Obsolescence

In Beyond the Writer's Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction Carol Bly presents a challenging project: 100 stories.

She suggests we ask children to endeavor to learn, verbatim, 100 stories by the age of 18. She does not, as emphatically or clearly, state that this attempt, this devotion, requires they have access to 100 stories, and a person to listen to their recitations. I ask that you keep this in mind as you read along and determine how this project can work for you (regardless of your age).

Bly argues for the merits of this project, offering the following observations:
1. Storytellers use Language.
2. If children are asked to memorize great stories—they will use classic language.
3. They will hear themselves speaking great words.
4. They will hear themselves narrating the lives of creatures very unlike themselves.
5. They will directly experience something other.

This lays the groundwork for many things.

I ask you to add to the notion of classic languages, the project of learning and using ancestral languages (often considered endangered, impracticable, extinct, or obsolete) for your own 100 Stories project.

Bly further argues that memorizing and telling 100 stories (to listeners) lays the foundation for empathy. Children will fill their mind with classical feelings and humor. She also writes, for the purpose of this project, "do not translate the language of each story into something familiar, current or provincial." She says you will lose the wonder and the tone—I agree and add you will lose much more.

Bly writes: "Children love strangeness if they're not afraid of it, and they are not afraid of it when they get to say the strange words in their own voice. When they tell stories of unlike creatures and unlike places they free-heartedly exercise curiosity about otherness—about things that will never be like what they know."

Further details about the project, as defined by Bly are on pages 163-170.

Some insights I had while reading Bly's project and her understanding of story. Her 100 stories project provides a concrete way (for people who do know how) to relate to the unknown, without killing it. She asks the young storyteller, and the related listener, to allow the mystery of the unknown and to memorize its language. She asks them (us) to relate to others without changing them, or reducing them to the known, the understandable or the same. She asks the young storyteller not to kill others, but to take the details of them into our mind and memorize them. Perhaps so we can recognize them when we encounter them? Perhaps to know they exist, even if we never have the honor of meeting them.

Many might ask who does this?

I do.
We do.
The Urban Nizhóní do.

Many ask who has the time to do this? (Meaning memorizing stories is impossible, or not worthwhile.)

I've heard and been persecuted by the notion that the oral tradition is always one generation from extinction. Stories need someone to tell them. They need someone to listen to them. Given the state of books and libraries I have an easier time now when I make my argument that books and archives are equally vulnerable to loss (by decidedly different means and methods). They need someone to care for them and read them too.

Devoting our lives to the stories that walk among us is more then a contemporary possibility, or a creative nonfiction workshop idea, it is an essential part of the project of life.

This project has merit, especially when you make a devotion to the stories themselves and the ethics of storytelling. Please remember, this project is not founded on theft. Do not go stealing stories. Make an honest and true devotion to story and start there. Start with your own stories, respect them. If you do not have access to them, start asking around, start reading.