Do-it-yourself storytelling

Danielle Pope
The Martlet (University of Victoria)
VICTORIA (CUP) – In an age when people live their lives online, it’s hard to imagine what role an oral storyteller has left in the world.
But Richard Wagamese, an Ojibwa from the Wabaseemoong First Nation in northwestern Ontario, is showing students at the University of Victoria that storytelling may be all we have left.
Wagamese is this year’s UVic Harvey S. Southam guest lecturer, in which role he gives writing students a unique chance to participate in his class, “Changing Perspectives: Discovering Your Story’s Voice.”
But Wagamese’s practices in oral storytelling are starting to stir up controversy. He’s throwing out old methods in exchange for even older ones, and students – and some faculty – are loving it.
“I think people are just starting to recognize the damaging effect that technology has wreaked upon our ability to communicate,” said Wagamese. “We consider messages on a cell phone typed with our thumbs communication. We consider 140 characters on a Twitter account as communicating, or three sentences on a Facebook page, or 18 cryptic telephone calls a day on a cell phone. And what’s it’s done for us is short-formed our ability to tell stories.”
The process of oral storytelling, Wagamese points out, is a much different experience from writing alone. We use our whole brains, he says, in an effort to combine the physiology of speaking with stream of consciousness and the logic of a story. In the end, we also activate three major parts of our being – our physical, mental and emotional elements – in what Wagamese calls a simply compelling process.
“It becomes what you and I do when we haven’t seen each other for a week and I ask you, ‘So what have you been doing?’ The sub-textual message under that is, ‘Tell me a story,’” he said. “So, when you start telling me what you’ve been doing, you don’t tell me flat and monotone […], you actually engage in a storytelling performance. You’re excited, you’re withdrawn, you’re pensive and we do that very naturally when we don’t think about it.”
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Wagamese’s teaching is somewhat radical when compared to the normal methodology found at UVic. After eight weeks of Wagamese’s writing class, none of the students have written anything. During one of his first classes he asked students to come up with as many writing rules as they could in an exercise to find out what it took to be a writer. Then, he walked around with a recycling can and had all the students literally throw out the rules.
“I told the students, we’re not using any of those rules in this class. Instead, here are some directions: Writing is not a struggle, because it shouldn’t be. Tell a story for the story’s sake and when you start to think, stop,” he said.
Wagamese will see his 11th book published this year. Each one of those works has been written, from the first word to the last period, only once. There have only been edits before the publishing itself. In an effort to outdo that feat, Wagamese wrote 60 poems in six weeks, submitted them – first draft – to a publication that requested his work. That collection was released in February.
It might be easy to think that someone with such credentials would come equipped with a long line of educational belt notches, but Wagamese has only a grade nine education. Born in northern Ontario in 1955, Wagamese spent much of his youth in foster care. He dropped out of school when he was 16. Wagamese describes the early part of his life as “crazy,” and only touches on the abuse and psychological damage he suffered.
Wagamese taught himself journalism by sitting in the library and working through the reporter’s handbook by himself. Occasionally, he would get jobs by proving to others what he was capable of – he rewrote a Globe and Mail article that won him a spot at a Native newspaper in Saskatchewan.
In 1991, Wagamese became the first aboriginal Canadian to ever win a national newspaper award. He has twice won the Native American Press Association Award and the National Aboriginal Communications Society Award for his journalism. In 2010, he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C.
But, what Wagamese supports more than university education – more than anything, for that matter – is sheer passion.
“Desire will get you more places faster than anything else on the planet. I just always had this dream and this wish,” he said. “I became a card-carrying ambassador for the culture of books, and I still am, because books taught me everything. When I was wandering around doing dead-end jobs or living on the street, the library informed my sense of the world. And it gave me an enormous frame of reference which I use today.”
For the first time, the UVic writing department has offered students a chance to be taught by First Nations traditions. This is also the first time the writing department has brought in someone with no prior teaching experience to teach virtually opposing methods.
“For me, the idea of teaching this course at UVic is much like the idea of being a storyteller and a writer in itself: it’s a role that functions as an honour and a privilege,” he said. “Creator graced me with this ability to do what I do, freely and without charge. So the thing traditionally that comes from accepting that gift as a gift is that it only becomes stronger and it only becomes respected and honoured in return by giving it away. So, this gives me an opportunity to fulfill that opportunity of offering it out again.”
David Leach, director of professional writing at UVic, says he’s thrilled to have a writer with Wagamese’s credentials and reputation in the program.
“Richard is very inspiring to watch, and to work with,” Leach said. “He talks about the pleasures and joys of creativity, how excited he gets with a new book in his hand and how thrilling it is to write. We spend so much time in university learning how to criticize ourselves, and this is very refreshing to a lot of students.”
Devin Stark, a fourth-year writing and biology major, says that being in such a revolutionary class has made a huge impact on his own writing.
“What Richard teaches us […] is that writing actually has nothing to do with the rules – it has to do with the story you’re telling. The rules just kind of happen, but it’s so easy to get caught up in them and focus on them, that you lose that sense of freedom.”
While Stark says he considers himself a storyteller by nature, he says he was impressed by how easily even the shyest members of the class became emboldened by the end of the word-associating assignments.
“When I tell someone a story about my life, I’d say that 85 per cent of it is true, and 15 per cent of it is my own,” he said. “That’s what makes the story creative and worthwhile – something that no one else can bring to the table but me. Richard gets that, and he knows how to help us get our stories in motion.”