F & CW Section Activities at AFS 2008, Louisville

 

 

The Folklore Muse: Folklorists and Creative Writing
Thursday, October 23
3:45 pm - 5:45 pm (Session #05-51)
Regency Ballroom North

Short Abstract / Long Abstract / Bibliography

Short abstract: Through poetry, short stories, novels, and literary non-fiction, folklorists express the experiences of being a folklorist, and the insights they have gained from the tradition bearers and cultural community leaders they have met. During this forum, authors from The Folklore Muse: Creative Writing by Folklorists, edited by Frank deCaro (Utah State Univ Press, 2008) will read from their writings and discuss how their creative writing intersects with their folklore fieldwork, research, and ethnographic writing. Come celebrate the publication of The Folklore Muse with us.

Forum Co-chairs:
Andrea Graham, independant folklorist
Margaret Yocom, George Mason University, myocom@gmu. edu

Participants:

Frank deCaro, Louisiana State University, emeritus, fdecaro@lsu. edu
Jens Lund, Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission, jenslund@earthlink. net
Ted Olson, East Tennessee State University, olson@etsu. edu
Libby Tucker, Binghamton University, ltucker@binghamton. edu
Steve Zeitlin, City Lore, szeitlin@citylore. org

Long abstract: In this forum, authors from and the editor of The Folklore Muse: Creative Writing by Folklorists (Utah State Univ Press, 2008) will read from their writings and discuss how their creative writing intersects with their folklore fieldwork, research, and ethnographic writing. Folklorists will read several of their poems, or section of their short story, novel, or work of creative non-fiction. They will also discuss how their creative writing intersects with their folklore fieldwork, research, and ethnographic writing.

Certainly folklorists have published creative writing before: Zora Neale Hurston, for example, brought her fieldwork alive in plays (Color Struck, Mule-Bone, etc.), and a novel (Their Eyes Were Watching God), as well in novel-like ethnographies such as Mules and Men. This book, however, is the first one to gather multiple writings together in one volume and present them as speaking to the greater understanding of folklore studies. The book’s sections (now in manuscript form) reveal its exploration of many aspects of folklore study and the men and women who have dedicated their lives to this discipline: Being/Becoming a Folklorist; Fieldwork, Folk Communities, Informants; Performance(s); The Powers of Narrative; Legend and Myth; Material Traditions, Material Things; Children and Children’s Lore and Language; Ritual and Custom; Worldview and Belief.

Is this creative work “ethnography”? No, say most of the authors of this volume, even though many creative writers who are not folklorists claim the term “literary ethnography” for their works that are, as Kate Riley explains, “imaginative attempts to explore human sensibilities, interactions, and communities via suggestive detail, narrative stress, graphic characterization, dialogue, and emotional contour” (5). The literary journal Green Mountains Review, for example, published an entire volume of literary ethnography in 1999-2000, and the web is alive with the term.

Why do folklorists turn to creative writing? What does such writing afford them that standard essays do not? What additional insights result from writing poems, stories, novels, and memoirs and from sharing them with readers? Some folklorists use creative writing to explore research and fieldwork questions that can’t be answered directly; creative writing allows for other possibilities to emerge. As poet William Stafford observes, “Sometimes a path opens in language; you follow it as it goes, like a plan. It guides you where you wanted to go, but didn’t know you wanted to till it happens” (6). Some folklorists’ creative writing show how folklorists apply their skills to examine worlds, such as cancer wards, that they’ve been dropped into unexpectedly. In this forum, we will allow time to let other answers emerge, and to encourage audience members to enter in to these questions and more.

Bibliography

Kaplan, Carla, ed. 2002. Zora Neale Hurston: Her Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday.

Riley, Kate. 1999-2000. Conjuring the Other: What is Literary Ethnography Anyway? Green Mountains Review 12(2):5-6.

Stafford, William. Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer’s Vocation. Ed. Paul Merchant and Vincent Wixon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

 

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Secrets, Betrayals, and Half-told Tales: Writing under the Spell of Traditional Ballads
Friday, October 24
1:30 pm - 3:30 pm (Session #12-07)
Conference Theater

Panel: Margaret Yocom, chair. Susan Tichy, Lee Ann Brown, Betty Smith.
Sponsored by Folklore and Creative Writing Section

Short abstract: Southern Appalachian ballads and their European counterparts often obscure rather than reveal their tales of love and power, relying on fragments, gaps, repetition, and resonant metaphors that call forth lives of centuries past. Two avant-garde poets, Lee Ann Brown and Susan Tichy, along with ballad singer, researcher, and playwright Betty Smith-- who have all lingered in the “gude green-wood” of the traditional ballad-- will read and sing from their works, and then discuss why and how they weave the ballads’ language, sound, and other-worldliness into their writing.

Long abstract: Creative writers have turned to ballads for inspiration as long as the classic European ballads have been in existence, understanding the “commons” that these artful songs, texts, and tunes have long provided for those fortunate enough to know about them. And ballad scholars tell us that literary works of late medieval and early Renaissance days also influenced the creation of some of the early ballads, too. On this panel with a folklorist-discussant and three panelists, the creative writers (two poets and a ballad singer/ researcher / playwright) will discuss how each of them has woven the ballads’ language, sound, structure, syntax, and other-worldliness into their writings. The panel will begin and end with the singing of ballads by a singer who learned many of her songs from her North Carolina mountain family, and ballad-singing will also be woven throughout.

For the two award-winning, avant-garde poets, the ballad has not provided the form of their poems; that is, they rarely write poems in ballad stanzas. Rather, they use fragments of ballad language, as well as the ballads’ gaps, repetitions, metaphors, and impersonal voice to construct their poems. Such ballad characteristics inform the way they create their poems on the formal, tonal, verbal, and acoustic levels. Often using the art of collage-writing, these two poets merge the language and sound of the ballads with other materials, such as overheard speech, news stories about the Iraq War, titles of fiddle tunes, recipes, and more. In the environment of one poet’s poems, for example, different speakers “bounce off each other without clear markers, speech veers into babble, . . . rhyme reels you in or turns you lose when you least expect it.”

The ballad singer / researcher / playwright will discuss her life with traditional ballads and provide another way of incorporating ballads in creative writing. Taught ballads by her grandmother and father, she has also gathered ballads from members of her community as well as from audio sources. She also performed at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival organized by Bascom Lamar Lunsford , and she will tell about her informants’ experiences with that ballad collector. In her play about the life of another ballad singer, the playwright includes ballads and performs them, emphasizing the contexts and functions of traditional Southern Appalachian ballad performances. She also conducts workshops on ballads and ballad singing, and one of our poets has been a devoted student of hers for many years. Influenced by such singings, this poet often sings her own ballad-influenced poems instead of reading them, and will do so during this panel.

Sponsored by the Folklore and Creative Writing section of the American Folklore Society, this panel will provide new ways of viewing and encountering the traditional ballads, as well as new ways of understanding their continuing hold on us as folklorists and creative writers.


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Folklore & Creative Writing Secion Meeting
Friday, October 24
12:15 pm - 1:30 pm
Churchill Room

Co-conveners: Margaret Yocom and Andrea Graham

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Folklore & Creative Writing Workshop: Collage Writing

Friday, October 24
8:00 am - 10:00 am (Session #9-06A)
Churchill Room

Workshop Leaders:

Susan Tichy, poetry professor in the Master of Fine Arts Program, George Mason University
Margaret Yocom, folklorist, George Mason University

Short Abstract / Long Abstract / Recommended Reading

Sponsored by Folklore and Creative Writing Section

Short Abstract: In the conjunction of folklore scholarship with creative writing, the relative roles of personal experience, fieldwork materials, and other source materials form crucial and vexing questions. This workshop provides one model for working with that conjunction via textual collage. We will look at examples of collage. Then, we will then write together, following an exercise to produce collaborative collage poems based on materials you bring with you. Although we will write poetry, this workshop and its writing model of textual collage will also serve fiction and non-fiction writers. Please check the Folklore and Creative Writing main page for further instructions.

Long Abstract (modified: Workshop Instructions added): In the conjunction of folklore scholarship with creative writing, the relative roles of personal experience, fieldwork materials, and other source materials form crucial and vexing questions. This workshop provides one model for working with that conjunction via textual collage. We will look at examples of collage constructed at the level of the word or phrase, and at the level of stanza or paragraph.

We will then write together, following an exercise to produce collaborative collage poems based on materials you bring with you to the workshop. Although we will write poetry, this workshop and its writing model of textual collage will also serve fiction and prose writers.
Collage uses quoted and composed text to create a space that honors both by preserving the texture, the material presence, of each source. It allows personal material to become just that—material, to be used in the same way as any other part of a composition. Collage also breaks down the binary of concrete image or example vs. generality or abstraction, by partially shifting the work of creating connections from writer to reader. By juxtaposing, rather than fully explaining its sources, collage creates a somewhat paratactic field of attention, in which readers are free to create their own emphasis and meaning.

Many of the metaphors used for collage also remind us folklore. Our favorite is one developed by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. Bachelard compares the building of a nest to the making of a shell: both are made by the animals who live in them, but where a shell is brought forth from the animal’s body, and remains part of the animal, a nest is made from the environment, and is like collage in that each piece used had another use and identity before. Collage reveals the writer’s sensibility, just as a nest reveals the species that constructed it, but it also keeps the newly made text continuous with its environment and its sources.

For Louisville: Each workshop participant should bring pen and paper, plus one copy of one page of prose. Choose a page with interesting language. We’ll be pulling small pieces of text from the page. If your last name begins with B through and including M, bring some written work from your field work (journal entry, transcript of informants, anything) or from the kind of source you want to work with as a creative writer. If your last name begins with P through and including W, please bring some text from an unrelated topic unrelated to your fieldwork or any topic you know you want to write about as a creative writer. You could tear a page from a magazine or xerox a page from a book.


Pre-workshop reading:
-- Harryette Mullen: Muse & Drudge (Singing Horse, 1995). Repr. in Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006; a text signifying on race, gender, and language).
At this site <http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/237>, look in the right column for the poems listed below. Please print, read, and bring to the workshop:
Muse & Drudge [just as I am I come]
Page 1
Page 34
Page 35
Page 39
Page 5
Page 72

-- Mark Nowak: Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House, 2004; book of poems about a factory closing and resulting effects on community).
At this site, <MP3 files of seven poems: <http://learningobjects.wesleyan.edu/wespress/americanpoets/poets.html#nowak>, please listen to Nowak reading these seven poems. We’ll send or bring hard copies of the poems.

Here is more information about Nowak and his “docu-poetry” if you’d like to read more:
Review that stresses Nowak’s history research:
http://www.citypages.com/2004-09-15/news/lullaby-for-the-working-class/1
Review that questions his process: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/405/254goska.html
Poetic Profile http://www.chicagopostmodernpoetry.com/nowak.htm
Review with a poem: http://www.mnartists.org/article.do?rid=147927
Poem: “Capitalization” http://www.woodlandpattern.org/poems/mark_nowak01.shtml


In the workshop, we will look briefly at examples from these two texts, and then we’ll write. A further reading list on collage writing will be provided.

See you soon, Susan and Peggy.

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