question of what else one might do if confronted with the appearance of evil. So just how would we manage a universe in which the attempt to destroy evil is seen as a form of insanity?” (ch. 4).

The story reflects a framework for the management of the universe. King looks at other examples also, talking about how oral tellings are not as respected in western culture as the written word, and about how reason and instinct are pitted against each other in order to justify the subjugation and exploitation of people the world over.

These three approaches, my favourite that I found, suggest story as a method for navigating a world that is built out of betweens. It is something that happens because of interaction, and of trying to navigate the implications of interaction: that through encounter, something outside can enter in, influencing the individual’s idea of themselves and the understanding of reality that they carry around, this little psychic google-maps that tells them about everything.

Liking what you Like

In Le Guin’s story, the conflict-harried hero is replaced by a way to carry something. Inside this container: things I find interesting, bits that grabbed me along the way enough that I wanted to take them with me…at any point to be called upon or pieced together in order to admire or to consider. Within this form, there can be a close attention, and a gentle looping in of the self and the self’s experiences, but room also for other selves to speak and other, unfamiliar narratives to come forth. Things can get intertwined and messy, muddy.

What Le Guin describes is a process mitigated by desire, one that is about personal resonance and not an external value system. It is largely intuitive, and its aims diverse. The emphasis here is on trusting the self, a powerful force and often inefficient, unmarketable. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.

American Fiction writer George Saunders describes his approach to storytelling in a similar way, calling his process a kind of juggling. It comes in three parts, he says: conjuring pins, throwing them in the air, and catching them as they come down. The pins conjured come into being “by doing whatever gives us delight, and about which we have a strong opinion”. As for this piece of conjured delight, Saunders says “Better not to name it. To name it is to reduce it. Often “pin” exists simply as some form of imperative, or a thing about which we’re curious; a threat, a promise, a pattern, a vow we feel must soon be broken” (ch. 7).

Edge of the Forest, Edge of the Shed

I wanted to believe that something magical would happen, that I would find something that would tie everything together. The roots of the spruce, the micro-organism feeding. I was looking for it in books and I was looking in conversations. I was looking everywhere, obsessively. Going for long walks with my eyes open outwards or to the ground. But there is no such thing. Just long lines of story that get stronger the longer you sit with them. And at a certain moment it can all fall apart. At any moment there can come unraveling.

I wanted to believe that something magical would happen, that I would find something that would tie everything together.

I invited myself to go hunting. To go hunt a moose. Before we get started, I feel I should tell you that we didn’t catch anything. That is not where this story is going. This is a story to hold something.

In Finland to get a moose license you need enough land. To get enough land you need to get enough land owners, to get enough land owners you form some kind of hunting board, a coalition. A collection, a cohesion. Then you get the license then you hunt on the land. And it’s agreed, the meat will be shared with everyone who owns the land. It is also shared with those who help but do not own the land, at the landowners’ discretion. But to hunt a moose you need to find the moose, and to find it they’ve figured out this way:

A bunch of people (including some land owners, but other people too) get together on a rainy Saturday in the fall, wearing their gumboots and all wearing the brightest orange. Some of them have guns. Everyone gathers in front of a shed; inside there are tractors and picnic tables and a grill. At 9am sharp you stand in a circle and decide which routes you will take. The routes have names like “the lookout” and “the hill”, although all of the places might have lookouts and involve hills. Once you’ve laid it out you all squish into some cars, the runners separate from the hunters (they are treated better), and you drive off. Along the way the hunters are deposited, they walk into the wet woods and they climb into wooden structures where they hide, very still and quiet, with their guns out. One boy has a camera as well as a gun.

The runners all drive to the same place, a stretch of forest, and they leave their cars there. They get out and they walk along the edge of the woods until they form a long line, evenly spaced, along one edge of it. They wait. They listen on their walkie-talkies. Some of them might also have a dog with them. When someone in the line knows it is time (they hear about it on the walkie-talkie) they start to call. You all start to walk, and you also start to call. You find a way to call that feels right, that fits your voice. Maybe you hit some sticks together. You make a ruckus. You enter the woods from the edge, from the field. You go from walking on one kind of harvestable plant and seeing far, to walking on a very uneven and varied surface. It is so uneven it is not a surface; it is some kind of collection.

Sometimes it is solid—packed dirt or a log or a big rock—and sometimes it is less solid, far from solid. Sometimes it is a puddle, or the air around and through the mosses that you step onto. Sometimes it is the spaces around sticks, they crunch as you press down on them, onto some other underlying unknown. Onto whatever underneath will hold you. The sticks are wet and you are worried that you might slip. You keep your balance. You run around a tall hill made of rock, or you clamber up and over it.

all this time you are calling, and all this time you are listening, too. You are listening for the calls that are on either side of you; you are trying to keep yourself in the middle, a balance of sound and of movement. You use this sound to determine your direction, if the place is new to you. You are not worried about being lost if you are keeping up.

Slowly the forest floor enters you. You feel the wet leaves and the mud. Maybe you see mushrooms along the way, lots of them, but for the sake of the chain you don’t stop to pick them, you continue to move. Maybe you pick one or two if they are special and put them in your breast pocket. the special mushrooms are orange and the vest that holds them is orange too. They shine with an orange glow. Their stems are wet and on them are small pieces of forest floor: a dead pine needle, one small arm of moss still reaching for something, what can only be described as dirt (although it is bigger and smells only of the forest floor—it is not a dirt smell, but a wet one. The mushroom, later, held to your nose, smells like the forest floor too, and also like your body wants it).

Now and then you can spot the ones on either side of you, small in their orange vests, slipping between trees with the human noises rising. They make the forest bigger by looking so small, the trees tall suddenly. The trees looked so small without the people there to make them huge. Sometimes you are very close together but then so are the trees, so it is the same, this feeling of glimpses that gives the forest some variety of bigness. Fullness. Fullness that feels like bigness, bigness that makes you full.

On the next-to-final run you spot the moose. Or someone in the chain does, and you can feel it. You can feel that you are in the woods together with the animal. There is some variety of excitement, a rooting in you for the moose, a rooting in you for the people. The moose slips the chain and so you make the same pass again, but backwards. This time you see moose tracks, fresh, and also moose poop. The tracks are also in the complicated forest floor, and the message that they communicate is weight and movement. They speak clearly in their own tongue. You make this sweep together and again you miss the moose, it is seen somewhere on the other side, moving away from you. You still feel the thrill, the excitement. You feel it for the moose. Escape! Both capture and escape are exciting, and even though you are hunting the moose with intent and desire you are also all rooting for the moose.

While you wait for the last car to pick you up, you are quiet and you look at the crows. The crows are hanging around in case of meat. Maybe they also let the moose know you are here, everybody’s cleverness competes. There are wet rocks on the side of the road. You feel the unseen animals around you. There is something about the cold wetness of the rocks, broken from bigger slabs of granite that are the ground/under, that holds you. Captures your attention. Here the view is a little more open, your eyes go further.

In the shed around those picnic tables, we siteatsandwichesgrillsausages. I am at the back, looking through the steam of thermoses, the many sturdy hands and the conversations, towards the open door. Where it is parked cars, then field, then wet and green and fog and beyond that, something wild and growing, calling in its own voice, through a kind of silence, a dark and heavy something, a lumbering between the darkness and the leaves.

Animal Writing

The following excerpt is from a series aimed at engaging with the hunting of animals (the arrow story) in a carrier-bag style: without progress, away from anthropocentrism, sans a hero, a conflict, finality, or celebration.

You can a more detailed description of the project and more of the texts here.

The Up-Turned Bag: Process as Result

While I don’t imagine Le Guin’s proposed form is a final, Utopic vision, I do see it as a useful starting point. My final form is maybe less of a cohesive, purposeful container, carrying bits of thinking to be arranged and rearranged, and more of a stew, of a resonant murk, a swamp maybe, where things go to grow and decay and where unexpected and strange visitors occasionally wander. When I tried to form a bag, thinking this a form that might work, I found that too many things just kept falling out: this form too, as an imagined shape, was far too constrained. Perhaps this was because it still relied so heavily on centralizing my own desire and wanting—my process is much more collaborative and fluid. If I am juggling pins, like Saunders does, I am throwing far too many up, and am far too interested in the experiences and offerings of others: the audience, who I want to have fun more than I want them to be impressed; the little dog who picks a dropped pin up in their mouth; other objects I could toss up; a rock that I could stand on; the pins themselves as possible subjects. Being an elegant juggler to me sounds boring, I am much more interested in fostering a combination of curiosity and the special magic that comes from things seeming like at any moment, they might fall apart. I am interested in seeing what can happen if they do: if the pins drop, if the bag is dumped.

Perhaps a better focal point is how Le Guin sees the contents of the bag, the one I just turned over:

“ the contents may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process” (153).

My favourite description of an upturned swamp comes from gender theorist Kate Bornstein. In a recent interview, Bornstein spoke of their idea of the polinary as an alternative to binary paradigms (20:30-25:00). Bornstein likens binary thinking to a circle with a line drawn down the middle, where everything must be inside of the circle, and everything must fall to one side of the line. Bornstein moves instead to an open form, one where there is no line, and more than a singular circle, and subjects can move freely, playfully, and creatively around all definitions. It is a space of possibilities, and added dimensions—Bornstein identifies IMAGINATION and CHANGE OVER TIME as two of them (LGBTQ&A).

Perhaps this is what I move towards: A space where things aren’t falling out, where it’s not that they either fit in or don’t, but instead a space where everything is participating in a process that is, like Le Guin’s, unfolding.