Talk Story

“In the Islands, when I was very young, the main entertainment for everyone in the community was visiting. And the main component of visiting was conversation. This was never called conversation, or chatting or a having a talk. It was called, in the insular, intercultural vernacular of the time, “talk story.”

“Talk story” is a pidgin phrase that, to me, is many layered and highly evocative. This is exactly what people did — they both talked out their stories and talked a story into being — they shared anecdotes, events, tales, adventures, daily activities, and sometimes recounted older, grander, traditional stories with each other — some told the iconic stories of the tribe, and others told the stories of cultures from which they came — and those stories, woven together, became the backdrop of my later experience.

The uncles who married my aunties brought tales from backgrounds in Scotland, Italy, Spain and the American Heartland. The aunties who married my uncles brought traditions from Japan, Portugal, China, Scandinavia and from their own multicultural families of origin in the Islands. A mini United Nations, they would talk for hours, taking great pleasure in the repetition of oft-told tales.

They didn’t analyse these stories; they didn’t interpret them. They recreated their life in oral tales and let listeners make of them what they would. And sometimes, because any number of people sitting on the porch or in the living room or around the table might have been involved in the same story, they brought a rainbow of perspectives to a single incident — each could add his or her voice to the narration and it became a crafted, collective tale — it took its place in the history of the family and the small community.

These were the voices that surrounded me in very early childhood. And later, when most of the family moved to California where I grew up, this tradition was maintained: each week, the standard mainland English of the weekday melted into the warmth of Island speech at the weekend gathering at the grandparents house, when once again, family and close friends would talk story — giving the voice of the Islands to their history and their current experience.

Other factors contributed to the music of these voices: many of my relatives spoke other languages and those multilingual nuances were present. One of my grandmothers spoke five languages. My paternal grandfather played three or four instruments and — something I don’t actually remember, but I was told — he had a beautiful singing voice.

But my father was the best storyteller of all. He had a gift for mimicry, timing, dialogue and perfect recall. He also had the material — a huge repertoire, gleaned from a habit of risk-taking and a kind of physical fearlessness (as did the company he kept) that constantly put him in almost unbelievable but well documented situations that would of course eventuate in highly entertaining stories. Everyone loved his stories. My friends (even in high school, when it is customary for teens to be interested in other pursuits) used to love to come to my house to listen to him recount exploits and adventures from his youth — and not a few from his current life.

What I am able to recall from my own memory and not from family stories about my early life, mostly derives from experience beginning after we had moved from that tiny town in Hawaii to the San Francisco Bay Area when I was able to participate in the storytelling, the arguments, the music, the great rolling laughter, and the multi ethnic meals that were so much a part of our lives…

Added to that colourful tapestry is the mesmerizing, beautiful, reverberant solemnity of the Latin Mass, which was a huge influence on me from infancy onward — the beauty of the ancient language punctuated with the oratorical English prowess of urban priests — as well as the great grand music of the Catholic Church, encompassing as it did the music of some of the world’s greatest composers — Bach, Monteverdi, Scarlatti, Handel, Schutz, Mozart, Haydn… and the liturgical year with its seasonal rituals and breathtaking beauty.

This is what I was born into. This is what I grew up with.”

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~ Excerpt from an interview with writer, Harrison Solow.

See the entire interview at: https://barbarafroman.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/music-and-prose-dr-harrison-solow/

 

In Conversation with Harrison Solow

Tags

Creative Non-Fiction, Liminality, Wales, Welsh, Writing

An excerpt from a recent interview:

 

AGA: When you leave Wales, do you feel you’ve left a piece of yourself behind?

HS: No, I don’t feel that I’ve left a piece of myself behind. Friends in Wales say, in their inimitable way, that I am still entirely there. I feel that also, so rather than being divided, I feel fully present in both countries. And I don’t long for it as one would a person. I don’t, in general, feel for people the way I feel for larger entities. That is to say, I might miss a person, but I only actually long for things like knowledge and outer space and virtue. Clearly, that “in general” encompasses notable exceptions but my default position is that rather than anthropomorphize places, I tend to do the opposite: to eschew the anthrocentric perspective.

AGA: That’s interesting because I often anthropomorphize places that I visit, and in turn, write about. Sometimes I also write about places as beings, creatures, organisms. Can you explain a bit more what you mean by “eschewing the anthrocentric perspective”?

HS: I don’t think that humans are the pinnacle of creation. I think there are more compelling beings. I wouldn’t feel that comparing a place to a person is a compliment to that place. Maybe this passage from my correspondence will clarify what I mean:

“Earlier today, I saw Amy Tan on TED. She said that when she was in China last year, the elders sent a dozen men on ghost horses into the underworld to find the solution to a problem. I have been living in liminality so long that I have no trouble believing that. None at all. I did, after all, fall in love with Wales. I fell in love with Newman’s The Idea of A University, and with the significance of Timothy’s voice. These things are all, in a sense, fiction. They are all imaginary in some measure. But how true they are.

I genuinely fall in love with statues and dead people, lines of poetry, the shape of a wrist, a voice, a streak of light, an aberration of thought, the scent of watercress. I form meaningful relationships with stone and spirit, fragrance and bone, the quick revelations in a word or a glance. Not – I want to be clear – with the writer of the word, but the word itself and its original referent. Not the person who gives the glance, but the glance itself. Not the singer of the song, the teacher of the taught, the painter of the painting, but the sound, the pedagogy and painted. The disembodied entity – the voice, the interstice – the liminal – the non-time between the first stroke of 12 and the last. Not the name of Saturday but what that interval would be without a name.”

AGA: So, describe your love of Wales in other terms for me.

HS: It has more to do with the inexplicable and irrefutable connection among the land, the people and the language than it does with any component of that indivisible whole. The notable travel writer Jan Morris, who is Welsh,  describes it thus:

“If you watch a man lifting a rock from the land in Wales, you’d be very hard put to distinguish between the land, the rock, and the man.”

— Jan Morris, The Matter of Wales, 1984

This is true. I’ve seen it. I’ve had many moments of pleasure and meditative respite in and with the natural world – in almost all the places I have lived or visited. But my deepest experiences have been in Wales. Every blade of grass, every stone has a sound – a music that you can hear.  At times I’ve walked alone there, through the woods and meadows listening to that music and it brought tears to my eyes. But that is true of the people of Wales as well. They move me. There is great mystery here.

AGA: You’ve been nominated for 3 Pushcart Prizes, and you won one for your creative nonfiction essay, Bendithion, which is about Wales. What does Bendithion mean, and why did you choose that title?

HS: Bendithion is the plural of “bendith”, which means “blessing” in Welsh and thus means “blessings”.  I honestly chose it because I liked the sound of it, I liked the way Timothy sings it in one of his songs and when I learned what it meant, I thought it appropriate for the title of the piece. [ Note: You can read the full piece. here.] Wales has been, and remains, a blessing to/for me.

AGA: Bendithion is masterful at creating a sense of place almost from the first sentence. You use dialogue and descriptive language of gesture and landscape to describe both people and place. Can you share a few paragraphs that you feel capture a sense of Wales, of your Wales?

HS: Thank you, Gigi. I appreciate the kind words. Here is a piece from Bendithion [not the excerpt you refer to but from the original long piece within The Bendithion Chronicles] I divided it into sections so that it is easier to read:

“I don’t think I shall easily forget that afternoon at the top of Pencarreg. Cerys and I travelled up a long hedge-rowed, one-lane, rural road that I had never seen before (but she had always known was there) with an incremental sense of enclosure – as it drew in, closed in, shut out whatever was behind us, like a wormhole in a galaxy far far away. The deeper we went into the land, the more unreal seemed even the memory of the rest of the world. Even Llambed, geographically a part of this same land, faded away.

The parts of me that belong to Llambed also faded away – and what remained, very strangely, was my own past — not just Cerys’. Whatever was peeled away in that microcosmic journey left me, the essential person, approaching the age of reason – at five, at six, not yet corrupted by thought. And so, able to see the fairies and imps in the hawthorne, the history in the plum. Able too, to pick up the scent of Druidry, green and smoky, in the air around the oaks along the way. There may have been mistletoe. There was certainly a golden flash of sickle.

When the parish road ended and the earth and pebble track began, the sheep fled in terror at our approach. This flock from another century, isolated by time and contained only by hedge and cattle-grate, fenceless, defenseless — seemed never to have seen a car before. Indeed the car seemed to me out of place and just as I began to think of it as such, it turned into a pumpkin, so to speak – the engine grew quieter and we may have been in a carriage for all I could tell. Or a cloud.

The moss on the trees may have muffled the sound or the wild rush of the brook, drowned it out. But I heard songbirds. Or birdsong. Invisible chatter and whispers. Revels in the wood. Saw the red kites flying three feet off the ground, like predatory butterflies. Or maybe that was later, on the way back. Everything is one, in Wales. Even time.”

[ Note, for more, read here.]

AGA: Bendithion skillfully takes the reader to the same spot you are standing, looking through your eyes. You use your senses a lot when you are giving a sense of place to the reader. How do you capture those senses and put them on paper?

HS: I honestly don’t know. I’m a very literal person in some ways. I write what I see and I write what I hear. I have been called a “chronicler of the invisible” but it’s all very visible and audible to me. I don’t like to know about things. I like to know things. That is my passionate absorption. I never write about Wales. I just write it. There is a difference between describing a song and singing it. This is the singing.

AGA: I’d like to talk about how to write about a place or a people, which you do very well in The Bendithion Chronicles. So often, in travel literature, we read an account that tells us who someone is, more than actively shows us who they are. Can you give an example from your story that you think shows a person and loosely gives us an idea of Welsh-ness?

HS: I will give you two examples, which are also just examples from real life, as all my writing of Wales is. This is what actually happened and I just wrote it down.

“One day, a distinguished university colleague of mine came out the Post Office (which is the heart of the village and just across the street from the entrance to the university) just as I was going into it. I had spoken to him earlier in the day, so he knew that I was going in to see Alun [one of the two postmen there who are lifelong friends] to get a particular official form. He said to me, “If you’re looking for Alun, he isn’t there.” I said, “Oh that’s okay, I have to buy stamps anyway.” When I walked up to the counter, there was Alun. This is how the conversation went:

Me: “Oh, hi, Alun. You’re here.”

Timothy, butting in: “Well, of course he’s here. Where else would he be?”

Me to Timothy: “Well, John was here just a second ago and he didn’t see Alun.”

Timothy: “Not everyone does.”

There is nothing more Welsh than that conversation.

Here is the second example:

With regard to the creative nonfiction essay, Bendithion, I was in the story that I wrote and that story was real life, which I simply described in that essay. It was reportage.  I couldn’t control the real story, since it was unfolding every day, so later, I turned it into fiction–or what looked like fiction–to see what would happen. It wasn’t really fiction, since everything in it actually happened, but I could play with time and metaphor. That “fictional” parallel story was a first prize winner in an international fiction competition. It starts like this:

“Storytellers usually say “Once upon a time” when they start to tell a story, which is a pretty good way to start. It tells you that there is a story coming and that it happened a long time ago. But how do you tell a story that keeps happening?”

AGA: Hmmm..how do you tell a story that keeps happening? That is a very good question, and one I’m sure will take more than this interview to answer, if at all. Let’s segue to The Postmaster’s Song, another work of yours: I read it. To me, it was a travel story. Can you briefly describe what it is about?

HS: Yes. It is about immersion in another world and about the tender friendship between Timothy Evans, a world class tenor, who for some reason, simply preferred his life in the post office and never stepped on the world stage despite entreaties from all over the world to do so, his best friend Alun, who also worked at the post office, and me.

I imposed an omniscient narrator. I described the unseen. I made myself younger and unmarried in the story to emphasize the nature of this delicate relationship – to demonstrate that it would remain the same chivalrous mystical friendship whether I was young and single or older and married. I felt that the nature of this innocent bond would be thrown into greater relief when there were no social obstacles to any other sort of connection.

When the first draft was done I gave it to Alun to read and when he finished, he looked at me, puzzled.

“What?” I said, responding to his look.

“I thought you said it was fiction,” he answered.

Now, in that story, there is a magical boy, an allegorical pregnancy, light that carries sound and a host of other things that would prompt any reader to define it as “fiction”. But not in Wales, where “magical realism” is another word for daily life. If anything describes Wales, this does.

 

See the full interview at: https://www.amygigialexander.com/conversations/2015/2/1/in-conversation-with-harrison-solow