Day 3

We began with a "storytellers' fire." This is an activity I often use as a way to create a mood and mentality for listening to stories. Here it is on bliptv:

I told the story of Raven Brings Light. You can find another version of the story in Coles, "The Raven Brings Light", page 719. Adding to the metaphor of Sky Woman's Basket, we now have the image of Raven's boxes containing light. Combining them as a metaphor for the storyteller, we have the challenge of seeing into the mysterious "basket" of the story and releasing whatever "light" we find there.

I made a connection between the Tlingit region of Raven and the Hawaiian region of Maui by noting that I learned in Hawaii that ocean canoes were made from trees that washed ashore from the NW coast of N. America. Tim asked if that was true, so I checked a map of Pacific Ocean currents. As you can see below, the currents move clockwise from north to south. Hawaii is north of the equatorial current and in a good position to get flotsam from British Columbia!

(As a side note: in recent years the idea that North America was first inhabited by nomadic hunter-gatherers crossing a land bridge across the Bering Straits has been hotly debated. If Polynesians could have made there way to Hawaii from Asia, why couldn't they have gone all the way to North, Central, or South America? Dates for the earliest human presence in South America keep getting pushed back making it harder to conceive of land migration from Alaska. See "Red Earth, White Lies" by Vine Deloria, Jr. for an interesting arguement against the land bridge theory.)

We discussed the story of "How Maui Fished Up The Great Island" (Coles, pg. 599) and found many interesting symbolic possibilities. Here are a few:
* The ancestress half-living and half-dead suggests a relationship with the past
* That he fashions a hook from the jaw-bone of his ancestress suggests the power of the past combined with the power of speech. Note that he chants as he fishes in order to bring up land.
* The paradox of being treated as "lazy" and "shiftless" yet at the same time being inventive suggests that creative personality type: does not fit convention, generates new possibilities, yet may have a day-dreaming style.

There was much more. Please add in your thoughts with comments. Here is a link to more variations of The Legends of Maui.

Some principles we noted:
*To understand a story, we compare it with other stories we already know. Example: Diana discussed the way that Maui and his brothers compare with Mary and Martha from the bible.
* The principle of silence: what is already understood, goes without saying. Hence we will find that stories leave out details that the original listeners may have supplied. Thus, Maui's journey to his ancestress seems very expedient. Yet the journey may have involved much more in the way of ritual and custom that is not reported because it "goes without saying" for members of the original culture.

We watched the youtube performance of a hula chant depicting Maui's Creation. On February 16 we will be joined by a hula instructor and get a first hand experience of this traditional form.
We discussed the use of "containers" for narrative such as highly codified dance forms in Hawaiian hula or totem carvings in the Pacific Northwest.

We watched most of the movie "Remembering The End of The World" depicting the efforts of astronomer, David Talbott, to find a coherent pattern in world mythology and determine what celestial events they may depict. Talbott was inspired by the work of Immanuel Velikovsky and determined that "Velikovsky's key" was pattern recognition. Such pattern recognition is useful for our work in storytelling. Talbott concludes from his research that the ancient astronomers observed a radical realignment of the solar system. For more on his theories go to www.kronia.com.

oral tradition & science

As with the Klamath Legend of the creation of Crater Lake, geologists are finding agreement between oral histories and geologic events. This brief from Bruce Masse shows that oral tradition kept alive historical record for 1500 years!

Reconstructing the eruptive history of Kilauea volcano from myths of the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pele

Reading Assignments

For Class #4 (next week) please read:

Ruth Sawyer, The Way of the Storyteller, to page 122.

This includes: "Pattern for the Past" "Experience" and "The Building of Background"

For Class # 5 please read the following stories from

Joanna Cole, Best-Loved Folktales of the World:

Beauty and the Beast, page 8

Eros and Psyche, page 180

East of the Sun and West of the Moon, page 287

Maui Hula

Re: Gender Roles in Storytelling

We talked briefly about ways men and women differ in social storytelling. Here is an interesting observation from an article on "Rank & Relationship in the Evolution of Spoken Language" by linguist, John L. Locke:

"Across diverse cultures, verbal performances have a male bias, just as aggression displays do. But there are other registers of speech, and these are associated with a different sex bias. Among females, power resides less in public demonstrations of verbal finesse than in the ability to carry off private applications of speech in personally oriented talk (Aries & Johnson 1983; Bischoping 1993; Haas 1979; Johnson & Aries 1983; Levin & Arluke 1985). Intimate talking, a category that includes gossip and self-disclosure, tends to foster relationships. Investigators typically find that females are more inclined to speak intimately than males when interacting with a same-sex conversational partner of their own choosing, and in this context they also tend to be more talkative (Dabbs & Ruback 1984; Ickes & Barnes 1977), even as juveniles (Jormakka 1976; Larson, Richards, Moneta, Holmbeck & Duckett 1996; Raffaelli & Duckett 1989; Smith & Connolly 1972). "

why stories anyway?

As part of my spiritual musings, I have come to suspect the "stories" we tell ourselves about ourselves often can and do, create a very real barrier between (us), our true self and the "peace that transcends all understanding." We tell ourselves we are strong/ weak, a victim of this or that and we have/lack this or that and we need/desire this or that ....and we suffer. Maybe we suffer because we solidify our stories so much that we become entumbed (sp.?) in our limited block of reality.

Day 1

It was a pleasure to meet you all tonight.

Present were: Emily, Johnathan, Chris, Jena, Ali, Diana, Gwen, Tess, Tim, Laura, and Shaun

For next week: Read Ruth Sawyer to page 56.
Also, note as many instances of social storytelling as you can find. Look for storytelling everywhere in daily life.

Here is what we did tonight:

We reviewed the syllabus. Please note my best email address: novateller@aol.com. Also, to learn more about me you can go to my website: www.novateller.com

After going over the syllabus, I asked you all to stand and move to the center seats. You did so without hesitation. I discussed the way in which the spoken word (combined with the implied threat of the the teacher) brought you into motion. I then shared some information about my time in San Diego. I described the Turkish Taffy effect of the landscape and the West and East sides of Balboa Park. I described the RC Airplane bluffs, the off-leash park, and the playground noting the similarities. We discussed the way that spoken language is a kind of remote control software that operates on a basis of understanding and agreement between speaker and listener.

I offered that the physical ability to speak seems to have appeared abut 100,000 years ago.
We discussed the question of whether people began speaking as soon as they had the ability. Gwen suggested that perhaps we grunted for an extended period of time.
Laura offered an example of the concept of the colors blue and green in Japanese as an example of language affecting thought.
Diana countered that she remembered understanding others long before she herself chose to speak.
I presented the concept of Recapitulation Theory as a way of considering the development of human language.
We then considered the number of stories that had been employed in the conversation.
Story can be thought of as a kind of storage (though the word "story" and "store" are not related, etymologically) containing ideas and experiences.
Tell is derived from Tally, meaning to make an accounting. Hence an Automatic teller Machine counts out your money.
Some of the first writing appears to have been tallies of stores.
Tell also has another connotation: to discern.
So to tell a story is to recount events and to discern their meaning or use.

After a break I shared a story about watching a lizard in my backyard. We reflected on the experience of the story and found that various experiences and memories were brought to mind.
I shared the thinking from Roger Schank that intelligent behavior means having stories to tell and knowing how to use them to relate to new experiences. We create understand by matching the stories we know with the new experiences we encounter. The more stories we know, the broader our capability for understanding.

We did a conversational story game in which we created constellations of stories using post-it notes. In 15 minutes we gathered 32 stories.
Discussion of the transfer of experience via story. the storyteller uses "involvement strategies" to create a virtual experience for the listener. Storytelling is the original virtual reality.