Middle Atlantic Folklife Association

“Living Words: Folklorists and Creative Writers”

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.

— Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (14)

Spring semester’s end brings joy and sadness: joy because classes end and summer roads stretch before me, and sadness because classes end and many treasured students graduate. This semester, those good-byes have been especially hard because one of my best George Mason University classes has just ended—folklore and creative writing—with students like Mary: “Peggy, your class is the BEST class I’ve ever taken for generating new writing. I’ve written several stories, have sketched ideas for a dozen, more, & have solved a major problem in my novel – all directly influenced by the readings for your class. Mary Overton Beall”

A couple of years ago, I found myself stuffing little notes in a new file named “folklore and creative writing course.” I used to teach folk music and arts for creative writers who needed a non-literary arts class, but that was 20-some years ago, and it really didn’t attend to students’ creative writing. This time ’round, I wanted to do something quite different; I wanted to blend folklore and creative writing. It felt daunting.

I’ve long noticed, though, how creative writing students in my classes understand folklore’s power immediately, travel deep into its words and resonant images. Some of those students still tell me how much folklore means to them. And, on a personal level, I began to ask myself: what do I want to learn from my talented GMU colleagues in my last decade of teaching? My answer: acknowledge that I’ve written poems throughout my life, learn more about poetry, and write more—and hopefully better—poems. So, I joined the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) women’s poetry group, founded the American Folklore Society Folklore and Creative Writing Section with Amy Skillman, signed on as AFS liaison to the American Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and proposed my course “Living Words: Folklore and Creative Writing” to the English Department.

Combining folklore and creative writing is hardly new. Our Mid Atlantic Folklife retreats feature creative writing workshops. Folklorists, such as Frank deCaro, have creative writing degrees. Some, such as Jo Radner who taught storytelling at American University, belong to creative writing faculties. Plenty of folklorists have published poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction. And organizations such as City Lore and the Western Folklife Center organize the People’s Poetry Gathering and the Cowboy Poetry Gathering. There’s a natural affinity at work, here. What is the power that folklore offers writers? How can we draw on it to strengthen our discipline and forge closer connections to the allied field of creative writing?

As the deadline for course descriptions crept nearer, I began to structure the class, deciding what to keep, what to toss. To help decide, I drew on my folklore skills and interviewed graduate students. I went in to the classrooms of my MFA Poetry colleagues, and asked, “What, of all that folklore has to offer, would you most like to experience?” I called MFA students who had taken folklore courses with me and asked, “What in folklore helped you most as a writer?” Poetry student Chris Tanseer told me, for example, that what draws him to folklore is its ability to help him create “a different land that is also home, a land that, if it works well, seems like it’s just around the corner” (Conversation, 11-22-2005). And fiction writer Robert James, now finished his MFA at San Jose State told me that his GMU folklore studies help him “pay attention to the emotional significance in seemingly insignificant details,” and “find stories” where he didn’t imagine stories would be (Conversation, 11-2005 ). With these and other answers in mind, I finished my syllabus. (The syllabus is at )

When registration began, I wondered if enough people would sign up, but within 24 hours the class filled with students I couldn’t wait to meet. Among them were a poet interested in Grimms’ tales and contemporary women’s experiences of trauma and incest, a non-fiction writer interviewing women for stories of their deepest secrets, a poet who wanted time to explore the spirit world of his Philippine homeland, a professional writing and editing student-songwriter searching for songs that told personal stories, and a folklore student who wanted to begin a novel on her Illinois “Little Egypt” family. All of them wanted to write, write, write.

So, I scheduled time to workshop our writings; I led many in-class writing exercises; and I organized the course around those places where the interests of folklorists and creative writers converge, places where we can linger for good conversation that may inspire new understanding, new writing.

Here’s one of those places: how do we know that we have a story to tell? What helps us recognize those moments? Folklorist Timothy Tangherlini discusses that good storytellers discern “memorable” stories about “significantly different” events (62). And William Stafford writes that knew he had a poem, had experienced an event that “could not be held small” when he found himself, at breakfast, telling his children about driving home over dark mountain passes, finding a dying deer great with fawn, and debating whether to push her warm body over the edge of the cliff—or not (87). In class, we talked about those moments we knew we had a story and what led us to that unshakable understanding.

Another place lay with word magic and word play, for what folklorist or creative writer doesn’t believe that just the right word can spin a magic spell? So, we read riddles, and we brought in riddles we wrote. We held a riddle session based on the rules for riddling that Kenneth Goldstein found in Scotland (330-336). A few days after class, Michael Martinez, poet and graduate research assistant in the Northern Virginia Archive, brought in a new poem. “It’s a riddle,” he smiled. “I left the title off on purpose. Listen, and tell me what you think.”

as the meat
within the shell

as the shell before the caw

a bleached weed
a fig
dusted to sweet the skin

albumen of peacock
butterfly

held to the ivory of oxen hoof
pulling
the space

between sins I am

as I am so

the host on the tongue
God of Bread

complexion of conquest
the salt of Lot

as God is
a crown of thorn
diadem of wheat

so am I the echo
calling fossil back to name

amaranth ash spread across the light

* * * * * *
“Bone,” I guessed.
“Close,” he said, “but no! The word is one of the properties of bone, but it’s not bone.” Nothing more came; I shook my head.
“‘White,’” Michael told me. I call it ‘White.’” (Conversation 2-2006)

Another place I took my students to was the fragment- and gap-laden world of the international wonder tales. We read not only their favorite stories, but also the tantalizing group of “Fragments” in the latest Jack Zipes translation of The Complete Tales of the Brothers Grimm (630). As writers, my students are deeply interested in fragments and gaps, given the work many of them are doing in collage, altered book, and erasure poetry (Tichy and Beachy Quick). Folklorists, too, have explored the evocative power of gaps and fragments (Constantine, Neal, and Yocom). What philosopher and poet Edmond Jabès says of the fragment is of interest to us all: “The fragment is our only access to the infinite. . . . Only in fragments can we read the immeasurable totality” (qtd. in Waldrop 2002:18).

As my students wrote in response to the tales—gaps, fragments, and all— several were amazed to find their work emerging with completely new shapes. Maggie Whittier, for example, found herself turning from realistic fiction toward something else as she wrote her story “Drawing Frogs.” “Subtle magic captures my attention more than anything,” Maggie writes, “ . . . [t]he critical moment in the story—when the ordinary tale takes a turn toward magic and wonder” (Statement of Reflection, 4-5). These “turns” —when the princess in “All Fur” stuffs three dresses into a nutshell, for example—are rarely explained, she notes, and she thinks that using such turns “holds a worth while lesson for fiction writing: gaps of this sort can lend texture and depth to a story, so much so that the reader may feel compelled to reread the story as soon as she finishes it for the first time.”

Maggie was inspired by the frogs in the Grimms’ tales:

In “Briar Rose,” a frog predicts the conception and birth of the king and queen’s daughter; in “The Lion and the Frog,” a frog helps the daughter navigate her way back to her beloved brother; in “The Frog King,” a frog persists in his courtship of the king’s daughter despite her reluctance to honor the promise she made. In these tales, frogs are so often princes in disguise, but I appreciate how much personality and influence they manage to have in their frog states. Rather than passively accepting their cursed existence and sinking into depression, these frogs go out into the world and effect change. I began writing “Drawing Frogs” in response to this vivacity I detected in the frogs.

In Maggie’s story, an elderly man living near the beach in Massachusetts suddenly loses his beloved wife of many years:

He took to drawing frogs because he couldn’t think of what else to do. At first it was an occasional hobby—maybe he’d sit down with the oil pastels and paper every other day or so—but it quickly evolved into a daily ritual. His frogs were brilliant neon greens and pinks and blues, like the poisonous tree frogs he remembered seeing at the zoo with Helen so many years before. Those real frogs were smaller than mice, but his were massive—each one commanded an entire sheet of the large sketch pad, and their faces all varied but they shared a certain wisdom.
“I see you looking at me,” he’d sometimes say with a smile, as he applied the finishing touches to another frog. He taped the pictures to his walls and delighted in the colorful company.
The thing was—and this was what he couldn’t bring himself to tell his grown daughter when she called on him—the frogs took on a life of their own. They seemed to guide him through the drawing process, calling to him in a language he could not understand with his ears, nudging his arthritic hand this way and that. They watched him from the walls and hummed a muddy-sounding chorus as he puttered his way through the small rooms.
One January they followed him to the beach. . . . (Whittier, 2-3)

* * * * * *

Reading the international wonder tales, Maggie Whittier explains, “pushed me in a new direction. . . . [P]rior to this course, I never would have attempted something so spectacular and unrealistic—my fiction lived indisputably in this known world. After reading the Grimms’ tales, I saw that possibilities exist apart from what I am able to observe. It is entirely feasible, not to mention exciting, that one of my characters may be able to see something I cannot, that he can teach me something about the world through his vision” (Statement of Reflection, 5).

For another student, the structure of the Grimms’ tales offered a scaffold to support her writing while she ranged freely in other directions, exploring gaps in the tales themselves.” Working with ‘Rapunzel’ has helped me discover a new approach to writing,” poet Sara Deacon says. “Knowing that I would be working with already established motifs and characters allowed me a certain freedom that I didn’t necessarily expect. When I’m writing from personal experience, conflict, emotion, etc., being so emotionally invested can be a hindrance to saying something in a new way, even if I know that what I might have to say is not anything new at all. ‘Rapunzel’ has helped me explore some of my old obsessions in new ways and has even introduced me to some new ones” (Statement of Reflection, 6).

One of the gaps in ‘Rapunzel’ that attracted Sara was Rapunzel’s exile: what was that time like for the young mother, alone with her twins:

A Moment of Light

My babies are asleep
snug in petticoat pillows, smelling of pine.
The girl kicks her tiny legs
and curls, then stretches out her toes.
She trusts the air around her
mingling with my breath.
The boy sucks his small fist
a slick of saliva shines on his knuckles
and he hums
a milk-satisfied song.

I remember
how they swam together inside me,
how I forgot––for a moment––the tower, the witch-mother, the prince…
I remember
a story of rapunzel, a mother’s craving
how she gave her daughter over to the spells of wiyches, heights, and men ...

In this wilderness
I could wish for stone walls and a roof
to replace these sticks and leaves,
which do little to keep the rain out;
I could wish for bread and wine, a certain fragrant vegetable,
or cheese and sauces flavored with
spices whose names I can’t pronounce;
I could wish for a warm bath, a proper haircut,
a new dress, a good book to lean my daydreams on;
I could wish for a mother, a prince, a savior.

But all those wishes have high prices.
Those cravings lead to promises
that can never be reversed or broken.
I fear the cost of such wishing.

The girl blinks
and rests her gaze on my face.
The boy grunts
and smiles in his simple dream.
The sunlight
touches us through the leaves.

This is the wish
I never thought to wish before.
And now, all I can think to wish
is this.

* * * * * *

There are so many other places of convergence between folklore and creative writing that we explored in our class together: ethnopoetic notation of collected stories, family folklore and the poetry of Alberto Ríos, and personal experience narratives and the story-poems of Christopher Howell. But I haven’t space, here, to say more.

What does all this have to do with the folklore profession in 2006? Plenty. Although the MFA is considered a terminal degree, many MFA students these days enter PhD programs. One of my MFA colleagues told me that he’d love to see his students enter a PhD folklore program or take several folklore courses while pursuing an American Studies or English PhD. As folklorists, we have great opportunities in these places where folklore and creative writing encounter one another. Recognizing our natural affinity with creative writers and strengthening the ties between us in universities, arts councils, and other agencies are certainly roads worth taking.

* * * * * *

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

____________________________________________

Works Cited

My thanks to all my students in English 591 “Living Words: Folklore and Creative Writing”: Mary Overton Beall, Sarah Colona, Sara Deacon, Shawn Flanagan, Dan Ford, Selena Grace, Jennifer Igoe, Jacquelyn Leggett, Jacob Lethbridge, Rachael Lipsetts, J. Michael Martinez, Katie Morris, Alexander Purugganan, Kristen Silver, Maggie Whittier, and Erica Wilmore. Thanks, especially, to those who generously permitted me to quote from our conversations, e-mails, and course work.

Beach-Quick, Dan. 2006. The Speaking Ear: Radi Os by Ronald Johnson. The Boston Review.March/April. 4 June 2006
Constantine, Mary Ann and Gerald Porter. 2003. Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song: From the Baltic to the Blues. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dodge, Jim. 2002. Rain on the River: New and Selected Poems and Short Prose. Grove Press.
Goldstein, Kenneth S. 1963. Riddling Traditions in Northeastern Scotland. Journal of American Folklore 76 (302): 330-336.
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. 2002. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, All-New Third Edition. Translated by Jack Zipes. New York: Bantam.
Howell, Christopher, 2004. Light’s Ladder. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
________________, 1996. Memory and Heaven. Cheney: Eastern Washington University Press.
Neal, David and Michael Robidoux. 1995. Folklore: “Phenomenologically” Speaking: Filling in the Gaps. Southern Folklore 52:2 211-229.
Ríos, Alberto. 2006. The Theater of the Night. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press.
Stafford, William. 1998. Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer’s Vocation, ed. Paul Merchant and Vincent Wixon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Tangherlini, Timothy R. 1998. Talking Trauma: Paramedics and Their Stories. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
Tichy, Susan. Courses: Fall 2006: English 497:002 Special Topics in Writing: Collage, Collaboration, & Bookish Beasts; and Spring 2006: English 619:002: Special Topics in Writing: Sequence & Collage. 4 June 2006. site
Waldrop, Rosemarie. 2002. Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Welty, Eudora. 1984. One Writer’s Beginnings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Yocom, Margaret R. 2006. “We’ll Take Care of Liza and the Kids”: Spontaneous Memorials and Personal Response at the Pentagon, 2001. Spontaneous Shrines and Other Public Memorializations of Death, edited by Jack Santino, 57-97. New York: PalgraveMacmillan.

*

Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Yocom, Folklorist
Associate Professor of English
Co-director of Folklore Concentration, Folklore Minor, MAIS in Folklore
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

myocomATgmu.edu

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