Stories

Wyn is Live!

It is with great delight that I announce and present the first issue of a new online publication.From the About page:

Wyn is an online magazine focused on providing resources and hope for mental and emotional healing. Each month’s issue has a specific theme that runs through all the articles. Articles and columns are published every-other-day or so throughout the month. To receive one email a week with the latest stories and news, sign up for the Wyn Weekly Newsletter in the upper right corner of the site.

The name Wyn is from the Old English rune that later became “w.” The word “wyn” means “joy/delight/pleasure” in Old English. The goal of Wyn Magazine is to help bring joy to women who have lost hope.

After Managing Editor Becky Castle Miller and Associate Editor Amy Jane Helmericks went through different experiences with depression, they talked about the resources they wished they’d had for themselves…and decided to create those for other women. The idea (and name) for Wyn came together in December 2011, starting a two-year project assembling a global team of writers, designers, and photographers. Wyn officially launched in June 2013.

Becky emailed me with great intensity (if you can accept that as a combination) toward the end of November 2011. Four hours ahead on the East Coast, she wanted to set up a mutually kidless time to talk about an idea.

Now, anyone who knows me knows I’m all about talking ideas, but we’re talking the end of November (days away from my third win in NaNoWriMo). I hesitated just enough for her to remember my near-goal and reschedule for December 1.

During that phone conversation we entered into hope and delight and concrete planning that tied to our strengths in a way that the world of dirty dishes and dirty diapers just couldn’t touch.

I don’t know about Becky, but for me the fit and the energy seemed too deep to be real. But there’s something true about speaking reality into life.

Becky and I talked about creation and consistency and content and sparked this hunger that we might have an opportunity to spare other women the confusion and isolation we experienced as we struggled for language and right-response to this unfamiliar entity called depression.

Becky’s years of traveling as a military kid and facility on the internet made her the hub of our writing and photography pool. My intensity, love for words, and impulse for instant-feedback (or maybe Becky can say the real reasons?) combined with hers to move us forward.

All the delight and hope-of-purpose suggested by our initial conversation has persisted. There is something ineffably rich about participating in a project so perfectly aligned with one’s natural gifts and natural brokenness.

I am still “in recovery” from/with my depression, sometimes still living ‘one day at a time.’

Holding out a hand provides me a sense of grounding, both to my past-that-is-past and the now-that-is-now.

That last sentence will make the most sense when you read this month’s closing article about Re-triggering.

Much of my growth has been discovering and entering into my strengths, even while I learn how to compensate for (or even accept) my weaknesses.

My blog-site, for example, has become my writing-business website (more on the business in future) and my kids are learning how to participate in more of the home & farm maintenance.

Anymore I can’t describe myself as anything but broken, but over and over again I am being reminded that broken is FAR from useless.

Real-World Magic: Not Speaking

Image courtesy of ACSelcuk via stock.xchng

Someday, a really hope that I write a serious essay on the existence (and/or definition) of magic.

For today I’ve settled for discussing the first on my mental list: Spells of Silence.

Let me begin here: Fairy tale silences are beginning to make a lot more sense to me.

How many people, today or at any time in history, have been trained to explain what they can’t explain?

I mean, I am one of the most articulate, word-ready people I know (Sorry if that sounds bad, it’s just true), and I have found myself mute in the face of certain circumstances.

This even comes after years of practice talking about how confused I am, or how I don’t have the words for something. In those situations I would keep talking (or journaling) until I reached some kind of coherence, or at least the next action point.

Image courtesy of Michael & Christa Richert via stock.xchng

But something changed with the depression. I wonder at times (in the present) if I would have had some kind of help–more help– if I had tried harder to say how broken I was.

For the most part I kept quiet, because I didn’t have any better ideas to give people to give me, and I was pretty sure that criticism without offering alternatives was shameful. That was complaining and it  recalled countless references over the years to “the children of Israel” after they’d been led out of Slavery in Egypt.

“Here they’d had so great a deliverance and now they were complaining about the food?”

I had little to give in terms of nurturing energy, and I imagined that I was caring for others by keeping the weight of my problems off of them.  It made me feel nobler or more generous in my loneliness and isolation.

Image courtesy of Michaela Kobyakov via stock.xchng

I’ve since learned that “Self-blame is a symptom of the disease [of depression].” That “people feel ashamed of being depressed, they feel they should snap out of it, they feel weak and inadequate. Of course [they do:] these feelings are symptoms of the disease.”

And these symptoms all go a long way to keeping us shut up.

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Speaking Practice #1: Start as You Mean to Go On

I gave my first speech at Toastmasters today.

Posting here at UT will probably be limited to speech-topics and/or the speeches themselves while I push through this speaking track. (There are 10 speeches in the first book, and my goal is to do one/week as long as the children are still in school.)

Part of what I find interesting about this start is comparing it to the first time I gave an “Icebreaker” speech.

It was literally my first blog post, almost 7 years ago. It had three precise points, and a reasonable structure. This one dismisses the possibility from the very beginning.

I started blogging at the same time I (tried) to start speaking, and blogging is what stuck. Instead of wondering what to get up and say, I made notes, some of them incredibly short, of complete thoughts.

I got used to “capturing” ideas. And organizing them (somewhat) and presenting them. Continue Reading →

To the Pure all Things are Pure

Or, to be less poetic, Who you are will direct what you see.

Some years ago I was in a storytelling workshop where we analyzed and discussed a Native American tale.

In it a girl sleeps beside a lake no one is supposed to visit alone.  A snake comes out of the lake and impregnates her.  When her pregnancy begins to show, the other villagers drive her into the wilderness. It is there that Lightning, the shining daughter of the old man of the mountain, finds her and brings her home.

The girl ends up marrying Lightning’s brother, Thunder, and after the young woman has his baby she wishes to take the child back to her village to show him off.

When she returns she tells the villagers who had been so unkind about her new family. They are fearful of her powerful new relations, but she tells them not to be afraid, because they are all family now.

It was a fabulous example of how much story can be crammed into few words (the original was less than half a page), and we spent a fair amount of time with it, discussing images, motifs and how one might learn to tell the story.

My favorite part of it all was the ending, I felt it was a wonderful picture of forgiveness and reconciliation.  I thought it was beautiful how the girl was able to forgive her home village and be happy after her tragedies.

I said so, and another woman present looked at me as if I had three heads.

That’s not the way she saw it at all.

“I thought it was about getting revenge.  You know, ‘Don’t be afraid of the storm’ so they’ll be careless and get zapped by it.”

And I’m sure I gaped.

Hurt People Hurt People

It’s not an excuse or a justification.

It’s simply a fact.

As a creator of fiction, one of my jobs is to make a story make sense.

At times I’m sure this is my primary motivation for writing: to have a place where stories make sense. As in, now.

Villains aren’t just evil to make life difficult for the main character; that’s too narrow a purpose. That’s living for someone else, and far too selfless for the best villains as I imagine them.

~ ~ ~

Antagonist is a more broadly applicable word than villain.

Most of us will not encounter a terrifying villain, in the same way that most of us will not change the world in any masses-remembered way.

I’m just talking statistics here. How many people do you remember of the billions that have come before?

It’s a math thing, not a despair thing.

And many, many people face villains the way that many people make a difference in a way known only to few.

How widely something is known does not change the power or significance of what we experience.

Antagonists may be out specifically to hurt us, for reasons of their own, or they may simply be thinking of themselves, pursuing their own goals, and we get run over in the process.

I highly doubt the individual who stole my iPhone last week heard my nutrition talk, took personal offense at my content or my speaking style and decided to take my phone to spite me.

Far more likely is the scenario when s/he saw the cracked thing in its dirty case, unattended, and decided it was worth taking.

Really it had nothing to do with me, personally, but it has seriously disrupted my life, and disappointed me (in no small measure because it was taken at a gathering of Christians).

Yes we’re allowed to be disappointed. That we’re warned doesn’t mean our feelings and reactions are tied.

What we’re left with is how we will respond to the hurt that comes into our lives.

Because if we’ve been hurt, we have hurt other people.

This is really hard to think about when we’ve been hurt really badly.

We see and feel our own hurt, and depending on many things, our own hurt can be big enough that it fills up all our available vision.

We might not see what we are doing to others, and what’s even sadder, we might not care.

The reason I call this even sadder is that this attitude (I’ve been hurt so much I shouldn’t have to be careful.) frequently drives the next iteration of wounding.

The fact is, we’re all hurt. And that ties us to the truth that we have hurt others.  May still be in the process of hurting others.

And ignoring this reality won’t make it go away.

Two responses I see are necessary: awareness and humility.

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Story Beyond the Chase

Feeling chatty today? I’m feeling chatty.

Ruth, over at Booktalk & More, recently started a discussion about the novel heroine Marguerite, where she pointed out our culture’s obsession with the “chase” part of a romance, to the extent that we expect the story to trickle away once the chase is over.

In a sense this blog title is already a misnomer, because movement is required for any story, and chasing is a fun movement before or after the relationship is solidified.

I’ve mentioned before that “the moonlighting curse” isn’t strictly logical, and I appreciate how that (2nd link) article puts the focus clearly on the skill (and guts) of the shows’ writers, rather than what the actors do onscreen (Seriously, EVERYTHING is being done on television now to some critical acclaim, and it’s all about the Story and the way the it’s told).

But I digress.

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Getting Personally Practical

Sometimes I think the reason I continually return to the idea of Storytelling is because I am looking for ways to  tie my story-compulsive brain back to my real life as the dedicated mother of three brilliant, sensitive children who need me to be connected to them.

So, with this in mind, yesterday I engaged my imagination as if my real life were a novel.

That is, I threw back to my earliest memories (sorry-in-advance to the loving adults in my world; this is not a reflection on you) and looked for concrete things that made me feel less, to feel insecure.

This was genuinely not a pity party. I was looking for specific ways I might be missing to affirm and encourage my kids. I think it could be a useful tool for any parent, I just applied it first in my writing, because that’s where it came naturally.

We had just had a tragedy that resulted in Melody *certain* she needed a band-aid, and as I did not share her certainty, I delayed my verdict to finish my task.

As I wrapped up, I had this memory of feeling completely useless.  Unnecessary.

All my life– including now– I have been surrounded by amazingly competent people.  And all my life– including now– I’ve had a painfully accurate awareness of how small my contribution is in ratio to the needs around me.

*Unnecessary* is a terrible thing for any child to feel.

I was on to the next project before I remembered I’d gone soft and decided to get a band-aid.  So, stopping when Melody walked by (and secretly hoping she’d noticed the interruption so I’d get Attentiveness points) I invited her back to the First-Aid basket where we bandaged her wound.

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What is a Real Story?

Because a site like this that takes the word Story as a proper noun really ought to have such an important term defined.

Story is not a cute (or obscene) something someone said.  It is not a physical object.

A story has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Becky is always quoting Donald Miller’s definition at me:

A story is just a person that wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.

Antoinette Botsford, in a workshop here in Fairbanks some years back, offered a memorable formula with the letters P.P.P.O., asserting this (short list of four elements) is the test to distinguish a true story from a mere anecdote.

An anecdote can be entertaining and can be valuable, but a group of words is not a story unless it contains a person, a place, a problem and an outcome.

 The basic story formula I heard James Scott Bell use  is:

Chase a man up a tree. Throw rocks at him. Get him down again

My main problem with this format is that I never could figure out why someone would end up in a tree, just to get rocks thrown at him.  So I’m always looking for motivation or reasons behind the “had to happen for a plot-point” stuff.

Could be why I’m drawn to folktales, to expand or find the why of what is required within that story.

Ultimately, I think a real story is about change.

It may be growth or atrophy, hard or harder, but if the characters are all the same as they were in the beginning, we have not experienced a story, just a storm.

We’re all Reacting to Life

Recently I began to think about the (fiction-writing) imperative that a main character must make things happen.

One of the most consistent criticisms of Linnea, the central character of my Lindorm novel, is that she’s too passive.  “Everything happens to  her,” someone said, “and she’s always having to close the gap and react.“

Linnea is my first (grown up) heroine.

When I created her I was telling a story. I wasn’t thinking of forms or expectations (hey, I was just trying to make word count half the time).  She grew out of my image of this wounded girl with too much strength to simply roll over and take it.  She continued to think and walk, and even fight when she could find (or create) the weapons.

I really admired her, because she did what I wanted to be able to do: choose the right way to respond.  I wasn’t thinking about how she was “always reacting” because that’s the way (probably unconsciously) I saw myself and people in general.

And I still do.

Lots of people have repeated the line about how our character is not shaped/displayed so much by what happens to us as by how we respond to what happens to us.

The fantasy of a proactive, powerful protagonist is part of our collective hunger to have more control than we have.

I believe most our life what we do with what we’ve been given: given to us either by powers outside of us, outside our control; or what we’ve given ourselves, in the form of decisions we’ve already made, and are now living out.

For example, being married and having children dramatically restricts the number of choices I have.  Because I’ve made the choice to live honorably.  This is a proactive choice I made. No one coerced me into it.  But it now restricts my “options”.

Every Yes we declare is a hundred silent Nos.   The more we live, the more choices we make, the more we are hemmed in by our own freedoms.

I would argue this is why the Young Adult category is one of the most exciting places to write; not only because your characters have more genuine, clean, and life-shaping choices to make over the course of the tale, but also because those choices are felt by those who read them.

Young people are trying on decisions through their reading, experimenting with how they fit.

Readers who are older, who’ve already experienced the profound familiarity breaking away, of falling in love, of screwing up massively and wondering if there’s redemption, relive the fear and excitement.  This is what good stories are for, and as long as they bring us along for the ride (and we like the ride) I’m less concerned about who started the story.

I care most about how the characters end it.

Girl Stories

I am a female novelizing fairy tales, with the goal of publication.

I have two daughters, ages 7 and 8, who love stories and princesses and “glamor” and dressing up.  They talk about  the man they’ll eventually marry (though they acknowledge they might not know him yet), and the sort of choices they’ll make when they’re mommies (some like mine, some different).

So discussions about “gender inequity” in stories and challenges like the Bechdel test intrigue me, as a woman, a mother of girls, and a storyteller.

But I sometimes wonder how much I actually care, since some of this is choosing where to look, and some of this is having enough hope to look in the first (or second, or third) place.

Now, to start with, I’ll be the last person to argue that there aren’t more male-centered stories.  That’s not my point.  What I think when I look at the list of movies that “don’t pass the test,” (that is, they don’t have two or more named female characters talking with one another about something other than a male), I don’t think, The slimeball writers left out the women!

I ask, Was it a good movie/story anyway?

Maybe I’m a storylover first and a woman second.

Maybe more than seeing surrogates for myself or my daughters in interesting/tragic/life-threatening situations I want to have an emotional journey.

I want to experience things I’ve never felt before, find words or images for something previously ineffable, or relive something that is over but an exciting memory.

So I watch Lord of the Rings, Stranger than Fiction, or a romantic comedy for an echo of that unexpected spark that surprised me when I first realized I loved the man I ended up marrying.

As an adult, I’m not particularly looking for “role models” or ideas for relationships or interaction.  Ms. Bechdel’s test is an interesting piece of trivia, but not relevant to my storylife.

As for my girls I’ve never had the illusion that they will find adequate role models from movies. When poor choices are in front of our eyes we pick them apart, discussing motivations, connecting cause and effect.

Yeah, being the children of a storyteller can be hard sometimes. For the record we actually don’t pick stories apart that much, but when anything seems settle really deep we try to make sure it settles in a healthy context.

So I suppose that has never been a pressure in my mind.

I don’t feel bothered by their attraction to beauty or babies or the ideal of marriage.  It is the life I hope for them: one where they are happily married and raising a family.

Statistically that’s what’s going to happen anyway, so why not prepare and make it something to look forward to?

We are surrounded by hard-working, kind-hearted women who know how to listen and how to speak.  These are the role models I want all three of my children to key off of.

But what about the stories?!

Yeah, I have a collection of those, too. Mostly picture books, because that’s what I’ve spent to most time with in recent years,

They tend to be traditional so they conform to some *tsk*tsk*able norms (daughters suffering for a father’s “sin”?) but I roll with because every story needs an inciting event.  And girls will always be surrounded by people and circumstances stronger than themselves.  I feel it’s more important what they do next.

And, yes, in a significant number of these stories the girl has help.

I’m glad for that: I never want any of my children to assume they have to do enormous tasks in isolation.  I pray they will always be surrounded by healthy, loving people who with share their burdens.

Most of those next time.

My list begins (and some commentary):

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