Good Writing is Never Done in Isolation

Chapter One

Stalking with Stories: An ancient Native American story shows the acquisition and assimilation of narratives is a natural step in the universal process of literate behavior.

Perhaps a real and ultimately useful definition of literacy and literate behavior is an ancient Apache tale called “Stalking with Stories.”

This is what we know about our stories. They go to work on your mind and make you think about your life. Maybe you’ve not been acting right. Maybe you’ve been stingy. Maybe you’ve been chasing after women. Maybe you’ve been trying to act like a White-man. People don’t like it! So someone goes hunting for you – maybe your grandmother, maybe your grandfather, your uncle. It doesn’t matter. Anyone can do it.

So someone stalks you and tells a story about what happened long ago. It doesn’t matter if other people are around – you’re going to know he’s aiming that story at you. All of a sudden it hits you! It’s like an arrow, they say. Sometimes it just bounces off – it’s too soft and you don’t think about anything. But when it’s strong it goes in deep and starts working on your mind right away. No one says anything to you, only that story is all, but now you know that people have been watching you and talking about you. They don’t like how you’ve been acting. So you have to think about your life.

Then you feel weak, real weak, like you are sick. You don’t want to eat or talk to anyone. That story is working on you now. You keep thinking about it. That story is changing you now, making you want to live right. That story is making you want to replace yourself. You think only of what you did wrong and you don’t like it. So you want to live better. After awhile, you don’t like to think of what you did wrong. So you try to forget that story. You try to pull that arrow out. You think it won’t hurt anymore because now you want to live right.

It’s hard to keep on living right. Many things jump up at you and block your way. But you won’t forget that story. You’re going to see the place where it happened, maybe everyday if it’s nearby and close to Cubicle. If you don’t see it, you’re going to hear its name and see it in your mind. It doesn’t matter if you get old – that place will keep on stalking you like the one that shot you with the story. Maybe that person will die. Even so, that place will keep on stalking you. It’s like that person is still alive.

Even if we go far away form here to some big city, places around here keep stalking us. If you live wrong, you will hear the names and see the places in your mind. They keep on stalking you, even if you go across oceans. The names of all these places are good. They make you remember how to live right, so you want to replace yourself again.

Nick Thmpson

Chief Apache Nation

1980

“This is what we know about our stories. They go to work on your mind and make you think about your life,” A simple, statement articulates profound, universal needs for and natural process of literate behavior. Working in the background are inherent problems and dangers of living a literate life, or not living one. Unraveling its all-encompassing relevance is more understandable from Carl Jung and the notion of fundamental archetypes. Disregard historical and cultural smoke screens, filters, altered states of consciousness and other seeming anomalies and think “this is what we know about our stories. They go to work on your mind and make you think about your life –“ is this an undeniable truth speaking to us on several different levels? Yes!

How else do we learn what we really learn? In other words, how do we learn how to learn? And more importantly, how do we pass on the knowledge and wisdom of our experience, our ancestors’, our culture? Our stories may not always get us corrected, perhaps the arrow is too weak and bounces off, but even that arrow has a sonar effect. It bounces off our consciousness or our sub-conscious and makes us aware, at some depth, of what we are doing and its general acceptability or importance, or risk.

Stalking With Stories came to light by accident (if there is such a thing as accident) as part of an intricate legal statement prepared by Keith Basso, an attorney for the Arizona Apaches, representing them in a civil action against the BLM and state of Arizona concerning water rights on the reservation and infringement of those rights by the state of Arizona. The federal court assigned to the case demanded written briefs of evidence, or testimony explaining each side’s positions before hearing the case. Federal treaties and subsequent state regulations had no clear, specific language on water rights. Although, the earliest treaties stated that all land, animals, forests and plants, indigenous to the acreage deemed to be the Indian Reservation shall be the property of the Apache tribe and legal residents on the reservation. The logical conclusion is that included water rights too. Because it didn’t say so in specific, legal, or even casual language, the non-reservation landowners of Arizona, finding a growing need for water, see a source for getting it and a method to go after it. This is part of the continuing crime of altering and violating treaty rights signed with Native American Nations. Thus the need for legal action since blatantly and vigorously killing Indians to get out of treaties cannot be accomplished in modern times the way it was a hundred and fifty years ago. Of course currently that’s not true of other indigenous people’s in other parts of the world and the issue is not water but nevertheless a fluid.

In explaining, the rules of evidence for the trial, the judge demanded written documentation showing and establishing the Apache mind set giving them the expectation of such a thing as water rights. But written documents are not, nor never have been, the Apache way. Their culture is one of an oral tradition and for what has proven historically true for them, they do not trust the written word. Nevertheless legally acceptable material had to be gathered, formed, and presented following the “rules of evidence” for the litigation to continue.

Because the Apache language is a spoken language with little if any written forms the only testimony relevant to the case would be the Apache stories of their land and the relationship of all things to the psychology, iconology, spiritual, economic, historic, and lifestyle traditions for the people living on this land. This lawyer, Keith Basso, made extensive and grueling trips into the rugged back -country of the Four Corners reservation to tape record the stories of the chiefs, medicine men, and elders of the tribe. To then be transcribed into legal briefs for presentation of evidence at the hearing.

It was a ‘gutsy’, precedent setting move by the lawyer to gather this testimony, and then enter it as evidence in the motion before the court. Because in the legal world narrative tends to have the same poor standing as anecdote does in the education world. You can’t prove anything with a narrative just like you can’t prove anything with an anecdote – only DNA, fingerprints, a double blind study, and a standardized test gives valid data! In this case there was a white Judge interested in interpreting and enforcing the law justly. The material read into the record had a positive effect (for the Apache) on the outcome.

When I write and talk about literacy and literate behavior I often make a mistake. I tend to talk about language - exclusively written language in the hands of competent, effective users in the forms they use it, comfortably, naturally. I‘m retraining myself to include effective, productive language in all forms used by those not always accepted as the competent and skillful (such as, perhaps, native Americans, or Rappers). Stalking with Stories is simple yet as profound I can imagine getting, and it speaks to all the social and cultural issues every person meets everyday, in every part of the world. It accommodates adapting to the normally occurring movement and restructuring of social and cultural needs. Notice that the story stalker is a grandmother, grandfather, or uncle. Not a parent. As is true in every poor culture, impoverished community, and mistreated group of people - one of the earliest and most common breakdowns of primary social structures are the parents. On the reservation, in the ghetto, in concentration camps, in the migratory workers camps a partnered, stable functioning mother and father are rare (which is often done intentionally), as it is more and more in mainstream American life. And the job of raising children falls to the older, wiser grandparents, or benevolent aunt or uncle who struggle to keep the family together.

What’s compelling and potent is seeing long before the White-man plundered and stole the Indian land and heritage, the insightful Apache already, recognized and fulfilled the need for teaching its people in a gentle, natural, humane process, a literate process. The notion literate behavior is only a written language process starts to come apart here. They (Apache) understood survival meant learning the process was the best and likely only way to fit into a family, community, tribe and nation, and to endure. Gentle, humane learning through narrative is a silent stabilizing process compiling itself through eons of history and every civilization since the beginning of time. It is often dismissed as too primitive to be viable, especially in a “high tech” world. “Stalking with Stories” belies that interpretation.

Stalking with stories communicates and includes on all levels and in every form. When a story stalker aims a story at someone, that’s the natural (literate) way of counseling someone. When anyone reads a writer’s work or hears their story, especially in progress, perhaps the strongest, most satisfying reaction the writer/storyteller gets is to hear another person’s words articulating the same thought, the same idea, the same truth the writer is seeking to express – one story echoing another story – the effect is compelling, bonding and unending. In therapy counseling, its that moment when the client hears the therapist stating in different words but with identical meaning, the client realizes their minds, emotions, fears, and insights have lined up and are matching up in a genuine therapeutic understanding and acceptance. The effect is like a stalking story; no one has to say anything to you, (directly) yet you understand. It is the deepest bonding and most profound learning anyone ever has. A genuine truth telling is going on.

Trust and respect are fundamental molecules of learning and “Stalking with Stories “ shows how they are embedded like DNA in the universal learning process. I know of no other way for one person to help another person to learn but through trust and respect.

For anyone who says it takes discipline (force) to ensure learning; I would argue - what’s being learned is not what’s being taught. A non-literacy approach to learning is never aware of its true effect or process. That misperception always shows up explosively later on. For example every public school in America “teaches” grammar but eighty percent of our students don’t learn it. Why? I argue its because its taught in a non-literate non-functional, non-contextual method. This incompatibility should be a major issue of public debate! But instead it is a big stick used to beat up dessenting opinion on how grammar is learned.

Isn’t it more correct to say, when someone tells the truth, and that truth exposes a mistake or transgression as well as a useful fact, that truth goes into your brain and heart and sticks there permanently? It alters your sense of values all the way down to that molecular level. When it’s an embarrassing or hurtful truth, we often try to deny it. But at some point we can’t. We can run away, drink away, drug away the truth but we can’t destroy the truth and make it go away. “Even if we go far away from here, to some big city, places around here keep stalking us.” Ken Macrorie (Writing to be Read) says…”good writing is dangerous…when writing is convincing and compelling we usually conclude it’s telling the truth.” We live in a culture (world) that does not practice truth telling. By logical extension that culture does not tolerate telling the truth.

True stories are true arrows; they hit their mark and stick solidly. Fiction can be the truth just as surly as the most honest, factual nonfiction. William Shakespeare is the world’s foremost literary force for the last 500 years because he wrote plays and poetry that reached deeper into parts of the human condition than anyone ever did before and pulled out large sections of the truth that no one understood before. We are still puzzling that out. And everything Shakespeare wrote is a story.

A troubling point is how profound, revealing, inclusive, understanding of learning psychology that emerges from primitive narrative, is not widely embraced. In this case coming primarily from a source that is almost exclusively of the oral tradition it is not fundamentally different from more formal, methodized traditions. Yet the ways Stalking with Stories uses narratives, shows how they work on our character, consciousness and souls and that is sacred, infinite wisdom. What more is wanted or needed from learning? It transcends geography, culture and time. It is a wisdom that all too often gets buried under the debris of evolving modern society and could be lost without a revival or rediscovery. Stories are raw, basic, material for creating culture. Stories are what happen after the potentially lethal challenge to physically survive is successful. Even when we fail, stories record out success.

Everything we know about cultures existing now or ever existed on earth, sooner or later is discovered or confirmed by the stories of that culture. Sometimes we piece together those stories from broken pottery, or faded painting (cave painting to wall frescos), from dance and theater, music, architecture, and of course literature. From the most primitive to the most advanced cultures, stories always contain the genesis for religion, sports, government, economy, medicine, science, astronomy, defense, and arts. Depending on geographic location and natural resources, arts – dance, music, drawing/painting, theater, and literature –one becomes the seminal form of the culture generator-recorder, which quickly stimulates all the other forms. To do this shows the undeniable imperative of archetypes embedded so deeply and richly in human action and interaction. Those archetypes are not the result of the human condition; they are a structural component of the condition. That’s why stories resonate with us, it’s like the wind and trees – only in the ultra extreme are they not compatible. And even that is natural.

A comparative study of mandatory social institutions is possible and useful by studying the narratives of cultures. Joseph Campbell became the foremost authority on the “storyation” of cultures by comparative analysis of worldwide mythologies. Even a casual reading of those myths today will posit compelling questions against our ideas of religion, sport, art, love, honor, family, nationalism. And more often than not, in pure ways, or corrupt ways, we turn to stalking-type stories to inform us, guide us, correct us, motivate us, and answer those questions. Chief Thompson’s tale reminds us where the seeds of our cultural imperatives are planted and how they grow the need to discover identity so that one does not destroy his identity before he has a chance to harvest it.

So someone stalks you and tells a story about something that happened a long time ago. When I was a small child (between two and three) my parents discovered I was blind; the unfortunate consequence of too much pure oxygen in an incubator at birth. I could see light and dark and movement with my right eye but not much else. My left eye was destroyed completely. Fortunately, this condition improved partially over time. Never to the point of normal vision but I was able to read, go to public school and to college.

My mother and grandmother never treated me like I was blind. I am so grateful for their natural wisdom. We had, and I remember in great detail, long nightly sessions of lap reading. The majority of the time these readings came from a book collection called “My Book House” I still have one of those books; the rest of the series was lost in a fire in my father’s house when I was in college. The book series contained eclectic groups of stories, poems, nursery rhymes, plays, myths, legends, essays, and illustrations. I know this because I can see them now but I’m sure I didn’t know that at the time. Today I also realize some parts of the series are sadly racist; I can remember most of the lines and have a vivid mental picture of “Little Black Sambo” and “Aunt Jemima”.

It’s not the lack of political correctness I want to recall but the literate behavior practiced by my mother and grandmother. Besides lap-time reading, we had a beautiful old wooden Philco console radio and I was a devout fan of such shows as “The Romance of Helen Trent”, “The Guiding Light”, Our Miss Brooks”, “The Shadow”, “Lucky Strike Hit Parade” “Arthur Godfrey Show”, and many more. I knew all the words to “The Tennessee Waltz”.

Between the davenport (there was no such thing as a couch in those days) and the wall, in a small space, my mother helped me build a collection of scraps of paper, pencils, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, records (the old vinyl 78’s) and note books – usually hand made and stapled together. I had my own little record player. It was plastic and shaped like a figure 8. One loop of the 8 was the turntable and the other held the tone arm and needle. My favorite record was a Hopalong Cassidy album; the kind with a follow-along-picture-book showing the story playing on the record. Topper, Hopalong’s horse, whinnied each time I needed to turn the page. I played and replayed that record so many times I wore it out; one day the needle broke through the vinyl. I also remember how important it was for me to turn the page when Topper whinnied. I think that’s where I learned voluntary compliance to rules, a behavior absolutely necessary to live in and keep a free society. I would like to know the Apache story that teaches voluntary compliance.

My mom called this little space my den. When mom and grandma sat on the davenport listening to soap operas or “Mercury Mystery Theater”, I sat in the den and wrote or drew pictures. Of course the writing was emergent writing (Britton, Language and Learning) and the pictures were vague scribbles at best. But my mother and grandmother treated me like a real writer and reader, I read my stories to them and they read them to me. I didn’t know I was blind.

All the rest of my life, wherever I live, I always have a den. The space is always cramped even if there is more room available. The den fills up quickly with den equipment. There is an over-abundance of pens and pencils, journals, note pads, post’ems, rulers, markers, scissors and reading lamps. There is always more than one writing surface – a table, a desk, a drafting table, a piece of plywood on top of stacks of books or bricks, a rocking chair with a writing board (like Robert Frost’s before I knew he used one) – and the den is always cluttered, messy; the more cramped, cluttered and messy the more comfortable and useful the den. Anyyone who looks at the den thinks, " how can he find anything". To me everything has a place and everything is in its place. I’m convinced that’s true because of learning what a den was and how to use it when I was blind.

My current den contains everything every other den ever had plus some pieces of new technology. I have two video-magnification reading machines, a lap top computer and the biggest flat screen monitor I can buy. Today, without the reading machines or big magnification, reading is impossible for me. I’ve been asked many times about audio books but for me that’s not reading but entertainment. It’s passive listening; reading and writing are pro-active processes. I think Donald Murray got it right when he wrote, “Writing is thinking, not thinking written down.” Thankfully, the adaptability of computers makes writing much less arduous along the eyesight plane. (I think of blind John Milton dictating “Paradise Lost” to his daughters. Besides genius, that is almost physically inconceivable). In the legal sense it is true today, but living day-to-day, I still don’t know I’m blind.

Another reason “stalking with stories” works is because stories awaken all your senses. It was summer and I was 4 maybe 5 by now. On a piece of paper I drew a map of our backyard and the backyard of the next-door neighbor. My vision had improved and the map probably had some verisimilitude. I went outside to play, which, in this case, meant taking the map.

What I remember most, with reassuring affection, is the sound of taking out the map unfolding it, “reading” it and folding it up again. To me, the sound of my map (writing) being folded and unfolded was as real and connected to the actual world as anything that ever happened to me up till then. Remembering that still makes my mouth water. Somehow that sound made me feel so good I have never forgotten it. I often wonder why that memory is so striking and enduring; I now think it has to do with the power of “stalking with stories”, it was an opportunity for getting in touch with fundamental, archetypal awareness. It was a story arrow showing me my literate behavior was important and meaningful. It told me I could make contact and sense of the world in other ways than seeing it.

I suspect artists, musicians, dancers, actors, and writers have a different version of the same story to tell. The point is it’s not the skill that’s important; it’s the behavior!! Skill and competence will come with time but a person can never learn that without possessing and using the behavior.

“Maybe you’ve not been acting right. Maybe you’ve been stingy. Maybe you’ve been chasing after women, maybe you’ve been acting like a White-man. People don’t like it! So someone goes hunting for you.” It is the narratives of our lives, connecting to the narratives of ancient ancestors, which guide us through a world that those ancient ancestors could never imagine but make manageable for us to live today. That is wisdom we cannot afford to lose!

The remainder of this book will be a series of narratives about learning. I often refer to it as my “teacher book” but I need to be truer to my theme; this is my “learning book” that comes out of 28years of being a teacher and 67 years of being a blind person. These are the stories that helped me “replace myself” as a teacher and as a person.

AUTHOR Don Hudson Page 1 DATE 12/31/11