Tag: stories

>Patricia Wrightson, Part 1: The Song of Wirrun and Beyond

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I’m starting an in-depth look at the work of the late Patricia Wrightson (1921-2010) this week.

I read her trilogy The Song of Wirrun for the first time this year, immediately after hearing news of her death in March. It’s an absorbing, sophisticated fantasy quest rooted in Aboriginal mythology.

A few comments from my earlier blog post are here. I wrote it based on the books I happened to be reading at the time, Wirrun and John Gordon’s The Giant Under the Snow, which draws on British legends for its spooky, dark adventure. Now, looking back, my comments on ‘the power of the land’ seem rather naïve in the face of long and deep-rooted debates about the place of Aboriginal culture in Australian children’s writing.

I was keen to move beyond the snapshot of Wrightson’s work offered by the obituaries and, from my limited Pommie perspective, try to understand the issues raised by her use of indigenous Australian myth. In fact, I was compelled: these books were just so gripping for me as a reader, I needed to know why they were out of print and so controversial. Over the next few posts on the blog I hope to give an outline of the critical debates on Wrightson for readers as new to her novels as I was.

Mark Macleod, Patricia Wrightson’s friend and publisher at Random House, was kind enough to join me for an e-mail discussion of her work and legacy. I started by asking him about the importance she held for Australian children’s literature in the postwar period, as both a writer and as the editor of Australia’s School Magazine.

He explained how Wrightson acted as ‘an enabler, whose passionate commitment to making stories with an Indigenous theme part of the literary mainstream helped prepare readers for the many Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists who followed. The cross-cultural partnership of Dick Roughsey and Percy Trezise, who changed Australian picture books in the 1970s, for example, found an audience already used to thinking of Indigenous subject matter for children as exciting, dramatic and edgy. That is at least partly due to the high profile success of Wrightson as a ‘real author’ in the education market before them.’

Yet somehow Wrightson has become a writer less read than revered: a name to conjure with, but one whose books are difficult to obtain.

‘It was significant that news of her death was carried in Midwest newspapers and regional networks in the United States, but barely rated a mention in Australia,’ Mark Macleod suggests. ‘I think we are still vaguely embarrassed or guilty about the idea that she might have been just another one in a long line of exploiters of Indigenous people – but in many cases that view is not the result of close acquaintance with the texts themselves.’

So why are these fantasy adventures by a heavyweight of children’s literature so hard to get hold of these days? And what is there to say about her use of Aboriginal myths and beliefs in those fantasies?

Over the next few blog posts, I want to look a bit deeper at Patricia Wrightson’s work and legacy. As critic Brian Attebery points out in a 2005 article, ‘the borrowing of one culture’s traditions by another is a serious and risky business’, with a danger that privileged white societies ‘acquire whatever is of value in indigenous culture while consigning the bearers of that culture to invisibility or extinction.’

So how might we read Patricia Wrightson’s relationship to the Aboriginal myths in her writing – appropriation, advocacy or something else entirely?

We’ll be looking at this question next time on the blog. For part two of this feature, click here.

>Books Around the World with Outside In – Children’s Book Week Event

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>Just a quick reminder that next week is UK National Children’s Book Week.

This year’s theme is ‘Books Around the World’, and to kick things off, the team at Outside In are holding an event at the Free Word Centre, Farringdon, on Monday 4th October at 5pm.

Alexandra and Ed from Outside In will be talking about the ‘Reading Around the World’ programme which has successfully encouraged UK children to read more books in translation.

You can find my May 2010 interview with Ed here and more on Children’s Book Week at the Outside In website, here.

Have a great weekend, all.

>Hansel and Gretel, Ghosts and Mirrors: Ignite 2010 at the Royal Opera House

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>On Sunday I managed to spend some time at the Ignite Festival in Covent Garden, thanks to a tip-off from Claire Massey’s Fairy Tale Cupboard.

Over three days, guest curator Joanna MacGregor had transformed London’s Royal Opera House into an enchanted zone whose magic permeated not only performance spaces but also foyers, cloakrooms and cafes within the building.

I guess it’s the academic in me, but my favourite part was the museum-styled Hansel and Gretel exhibition from Ghosts and Mirrors, Drama Centre London’s presentation of moments from opera in a living cabinet of curiosities.

Behind the doors of the subterranean Supper Rooms, visitors to Ghosts… found strange fragments from the world of opera, reworked as English-language vignettes by director Richard Williams, in minutely detailed sets by David Collis and Janey Gardiner.

An excerpt from Tosca, bringing us close to Scarpia’s interrogation of Cavaradossi, was almost too comfortable for anyone who’s spent a night on the sofa in front of Law and Order: high culture neatly equated to primetime police procedural.

At the other end of the spectrum, the scene from La Traviata, which allowed the audience to approach the mourners at the side of coffin, was almost unbearably intimate and felt almost intrusive to watch from arm’s-length distance.

After these tableaux and another taken from Der Rosenkavalier, it was a bizarre experience to step into the Hansel and Gretel room, and be addressed by the curators of a mocked-up museum exhibit, who anatomised the fairytale – and Humperdinck’s opera – through the academic presentation of an archaeological dig.

Laminated academic reports were passed around to visitors as the two scholars, deftly played by Alex Large and Michael Hanratty, explained their aim of obtaining DNA samples from a chicken bone and lollipops uncovered at a 1936 excavation in the German village of Rottweil.

A theory of ‘Old Crone Optometry’ was used to explain how ‘living in an over-aerated and artificially engineered gingerbread environment could result in a serious loss of response from the optic nerves’; similarly there was a ‘theory of crumb consumption’ and a display correcting factual errors in Engelbert Humperdinck’s account of the ‘Hansel and Gretel Incident’.

The atmosphere of W.G. Sebald-meets-Fred-Dineage was perfect, and the performers took every response in their stride, from visitors entirely ignorant of the folk tale through to more inquisitive, difficult types like me!

It would be lovely to see Ghosts… performed in a larger venue one day, with the Hansel and Gretel performers given more time to develop a thorough backstory to the project and slightly more rounded characters, but even in its current form this was far and away the pick of an outstanding line-up at Ignite 2010.

Claire Massey’s post, with information on the whole Ignite Festival, can be found here.

>Steve Killick Interview – Being Our Best at Cae Mabon

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>Storyteller and child psychologist Steve Killick returns to Books and Adventures this week, in advance of his workshop ‘Being Our Best: Bridging Storytelling and Positive Psychology’, run with Eric Maddern at Cae Mabon this month.

The four day event offers participants the opportunity to explore and apply the wisdom of traditional stories in the context of modern psychology.

Steve explains: ‘By Being Our Best we mean looking at the best aspects of human nature, love, creativity, compassion, co-operation, rather than our negatives: selfish, destructive, short-sighted ,fearful. In a sense, this is the symbolic struggle between good and bad that is played out in stories.

‘Stories have always been the most effective ways of transmitting ideas, values and beliefs essential in religion, mythology and simply learning how to live. Education without them is impoverished and, in my mind, impossible.

‘In the course Eric Maddern and I are running we look at what Positive Psychology, the study of wellbeing and optimal performance, and what the wisdom of traditional tales is telling us- and what they have in common- and there are some surprises there!’

Steve is concerned that, in a technologised world, oral storytelling should continue to have a place alongside other media. ‘Storytelling takes place without technology, just “eye to eye, heart to heart and mind to mind” as the proverb goes.’

Often, participating in this oral tradition involves retelling time-honoured myths and fables. This requires a delicate balance of respect and reinterpretation:

‘On one hand, you cannot just change a story on a whim. On the other hand, it is a dynamic thing that needs to resonate again in the present, rather than be a museum piece to be looked at and never touched.

‘A story is a message from the past to today. For me it is about making the tale live now – what values do we find in this story now? We don’t always know what the story meant in the past.’

As an example, Steve points to the radical renegotiations of traditional stories which have been popularised by the like of Neil Gaiman and Angela Carter:

‘Heinrich Zimmer said about myths that they have to be questioned and consulted anew, with every age approaching them with its own variety of ignorance and understanding. If you are working with traditional material you do it with love and care. You retain the spirit and breathe new life: That’s what I think Carter and Gaiman have done fantastically. Carter’s reworkings, particularly, have contributed to the revival of interest in storytelling.’

There’s still an opportunity for participants to sign up for Steve and Eric’s journey of narrative exploration at Cae Mabon from 23rd-26th September. You’ll find more information on Steve’s site at http://www.wordsofwonder.co.uk/Cae-Mabon.html

Into the Hoods…

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It’s been a busy week for me at work and play, with not much time for the blog.

Coming very soon, you can expect South American carnivals, charity news and hopefully a couple of interviews, but for now you’ll have to make do with my review of ZooNation’s hip-hop/fairytale dance show Into the Hoods, over on Claire Massey’s excellent blog, The Fairy Tale Cupboard:

http://thefairytalecupboard.blogspot.com/2010/08/guest-post-matthew-finch-on-zoonations.html

Hasta luego,

Matt

The power of the land: Patricia Wrightson and John Gordon

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I felt that it was time to get back to nature here at Books and Adventures.

A few weeks ago, I found out via Judith Ridge, Young People’s Literature Officer for Western Sydney, that Patricia Wrightson had died. I was pretty ignorant about this acclaimed but controversial Australian children’s writer, so I ordered up The Song of Wirrun, three linked quest stories describing the efforts of a young man to protect his land from troubled spirits.

The trilogy is incredibly powerful – I really hadn’t experienced anything like it since I heard The Iron Man and Beowulf told on the BBC when I was a child. The background, a blend of Aboriginal beliefs, is powerfully evoked as humans and spirits alike are threatened by the misadventures of magical beings. When the delicate balance of nature is upset, one young man, Wirrun, finds himself called to save his land and restore some kind of order.

Our heroes’ quest across Australia is thrilling, but undercut with a deep melancholy. Wirrun and his allies face much sadness and loss on their travels. The second story, The Bright Dark Water, finds Wirrun united with a girlfriend and ready for a ‘happily ever after’, but the ambivalent conclusion, Journey Behind the Wind, complicates matters and challenges us as readers to think about love, forgiveness and the nature of victory.

By chance, the next book I picked up after The Song of Wirrun was John Gordon’s The Giant Under the Snow. This British children’s fantasy from 1968 also takes its sense of landscape and native magic very seriously.

Jonk, a girl on a school trip, is separated from her group and stumbles across what appears to be a giant hand buried in the woods. Taking a treasure that she finds there, Jonk finds herself drawn into the final stage of a centuries-old battle between an invading warlord and the mysterious local spirit Elizabeth Goodenough.

There’s so much to recommend about this book – the unsentimental portrait of the teachers who lose Jonk on the school trip, the terrifying monsters unleashed by the warlord, and the sense of deadly high stakes for the children caught up in a plot to revive the ancient Green Man. For me, the exciting thing shared by both The Giant Under the Snow and the Wirrun books, is the sense of respect for the power of the land.

Both John Gordon and Patricia Wrightson’s spirits show a great sense of territory, and the landscapes they evoke are as powerful as they are distinct from one another. Wrightson’s spirits literally turn the world upside-down, travel through the Australian rock, or call a new Ice Age into being – but they do so with a healthy respect for the laws of territory and trespass. Gordon’s benevolent Mrs Goodenough is barricaded in her forest retreat by the evil “leather men”, while the warlord’s power gradually seals off Norwich along the lines of its old city walls. It’s also interesting to note that the heroes in both stories are given the power of flight by benign spirits, allowing them to survey their native land from a new perspective, and cross the supernatural borders.

Great children’s books are coming out all the time, but it’s also good to treasure books from the past, and it would be a real shame for either of these works to be forgotten. They’ve aged well and as fantasy stories they have a special quality: serious without being solemn. I love the high adventure of books like Skulduggery Pleasant or Artemis Fowl – when Skulduggery blows the front door off Stephanie’s house in the first book I stood up and cheered! – but there’s also something cool about stories where you really feel something is at stake.

There’s so much more to say – particularly about Patricia Wrightson’s work – but it will wait until a future blog post. Tonight I have gardening to do: the closest I get to the power of the land these days is pulling out fence-posts with a pickaxe…

Steve Killick Interview

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This week we’re lucky enough to have an interview with Steve Killick. Steve is a storyteller and clinical psychologist whose book Telling Tales, written with Taffy Thomas, is a great practical guide for people interested in education, storytelling and emotional literacy.

You can find out more about Steve and his wide-ranging work here.
What does storytelling do that stories in books can’t?
I think what is happening when a story is told and heard is very different than when it is read. When told the teller is able to engage the listeners by their creation of the story, they can bring many aspects of non-verbal communication in, such as tone-of-voice, gesture, facial expression these all provide stimuli for the imagination. Most importantly the storyteller can modulate the delivery depending on how the listeners are reacting. Reading stories are good for us but by telling a story we bring it into the social domain and increase the usefulness of the experience.

One reason for this is that we think in story terms anyway and often socially we are telling each other stories, the everyday kind, what’s happening to us, our successes and achievements. By listening to stories we understand a lot about people, our imagination is stimulated and we can think more flexibly and creatively and we also learn how to tell stories by listening, and that is an important social skill. Reading fiction can help to develop social and cognitive skills in children such as language and empathy. Hearing stories can help children not only become more interested in reading but also it directly develops important interpersonal skills particularly speaking and listening.

How does storytelling benefit us, as children and as adults?
I think storytelling is one of the most beneficial activities human being can engage in but the evidence to support such a claim is limited. We know stories can certainly develop language and other cognitive skills. Stories also just inform us about the world around us, our history (or hi ’story’), they tell us what is socially valued, what’s good, bad, moral and so on. Basically they tell us about life. They are powerful things and can be abused as well. As a psychologist, I am most interested in how stories develop social and emotional skills, to understand feeling, to get in touch with them and learn how to deal with them, they help with motivation and in getting on with others.
For children stories really help us develop the key skills of what we call emotional literacy. For adults they too are very important. Many people are drawn to stories in drama on TV or film or in reading fiction. Keith Oatley, a leading psychologist in the study of emotions, feels that is because they help us attune with emotions. Being involved in a story is like a work-out at the gym for our emotional mind. However, many adults have not had the experience of listening to a good story well told and dismiss it as something for children. They are missing a wonderful experience.
Do you need special training to become a storyteller?
As an art form storytelling is one that is relatively easy to learn. It is a natural capacity and can be developed through practise. It’s not about learning how to do voices or anything like that, more about finding a style that works for you. Much can be learned through listening and watching people tell stories especially skilled and professional tellers. If someone is really interested in storytelling and especially performance storytelling then doing some training is certainly recommended and many storytellers offer training. I think most people can learn the basics of storytelling easily and find ways to use them at home or work. To become a professional storyteller needs a lot of study and isn’t for everyone.

What does “happily ever after” really mean?
Great question. Its major function is to say simply that’s the end of the story – all the issues are now resolved and it is over. Like ‘Once upon a time’ which starts a story, the phrase marks out the boundaries of the story world. It is, of course, symbolic rather than literal. Jon Kabot-Zinn felt its really meaning was almost the opposite to ‘ever after’- rather it refers to happiness in the here and now, the present – and of course the present moment is the eternal moment. I liked that! I also think there is another symbolic meaning in fairy tales for often these stories are about growing up. When the hero or heroine marries and receives untold riches it is really saying they have had an experience which has taken them to maturity and they are now able to live as mature adults. This is why many fairy stories send optimistic messages, even the least favoured smallest child can grow up to succeed.

Do you have an all-time favourite story to hear, or tell?
I don’t know about an all-time favourite but certainly a story that has obsessed me for the last few years is the ancient Indian story of King Vikram and a corpse he is fated to carry. However, his burden is inhabited by a spirit who instructs him in wisdom in living through a series of tantalising riddling stories. I have been tracking down different version of this story for year. I also tell it and am trying to rewrite my own version and I’m always finding new things in it.