Once Upon a Time...

Some thoughts on The Pedagogy of the Short Short Tale

Fox and the Grapes by Charles Robinson

I tell a lot of short, short tales. I love a lot of different kinds of stories and tell a few very long tales. But "short," I mean between two and seven or ten minutes. "Long" starts around ten minutes and can be as long as 45 to 90 minutes (occasionally longer still). The short tale is a feature of every culture I have had a chance to look into. Whether fable or parable, these stories rely on a simple structure of conflict and resolution. The 'setup and punchline' of most jokes is perhaps the most stripped-down expression of this structure. And it is a structure that virtually every culture has learned is excellent for encoding and communicating wisdom across generations, if not millennia. It is this wisdom - often poignant, frequently funny, sometimes seemingly contradictory or tricky - that I've valued as long as i've learned these tales. Thus i tend to refer to the whole of these as Wisdom Tales. Mind you, all tales contain wisdom, so it's really just a convention I apply for the sake of my own memory, i suppose. My mind is something of a memory palace for stories and I have a special architecture devoted to wisdom tales while other types of stories get their own rooms and edifices. (Incidentally, there's an origin story about memory palaces I'll share in a future post.)

Wisdom stories, both secular and religious, from the fables of the 2,200 year-old (likely older still) Panchatantra, to those of Aesop (likely influenced by the Panchatantra), to Buddhist Jataka Tales, to Sufi teaching stories, Jewish and Christian parables and tales, Zen koans, and more, have been swapped back and forth amongst earth's peoples for millennia. As long as I've been researching stories I've been delighted by coming across similar (occasionally virtually the same) story separated by centuries and vast distance. Stories have old and restless legs and love nothing more than to travel. So does that make them all common property? In a sense, yes. Apart from copyright (which legally protects the specific property of a creator - in this case a particular text and/or unique spin on an otherwise traditional story), there's no storytelling regulatory authority that can either assign permission to tell something or hold to account someone who is deemed inappropriate. We are left with the messy world of politics, culture and the very, very complicated relations of inequality, oppression, struggle and so on.

What is most true to me about telling stories is that there is always a context from which the stories came, in which they were learned and in which they are being told. And it's really that context that concerns me most. Thus, an important part of telling a story is acknowledging that context as much as possible. Which means learning something about the origins of the story or simply remembering from whom you learned it. And, where possible and appropriate, sharing something of what you know. This can be a mere nod to the culture of origin, mentioning the name of the person from whom you first heard it, or sharing the literary source (if not the citation). In these wisdom stories is condensed incredible lessons learned over the ages. And the story is a storage device, a medium to preserve and transport that learning across time, space and culture.

My advice for people who ask me about the sources of the short stories I tell is two-fold. First, from Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano i learned something i have not forgotten since he told it to me almost 25 years ago. My friends Clara and Ruby and i were having drinks with Galeano after a reading he'd done at Harbourfront in Toronto. Between his roguish flirting with my friends i trotted out the most prosaic of questions authors get asked: "How is that you find such magical things to write about?" Galeano looked me straight in the eye and with a well-practiced grin said, "You don't understand. You see, two or three magical things happen to me every day." And i knew immediately the truth he was sharing. It was a moment of startling clarity and i knew all i had to do from then on was to keep my eyes open. Galeano's simple response is one of the great gifts in my life.

My second piece of advice regarding wisdom stories is this: once you've found a story that strikes you (whether with pleasure or with pain or, more likely, something between) sit with it, reflect on it, repeat it to yourself many times, meditate. Wisdom stories are like songs without apparent music. And as you come to know the story and some of its onion layers of meanings, you may begin to hear the secret music of that story. I have told some stories dozens if not hundreds of times and every now and again i worry that the story will get stale if i carry on 'repeating' it. But if repeating is what i was doing then it probably would get stale. But this has never happened to me. Nor have I ever had to think consciously how to make the story new or fresh. My theory of this is that as long as I still have something to learn from the story it will remain fresh. I have noticed with some stories that their import for me has shifted slightly since first learning it. Perhaps this is evidence of the nature of incremental learning and growth. Then there is the nature of context which is also something that is constantly changing - each context casting the story in a different light, creating unique emphases, evoking different meanings. Last week I bumped into a friend on Bloor St. who was waiting for a food order with his daughters who were bundled in the carriage of their cargo bike. It was a noisy and warm winter evening and, while we chatted, i noticed the girls getting on each others' nerves and expected the usual escalation of such things. I asked if they would like to hear a story which seemed to catch their attention. And i told them the following tale:

There once lived a farmer who worked hard to till his land and feed his three children. His wife had died some years before and he realized that he was getting on in years and should think about how he would one day pass on the land to his children. Should he die suddenly he didn’t want there to be any fighting over who would get what. So he called his two sons and his daughter together and told them that he had designed a contest. Each would have a turn at filling the shed beside the barn as full as it could be. The one to fill it the most would be the winner and would get to have the first choice of land to inherit. The children agreed and the father turned to his oldest child – his son – and nodded.
The boy went all over the land and gathered every stone and boulder and pebble and brought them back to the shed where he piled them all in. He pushed and shoved and carried until he closed the shed door with difficulty. The shed’s walls and door bulged with the weight of the stones inside. The boy, knees and elbows scraped and bloodied, turned to his father.
The father nodded and smiled and said, “That is a very good effort. I am most impressed.” Then he bent down and picked up a handful of dirt which he threw into the shed through a small window. The sand disappeared inside and the son breathed a sigh of disappointment. For he had failed to fill the shed completely. But his father kindly said, “A very good effort. Well done! Now let us see how your brother can do.”
The shed was cleaned out and the second child, taking a wheelbarrow, gathered as much sand and dirt as he could from all over the farm. Load after load, he piled the sand and dirt into the shed. He pushed it in and stamped it down and packed it tight. With the door shut and bulging he still pushed sand and dirt in under the crack. He packed it into the window. Again the walls of the shed bulged from the weight of the sand inside. The boy turned to his father.
“Very impressive. A mighty feat. I congratulate you.” Then the father went over to a bucket of water and dipped a ladle in. He brought this back to the shed and poured the water in through a crack in the roof. The water disappeared inside. The boy looked crestfallen. But the father said, “A good and noble effort, my son. Now let us see what your sister can do."
Once they had emptied the shed for the next attempt the young girl had disappeared. They called out, they went around the house. They heard the back door of the house open and close and, by the time they had returned to the yard, the young girl, holding something in her hands, was entering the shed. She came out of the shed almost immediately, having left there what she had been carrying. When her father and her brothers looked into the shed they knew immediately that she had won the context. For she had placed down a candle. And the light from that candle filled that shed to its furthest corner. The girl turned and faced her father and brothers and they smiled at her.

This tale makes for an easy riddle by letting listeners guess what it was the daughter placed in the shed. The noise of traffic, pedestrians, and weather, ad the plastic covering of the cargo bike basket, made it a challenging exchange and I think they enjoyed the story. At least they were quiet while they listened. I have found that this story is as delightful to children as to adults. And, as with many tales, it exists in several versions. And, as i mentioned, it is still a story that has something in it that I am still learning.

As I mentioned in last week's musings, I like to begin classes, workshops, and meetings with a story while sometimes daring to end such events with a poem. There's a curious difference between the kind of response that a story invites compared to a poem. I realize, even as I write it, that I choose to describe this as "curious" because I'm still figuring it out (and expect to continue this figuring for some time to come). When I tell a story in this context, I will often say a little bit about where I learned it, what culture or cultures if hales from, perhaps the specific oral or literary source. But then, the story having been told, I move on immediately with the substance of the class or workshop. I do not say anything about what I think the story means. And, with all due respect to Aesop, I never end a story with anything even remotely akin to "the moral of the story is..." At some point in the process I will often share a brief account about why i do not interpret stories, citing both Sufi practice and Indigenous storytelling, both of which I have witnessed, as two examples of traditions that eschew interpretation. If time permits I will share this very brief Sufi story: A disciple of the Sufi master Bauhaudin Naqshband once asked him why he never interpreted the stories he told. Naqshband responded, “How would you like it if the fruit vendor from whom you bought fruit ate the fruit and left you only the skin?” And, as far as the particular story I've told (including this Naqshbandi anecdote, I leave it at that. I'll happily discuss the nature of storytelling, stories, short, short stories and so on. But I consider the refusal to interpret these stories a radical pedagogy from which I am still learning.

As for how poems work in these contexts, last week I shared Muriel Rukeyser's intriguing point that "a poem invites a total response." I think that "total response" is a good name for what I have often observed. While it's easy to move on smoothly with a class after telling a story, trying to do so after reciting a poem feels awkward at best and jarring at worst. I wonder if that "total response" isn't invited (or, perhaps, provoked is more accurate) in part by the nature of a poem being a specific arrangement of words and phrases and rhythm, meter, cadence and so on. A story, by contrast, is composed of dynamically shifting language (from telling to telling), subtle shifts in emphasis, changing word choice, spontaneous repetitions, inserted asides and parentheticals (that are usually responsive to the moment) and even meta-comments that playfully break the "fourth" wall of the telling. Wisdom tales told in this way are relatively easier to remember than the specific lines of a poem. I think this explains a bit why it is we feel urged to stay with the poem for a moment but are content to let the story rattle into our minds and bounce around there for a time. That "total response" that Rukeyser posits makes it difficult for listeners to shift their focus quickly from recitation to a new subject. Simply to move on means disrupting that "total response." Thus the jarring feeling I often feel is evoked. However, poems are a terrific way to end a meeting. People are free at that point to engage that moment of "total response" as they wish. They can take it with them and ponder it privately or discuss it with a fellow participant as they wish.

I like to think of both poems and stories as riddles regardless of whether this is apparent in the presentation. Sometimes the answers to these riddles are obvious, sometimes only apparently so. They are contributions to a dialogue that we join for a moment but which precede our participation and carry on long after we have moved along. They are the voices of the past and of the artists of our present. And any of us can play our part in breathing life into these tales (and poems). While i think it worthwhile to memorize poems and wish that it was still something commonly learned in primary school (cause those poems are remembered for a lifetime) stories are not learned by memorization. We remember them the way we remember our experience. And need only make the story part of our experience. I encourage everyone, young and old, to learn a few stories. The short ones are hardly more challenging to learn than a good joke and require little to no technique. The longer ones require more work and there are some good techniques for this - though the principle one is to tell it many times - even if only to oneself in the privacy of your home (maybe while looking at yourself in a mirror).

Here are a few recommendations of books that are filled with tales good for telling, some from traditional sources, and some from contemporary writers.

Traditional Tales:

• De Mello, Anthony. Taking Flight: A Book of Story Meditations. 1988. NY: Image Books-Doubleday. And The Heart of the Enlightened: A Book of Story Meditations. 1989. NY: Image Books-Doubleday.

• Feldman, Christina & Jack Kornfield (eds.). Soul Food: Stories to Nourish the Spirit and the Heart. 1996. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Modern Tales:

• Fumoleau, René. Here I Sit. 2004. Ottawa: Novalis. René was a friend I met through the storytelling community. An Oblate priest he came from France to Denedeh where he devoted his life to supporting the indigenous people of that land. He took thousands of photos - which are archived at a university. And he wrote delightful stories of his experiences and about the stories he learned from the Dene.

• Galeano, Eduardo. The Book of Embraces. 1991. NY: W.W.Norton & Co. And Walking Words. 1993. NY: W.W.Norton & Co. And Memories of Fire (3 volumes). 2010. NY: Nation Books. Galeano was Uruguayan journalist who, like many in Latin America, chose exile to avoid the repression of the police states that dominated that part of the world in the 50s, 60, and 70s. He turned his journalistic hand and research skills to crafting short short stories of suffering, resistance, love, humour, and so much more. His skill in creating short tales so impressed me that i use his name to refer to a particular kind of modern anecdote that conveys a poignant truth about our world. I call them galeanos.

• Namjoshi, Suniti. The Blue Donkey Fables. 1988. London: Women's Press. A wonderful writer who uses the fable form to tell powerful stories of feminist resistance, and of defiance to oppressive power of many kinds.

• Cage, John. Silence. 1961. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. And A Year from Monday. 1969. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. John Cage, famous for his musical composition, also loved the short short story form. His stories tend to the mischievous.

• Wiseman, Bob. Music Lessons. 2020. Toronto: ECW Press. Bob is a friend and colleague and a musician of rare talent - i compare his approach - his genius - to that of Cage and others of their ilk. Some years ago Bob started writing short anecdotes of his experience in the world of music and of teaching music. His style is kind of a cross between Cage's whimsy and Galeano's poignance.