From the Farmhouse Table: November 2024
What is the role of the storyteller in times of despair?
What a doozy of a week. Although, many of us are struggling to make sense of this moment, the impact, and the path forward, we know that storytellers and seeking out and strengthening our communities of care are key. We feel honored to have found community, connection and partnership with Clarion West throughout the planning of our upcoming Speculative Fiction Convening: So Be It! See To It! This process has involved a lot of consideration, intriguing conversations, and sharing. Below is a peek into a recent (pre-election) conversation where we discuss the role of the storyteller in times of division and despair.
Flame: What is so fascinating about the timing of this partnership with you all is that our theme this year has been “Back to the Future” and our own Executive Director, Kimberly, loves Butler’s Parable Of The Sower. We read it as a team in our Justice Book Club last year, knowing that July of 2024 is where that story begins. We started talking about the sort of prophetic nature of this storyteller that Octavia Butler was and that began our conversations with you all at Clarion West, and how to support more women-identified writers in speculative fiction.
As you watch these generations of writers come out of your programs, as you've seen stories develop that build futuristic worlds that could or could not be made real – what does Liberation really look like, and what is the role of the storytellers – specifically women-identified storytellers – in building our future?
Amy: We need the people who can imagine futures and give us that road map as something to work towards. Imagination takes energy, and if you’re just trying to survive and get by, your imagination is the thing that often suffers. Storytellers are imagining for a lot of us who don’t have capacity to imagine for ourselves.
Rashida: The storytellers, collectively, are the ones that keep pushing the imagination, keep pushing the realm of possibility, like Amy said, for all of us – and for other artists. That's a critical piece: how stories and writing can be for the larger community or audience, but also for the artist and the future artists. So Octavia's influence is not just storytelling for the world but also to spark the next set of artists to tell their stories.
Amy: That’s so exciting, to think about, the artistic lineage too, not just the experience of the reader!
Rashida: I wouldn’t want to put words in Octavia’s mouth, but I think she would be very pleased to see that things have gone beyond her vision and to things she might not have even seen as possible. If we all start collectively dreaming, the pieces make a more expansive whole than we could imagine alone.
Jen: I often think about how so much of what storytellers do influences activism and exists in that same space. The path for artists is intertwined with the work of activists. I think of Mariame Kaba’s work - she frequently talks about this dream space – this totally other space of what could be, not in reaction to what is. I would consider her an activist but an artist as well, just like adrienne marie brown. It’s interesting that the role of the storyteller is often an intertwining path with some form of activism, and how each informs the other.
Flame: We know that not all activists are artists, and not all artists are activists. It's easy to forget that there are billions of people that may or may not have an investment in future-building! It’s maybe doubly important to have someone spin a good story to spark, like you said, Amy, the imagination of what could be.
It's very clear that Octavia was obsessed with the stars and space travel, but what's interesting about the world-imagining happening now is that there are so many more stories that are versions of here (on Earth) being reinvented and reimagined. Are the stars our ultimate destiny as humans? Is that the vision for the future?
Rashida: I'm very curious about what it would be like to be somewhere else, and I love the idea that there's possibilities for human life outside of this planet, but it's a bit of escapism. If we turn the level of technology, intelligence and creative problem-solving needed to get us in space and sustain us in the stars, what could we do here?
Flame: There's a little bit of an embarrassment, too – I don't want to meet alien forms who have made space-time travel possible from whatever world they inhabit – I don't want them to see us like this! Can we clean up a little first? There’s a feeling that there is a way to no longer be tethered to the historical consequences that we were birthed out of and birthed into.
Rashida: Yes, there’s a difference between going into space because you've accomplished things here and set up a strong base and are reaching out into the next level versus this stuff's going down, so let's just build a raft and get out of here! And those who can get out, great, and those who can't, too bad you weren’t pulling yourself up by your bootstraps like the rest of us! Ta ta.
Amy: That’s what comes to my mind too – what’s our model, how is going out to space different? We’re not going to see who we can help, that’s not the big plan. We’re going to see what we can extract for ourselves. There’s not a broader contribution to the universe or each other, it’s all “what’s out there for me”.
Flame: What I appreciate about the majority of Octavia's writing is that the hero is an unlikely hero. More of our stories are skewing towards collective care, are skewing towards interdependence; we are positioning human beings like the reader as the one who can bring about the change. Maybe that is one of the special superpowers of Octavia's work: it has intrinsic in it a call to action and I think people who write in these genres are answering a call to action even if they don't know intentionally that they're doing so.
Jen: I have heard that she was very overwhelmed and often depressed while writing The Parables, and I wonder, did she know she was writing a prophecy? There’s a knowing there that was very overwhelming and hard.
Flame: Do you think Octavia considered herself to be a prophet?
Rashida: She’s a futurist – and she looked at everything going on in the now, in her now, and was like “this is what happens if we take it to the nth.” In a similar way Margaret Atwood talks about everything that happened in The Handmaid's Tale was happening somewhere or had happened to women at some point in time, some place in the world. That’s a level of futurism that is more impactful than prophecy because it draws from what is and, in Octavia’s case, comes from a perspective that isn’t always placed in the protagonist’s position.
Those perspectives can also create a different kind of agency in story. When you come from marginalization, your agency may be through community, keeping everybody together and moving together as a group – because it's safer in a group, it’s stronger together. Instead of seeing the one dude in the galaxy doing things that nobody else can do, you might see somebody from a very powerless position do all the little things around them that keep everyone together and safe. It creates a different kind of reader involvement. Instead of idolizing a distant hero, you see yourself as the protagonist.
Amy: Octavia was just so aware and paid so much attention and read the news like crazy, and what she extrapolated from that, she could forecast. And thinking about the word agency, we can all do that, we can all pay more attention to what’s going on and make our own forecast. There's something really beautiful about that – yes, of course, she was gifted, and her mind was incredible, and she devoted herself fully to her art and her writing in ways that most people don't – but it wasn't divine, it was forecasting. It was her paying attention and then doing something with what she was seeing.
Flame: We like to specialize people because it helps us shirk responsibility, essentially. If we are not the hero, we can't change the world like that. I would love to conclude with your thoughts around our responsibility or call – or maybe Octavia’s call to us – to pay attention, to think consciously and move intentionally to shape change. What is the change we need to be shaping and focusing on now? What do you feel called to change or shape?
Amy: We're not going to get to the Happy Ending – that’s not the goal, and is just kind of depressing as a concept because it's never going to happen. But it makes me think about what I'm working towards, and this idea of helping people find their purpose, as an organization, as an individual, feels like so much of the work that I do and the work that I'm drawn to. Part of the reason I love Hedgebrook and I love Clarion West is that these are organizations that support people who are on the path that's bolstering their purpose in this world, and to get to do that as my work most of the time is really wonderful.
Rashida: There is a difference between Changing The World and changing YOUR world. For me the goal now is to be aware of how I touch things in every sense of the word, the change I am bringing to them by touching them, and how to leave them changed in a better way than I found them. Make my touch add something rather than subtract. Purpose is necessary, but so is opening the definition of what purpose is to include things like creativity, playfulness, and exploration in the way that story and storytellers do so well. I love that so much because this play as purpose breaks us out of the mold of needing the creativity to serve some sort of function and to contribute something monetarily to us, versus the larger importance of creativity opening space for us to imagine different futures.
Flame: Yes, creativity that creates positive change instead of extracts or takes! Creativity for inquisition’s sake versus acquisition.
Jen: I've been having lots of conversations about the idea of “change the world” versus just coming healed to the party. Let's work right here and think about how you have changed what you touched. Creating space is what I love to do best and that's what Hedgebrook does well – just creating the space and time and environment for storytellers to come in and play and be and feel held and see what comes from that.
Flame: I'm going to keep that idea central: how am I literally touching and shaping my work, am I doing it on purpose or am I doing it carelessly? What a great question to hold as a guiding star!
Take good care of yourself and each other.
Amber Flame, Program Director, Hedgebrook
Amy Hirayama, Events and Residency Coordinator, Clarion West
Rashida Smith, Program Director, Clarion West
Jen Will-Thapa, Program Manager, Hedgebrook