Rebecca Solnit--Making and Breaking Stories

[asakiyume]

The other day, I caught the tail end of a lecture that Rebecca Solnit (apparently an award-winning essayist and environmental historian, though I'm not familiar with her) gave in Seattle earlier this year. It was broadcast by Alternative Radio. These words had me transfixed--I was trying to commit them to memory, and they were coming too fast, so I bought the transcript. I'm hoping that this small quotation is fair use and not an infringement:

Something wonderful happens to you, and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. Something terrible happens and your life has always been a litany of woe. The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn’t a story; it’s a whole milky way of events, and we’re forever picking out constellations from it to suit who and where we are ...

Musselwhite saved his life by caring deeply enough, Smith by telling it in a way that made someone else care, or at least hesitate, and by being yanked from the grip of her own troubles by the intensity of that ordeal.

I tell stories for a living, where I dismantle and break them and tell them otherwise. But never forget that you are also a storyteller. That we live in stories the way fish swim in water. That we choose our stories, if we can see them. That we are made of stories, and this can be a blessing or a curse, and is usually both at once as our lives unfold. Choose your stories carefully. Listen to what has been silenced. Learn to see the invisible.¹

The earlier portion of the essay touches on all sorts of things, but always with the theme of how the story has been told and how it can be reinterpreted to show new truths--touching on the nuclear era ("though we imagine nulear war as a terrible thing that might happen someday in the future, it was going on regularly, routinely, at the rate of a nuclear bomb explosion a month or so, between 1951 and 1991"), the war against native peoples in North America, how mass shootings are reported. Those are all cases where a comforting narrative is displaced by a more stark one, but she also talks about how a negative story can be replaced by a more positive one: how people's response to natural disaster is not the Hollywood portrayal of panic and chaos, that in fact "not only do people do this work that needs to be done of rescuing people, making community kitchens, improvising shelters, looking after orphans and injured people . . . but they love it, they take great pleasure in it, they find great meaning in it."

But it's the last part of the essay--the two stories leading up to the quote I give above, that I loved best, the story of two people who changed their own story, and thereby saved their lives.

¹Rebecca Solnit, "Making and Breaking Stories," lecture given June 5, 2014, in Seattle, WA, available through the Alternative Radio website.

Comments

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

Oh, I like this! And coming at a good time for me to think about it, too. :) Thanks!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Very much my pleasure! Feel free to come back and share thoughts if the opportunity presents itself (but no pressure, either).

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

'Things have to come to an end, see. That's how it works when you turn the world into stories. You should never have done that. You shouldn't treat people like they was characters, like they was things. But if you do, then you've got to know where the story ends.'

Terry Pratchett.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

He's a really, really wise man. I agree 100 percent.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Interesting - thanks for pointing to this.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

You're very welcome. The talk is all over the place--not disjointed, but it covers a lot of ground--and there are *many* thought-provoking points.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Very timely for me right now, during a week of writing talk. This sounds like something to check out further. Thank you!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

My pleasure--the transcript is $3 at the website, payable by Paypal--it might be a good thing for everyone at VP. (I feel like a salesman :-P ... normally I'd just share the PDF but this is Alternative Radio's only way of raising money, so...)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

Rebecca Solnit is also author of the very famous "Men Explain Things to Me," and the similarly titled small essay collection contains a bunch of other fine feminist work as well.

Palimpsest of all sorts exists because we so love to turn a familiar story or a beloved story around and look at it again-- and when we do that as readersm we become creators, and that is where fan-fic comes from, as well as a long-present and now-increasing amount of "official" literature.

And yet we also have people getting mad when the familiar story is turned a different way.

Just mumbling to myself, here.

I like Solnit.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

So is she the originator of the word "mansplaining," then?

I like her too--at least, I liked this lecture a whole lot.

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

Her essy is, but she isn't! Readers coined the term, about which she's ambivalent. (Which makes me like her the more.)

[duccio.livejournal.com]

Ira Nowinski (photographer) and Rebecca Solnit at Stanford in May, 2012.

My sister has collaborated with Rebecca Solnit on several projects. I have some of her books and have met her on several occasions.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

How cool! Small world.

[pinkroo.livejournal.com]

The only book I have been able to read during the recovery from brain surgery is her book, "A Field Guide To Getting Lost." I read it out loud to myself, and I am in love with her mind, her voice. I started writing a book this week, trying to tell my stories. My story. Thank you for this entry.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Wow--thank **you**. Thank you so much for telling me. I love this; I live for this--this coming together of people.

And I am so, so glad that you've started writing your story. The world will be richer for it.

[pinkroo.livejournal.com]

I love that, too--I think one of my favorite fantasies is that all my friends know one another, love one another; it makes me feel like I made something good happen. Not sure that's what you meant, but anyway.

And thank you. I need to do it, for myself. So in that way, I suppose the world may be richer, as I understand myself better. As my therapist says, you save your own life, in some way you save the world.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

you save your own life, in some way you save the world

Your therapist is so right.