The Myth Weavers

It’s been over half a year since our last session of “Howl of the People,” so we take this episode to recap season 1 to date.  What questions do you have about the characters, the themes, and the story so far?

Does Singing Bird want revenge? How will she get it? How will her PTSD manifest itself? What hard choice will it inspire? Will it end up hurting her children, along with Bear? How will her natal pack help her? Who makes up her natal pack? How will they feel about Bear? When SB thinks of Grey Bard, what does she remember about him?

Swiftpaw: How will Swiftpaw’s impulsiveness play out? How will it help, and how will it hurt? Will his ‘motivation’ edge ever get him into trouble, or will it save the pack somehow?

Watcher - does the Geas laid on Watcher have other effects besides compelling him to kill Bear? How will Grey Bard’s spirit manifest in the waking world - will it affect Adam somehow? Can Watcher’s geas infect a human?

Bear: What will Bear sacrifice for redemption? Can Bear willingly go into the Spirit with Watcher, by using some fungus help?

What else threatens the Wolfpack’s in the Eagle Cap? How will humans impact them,if at all? What does Adam do about the fact he met two wolves - does he tell his friends? What do they do? Does he tell his family? Do they (like Ranchers and Farmers) hate wolves, or do they greet the news well? Does the news get to someone who hates wolves?

 

 The Myth Weavers, episode 7 [23:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (191)

We experienced some technical difficulties with this one (Skype kept dropping our call), but we still managed to stitch the pieces together.

 

 The Myth Weavers, episode 4 [1:16:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (205)

We’ve gotten listed on iTunes!  We haven’t gotten together to record much lately, though.  But, I do have two old episodes that have not yet gone online.  Here, you can download the first of these, and I’ll put out the second a little later.

 

 The Myth Weavers, episode 3: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (196)

The pilot episode of “Howl of the People.”

 

 The Myth Weavers, episode 2: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (236)

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

 

 The Myth Weavers, episode 1: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (195)

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—

Premise

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.

Conventions

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.

Tone

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.