In season one, Howl of the People follows the lives of a wolf pack newly migrated into Oregon’s Eagle Cap Wilderness, an area where wolves have recently returned. Season one follows the lives of one family of these intrepid pioneers, returning to a lost, native land.
Produced by Willem Larsen
| Bear | Jason Godesky |
| Singing Bird | Giulianna Lamanna |
| Swift Paw | Fenris |
| Watcher | Matt Hammer |
For our first game, we decided to start with Primetime Adventures, ironically enough for a bunch of rewilders not particularly impressed with the nature of mass media. But then again, in terms of restoring our natural oral traditions, what better place to start than by appropriating the conventions of television, right? We did something that I personally think of as really innovative. We present Primetime Adventures‘ first wildlife documentary—
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Around the world, humans have shared a unique relationship with canids. Today, often hunted to the brink of extinction, wolves and coyotes have done extraordinary things to adapt to this new world. Howl of the People follows the social life and drama of canid lives in transition, packs living on the edge of civilization, struggling to find a place for themselves between diminishing wild habitat and the expansion of civilization. Like Meerkat Manor or Orangutan Island, Howl of the People looks closely enough at these packs for their individual personalities to take center-stage, and the inter-personal drama of how they relate to one another.
We’ve planned three short seasons for the series, moving from west to east. In season one, we’ll follow a wolf pack recolonizing the Cascades. In season two, we’ll see how coyotes live in the suburbs of Calgary. In season three, we’ll follow packs of “eastern coyote” in western Pennsylvania.
We want to emphasize eloquence and poetry, with thick description that appeals to synaesthetic experience and senses other than sight, particularly scent. Violence shouldn’t distract us from that, so when the plot goes there, we won’t shy away from graphic descriptions of violence, but by the same token, we won’t add violence for its own sake, either. On the other hand, we all feel sufficiently uncomfortable with cross-species erotica to just “fade to black” when it comes to canid mating. Ideally, we could tell the whole story from thick descriptions, odors and body movements, but if we have to resort to talking animals from time to time, we can accept that as a shorthand that compensates for our limited olfactory vocabulary. If it takes you a while to figure out that the characters appear as wolves, all the better. Like most native human groups, they also refer to themselves as “the People,” and speak more in terms of verbs and patterns of movement than the literate habit of referring to things and their attributes.
Like Meerkat Manor and related shows, Howl of the People takes other-than-human personhood seriously. If not for the accident of their species, you might see these characters on an hour-long HBO drama. We’ll have tension and drama, but we also want to show ‘the good life’ that wild creatures can have. The series emphasizes questions of nativeness vs. invasiveness, bioregional connection, wildness, feralness, and domestication.
Once upon a time, there was a small village in a valley, where there lived two of the weavers who were known all over the world. These weavers created beautiful fabrics that shimmered like morning dew and were as colourful as a field of wildflowers. They knew each other well, and liked to challenge one another and test each others abilities. One winter, when the wind was blowing coldly outside and everyone was getting chilled, they challenged each other to see who could weave the best way to keep warm, to stave off the frigid air, to provide comfort and support in the face of the frigid and barren winter. They set their looms side by side in the town square, with the snow swirling in strange patterns in the air and on the ground and began to weave. As they wove, they talked and laughed, tying ever brighter and warmer colours into their looms. They drew crowds of people from all over the village who came to see, not only what the weavers would create, but the joy they took in the weaving. The weavers seemed to dance around their looms, playing with the threads, only to have them slowly fall into wondrous patterns as if by accident. Finally, after three days and three nights of weaving, and only weaving, the weavers were done, and the people in the town square gathered close to see what they had created. Hano, the first weaver, had created a beautiful, storied tapestry, thick and heavy with meaning and weighty with colours and patterns more beautiful than a sunlight, layered grove. Tyli, the second weaver, had created a bright shawl, thinner than Hano’s tapestry, and embroidered with fewer and simpler stories and figure than the great tapestry, but still beautiful and meaningful in it’s own right. However, the villagers all flocked to the profound safety seemingly offered by the tapestry, impermeable to the wind and weather. “But the contest in not yet complete” cried Tyli, and all the villagers turned towards her. “We still have to see whose performs best throughout the winter” she said, and all the villagers nodded, sure that Hano’s creation would block out the wind and snow and keep him the warmest. Hano and Tyli left the square, and each went to their own home, where Hano put his tapestry across his door and Tyli put on her shawl as she walked home.
Both weavers were comfortable and warm, both the tapestry and the shawl gave relieving heat and soothing protection, and the weavers went to sleep to rest and recover after their three days spent weaving. When Tyli got up the next morning, she put on her shawl and left her home and went about her daily business. She stayed warm and protected from the cold elements all throughout her day. When Hano woke up, he walked towards his door, and shifted his magnificent tapestry so that he could get out. Immediately, he has hit with a blast of cold snowy wind that shocked him so much dropped the edge of his tapestry and it swung back into place in front of his door, stopping the cold wind. While Tyli was out doing meeting friends and doing errands, Hano stayed stuck behind his wonderful tapestry. He couldn’t leave his house again till the end of winter.
The next winter, Hano wove a shawl.
I want to weave a shawl, something that has meaning and significance, but also something that I can carry with me, take into the wider world, and use there. I also want to experiment with the play of playing, increase my spontaneity and ability to improv and work collaboratively to create. I want to tap into my ability to create, that I don’t use that often and that I would like to use more, another thing that I would like to carry with me into the world out of this experience. I want to create stories with meaning, significance, as well as stories that are fun to play.
I want to chart unexplored territory, territory I’ve found myself surrounded by but never really ventured into. Story. To start weaving and playing in story and drama, dancing in improv without tripping over my feet so much. I’ve got an almost contradictory nature, on one side, shy, quiet, lacking in my social skills, and lately finding I fall almost dumb when put on the spot. And well, that bothers me, because for my other side, my mind races and thoughts pour into my head and I’ve found I can write off pages and pages, and I want to blend this in to my everyday and in the moment. I’ve done theater, starred as a ’scooby doo/con artist’ dark butler in Ha Ha House and sang and danced as a Sailor (and bartender) in Anything Goes, as well as writing and playing two albums in the band Femantiks.
I love jamming and improv, I love when the magic happens, and I feel a bit rusty at it, and want to improve. I think practicing in any help all of them, but I like them all, and I haven’t done much musical jamming (with others) or dancing of late. As far as roleplaying games go, I’ve played minimal amounts of D&D, but had a fun time doing so. With story jamming I intend to start feeling, seeing, and playing with story around me, to take the story brush and start painting my canvas. Here goes to losing my story gaming virginity.
Cheers
My main goal: to unleash as much creative chaos as possible. To tell bad stories – I believe we have a bank of half-assed art in us, that we have to burn through before we get to the good stuff. So lets tell a bunch of average, bad stories!
Or something like that. I think you know what I mean – unleash play, rather than hobgoblins of consistency. I have to constant play whack-a-mole with my personal hobgoblins. But when I’ve whacked ‘em good, what fun!
Also, once I’ve told a chunk of bad stories and finally get to the good stuff, I want to bask in the golden light of storyland, and wander wild green paths of agony, despair, joy, and insight. I like the stories that draw and quarter one’s heart.
Yep.
You may not be able to tell from my oft-sarcastic writings on Teh Intarwebs, but in real life, I’m painfully shy. When it comes to social skills, well, I have none, and when it comes to my writing, I’m such a perfectionist that more often than not, I worry myself into not writing anything. I’m hoping that participating in this story band at least rounds off the sharp edges of these personality flaws. Story jamming is a very social activity (even long-distance over Skype), so hopefully this will make me more comfortable opening up to people. And the spontaneous nature of cooperative storytelling doesn’t leave much room for perfectionism. I’m already worrying about whether I’ll be able to come up with the kind of lush, synaesthetic descriptions that our game calls for on the spot, but as Willem has pointed out, you do this well by aiming for average, not brilliant. Hopefully through story jamming, I can gain some much-needed confidence in both my writing and in my life. And hopefully I can do it without driving the rest of the Mythweavers up a wall. 
Every relationship tells a story, and every story traces a relationship. We regularly mistake the most common bundles of relationships for “objects,” with their “essence” and “nature,” but even our own physics tells us that this simply indulges a linguistic illusion, a projection of our noun-rich language, itself an epiphenomenon of the literacy that trains us to see every word as an object on the page, and directs us to look for the smallest components, the elements and atoms that build up our world like the letters of the alphabet build up our thoughts—a quest the first Greek writers embarked upon that has led us, in our own time, to quantum physics and the slowly dawning realization that all those nouns make up the punchline of a 5,000 year long practical joke. We don’t live in a universe of objects, but a universe of relationships. Stories give us life. Stories tell everything the universe has in it.
Most of us have a dysfunctional relationship with story these days, though. We get our stories from story professionals. Writers, authors, TV executives, directors, movie producers, they know how to make story. We don’t participate with story, we don’t wrestle with story and chase story and embrace story. We just sit back and consume story, along with a bag of potato chips and an extra large bottle of pop.
I rewild, and a big part of that means going into counseling with story. I prefer ecopsychology therapy, naturally, but I want story back in my life. I want to rediscover what it means to “storyjam.” To quote my fellow weaver, Willem:
Story games, relying on each other’s support to create new stories together, to collaborate, to form story groups in the exact same way musicians form bands, and jam together. Then the issues become ones of trust, willingness to listen and respond, making each other sound good, and one-mindedness that comes from all of that. Rather than a rock band, we form a Story Band.
I want to begin moving towards the creation of our own, authentic oral traditions, something alive and real and deep, rooted in our bioregional experience, something that speaks to our experience rewilding, moving towards that grand reunion of family and land. By the same token, I know that no simple cultural appropriation can answer those needs. It has to come from us. Put like that, it becomes all too easy to fall into despair, and from despair, to simply accept that we can’t do it, that we’ll just have to rely on books and comics and TV and movies for our story, because we can’t do this ourselves. We need to leave it to the professionals.
But we also have the tools to resuscitate home-grown story: story games. Most people just play them because they make for a good time (which they do!). But if Coyote ever taught us anything, he taught us that play makes for some serious work. You learn how to live by playing, and story tells you everything life has to offer. From our dysfunctional relationship with story, we dismiss these things as light and frivolous, but I don’t think I could find anything more serious. Story games provide the perfect tool to find our own oral traditions.
Unfortunately, some of us have had a little trouble finding like-minded souls from our own bioregion, so we banded together online to try to push this forward as much as we could, a remedial story band on the way to rehabilitating our relationship with story. We meet online to exercise our storytelling muscles and experiment with how we can use story games to begin our own, feral oral traditions. We record our experiments, and put them out there for others to listen to, whether you enjoy them as entertainment or mine them for inspiration, or anything in between.
Mostly, though, we get together as a support group of broken-hearted poets, writing love songs to our long-lost darling, and begging she’ll come back into our lives. Please, Story, baby, give us another chance!
