Tell me a story

Rafe
Martin creates entire worlds out of simple words, or, as he puts it, “sounds on
air.” He’s not one to run around on stage during his storytelling performances,
preferring to simply sit or stand in one place, using gestures or a change in
tone to plant his audience — of children and
adults — firmly in a different time and place. In the midst of a crowded
auditorium, he makes you feel as though he’s telling the story directly to you.

            Although his published work, which
now includes 19 books, is based on native and traditional tales, he brings a
freshness to the stories that enables them to speak to us today. Last winter,
after a benefit performance Martin held for the Cobblestone School, I came away
feeling like this is what people are supposed to do on cold winter nights:
We’re supposed to get together and listen to stories.

            Martin’s the kind of guy you want to
spend time with. I first got to know his work years ago when he told stories at
the Rochester Zen Center, where he’s been a member for 30 years. Our occasional
meetings at the Zen Center grew into regular get-togethers at the Rochester
home he shares with his wife, Rose. We’d meet in his office, which looked
pretty much how you’d expect a writer’s office to look: books everywhere (at
least a few of them organized in some way), manuscripts in various stages of
completion, a computer. But there are also small animal figures, Buddhist
images, eagle feathers, and, more recently, photographs of Martin with his
beloved motorcycle.

            Martin and I recently spent time
talking about the role of the storyteller — today and in traditional cultures
— and how he has approached storytelling throughout his 20-year career. What
follows is a distillation of those conversations.

City: When I first met you and got to know your work, it was as
“Rafe Martin, Storyteller.” But you’re really both a storyteller and writer.
Which came first?

            Martin:
Actually I was a writer first, but then I kind of lost touch with it. It
wasn’t until I had children that I began to get into children’s literature. I
was looking for books for them and eventually I find things and I go, “Wow!
This is really interesting stuff.” I began to realize in reading aloud to them
that what had been missing for me had been voice. I had forgotten that stories
are transmitted with voice. It was like rediscovering this missing world, like
a hidden door to a hidden room was opened and I began to get a sense that the
telling of stories was really how they were passed on, and the power lay in
finding voice and sharing stories.

            City: A lot of people think children’s literature is really, well,
kids’ stuff.

            Martin: Children’s literature isn’t “kiddy.” It’s really about universal structures of
the imagination. And in children’s literature you can go directly to the myth;
to imagination. I think the highest point of language is to get us to
experience a sense of wonder. And what we call children’s literature is one of
the real refuges for that mature inner state. Wonder is not childish. It’s a
very mature condition to live through the bitterness of experience and to come
out in a state of wonder, which mythic traditions tend to emphasize over and
over. We think of traditional peoples as primitive, but this is a very serious
mistake because they’re dealing with states of awareness and imagination that
are very mature. Children’s literature and traditional tales are really records
of wonder, which are not childish at all. Children have access to it but adults
often don’t.

            City:
What’s the difference between the
story you’ve written down and the story you’re telling?

            Martin: When you’re telling a story it’s like you’re always in the process of
rewriting, which is really neat. You’ll never come down to a final text. That
story will continue to grow and change until you die. You’re changing it and
it’s changing you, it’s a mutual relationship. Native peoples think of stories
as living things, not a bunch of words on a page or thoughts in a person’s
mind; they’re a living being and you kind of experience some of that when
you’re telling a story.

            City:Almost all of your work is rooted in
traditional tales. Why is that?

            Martin:
I think it’s because they deal with fundamental configurations of the
psyche. They’re not just about a particular time and place. They’ve been worn
down to the nub over thousands of years of being told and shared and moved from
culture to culture. So what we’re left with is the absolute core structures of
the imagination. In traditional tales, it’s not so much about the minds of the
individual characters but the experience in ourselves. They’ll be relevant no
matter what the time is.

            City:How can they still be relevant today?

            Martin:
You’re dealing with issues every human being deals with, like impermanence
and dignity in the face of the degradations of time. How do our actions affect
ourselves and our communities? What is walking down the right road going to
look like? And what is walking down the wrong road going to look like? This is
all stuff we all know and we forget. We forget what makes life dignified and
meaningful, and I think these old stories speak exactly to those questions that
every person is born with. I’ve told the “Rough Face Girl,” which is an
Algonquin Cinderella tale, to inner city kids and in the beginning they had
their arms crossed and were staring me down. In the end they were wiping tears
from their eyes.

            City:
How long do you think these stories
have been around?

            Martin:
I have a feeling that these patterns are as old as the human race. And that
if you go back to Lascaux — the cave paintings — what we’re seeing there
are not just images but stories, and if we knew those stories, they’d ring
familiar. I think we’d have narratives that would be oddly familiar.

            City:
And what would those narratives be?

            Martin: I think they’d address: Where are we? Who are we? Where did we come from?
What’s our purpose? Why are we born? Why do we die? I think there’s something
very mysterious going on in narrative. In any story, you’re dealing with a
beginning, middle, and end, and somehow the patterning of the story makes
sense. When you started out, you didn’t know what was going to make sense. But
when it’s done, it makes sense. It’s a model of our hope for life. Somehow,
narrative is a statement of immense faith that in the end, the human story will
make sense and each individual life story will make sense.

            City:Are there any modern equivalents to these
stories?

            Martin: I have my doubts, which is why I’m drawn to traditional tales. They’ve worked
for thousands of years. It puts a kind of food in the psyche that no other kind
of story can. It’s like a vitamin for the imagination, a building block. These
stories tend to be about actions and consequences, thoughts and consequences.
So if a child grows up with stories, and they’ve created those places and
people in their own psyches, they know what good and evil are. So when they
have choices in their life, they can actualize that territory and say, “This
looks like that road and do I want to go down it?” If you don’t grow up with
those kinds of stories, then there’s a missing place in the imagination, and
we’re always unsettled.

            City:So why this need for spoken stories? Why
not just read them?

            Martin:
First of all, spoken words are a realm of power. When you’re telling
stories, you’re entering a realm of power, of life and vitality. Most of our
communication is really not in words, but in tonal and gestural language that
surrounds the words. Every telling of a story is in some ways the repetition of
some ritual or ritualized awareness. Traditional tales deal with community.
They always deal in the end with casting out selfishness, ill-humor, greed,
cowardice… And they always seem to uphold courage, perseverance, good humor,
and a kind of respect for living things. At the very least, the selfish and
greedy get tossed out of the story.

            City:One role of the storyteller is to bring
people together.

            Martin:
Listening to a story is a communal act. When you think of the role of the
storyteller in our culture, one responsibility is to keep a gateway open to the
imagination. I think we’re hard-wired to respond to live images in a very
profound way. Traditional storytelling used to go on all day and night. It
wasn’t for children. Children were allowed in, but it was really a way to
restore the values of the community. Imagine living with a certain group of
people, depending of the land, and you’re all hearing the story brought to life
in told form. Instead of getting it in someone else’s images, you’re all seeing
it together, and you need each other to be there to make it happen. You’re each
creating your own images in your own mind, which is a very mysterious thing.
Storytelling is a realm where old and young, inner and outer, communal and
individual, these worlds all intersect.

            City:It seems that people feel safe when
listening to a story in a group.

            Martin:
There’s a magic circle — magic in the sense of a ceremony — where
you’re in a protected space. You can see the patterns without fear of what’s
going to happen. You see the good and evil unfolding, and in a good story it’s
somehow held in balance. I think stories give us access to our fullness as
people. The good and evil characters are all going to be ourselves and our own
possibilities. A story gives you a shape and a path to hold the good and evil
in yourself in balance. Art is providing a protected environment that if you
explored them in actual life, it’d be too dangerous or risky. It allows us to
play those possibilities in the mind and see where they lead, and we come out
knowing why we need to be decent people.

            City:
Traditional tales differ from the
usual fiction because you try to take people out of their everyday experiences.

            Martin: Right. It’s not the world of bills, cars, or buildings. You’re coming to an
open place in the psyche, first of all. And second, they’re simple states; not
simplistic, but archetypal. In a way our minds have become so intellectually
complex that it’s harder to access these simple states except in times of
extremity in our lives. Remember, these old tales are meant to be told over and
over. You don’t claim to understand them, because new things and new levels
always appear.

City: Many of the stories you tell and write take place in this
region.

            Martin: You live in a place long enough, things begin to speak to you. I think some of
the most mysterious, beautiful stories come from Rochester. They’re Seneca
tales. And no one seems to know them. No one who isn’t Seneca, anyway. I felt
like it was a responsibility to give something back to the imagination of the
place I live. It’s like spiritual ecology. You give something back. I felt I
should know Seneca stories if I live here. And if I know them, I should share
them. I was fortunate to be invited to tell stories at Ganondagan and part of
that request was to tell a Seneca story in the longhouse there. Peter Jemison
at Ganondagan supports what I do, and I’m honored by that. I think Native
stories are important because children growing up in this place don’t even know
their own stories; those of the Americas. Also, Native stories remind us that
all living things are connected. It’s very important to know the stories that
came from these hills, these rivers, these trees. These stories allow us to
dream ourselves back into very old places in the psyche, places we’re cut off
from today. There’s a healing power in them.

            City:
Have you had any problems with Native
groups thinking you don’t have a right to tell these stories?

            Martin:
No, not really. I’ve actually had a lot of support. The stories I may tell
from other cultures aren’t stories I’ve taken from another storyteller. They’re
not so much retellings as recreations based on stories published long ago which
I found and was moved by, but came to feel hadn’t yet brought the potential in
the story fully to life. At least not for our time. I think if you respect the
story and you love the story and you’ve researched it, then you should tell it;
especially if you’re working with children. One of the reasons I was originally
invited to tell stories at Zuni Pueblo [in New Mexico] — and I’ve been back
for 10 years running — was because they liked my books and the way I handled
the story.

            All I can do is tell the story with
the most respect I can. I try to live with a story for years before I tell it.
In part, I think of the tradition of Zen practice. That was part of the Zen
tradition: to take things from the culture and find another level in it. Old
Zen guys used to tell folk tales and songs and turn them into something else.
Some koans are drawn from old tales.

            City:
You’ve been a Zen practitioner for
something like 30 years. How has that affected your work?

            Martin: I don’t think I could have become a storyteller or the kind of writer I am
today without Zen practice. Not because it taught me anything specific, but
because it took away so much else and I realized that was all I had left:
storytelling.

            City:Beyond that, are there any similarities
between the teaching of Zen and storytelling?

            Martin:
The teaching is oral. I think that Zen is a part of the old ways. It’s
essentially an apprenticeship program to spiritual life. With traditional
tales, you’re hitting places in yourself that are really about you as a
universal human being. So when you think of it from Zen practice, storytelling
seems connected to an insight of emptiness. Everything is interconnected.

            City:
Has working on koans, which are often
called Zen puzzles, affected your storytelling?

            Martin:
I think that it totally affected my storytelling in that I worked on
stories as koans. The stories of the world are the koans of ordinary life. My
job was to demonstrate the life of the story. Not to think or analyze. The real
job was to embody it. That’s why storytelling became so important for me. So
much of it is gestural language, not about the words at all. It all began, in
many ways, coming out of that oral tradition, from the old ways that lie at the
heart of Zen.

            City:
You’ve got this grounding in
traditional tales, in the old ways of Zen, and now you’re on this motorcycle
going fast.

            Martin:
It’s going fast, yes, but more it’s going. Motorcycling is getting out into
the hills and the rivers and the sky and those things are the traditional
elements of a story. I don’t get that in a car. In riding, you feel the earth
moving, shifting; the angles of the earth, the curves meld. You can feel the
weight and spaciousness of the sky above you. Hawks swoop down. When I was a
kid I really wanted to be a knight with a horse and a suit of armor and ride
over the earth. With the motorcycle, you’ve got the helmet with the visor that
flips up, armored gloves, boots, and you’re riding your horse over the earth.
It’s very primal. It’s an imaginative act and a very sensuous one. I tend to
have good ideas when I’m riding. They may not always be the right ideas, but
they’re interesting.

            Plus you really have to pay
attention. You let go of the ghost world, enter a primal world. Your mind full
of stuff is that ghost world. When you’re riding, you have to pay attention and
that ghost world disappears. You’re in a primal world again; the world of
stories. It’s an actual live, world. Rochester is a fantastic motorcycling area.
You can be out on empty roads, gorgeous roads. Plus there’s a sense of
community. There are a couple of guys I ride with, all different backgrounds.
But there’s this sense… I don’t know maybe it’s kind of this primal hunting
band, an old ways kind of sense of this group of guys traveling together over
the earth. The only danger is that I’ll forget about working because I like it
so much.

This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2003.