What's in a Name?

A name is something given to you by someone else.

I've known people who tried to change what they were called. (Sorry friends, in my head I still call you by the old name!) And I have even kind of done that. I used to go by "Sarah." Now I go by "Sarah Beth." But did I really change my name?

No. My friends in college started calling me "Sarah Beth" before I decided to officially own it. First one friend did it to kind of irritate me, because I was still doing my whole "I'm not Southern" thing and I thought that having a double name sounded Southern. Then a few other friends picked it up. Then John's family called me "Sarah Beth" because his sister is also named "Sarah." By the time I got to grad school it seemed like a no-brainer to just introduce myself as "Sarah Beth."

It used to feel overly personal for people to call me "Sarah Beth." Only family had called me that previously, and only occasionally. Now it feels too personal when people call me "Sarah." The only people who call me that knew me before I was "Sarah Beth."

Even though I get a little jolt by being called the "wrong" name, the truth is, I don't really care. People want you to choose, so I choose, but to quote my mother, "You can call my anything as long as you don't call me late for supper."

Of course I've changed my last name, too. I do miss my old name. It had character. It matched at least part of my ethnic heritage. It was unique. When you searched me on the Internet, I was the only one. But I've gotten used to my new name and I really can't imagine being anyone else.

I find it funny that both my children are quick to tell you what they want to be called, even though my husband and I, of course, gave them their names.

Virginia called herself "Zia Zia" before she could pronounce her name. But after a while, we started to wonder if she was trying to come up with a nick name for herself. I asked her, "Do you want to be called Zia Zia?"

She frowned at me and said, "No I'm Vir-gin-ia." She never mispronounced it again.

Horatio also defends his title. If I call him "honey" or "peanut" he says, "No! I not nut! Ray-sho!"

Of course he has no problem making up names for other people. He calls Virginia "Mine" and sometimes calls me, "Momma Me Me."

Every word is a name, giving us a way to talk about that thing. Many cultures believe names to be sacred. If a person knows your true name they can have power over you. What does it mean that the names we are known by so rarely come from ourselves?

The Universe in Your Cup

I've started reading A Salmon of Doubt (trying to read stuff from my bookshelves at home), and I haven't even gotten to the stories yet. I'm still in one of the many introductions, learning all kinds of delicious things about Douglas Adams. As much as I love and admire him, I'm going to have to disagree with one of the things he's said.

He didn't have a great deal of success until Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But that was wildly popular and there was demand for more books. Supposedly he complained that when you write your first book you are drawing on, say, 25 years of life experience. But then, you publish another book about a year later, and only have one more year of experience to draw on. Soon you are "running on empty."

As a relatively young storyteller, I have fallen into the trap of thinking that I don't have enough experiences on which to build my stories. But, time after time that has proven to be simply untrue. And it's not just because I'm getting older. I'm finding stories I already have much faster than I am living new ones.

I think the reason for this is the microcosm. Each moment is filled with infinite experiences and stories. I can mine the same exact experience and find something new to tell about it.

For example, I am currently compiling stories from my study abroad trip to Rome. Several years ago, when I started to get a little more "real" about my storytelling, and was specifically hoping to merge my mythology interests with personal stories, I tried to work on a piece about Rome.

The only thing I could come up with was the Milky Way story, which I love and have performed with great success.

In the last couple of years, thanks to prompts from Carapace and Stories on the Square, I have also told stories about my failure to learn Italian and how that impacted my stay in Rome, and an unfortunate incident in Pompeii involving lots of wine.

Add to that some ideas I've been pondering about the Forum, and a few more things that popped into my head while thinking on the newest Carapace theme, Bad Behavior, and that overall Rome trip story is practically telling itself.

See I thought I had this one experience. But really I had so very many experiences during one six week time period. Looking at that same time through different lenses, digging deeper into specific topics, continually gives me more and more material.

The same thing happens with my naughty stories, my band stories, my parenting stories...

I don't think my creative efforts will ever exhaust my supply of life experience. Each and every moment is too rich to become used up.

I am so glad that storytelling has helped me to see that.

Women's Stories

Standing in line for the bathroom at a tapas bar on dueling pianos night I found myself in a conversation about telling children the facts of life. I don't remember how it got started (there may have been some drinks...) but one woman was talking about her daughter, who had an older brother, asking when her penis would grow in.

As I was left with just the woman behind me in line, I confessed that my four-year-old daughter knows more about being a woman than most of the fifth grade students I teach (who are getting "the talk" at school about now). She asked me if I was from the northeast.

I said, "No, but my parents are."

"Northeastern kids are very savvy." She said.

Initially, I was left wondering if the fact that I am so candid with my daughter is a holdover of my New York roots or is, as I have thought, because I am a crazy liberal librarian and believe that more information is the answer to every problem.

It isn't just that, though. Storytelling has been teaching me some interesting things about women. We have got to be honest with each other. And we must share our feminine wisdom between generations.

I have become infamous in the Atlanta storytelling scene for my "naughty" stories. It all started with Carapace's "Taboo" show, in which, with much trepidation, I shared a story about buying a menstrual cup. (Yes, I wrote about this before. This post is a little different.)

I was embraced by the very warm Carapace community and gained the courage to not only share this story with other audiences, but to propose an entire fringe performance based on "naughty" stories.

With a little luck, I was chosen for the National Storytelling Conference fringe, where some of this really started to sink in.

As storytellers go, I am young. I walk in both the traditional storytelling world and the "reality" storytelling world. At Carapace there are many more people my age, but plenty who are older as well. In the traditional storytelling world, I'm an outlier.

My old anxiety about talking openly about menstrual cups and vaginal depth came back as I looked out at my fringe audience. I advertised that it was naughty stories, so they knew what to expect, right? RIGHT?

Not only was my show well received, but many of those who chose to tell me they enjoyed it were older women. I think now that women know, in our hearts, we have to share these stories, at least with each other. Being a woman is hard. Not every woman has a story about ill-fitting menstrual cups, but they have stories about other menstruating misadventures and when we share these stories, no one has to feel alone.

I continue to work to promote "naughty" stories because I have started to realize that they aren't just entertaining. They are important. And if we don't tell our stories, we run the risk of letting someone else tell them for us.

I will take a moment here to say that I do realize calling them "naughty" stories may not be the most productive thing. It is kind of perpetuating the idea that these are not things we are supposed to talk about. But also, those are exactly the stories I mean: the ones we think we are not supposed to talk about.

Back to women, and folklore, and stories. In many cultures, women of multiple generations used to work together for several hours at a stretch with no men around. Adult conversation often turned to true stories and folk tales and jokes, about being a woman. The girls would hear. There were no surprises about growing up or growing old. The female wisdom was available to all ages. No woman thought she was going though some very normal female thing alone.

I'm not saying we need to go back to the "good old days" of women doing only distaff duties. It's just that we have to make more of an effort to talk to each other. If that's on stage at a bar, I'll see you there. I'm listening.

Spider Speculations

I've just finished reading Spider Speculations: A Physics and Biophysics of Storytelling by Jo Carson, loaned to me by a friend. I found myself whole heartedly accepting some of Jo's claims and viewing others with skepticism. But, regardless of my feelings on each topic all of it has been seeping into my subconscious and effecting me more than I had initially realized.

The theory I put forth in this blog, that the spoken word is closer to meaning, also has many connections to Jo's work.

First of all, she created plays for communities based on stories collected from members of those communities. Why even do this unless those stories need to be spoken aloud?

In her book, she talks about reframing, how the way you tell a story can change the way you think, and feel, about something that has happened. In one of her examples she tells the story of a woman who cares for her elderly stepmother who abused her when she was a child. The way Jo tells the story, it is not the woman who is stuck with her horrible stepmother, but the stepmother who is stuck entirely reliant on the woman she abused. How uncomfortable for her.

I have felt the power of reframing in my own life. I lay-led a service at Northwest UUC about telling your story. I talked about my own faith journey and about when I began to question Christianity. I talked about how I could have ended the story with feeling pushed away from Christianity by my friends. But instead I end the story with something one of my friend's fathers said to me about our lunchtime discussions. I was sure he thought I was a bad influence on his son, but he said, "No, I think you are good for him." I decided that if I was good for him, he was good for me. He and all my friends had done me a favor by making me think. (That's a better ending, and encourages a better attitude.)

That's reframing. It is powerful. And the reframe gains power every time you tell the story. Your brain starts associating that feeling with the events instead of what you might have felt at the time.

The other main thing I want to talk about is agency. Jo gave agency to the abused woman, mentioned above, by making it her choice to take care of the stepmother, not something she had to do.

I finally had a breakthrough with another personal reframe job (and a really difficult story to tell) by giving myself back some agency in a similar way. Instead of focusing on things that had been done to me in the story, I acknowledged that I made certain choices. Not always good choices. But because they were my choices, I could also choose something different for myself, which I eventually did.

Jo gives several other examples of agency, but what really struck me, from a sound and sense standpoint, was how pretending to have agency can make you actually have more agency. In one of her plays a more timid woman acted the part of a woman who had been very "brash." The actress began acting more like her character both on and off stage. In this case, acting, saying something, doing something can make it so. The sound becomes the sense.

For myself, as an introvert who could use a little more agency, this makes me consider doing more portrayals. Maybe of particularly agency-filled women. It occurs to me that the two women I already portray, Boudica and Mayhayley, do have a lot of agency. So far, I've chosen well.

And the final, kind of eery influence this book has had on me: I was filling out the google form for the Listen to Your Mother interview while tired and maybe slightly tipsy. When asked to tell a little more about myself I started with: "I think at my worst, I am difficult to work with, but at my best I can be an agent for positive change."

Then I stopped and looked at that sentence and thought, "Oh no! I'm a trickster!" Now I'm pondering the place in this world of a reluctant trickster. Or maybe I should drop the "reluctant" and keep trying for more agency.

Agony and the Internet

One of the biggest things that struck me on rereading The Shallows in preparation for leading a faculty summer reading discussion at the beginning of this school year was the similarities that Carr points out between the digital word and the spoken word.

He talks a lot about the kind of mind that reading fosters: A mind that can be quiet and focus on a single task for an extended period of time.

And he contrasts that with the kind of mind that the Internet fosters: One that harvests large quantities of information quickly without going too deep.

But in these comparisons, he brings up some ways in which the digital word is taking us back to what came before writing. Primarily, this is social information sharing.

In the oral tradition, sharing information is, by necessity, a social event. One person speaks to one or more people, imparting what they know. The person sharing the information is treated as an authority and can be questioned. Information sharing is interactive. In Orality and Literacy, Ong talks about the agonistic nature of oral cultures. People do battle with words. Think of debate. Think of jokes and riddles.

Writing, and reading, Carr points out, are both solitary events. The piece of writing becomes the authority as the original author can not, usually, be questioned. And the writing continues to say the same thing, no matter what you ask it. There isn't the same back and forth, the same argumentation.

And then there is the Internet. Web 2.0, the social web, to be exact. Yes, we have blogs, facebook, and youtube, allowing anyone and everyone to share content with the multitudes. But more importantly, we have comments. Anyone and everyone can argue with the author, not just the work.

Now think about flame wars. Think about how reading the comment section on almost anything on the Internet can make you lose faith in humanity. People say it is just that people feel more free to be mean online because of distance and anonymity. But I think the driving force behind these arguments may run deep. Like, oral roots deep.

This is the agony. It is the way of social information sharing. I suspect it is a little cruder now than in the old days. But if we understand it maybe we can channel that argumentative energy towards something more productive? I would like to think so.

Empty Characters

This past weekend I attended the American Association of School Librarians conference and one of the many sessions I attended was a panel discussion on boys reading and fantasy, consisting of the following authors:

Jonathan Auxier
Jon Scieszka
Adam Gidwitz
Neal Schusterman
William Alexander
Tony Abbott

So it was bound to be good, right?

This idea came up in the discussion about rich characters and empty characters. But "empty" wasn't a bad thing. An empty character is one that, yeah, might be hard to describe other than "heroic" or something like that. But, because the character is "empty" the reader can see him (or her) self as that character. Examples mentioned were Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker. Their friends are all rich characters, but these leading men don't have quite as much that defines them, and that's a good thing. The speaker even mentioned Tintin, who is drawn with minimal detail, even though the rest of the illustrations are detail rich. The reader can put himself in Tintin's shoes.

Of course this made me think of the stereotypical, archetypal characters that come out of the oral tradition. They usually have only one or two defining characteristics and are not very complex. The wrath of Achilles, anyone? Walter Ong describes how writing has allowed us to come up with more complex, more psychological characters. And yet, we still love our empty heroes.

Is it because we are nostalgic for the epics of the past? Is it because the ancient bards were on to something? Is it because we need to be connected to, to be a part of, our stories?

Another question came up about building upon folktales, myths, legends, etc. and one of the authors told the following joke:

A magician became so great a magician that he told everyone not to call him a magician anymore, but to call him a god.
The God of the land heard about this and they decided upon a duel of the gods.
The God of the land grabbed a handful of dirt, spit in it, molded it, blew on it, and away flew a bird.
The man who was once a magician grabbed a handful of dirt, and just as he went to spit in it, God said, "Hey! Use your own dirt."

The point was that all stories are built on what came before. No one is using their own dirt.

I think this was easier to see during the oral transmission of stories, because there was less focus on the author of a story. Think of how we don't know the author of most folktales, and there are so many different versions. They aren't written. They are collected.

Each telling of a story was slightly different. Stories were constantly both old and new. Connected to an earlier time, but being what they needed to be in this time.

The empty character is an invitation. The storyteller, the writer, knows he has used someone else's dirt. Now he is inviting the listener, the reader, to use his. Come on, he says, be my character.

Scriptura Continua

It's hard for us to imagine today, but no spaces separated the words in early writing. In the books inked by scribes, words ran together without any break across every line on every page, in what's now referred to as scriptura continua. The lack of word separation reflected language's origins in speech. When we talk, we don't insert pauses between each word - long stretches of syllables flow unbroken from our lips. It would never have crossed the minds of the first writers to put blank spaces between words. They were simply transcribing speech, writing what their ears told them to write. - The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, pg. 61

Carr goes on to explain that early readers experienced a "cognitive burden" trying to pick out the words from the continuous line of letters. Spaces were introduced to make reading easier. Hyperlinks and other distractions on the Internet are again creating a cognitive burden, according to Carr, by forcing us to make decisions while we are reading (do I click on the link?) rather than focus on what the words are telling us.

One of my arguments for writing being further from meaning than the spoken word is that writing is a graphical representation of sounds. It refers back to the spoken word, not to meaning. D-O-G tells you how to pronounce the word "dog," it doesn't tell you what a dog is.

The spaces between words, however, are not there because people pause between each word when speaking, but to help readers understand the text more quickly.  They ease the cognitive burden. It is so hard to understand the written word, so laborious, that we have to add things that aren't there so that we can comprehend a text at a speed that approaches our comprehension abilities with the spoken word. And, it is not just spaces we have added. We have punctuation, we have altered word order, we have italics and bold and big and small. All in an attempt to make writing as readily understandable as speaking.

Then there is this business of the Internet. Are we moving further from meaning as we further technologize the word? Um...yeah.

We worked to ease the cognitive burden of reading so that we could spend more time thinking about meaning and less time thinking about deciphering. But the Internet is increasingly distracting - increasingly burdensome. We get so caught up looking for information, we fail to pay much attention to what we find. (This is the main thrust of Carr's book. Forgive me for making these bold claims without elaborating on them. He's done that for me.)

The digital word isn't trying to be like the spoken word. It isn't trying to be easily understood. It is like a living thing, trying only to propagate itself. The digital word is all about more and more and more digital words. But if we are too distracted to pay attention to what these words say and certainly too distracted to remember for more than a few moments - then they don't say anything.

Maybe this is all a little dramatic. Clearly, I like the Internet. Hello out there blog readers, I hope you are enjoying all my tasty digital words! Just try not to forget me when you click on the next link...