Poetry Friday: How It Is Told

Writerly Friends, it's Poetry Friday, but I've been thinking about stories.

Today's Poetry Friday host is
Kerry at Kerry Recommends

Whether we are talking about outlandish fiction like the Harry Potter books, sharing family history, or "How was your day?" over dinner, a lot of our time is spent sharing stories. Why do we read them, listen to them, tell them? 

Here is a true story:

A brilliant young person is accepted into a well-respected college. With degree in hand, the person embarks on a promising career. Feeling unfulfilled, our protagonist drops out of chasing the American Dream and opts, instead, to study Buddhism. This study becomes all-absorbing, as the person enters into monastic life as a Buddhist teacher.

The twist? This story is true for two people.

One is Sister Dang Nghiem, MD.



I read about this Zen Buddhist nun and disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh in Prevention magazine's January 2014 issue. "Sister D's" story is compelling. A Vietnamese refugee living in California, she had pushed her own difficult history aside to become a successful medical doctor. A catastrophic event led her to attend a mindfulness retreat with Thich Nhat Hahn. There, she began a different kind of life as a Buddhist nun.

The article is entitled, "The Healer." (Read it at Prevention.) It includes such subtitles as "You Can Cultivate Joy Even When You're Hurting," "Mindfulness Is Powerful Medicine," and "Kind Actions Matter." The story speaks admiringly of Sister D's  "peace, mindfulness, and clarity."

Sister D's book is published by
Parallax Press. Find it here.

But the brief story I told above is also true of another person -- a member of my family.

I won't share the details of this person's life without his permission, but: brilliant young person, Ivy college, degree, promising career -- all of these are true of him. And, like Sister D, he stepped away from everyone's expectations to become a Buddhist monk.

What made the Sister D article resonate with me so deeply was how closely her story parallels the life of the person I know, except in one respect.

How it is told.

Remember the loaded words in the Prevention article's subtitles? Joy, Mindfulness, Powerful, Kind.

When my family talks about our Buddhist monk, those are not the words I hear. This person is spoken about in other terms: Disappointment, Crazy, Kook, Threw It All Away.

At a recent gathering -- our monk was not there -- I listened to how my family was telling his story. Sister D was on my mind. I asked the speaker, our family patriarch, to look at the monk in a different way. 

I asked, "Hasn't he been doing this for twenty years?"

What I meant was, our monk isn't a crazy twenty-something who's throwing his college degree away to live like a kooky Buddhist and disappoint his family. He is a grown man who leads a peaceful life, even if that life is one the rest of us struggle to relate to.

At the top of this post, I asked all of us to think about why we read, listen to, and tell stories. This experience answers some of that question for me.

We tell stories to understand life and the world around us. The way we describe an experience shapes and is shaped by how we feel about what happened. Sometimes, as with my family, we need to stop telling the story in a way that has become habitual, and create a new narrative.

As writers for children, it is our responsibility to be aware of the power not only of story (plot), but of how it is told (word choice and tone). The words we use as storytellers profoundly shape young readers' and listeners' points of view.

Here is a poem for Poetry Friday, "Call Me by My True Names" by Thich Nhat Hahn

Call Me by My True Names

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.


Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh gives a beautiful reading of the poem in this YouTube clip.



This is a lot to think about, Writerlies. I welcome your feedback.

Amok in New Hampshire: Storytelling with Odds Bodkin

Driving home one afternoon, I saw a familiar looking boy. He was holding a broken geode in his hands – each of his upturned palms holding half of the stone. I kept one hand on the wheel and started scribbling in my notebook. I knew this boy. It was Archie Nagle, eleven-year-old hero of the children’s novel I’d been working on. He was in my vision as clearly as the traffic light ahead of me. The light turned red, giving me enough time to ask, “Why is Archie holding a geode? What does it mean?” Another flash. The stone split in two meant Archie was a twin. Had been a twin (duh! Why didn’t I know this two drafts ago?) He lost a brother before the story opens. My light-hearted middle grade novel suddenly had a heart. Where do these creative flashes of story come from? Last weekend, I was amok in New Hampshire, hoping to find out. My friend Jennie and I headed to Squam Lake for a workshop with master storyteller and musician, Odds Bodkin. Odds has been a professional teller for 30 years. Before the workshop, Jennie and I (like the former English teachers we are) looked up “Odds Bodkin” in the dictionary. It’s a mild curse. Think “Holy cow!” in the 1600s. It’s a good thing we did our homework. When a guy greets you with: Call me “Odds,” you don’t ask why. Odds doesn’t script his stories or write the accompanying music. He knows the basic plot and characters, but tells a tale differently each time he sits in front of an audience, adding details, dialogue, and a soundtrack (on guitar, harp or kalimba) as the Muse strikes him. As opposed to TV and video games, Odds said that tellers of tales “go right down into this ancient tap root in children’s minds” that activates cognitive areas screen-entertainment misses. Hooray for the children’s authors among us! Stories, especially spoken stories, tap into more than kids’ visual imaginations. Stories can activate our hearing memory, sense of taste and smell -- even create physical sensations. To prove the point, Odds described eating a slice of pizza. Granted, it was right before lunch, but all it took was the words “gooey cheese” and my mouth was watering. (Odds Bodkin! that was tasty.) Odds also talked about two creative styles. Some of us are like Mozart, who transcribed his compositions whole and perfect: “The Witness.” I’m not big on the Muse concept, but I knew what Odds was talking about. Many of us compose paragraphs or poems in our minds without writing a word down – often unaware that we are doing so – until the piece is close to perfect. When my mind produced the image of Archie holding his broken geode, I was acting as Witness. The other creative style is “The Director.” This is the skill I use when writing non-fiction -- putting facts, quotes and description together as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. I was relieved when Odds told us that Beethoven composed music this way. He made it clear that, as a storyteller, being a Witness is no better or worse than being a Director. In fact, most creative folks use a combination of the two styles in their work. Okay, readers. Are you more of a Witness or a Director? This Week’s Writing Exercise (Appropriate for All Ages & Levels) Don’t Write! Imagine We often ask students, and ourselves, to be imaginative when writing. But imagination without boundaries can be uncomfortable. After all, our imaginations produce nightmares. Here is one of Odds’ best recommendations from the storytelling workshop: when you’re asking someone to use his/her imagination, start with a familiar setting to warm-up those mental muscles. So, put away the notebook and pencil while you try this exercise in sensory imagination (adapted from Odds Bodkin’s workshop). You can take notes later. Sit quietly, close your eyes and imagine that you are in your bedroom. Your bare feet are standing on a low marble pedestal. Turn slowly – 360 degrees – and take in every detail of the room. Not just the pictures on the walls and the colors of the bed spread, but also any smells, and the temperature of the air. You notice a light coming from under the bed. Filled with curiosity, you step off the pedestal. You move the bed aside with one hand – it’s as light as an empty box and glides across the floor. There, where you expected to see carpet or planks of wood, is a window. What a strange place for a window! How can sunlight be shining through a window in your floor? You kneel down beside the window and see… this is the tricky part, writers. Without composing a story, let your imagination see, feel, hear, taste and smell whatever is beyond that window. Let us know what’s out there. Next Week: Amok in Men’s Clothes (Literary Cross-Dressing)