By Edward Karshner
When someone asks me what I do, I fight the urge to say “cowboy.” I usually say, “I teach.” I never lead with “I’m a writer.” I never feel comfortable with that particular job. It’s my favorite. Not my favorite to talk about. Eventually, I confess, and the next question is, “what do you write?”
That is a good question that really gets to a deeper question.
We tend to be object centered. What is it? Where does it go (on the shelf)? Heidegger calls this a question of utility. We really don’t know what something is until we know what it does. I can’t conceptualize “what” I write until I take it through the process of how it came to do what it does.
Like most writers I know, I think about writing in terms of projects. A big mess of plans, desires, exalted joy, deep longing, utter disappointment. I like this metaphor, writing as projects, because it syncs with one of my favorite philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas, who writes that an authentic life is, itself, a series of projects. He proposed that we find our purpose when we are “present of the future,” move beyond all the shit we think we know or feel and begin to contribute to our own story in a meaningful way. Folklorist Jack Zipes calls this “piercing the spectacle,” those pedagogical moments in folk and fairy tales where we learn what it means to act authentically by finding our place in stories.
There’s a folktale from Berea College’s Special Collections and Archives’ Leonard Roberts Collection that nicely illustrates this idea. “Nine Cat Tails” is a story about a widow woman and her children who live in a valley that “always had the right rainfall and climate.” Suddenly, the weather turns and there is too much rain and all the crops drown and rot in the fields. The widow packs up her children heading deeper into the valley looking for a new home. However, the entire valley is a wasteland: the first place they stop is too dry. She journeys further discovering places too hot, too cold, too windy and one place this is simply described as “barren.” Finally, the widow and her children stop to rest in a place that can’t be characterized because it is “completely dark.” She lays there contemplating a dark so thick that “all she could see was the moon…She was thinking about what she had heard about the man who had to go to the moon for working on Sunday. She began to feel that the moon was the only friend she had left ‘cause it was giving her light out there in that vast darkness.”
I find that fascinating. The widow remembers a German folktale about a man sent to the moon for collecting sticks on Sunday. This folktale is based on an even older story from the Bible. Numbers 15: 32-36 tells the same story except the man is stoned outside the community rather than exiled.
Once the widow recalls the story, the moon comes to her and tells her about a witch that keeps this otherwise verdant valley “in the dark.” The story she remembers becomes a means for her to orient herself in the darkness of the unknown. And, just like that, the moon’s story is resignified as the widow’s story and she is able to bring light and life to the valley, for her family, through the re-weaving of stories.
So much of life is moving in and out of someone else’s story, making our own, that someone else will move through to make another. If you’ve read my columns, you know my nerd pleasure is pre-Christian Scandinavian metaphysics. In my last column, I wrote about how these people understood story as a world parallel to this one and we could access it by telling more stories. In fact, their communication model was based on a magical, three-part formula with the gielp (a story from the past), beot (a promise made in the present from the storied past) and thyrm (the “glory” that would open the portal to the hidden realm of Story.) Putting ourselves into the formula is where we find our project.
Writing, like life, is a movement of time. What, in old Norse, is called “fornhaldin skop norna,” the old held way of twisting time according to the natural course of things. Mark Fisher, in his essay “The Weird and the Eerie,” asks the question who or what is doing this twisting, this weaving of time and stories. The answer is, we are, whether we mean to or not. So, why not just embrace it? The starting point of any discussion of craft needs to be about having an openness to other stories. When we choose to become part of a story, we need to be loud (gielp), own it (beot) and take pride in what we’ve accomplished (thyrm) even when it falls short of our expectations.
Slowly, I’m coming to terms with the idea that I’m not exploring my dark valley with writing, I’m hiding in it. I’ve been using craft to read a map rather than to occupy a place. I write all kinds of things no one ever sees. I write about my fears. I write whole scenarios about what could happen, what isn’t likely to happen—I fill notebooks with stories I hope never come to pass. “Nine Cat Tails” tells me that illumination doesn’t come out of darkness or beat back darkness. We only truly see what’s in the darkness by contemplating the dark itself. That should be my project: to embrace the mapping of my own inner fearscape as an acknowledgment of those stories and stories about stories that will place me in that barren place where I can craft my thyrm, glory, make a proper uproar and, like the widow woman, live with those stories “ever after.”
Read more of Ed’s work here at Reckon.
Edward Karshner was born in Ross County, Ohio and grew up in the Salt Creek Valley of Southeast Appalachia Ohio which draws together Ross, Hocking, and Pickaway Counties. After earning a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Philosophy from Bowling Green State University, he began to explore cultural rhetoric as expressed in folklore. His primary interest was how landscape influences folk-ideologies. In the early part of his career, he travelled extensively in China, Slovakia, Austria, and the Czech Republic before spending over a decade working with the Dinè(Navajo). Now, as a Professor of English at Robert Morris University, he has returned to researching, teaching and writing about Appalachian folklore, magic, and mysticism. A 2022 Research Fellow in Folklore at Berea College’s Special Collections and Archives, Karshner is the author of “These Stories Sustain Me” in the collection Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Replies to Hillbilly Elegy. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and in Still: The Journal.