The Myth Weavers

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!