A Storyteller's Process: Karen Lethlean

Organic came about as a result of my avid habit of walking trails in the Royal National Park near my home in the Sutherland Shire of Sydney.

I also belong to a running group infamous in the area – Billies Bushies, who run these trails, as well as getting out on a Mountain bike.

Being aware of the problems to do with invasive and feral species also assisted in writing Organic. I wanted to deal with the universal struggle of Man versus Nature from a different aspect.  Back in 1980s I also spent an extended period tramping, bike touring, back-packing and working as picker in New Zealand, which is were I imagine these events unfolded.

Somewhere in my reading I am sure I encountered a snipped that informed the story Organic, perhaps it was the actual detail that the feral cat scratched the human victim, or purred as it ate. I loved this image, and it stayed with me so much that I had to build more into the exchange.

Organic has been worked on, edited through several processes and a few sets of eyes, which helped the end product.  One of the most significant points given to me was to think about the quality of noises the protagonist encountered, and also to be very specific on elements of his trip into the mountains.

Having a word limit from Wild Words meant that I had to re-think the necessity of some sections, always a good process.

Not that I destroyed the longer version, you never know when there will be other opportunities.

I would advise all writers not to take editing input on their stories personally, try to avoid letting someone’s comments hurt, even though they might be meant to be helpful. Ultimately comments from others are only one person’s opinion. Someone thought the title was too ambiguous! In the case of Organic I was also told that in the closing scene the boat on the harbour should be more important than the wake in the water, but I disagree – ultimately I wanted nature to be more powerful than the things mankind has build and placed into the natural world.

Someone once said to me, “Listen to everyone, and then take from all this advice only what you need…” 

Karen was a runner up in the Wild Words Winter Solstice Writing Competition 2017. This is her winning story...

Organic

Five burley fishermen lugging rods and a huge esky came into view. They smiled and waved, ‘You right mate?’ 

‘Perfectly fine,’ Garry answered.

‘Severe weather warning, bro. Came over the radio.’

Garry shook his head, refused to believe. ‘Thanks. But I only just got here.’

Younger members of the group had gone on, carrying the esky between them slipping, sliding and laughing, so the harbinger of doom bade farewell and went too, unhurried.

Harbinger. Hard bringer. Harp binger. Where had that word come from? If Garry had his phone he could find out. It was odd, not being able to sate his curiosity immediately. But he felt healthy, disciplined; like refusing a beer.  

It was less windy up here than on the beach. Yet the trail was littered with broken saplings and crushed scrubs where the fishermen had skidded with the esky’s weight. Even Garry slipped, came down hard on one knee. Onward, Garry told himself. Despite the throbbing and bleeding. First-aid kit; should have packed one.

Garry turned at the first fork the track offered and went along for half an hour or so. His knee pinging and back straining with the weight of his bag. The track narrowed and dropped again into a small clearing. Perfect. Even a stream and blackened fire spot

His shelter was less complicated than the tents he’d erected on surf beaches with his stepfather. An action accompanied caustic comments, while sand stung Garry’s face. All that effort for something that would be dismounted mere moments later.

There were enough twigs lying about for a small fire. Garry sat on the ground, pulled the joint from his pocket and took a deep drag. And another, until he felt the warmth seep into his brain. Night was falling and so was the rain. Heavy drops plunking on leaves. Base tones pattered on the clearing floor. On the humus. Hummus. Humans. Hubris

Garry stood, stiff legged. He felt his head spin as if he was going to topple forward.

Just him and his thoughts. His chance to do what he’d come here to do. Think about his relationship. Deprive himself of company, see what was addictive, habitual, and what wasn’t. Fifty ways to leave your lover…Recognizing those words Garry was filled with joy and regret.

Then he realised he was stoned.

A nearby bird called out mournfully, a single downward cry, as if it too resented the rain. Inside the tent, spread out his sleeping bag on the bumpy groundsheet and lay down. Almost immediately, as if it had suffered sudden death, the bird stopped mid cry. There was a scuffle in the leaf mould outside; a low growl, and the tent wall bulged suddenly against his head – solid, animal, alive – and then gone again. He was up and out of his tent and into the clearing, working his cigarette lighter to a flame. The flash showed him two reflective eyes the size of golf balls and a dark, muscled shape hunched over a feathered mess.

A fucking huge wild cat. A super cat. He’d read about them. How feral cats were evolving after nearly two hundred years of going wild in the bush.

The flame died the same instant that Garry realised his finger was burnt.  He waited for his senses to adjust. The cat’s eyes reflected dully. The beast moved. And vanished. Into the tent. He was sure that had been fur against the opening.

Packaging was being ripped open, like Christmas morning. The salami? The cat was quieter now. Difficult to hear over wind and rain. Then Garry could hear another sound. A low rumble, which took a moment to identify as purring. Monster hadn’t purred when it ate the bird.

‘Puss, puss!’ he called like his mother summoning the family moggie. ‘Here pussy, puss.’ Falsetto.

Ridiculous. ‘Be a man!’ Penny would have said.

‘Right.’ Garry said to the listening forest. ‘I’m coming in.’

The cigarette lighter gave one last wavering flame, enough to see the way to his bed and observe a damp-furred scavenger hunched in a corner. Garry climbed into his sleeping bag and spent the night in a wet tent alone except for an apex predator that permeated a sharp, gut-wrenching stink. No neat scratching in a tray for this beast.

In the morning, when he woke, the cat was curled up against him, the tent floor a wasteland of greasy paper and plastic wrappings. The cat woke too and for one long moment met Garry’s sleepy gaze. With no warning, the animal extended a long hairy paw and scratched a deep incision into Garry’s brow and cheek, narrowly missing his eye. Then it was gone, a swift tumbling backwards movement which leapt through the tent flaps. He heard drumming paws, then shifting and refolding of enclosing bush.

At the bus stop Garry endured curious stares from locals. His foul smelling tent had refused to pack neatly. Gagging from the stink and half blind with pain he’d stuffed the bloody thing as best he could, but still had to carry the segmented rods loose in one hand.

After the night’s rain, parts of the track had been washed away. Garry had fallen, slipped, skidded, scraped his arms, and knocked his head on a low branch. His clothes were thick with mud, drying now but still likely to besmirch the seats of the bus when it finally arrived.

‘Rough night, mate?’ was all the driver said as he took the fare.

They wound up over the hills until the city spread below. The distant harbour had a sheen. Grey moody skies with the sea crossed by white wakes of boats and ferries.

Deep contentment welled, satisfaction as unheralded as the sudden claw of the cat. He’d confronted the wilderness, he’d not taken his phone.

Ahead Garry saw a future with his arm around Penny’s tattooed shoulder. He would not abandon her like his father had done.

Writing Resolutions

What if, when I wrote, I was to infuse the sheet of paper with the star freckled galaxy? What if I poured the seas into my pen? And made every mark on the page, the scratch of a lion’s claw?

What if, in the capital letter, was the howling of wolves? In the underline the mole tunnelling? In the flow of words the swimming of dolphins? In the comma the river whirling round rocks? In the speech marks the tweeting of birds? In the full stop the grunt of a boar?

And in the turning of the page the wind hurtling through mountains?

What if, in the exclamation mark, was the cormorant diving? In the brackets the eagle ruffled his plumage? In the question mark the hare was up on his back legs, sniffing? And in the blot I make because I write with my left hand, I found the walrus sunning himself on a rock?

Today, with my first A I will make an assault on Everest. With my last Z I will skate on frozen Lake Superior and between them I will dive deep in the vast oceans with the spirit of a pioneer, I will traverse the globe.

First published November 22nd 2012

From the archive: The Fire

In the winter this house is heated solely by a wood-burning stove. It’s fairly labour intensive to chop logs.  

And it takes commitment to keep bringing them in, to keep the fire burning through the day. But I love it. We have something alive, something wild at the centre of our world. It hisses and cracks and roars just like any other wild thing. The Beech wood, with its silvery snakeskin bark, lights easily and sizzles. The Oak, its raised bark like the tyre of a four-wheel drive truck, is frustrating slow to catch. But once it does it smolders enduringly, with an intense heat.

Like anything wild, you have to create a relationship with it, rather than impose your hurried ways upon it.

In the mornings if I’m anxious, or impatient, it never catches. If I bring patience to the task it’s ablaze in an instant. There’s a real art to fire lighting. Logs need the friction with other logs to burn, but there has to be enough air between the wood for them to breathe.

At first glance the flames have the delicacy of silk, and it’s alluring. But I know better. Their licking tongue is always hungry. The memory of the terrible smell of burnt hair and skin pricks sharp in my mind.

During the day, whenever I take a break from writing, and come down from my cold office, the fire is waiting. The orange flames endlessly shape-shifting remind me of my potential for creativity.

Some days my body has rigidified into the question mark shape of the anguished writer too long at her desk. Then, those flames laugh at the inflexibility of my body, and my words. They tickle and taunt me. It shifts me from my petty concerns.

On the worst writing days I’m thickheaded and wobbly-limbed. Then they seduce me back to life, stroking my face and my back. Painfully wonderful. They know that I’ll never write well with that tension in my mind and body. After these encounters, I go back to my desk with their enchanting laughter ringing in my ears.

Back in my cold office, I ask myself: how can I lay my words side by side so that they have space to breathe, but are close enough for their friction to make my stories blaze? How can my words form shapes as endlessly varied as flames? How can I release the energy contained in those words, but not be burnt in the process, or smother them for fear of the heat?

The Weekly Prompt

Observe a fire. Write about the shapes you see flickering in the flames. First, describe it using as wide a variety of verbs as possible. Then, relax your eyes a little. Now, what do you see? Let your imagination blaze.

First Published March 18th 2013

A Writer's Process: John Porter

Walking to my studio in the Leighton Artists’ Colony just before dawn, I mentally pen a haiku;

Gravel dark and wet

Shines at first light as I walk

Easy under foot

 

A mist lingering from damp snow overnight creeps through half perceived trees.  The few amber lights along the path are just enough to show the way through the pines.  I imagine deer lying nearby in long brown grass beneath the trees, but the dim illumination does not reveal their location.

 In the bright circle of the Valentine Studio porch light, a young man unexpectedly appears and slouches past with a large portfolio tucked under his arm.  He looks up momentarily with a sad, tired expression that seems to say;  'That was my last night spent on the drawings … now I'm leaving but wish I had more time.’  

But I am just arriving to work for a month.   I turn right down the little track that leads to the bottom of a small ravine where my studio Evamy awaits.  I set down my computer case on the porch.  It makes a soft thump on the old boards. 

In the darkness, I search for the key in jacket pockets before remembering that it is carefully zipped safe in the inside pocket.  Fishing it out, I fiddle with the handle lock, before feeling it relent and the door opens towards me, sticking slightly on the jam just as it did three years ago when last I opened it.  

Switching on the light, a warm interior welcomes me back.  I cannot resist saying aloud; ‘Hello Evamy ’ as if addressing an old friend or lover.  I make a quick inspection.  Two computer chairs are neatly placed at either end of the long desk surface.   A lounge chair extends beneath shelves with clean glasses, a Banff Centre mug and a box tea bags left by the last occupant.   Nothing has changed, except perhaps. me. 

This is where I wrote my first book.  It success renewed my life and connected me with so many different people.  

My main job is no longer as a business advisor to small engineering companies.  I am now a writer.

I extract a tea bag from the box and fill the kettle, putting the carton of milk in the small fridge beneath the sink.     Multi reflections of my presence move hither and thither in the studios many windows.  They are still dark mirrors before the dawn.  In an hour they will be windows again, revealing the woods beyond and hopefully an old friend.  I recall an earlier haiku;

We work together

You store pine cones for winter

I fill a blank page

 

No more excuses.  With tea made, I sit down and turn on the computer.  While it fires up, I extract the first of hundreds of poems which need to be polished and brought into the light. 

A Storyteller's Process: How Nature Supports Me

I am familiar with the creative release that a good walk can provide.

It’s one of the most well known inspirational activities, along with having a bath. There’s something about the inwardness they induce, along with the mechanical process of habit, that allows my mind to wander, sometimes along the most fantastical loops and avenues of imagination. Often work that was stuck can come dramatically unstuck, or a new idea can come seemingly from nowhere.

Walking in nature adds another dimension. Not only can I commune with myself in imaginative ways, but in doing so can find myself immersed in the vastly elemental, or the intricately particular, enraptured by the beauty of colour, movement or sound, or plunged into battle with weather, rocks and other natural obstacles.

I can identify, in my mind, with anything from an ear of corn, or a woodlouse to a buzzard or oak tree or – if I’m so lucky – stag. I can engage with all the symbolism and dreamscapes drawn from the natural in art and writing.

I can connect to the past and future beyond human measures of time, or find myself at one with the present moment in all its unfolding complexity and richness.

For me there are a couple of particularly productive places to wander, where I will always regret it if I have forgotten to take a notebook to write down my thoughts.

I’m extraordinarily lucky to live by the sea, giving me rugged inland landscape as well as beaches, horizons, and that extraordinary west coast light that has inspired painters and sculptors as well as writers.

A couple of years ago, the shoreline and the rhythm of the ocean were inspiring my thinking. Presently it is a particular sub-tropical garden that was once a monastery vineyard and looks over the coast to a view of St Michael’s Mount. The seascape is breathtaking, but no more so than looking closely at the plants growing there, at their fractal geometric patterns, their dramatic colour and shape, at the way they filter light, their natural cycles of rebirth and decay or the sound of the stream mingled with the soughing of the majestic summer trees.

Sometimes I sit in a gardener’s hut, making stream-of-consciousness notes, channeling myself into an almost visionary state.

At other times, as on my last visit, I flop onto the grass, thinking my mind is empty and exhausted, only to roll over, see the swallows zipping across the space in predatory arcs, and suddenly find my brain is embarking on a poem.

It doesn’t always produce a finished piece of work – though many of my favourite completed poems have come from walks there – but this particular garden, with its sights, sounds, smells, textures, layered symbols of birth, fertility, death and renewal, never fails to inspire me. 

The Body Knows

Playing with words and images in the mountains of the Pyrenees. Peter Reid carries the camera. I carry the notebook. This is the first in series of images that records our cavorting, and creative collaboration.

A Storyteller's Process: Annette Hadley

When I approach a new project, whether at home or work, how do I go about doing it?

Jump right in, learn as I go?

Read the manual first?

Somewhere in between?

I've tended to be the jump right in sort. In fact, I used to joke that when you tell me to jump, I'm in the air before I ask "how high?" I've learned, after numerous wasted efforts, that sometimes it's wiser to slow down, see how things unfold.

Going slow also allows for an internal processing to take place.

Still, one thing I know is that, regardless of the nature of the project, I always start with one thing: doing what I know.

In my previous career, as Clinical Strategist for a global healthcare informatics software company, I authored many different types of technical documents as I moved from assignment to assignment.

As long as I had some sort of example, I could take that and off I'd go.

As in to the break room. Really!

Walk around the department, maybe take a walk outside. 

Because what I already knew needed to swirl around with what I was learning, and come together in my mind. Once that was done, I would sit down and type away.

I used to think I was avoiding that particular project until I realised what was happening. That a natural thought process evolved which resulted in quality documents.

I've found the same to be true in writing daily blogs for the last four weeks.

I've basically been writing what I know. And its literary cousin (I just made that up), writing what I notice.

Four weeks ago, when I accepted this 30-day challenge, I tended to write earlier in the day. That has shifted to after dinnertime, which allows me to notice the events and thoughts that come and go throughout the day.

By the time I sit down in the evening to write, it's pretty much already done. In my head. I type the words out, play with them, edit, edit, edit.

Marion Roach, a famous memoirist, observes that the first draft is always the vomit draft.

While the thought of vomiting does not appeal, I do love how that gives me permission to not worry about how good it is straight off…

Though I do believe that much of what bubbles up is spot on. Cheeky me!

Seriously, the truth lies in telling my truths.

I do what I know. 

Spoken Word, Written Word

Photograph by Noel Harvey

As a writer, I’ve often asked myself: how can I get the maximum aliveness into a product that sits flat on the page? It’s not an easy task. (Here’s a poem about my sometime frustration in this respect.)

Stories are alive. They are ever-evolving creatures. In my experience, they often resist being reduced to a ‘definitive version’.  At a certain point, we usually just have to make a deal with our subject matter that it’s time to part ways. Then we take courage in both hands, and let go of the re-writing.

I’d long suspected the value of looking at how words are used in language, and stage performance, and then find ways to transfer that power on to the page. So, I watched a range of spoken-word stage performances, as well as listening to conversations in the street, with that lens in mind.

Now I understand much more about how writers can learn from spoken word poets and oral storytellers, and vice versa. And how invaluable that learning can be.

The differences

Certainly, there are fundamental differences between language and writing. They are different creatures, rather than (as used to be assumed) one just being the descendent of the other.  When we speak to someone, there’s a limit to how much information they can process in any one instant. If they’re reading a text we’ve written, there isn’t the same problem. They can take time to unpack and digest. Language therefore, tends to come in bite-sized fragments, with the written word in general being more elaborate, embedded, and closely packed.

Who is better at what?

Spoken-word sometimes lacks durability, complexity, subtlety, and beauty of form. I’ve found that spoken-word artists on the Wild Words courses revel in taking the range of tools and techniques that writers have, and applying them to the creation of a spoken-word-baby-to-be. They enjoy mining the written words alone, to get maximum impact into them, before the extraordinary power of performance is added. They record, on paper, their spoken word gems for posterity.

Those who work only with the written word, can sometimes struggle to unleash spontaneity and aliveness on the page. Writers easily lose touch with their embodied experience, without which, in my opinion no story can flourish. The utilisation of body-awareness and physicality, is something that performance poets often excel at.

Writers learning from performers

Over time, writing has become increasingly distanced from its roots in oral storytelling.

Pauses

For example, when first introduced, the hierarchy of punctuation marks on the page seems to have been thought of as representing pauses of different lengths, that is, as reflecting purely phonetic facts.

It was recording what master storytellers did in front of their audiences, to raise tension, and set up patterns of tension and release. They paused their speech at key moments in a story, or use a drum roll of other musical instrument, clap their hands, stamp their feet, or changing position on stage.

Writing, gradually, over time, honed its invaluable ability to display the logical structure of a passage, independently of how it might be read aloud.

Remembering it’s roots, it seems to me an interesting experiment to do as a writer, to take a step back into the history of writing, and think about how we might rediscover how to create pauses, and therefore raise tension in a story, through punctuation.

And punctuation isn’t the only way to do it. When we use language on stage, or in everyday life, it is always accompanied by gestures, mannerisms, movement and changes in facial expression. So, when we write a piece of dialogue, and want to create a dramatic pause, describing physicality is often the best way to go.

Intonation

A major aspect of spoken language that there is no satisfactory way to put on to the page, is intonation, or pitch. The intonation in someone’s voice contains vital information about the mood, and intention of the speaker. The best we’ve managed to come up with on the page, is the of use punctuation to partially convey those things. When, in linguistics, the speaker’s voice rises,

a question mark (?), or exclamation mark (!) is the equivalent on the page. When a speaker’s voice falls, the equivalent in writing is quite often a full stop (.)

On Wild Words courses I have an ‘experiment’ I like to suggest to writers. Us writers can be a timid, body-static lot, but I’ve often suspected that inside most writers, is a frustrated performer trying to get out. So, with the upmost respect for your love of sitting quietly in your room and imaginative space, how about trying the following, just to see what happens?

To see the Prompt, you'll need to sign up on the Wild Words website homepage to receive the Monthly Newsletter. 

Connected to this fascinating subject (and I’m rubbing my hands in anticipation), is a discussion on the links between embodiment, music, the sung word, and the written word. But that’s for another blog…