Blacklisted.
"He should be blacklisted, that Odds Bodkin," she had said, the storyteller Gerry had met many years ago, when he and I had started working together. At least that's what Gerry told me, sitting there in his recording studio the other day. After all these years he'd told me.
I had come to pick up the final CD masters-a golden one, bound for our audio manufacturer, and a white one, same data--for us to listen to and give the final ok on The Harper and The King: The Story of Young David, our next release.
"She really said that," I responded.
"She sure did."
For twenty-two years I've made my living telling stories and selling recordings of them. I'm somewhat of a lone wolf, but that was the first time I'd heard the word spoken. Blacklisted. I sank back into the couch, envisioning swarms of McCarthyites dragging big black markers across my name. Then I adjusted the thought: no, probably just a few of them. Most of them are pretty nice people, actually. Writers seeking audience, basically. Believers in the human voice. Just like me.
I know I'm a bit iconoclastic among storytellers. The character voices. The music. The sound effects. What can I tell you? I'm bored otherwise. It's what brings the story to life for me. Besides, I'm working in a storytelling tradition that predates most styles used nowadays.
The bardic tradition-- telling stories with music and characters-dates all the way back to Homer. Scholars think Homer plucked a lyre and performed his Iliad and Odyssey with voices. Most current "platform storytellers", as they are called, rely upon a third-person narrative approach emanating from-or at least dominated by--the Appalachian American Southern Tradition of Storytelling, if that's not too ponderous a term.
The best of these storytellers are very witty and wise. The personal story and Americana fill much of their repertory. Disinterested in sharing stories about myself growing up in suburban Virginia, I've tended toward mythic material. Plus I've found that young audiences- accustomed to TV and movies--respond to bardic performances with very high levels of imaginative concentration, which for me is the gift truly worth giving.
Relatedly, one of the warmer events of 2003 was my summer visit to The International Storytelling Institute, created and held by Dr. Flora Joy at East Tennessee State University. ETSU is a stone's throw from the renowned Jonesborough, Tennessee, where the National Storytelling Festival is held every year. Jonesborough is home to what is now called the NSN-the National Storytelling Network. This is the oldest and most venerable international institution devoted to the art of storytelling. I was invited to the Festival once, a few years ago. Got a few thunderous standing ovations. Sold a large number of recordings. Gee, I thought, they like my work.
Ah yes, the storytelling world. Simmering like some strange cult, just beneath the surface of the mainstream. Tell most Americans that you're a storyteller, and they'll ask, "You're a what?"
The mainstream media flows by, a thunderous surge of vociferous talk show hosts and blondes pretty enough for television. And there, off by its little lonesome, playing to small houses and select people, sits the gossamer art of storytelling.
Of course, that's one of its blessings: it hasn't yet been corrupted by the sort of money that is made in successful broadcast-driven sex and violence media. So it's still a rarified beauty, just the act itself- telling a story with the human voice. Entertainment for the pre-frontal lobes we've forgotten to use. Forget about varying levels of talent and commitment, just the act itself of hoping to hold people's attention with the spoken word-standup comedy's one-liners aside--I think, is beautiful.
I was walking around the house thinking how sad it was that my eyes have lost the high-resolution acuity they used to have when I was a young naturalist, describing the intimate parts of flowers to kids, in Central Park. I could focus down and observe the tiniest of silver filaments along stamens and pistils, and talk about them.
Ah, those were the days. But now I use reading glasses, middle-aged as I am, and find it offensive but unavoidable. Silver filaments are now a silvery blur. Captured as so many of us are by screen life, especially the kids, to me it's as if the natural world has grown blurred for so many, just like having middle-aged eyes. Can't quite catch the details of the stamens and pistils. Especially when there's so much to watch. So many pretty faces. So many explosions. On flatscreens the size of walls.
Dr. Flora Joy, by the way, and her husband Henry, hosted me in their lovely home while I was down there in Tennessee. Mists and horses, at dawn, in the hollows, fall away from their gracious hilltop home. Extraordinarily fine people. Blessed with knowing who they are. It had been Flora's last year running the Institute. Her magazine-Storytelling World--had given my recordings a few awards over the years. Sitting back, I realized that she must have braved all manner of resistance to bring Odds Bodkin in at the very end of her tenure. Flora had pried my name, burned in and charred for years, I imagine, from the NSN blacklist. A brave thing to do. At least that's how it looked to me. I could be wrong.
"That's pretty rugged," I said to Gerry.
"Yours is the only storytelling I know about," he went on.
"Oh, there are lots of us."
Gerry is a fabulously intelligent man who never fails to have some interesting thought floating around his mind. He usually records musicians.
"Well," I said, "as a charter member of the Black List, I think we should listen to this recording one last time, to make sure we got it right." So we went back to work.
One never knows. Perhaps if The Harper and The King is as meaningful as I hope it is, someone on some committee will feel a little less righteous about dragging that marker across my name. Then again, it may prove the very impetus for them to do so. It's hard to know much of anything for sure in this world.
