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From: Maia <maia>
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 23:51:54 -0400
I've been thinking a lot about Marion's question -- and haven't come up with any easy answers. One thought was that perhaps we have to choose which stories to tell, and when? And also to whom? I wouldn't give a book written from a racist point of view to a young kid -- for example, a story of a plantation owner who held people enslaved and who made no progress during the course of the story toward understanding the evil in his actions. I wouldn't give a story to a child whose narrator valorized or rationalized abusive actions or people.
The why of this has something to do with what I believe to be the magic of fiction. When we read a story, we become a part of the narrator, we see through that narrator's eyes. The skill (technical, lyrical) of the author determines the amount to which we are drawn in, in the context of our own abilities to absorb Story. Our personal skills at suspension of disbelief allow us to set aside our own worldviews and hold another's in our minds' eyes briefly. To me, at least, this signifies a "good reader", someone who is able to be transformed through Story. This reader, however, is at significant risk, because of the very sensitivity that allows them to become part of the Story.
Every reader must balance the positive and negative aspects of experiencing and integrating someone else's worldview. Sometimes that experience comes at both high cost and high reward, and a reader may make the choice that a painful cost is outweighed by the potential understanding. Other times, the reader must for his or her own health choose not to experience what would for them be a destructive worldview.
This balancing is something we learn with time. And as adults, we make choices and the media also makes many choices for us. But we are better equipped to moderate the input of Story into our worldview, and to select which other eyes we will see through.
Young children learn this moderation slowly, just as they learn slowly to separate mother from self, to develop selective barriers, and to modulate their empathic responses. A child who has not adequately developed psychological barriers, and the skill and ability to raise and lower them somewhat at will, is relatively defenseless against the power of Story and media. And as adults, though we have better defenses, none of us can experience Story unmarked.
Back to the plantation owner, then. I wouldn't write a Story for children that would draw them into racist ideologies or justifications. Yes, that plantation owner has a story. I still wouldn't tell it to kids. Until they have a better sense of self from other, and can articulate their own ideologies, then they are in some ways fragile. Ironically enough, an author who has great skill at writing is in the position to do the most damage, because that author can sneak beneath defenses that clumsier prose would alert.
I think that an author has to make sad choices sometimes, and hard choices constantly. How important is it for me to tell the Story this way? Where is this Story ready to be told, and how? To return to Joseph Bruchac for a moment, in
, he suggests some questions for storytellers that authors can use as well: "Is this a story my audience will understand? Is this the right story to tell now? Why is it the right story to tell? How do I hope my audience will respond to this story?"(pg 95)
We who write sometimes like to think of ourselves as living in a vacuum, or a private universe where only our self and the Story exists. And perhaps this is true, until words touch lip or page. And then, I think, we must ask ourselves some of those hard questions.
I wish I could answer Marion's questions with a set of straightforward guidelines. But I'm not sure that they exist in an articulable form; the question seems just too complex for that. And I think that the answer even changes, because what the audience is ready for now may not be what they are ready for tomorrow. I am pretty sure that there is nothing as simple as fixed rules of who may write what, when -but I am also sure that sometimes it is not the time for the Story we had thought to tell, in the way it first came to us.
I'm not you, Marion -- but I wouldn't write a story in which my characters acted in racist, genocidal ways, unless I was absolutely sure that I could pull redemption out of that Story, and that my characters' worldviews were precious enough and timely enough that they should be shared now. I wouldn't choose to write a story that didn't have more grains of healing than hearts wounded. Every author has to judge their Story, or I suppose, to ignore that the choice to do so exists. And every editor, publisher, bookseller, librarian, teacher and reader then must look at a Story and judge for themselves. That is, I think, why we are here this month. To learn something about one group of Stories, and to learn to make choices about through which eyes we see.
Maia
Received on Sat 30 Oct 1999 10:51:54 PM CDT
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 23:51:54 -0400
I've been thinking a lot about Marion's question -- and haven't come up with any easy answers. One thought was that perhaps we have to choose which stories to tell, and when? And also to whom? I wouldn't give a book written from a racist point of view to a young kid -- for example, a story of a plantation owner who held people enslaved and who made no progress during the course of the story toward understanding the evil in his actions. I wouldn't give a story to a child whose narrator valorized or rationalized abusive actions or people.
The why of this has something to do with what I believe to be the magic of fiction. When we read a story, we become a part of the narrator, we see through that narrator's eyes. The skill (technical, lyrical) of the author determines the amount to which we are drawn in, in the context of our own abilities to absorb Story. Our personal skills at suspension of disbelief allow us to set aside our own worldviews and hold another's in our minds' eyes briefly. To me, at least, this signifies a "good reader", someone who is able to be transformed through Story. This reader, however, is at significant risk, because of the very sensitivity that allows them to become part of the Story.
Every reader must balance the positive and negative aspects of experiencing and integrating someone else's worldview. Sometimes that experience comes at both high cost and high reward, and a reader may make the choice that a painful cost is outweighed by the potential understanding. Other times, the reader must for his or her own health choose not to experience what would for them be a destructive worldview.
This balancing is something we learn with time. And as adults, we make choices and the media also makes many choices for us. But we are better equipped to moderate the input of Story into our worldview, and to select which other eyes we will see through.
Young children learn this moderation slowly, just as they learn slowly to separate mother from self, to develop selective barriers, and to modulate their empathic responses. A child who has not adequately developed psychological barriers, and the skill and ability to raise and lower them somewhat at will, is relatively defenseless against the power of Story and media. And as adults, though we have better defenses, none of us can experience Story unmarked.
Back to the plantation owner, then. I wouldn't write a Story for children that would draw them into racist ideologies or justifications. Yes, that plantation owner has a story. I still wouldn't tell it to kids. Until they have a better sense of self from other, and can articulate their own ideologies, then they are in some ways fragile. Ironically enough, an author who has great skill at writing is in the position to do the most damage, because that author can sneak beneath defenses that clumsier prose would alert.
I think that an author has to make sad choices sometimes, and hard choices constantly. How important is it for me to tell the Story this way? Where is this Story ready to be told, and how? To return to Joseph Bruchac for a moment, in
, he suggests some questions for storytellers that authors can use as well: "Is this a story my audience will understand? Is this the right story to tell now? Why is it the right story to tell? How do I hope my audience will respond to this story?"(pg 95)
We who write sometimes like to think of ourselves as living in a vacuum, or a private universe where only our self and the Story exists. And perhaps this is true, until words touch lip or page. And then, I think, we must ask ourselves some of those hard questions.
I wish I could answer Marion's questions with a set of straightforward guidelines. But I'm not sure that they exist in an articulable form; the question seems just too complex for that. And I think that the answer even changes, because what the audience is ready for now may not be what they are ready for tomorrow. I am pretty sure that there is nothing as simple as fixed rules of who may write what, when -but I am also sure that sometimes it is not the time for the Story we had thought to tell, in the way it first came to us.
I'm not you, Marion -- but I wouldn't write a story in which my characters acted in racist, genocidal ways, unless I was absolutely sure that I could pull redemption out of that Story, and that my characters' worldviews were precious enough and timely enough that they should be shared now. I wouldn't choose to write a story that didn't have more grains of healing than hearts wounded. Every author has to judge their Story, or I suppose, to ignore that the choice to do so exists. And every editor, publisher, bookseller, librarian, teacher and reader then must look at a Story and judge for themselves. That is, I think, why we are here this month. To learn something about one group of Stories, and to learn to make choices about through which eyes we see.
Maia
Received on Sat 30 Oct 1999 10:51:54 PM CDT
