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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