ENGL 591
Special Topics in Folklore and Folklife:
Living Words: Folklore and Creative Writing
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for
them is something more acute than listening to them. — Eudora
Welty
What drives me on, I realize, is a craving to force entry into another
heart, to trick the tumblers of natural law, to perform miracles of knowing.
It’s human nature. We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable
otherness of others. — Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the
Woods
My grandmother tells me
About her first love
Johnny Hansen was his name
She’ll always remember
A warm autumn day
She was fifteen
Or almost fifteen . . . — from “Mahogany China,”
by Jim Dodge
How do we know what moment is worth telling? How do we listen for and
find good stories? What spoken words linger in a listener’s ear?
Where does the power lie in ambiguity and in fragments?
Folklore and creative writing make good partners. Proverbs and jokes pare
down words and turn on themselves quickly; they urge us to condense, to
write concisely. Auction chants, drum beats, jump-rope rhymes, and unaccompanied
singing offer rhythms, new and old. Folk speech anchors words in place.
Riddles lead us to danger and wisdom. Foods we eat, objects we make, rituals
we practice enliven scenes of all kinds. And stories—whether mythological
tales, “fairy tales,” legends, supernatural tales, tall tales,
or stories of personal experiences—provide the inspiration, provocation,
and backbone for many poems, novels, and non-fiction essays.
In this class, we will encounter these forms of folklore through readings,
recordings, and film and use them to further our writing. Through workshops
and discussions, we will explore the unsuspected depths of everyday cultural
forms and practices. In-class storytelling, interviewing others, discussing
in workshops the oral words we collect, and translating oral words to
printed text will offer ways to attend to writing. Course readings will
pair poetry, fiction, ethnography, and non-fiction with folklore texts.
Possible readings include Coyote and other mythological tales, tales of
the Brothers Grimm, The Poets Grimm (20th c. poems that revise
Grimm), and legends of La Llorona and other supernatural figures; others
will be determined by student interest. Requirements include in-class
presentations, short paper, and a semester project. Writing assignments
will be tailored to the different interests of students, including those
in MA, MFA, PWE, and TWL programs.
Please e-mail me at myocom@gmu.edu
when you register for the course. I want to plan our semester’s
readings around your writing interests.
What is Folklore? Answer at The
New York Folklore Society Website
________________________
Course Readings:
Here are a few of the book we'll be using. As I make final decisions,
I'll add more. Please don't buy other books, even if they're on the shelves
at the GMU bookstore.
– Patrick Ford, editor. The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh
Tales (University of California Press) 0-520-03414-7
– David Thomson. People of the Sea. (Counterpoint Press,
2002) 1582431841
– Jack Zipes. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
All-New Third Edition (Bantam) 0-553-89740-3
– Steve Zeitlin. A Celebration of American Family Folklore
(Yellow Moon Press, 1992) 0-938756-36-2
I'm considering these:
– Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson, editors. The Poets’
Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (Story Line Press,
2003)
– John Miles Foley. How to Read an Oral Poem (University
of Illinois Press, 2002) 0-252-07082-8
– Kira Van Deusen. Singing Story, Healing Drum: Shamans and
Storytellers of Turkic Siberia (McGill-Queen’s University Press,
2004) 0-7735-2617-X; (Univ of Washington Press, 0-295-98418-X)
Possible activities for ENGL 591 “Living Words: Folklore
and Creative Writing”
(Spring 2006, Margaret Yocom, myocom@gmu.edu)
– Finding moments that are tellable. What makes a story
/ a moment tellable?
Storytelling activities that help us find stories (tellable moments) where
you didn’t see stories before. (Example: William Stafford’s
essay on telling his children what happened to him the night before and
realizing he had a poem-- “Traveling through the Dark” in
Crossing Unmarked Snow)
– Collecting a story from a friend / discussing a favorite
traditional tale: workshops on that tale to discover as much
as we can about it
– In-class writing and storytelling exercises
to help start or develop a piece of work that could proceed from traditional
materials.
– Discuss and play with the language of oral materials:
repetition, fragments, gaps
– How the word sounds on the page. Experiment
with ways to line-out orally told stories on the page, giving them the
appearance of poetry; folklorists call such a layout “ethnopoetics.”
– Reading folktales, legends, and more to discover the
resonances of objects such as skin, shoe, hand, foot, raven,
ring
– Reading, listening to folktales, legends, and ballads
to explore characters (like Coyote in Native American mythology
or characters in the Grimm Brothers collection of international wonder
tales or religious figures such as the Virgin of Guadalupe). Experimenting
with collected language poems.
– Reading about festivals, celebrations, rites of passage
such as Halloween, Day of the Dead, funerals, reunions
– Read family folklore materials to discover material
for poems/stories/non-fiction about family. Interview family members.
Discuss family photography.
– Read about traditional food and foodways to
develop material for poems/stories/non-fiction about food and the life
around food. Interview tradition bearers.
– Telling stories / reading poems, stories, essays aloud
in class and at an open mike
_______________
One folklorist’s views on poetry’s connection to traditional
arts: "Artifacts rarely mean in the manner of lucid prose. Poetry,
explosive with ambiguity and uneasy in the confines of time, comes closer
to the artifact's mode of significance. Music, moving more than allusive,
repetitious in transformation, come closer still. At last, the artifact
finds its own way to meaning, and in learning it we begin to hear the
voices in things . . . Then we accept the strange responsibility of putting
into words that which is not verbal" (47)
– Henry Glassie (1999) Material Culture (Bloomington: Indiana
Press).
____________________________________________________________________
What is folklore? the study of traditional expressive behavior (like
storytelling) and its products (like stories).
What do folklorists study? Here's a list --
After you read this information, please email me and tell me what you'd
most like to read, talk about, do in our 591 course on folklore and creative
writing. myocom@gmu.edu
ORAL LITERATURE and MUSIC
folk narratives
mythological tales
international wonder tales (“fairy tales”)
legends
contemporary legends
legends of the supernatural (ghosts, fairies, and much more)
tall tales
animal tales and fables
anecdotes
family stories and oral history
personal experience narratives
jokes
folk dramas
folk gestures
folk speech
proverbs
riddles
rhymes and folk poetry
games (jump-rope rhymes), rap, auction chants, cowboy poetry, and more
names and naming
personal, family names
place names, and much more
folksongs and ballads
blues, and much more
folk dances
CUSTOMS
beliefs (“superstitions”)
word magic
customs
making shrines and spontaneous roadside memorials, and much more
divination of the future, and more
festivals
birthdays, saints days, weddings, funerals, and much more
MATERIAL CULTURE (Also called Folklife)
foodways
folk arts
quilts, carvings, roadside shrines, murals, lawn art, and much more
folk dress and costumes
folk architecture
porches, fences, house types, barn types, and much more
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