Habitation Tales

Habitation Tales--I wonder how long it will take before my penchant for giving everything a catchy name begins to irritate people...  In any case, such tales would become the part of the collection most familiar to me, as a long-term English/writing teacher.  I envision these to be first-person accounts of people's experience of living-in-place, which might provide the raw material for a different, less data-driven, analysis of community and the phenomenology of place. 

These might overlap with bits of what we usually call "nature writing," or with accounts that are collected for an ethnography, or with sections of autobiography.  Or, to reach toward a different discipline, place-accounts would likely contain the wisps of folklore--wisps because a genuine folklore is not simply a first-person account, but a bit of narrative or lore that is passed on, that becomes "traditional" within a community context.  Thinking in those terms might give an indirect measure of a bioregional community.  That is, will any such wisps, or personal anecdotes, personal accounts, be able to solidify into transmittable lore?  Or, are we too disjunct, too mobile, too distracted, to retain and amplify such stories?

And would recording and making public (web-public) such accounts of place-lore affect or promote the process of folklore creation?

Work to be done--I should meet with various teachers and writers and work toward creating writing prompts for such place-accounts, not to standardize the accounts, but to make it easier for people to tell their tales.  There wouldn't need to just be one prompt--different audiences might have different needs.  I need to find some teachers from Rockbridge and Hickman High Schools to sit down over a beer or coffee and talk about this process.

A variation of this might be to look more at the "story maps" of indigenous peoples--I should explore this with Mark Palmer.  Such maps don't worry about decimal degrees nor UTM projections.  They illustrate the subjective projections of one person's place-world, or sometimes, a community's vision of its place.  I would love to have grade-school kids draw the maps of their worlds, and maybe again in high school.  Even better, to have the maps they create, but also videotape each student explaining the map.

[Security--even after parental permissions, how to deal with the security of kids talking about the places they frequent?  Agree not to publish any kid-map or video for a full year?]

Other sources--maybe the members of the local Sierra Club would agree to write their habitation tales.  Maybe some of the Columbia neighborhood associations.  Maybe, framed well, some churches ("building local community").
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What might go into such tales?  Probably a lot of what people do in a typical day--work, school, shopping, home, visiting friends.  Perhaps special places they like to visit.  And perhaps, under pressure of needing to write, people will, say, notice after a heavy summer rain, how the mist comes up through the trees and partly hides the road, and be reminded of Chinese landscape paintings.  Or recall the balloon festival or walking around to see Christmas lights or Homecoming decorations, or give us their Flood of '93 stories, or cicadas tales, or talk about taking their grandkids to see the Bur Oak.  All those things that might bind us to a place--or that might lead us toward being newly indigenous ourselves.

bob