Simon Sylvester's Blog

Another tale, another telling; at my last story circle, I performed a Siberian folktale called The One-Eyed Man & The Fox Woman from a wonderful collection called The Sun Maiden And The Crescent Moon by James Riordan. It’s a story I first heard on a podcast told by Daniel Deardorff. By way of drums and dreams he seized me by the scruff and never let me go; when I started storytelling, The Fox Woman was right at the top of my list of pieces to learn. It’s longer than Gobbleknoll or The Talking Skull, about 20 minutes or so, and I’ve been working my way up to it by way of shorter tales.

There’s an otherworldiness to this one. The titular One-Eyed Man is a pretty small part of the story – the journey belongs entirely to the Fox Woman – her anger, her longing, her choices, her consequences. It holds at its heart a crystal truth about moving through life; about what a person should tolerate, and what they cannot. It’s about ageing, changing, desire, belonging and peace. It’s vast and it’s wild.

The Siberian stories are strong. I’m currently reading The Turnip Princess by Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth: 72 folktales and fairy stories collected roughly in parallel to the Grimms, then lost for over a century in a city archive. As with my recent reading of some Russian stories, I’ve been struck by how many of them are structurally quite weak; elements appear at random with successions of unconvincing ‘and thens’ disconnected from what’s already happened. What I admire in the Siberian stories (as with Inuit stories) is that most elements of the story happen because of something else – the magic remains wild and vital, but the threads of story are causal and connected, rather than consecutive – at times almost random. As a side note, it’s fascinating to see the movement of stories through time and place – there are quite obviously elements of Grimms throughout The Turnip Princess, then what crops up but half of Three Golden Heads Of The Well? (Another story high on my list to learn.)

I’m off topic. Back to Siberia. The stories are rich in blood and fat and sinew. Eating, not eating; animals that talk to people; the Moon sneaking down by night to steal a bride; clayman, raven, elk. Animals are completely and vitally integrated with people – survival depends on food, and food is meat, and meat is animals, and animals is hunting. This is the prism through which almost every story plays out; from the mythic to the domestic, tales of tooth and blade and fur and fire. Odd thing for a vegetarian to say, but count me in. I’m there.

Telling The Fox Woman went well, I think, I hope. Ten of us met in an old Quaker graveyard high on Fellside, looking out across the town, with a large ginger cat slinking through the long grass, and the last of the summer swifts high overhead, and a robin ferreting through wild blackberries. I brought in repeated motifs to bookend the story, and that seemed to go well; one of the jokes didn’t land at all, but the other landed superbly. I extended the scene with the baskets of skins, which felt to me to make sense to the story, and I removed the scene with the reflection in the pool. I managed not to rush – to slow down and relish the flow of words. I’m increasingly drawing on my well of prose and poetry when conjuring the images. I still have a very long way to go in using my body and voice and face, and this is something to work on.

Next telling is at the Brewery open mic supporting Rose Condo – either a Zen koan called Two Tigers & A Strawberry or Queen Albine, depending on how angry I am on the night about English nationalism. Chances are I’ll be quite angry.

Well I don’t know. You wait six months for a gig then two come along at once. Two concerts in two weeks for me and Mon – first King Creosote at the Brewery, and then Elbow at Castlefield Bowl in Manchester. Two very different performances united by virtue of being bloody wonderful.

King Creosote was in the Brewery’s biggest space, the theatre, but also incredibly intimate by virtue of us being on the front row and in actual touching distance of the stage:

Kenny played loads from his FIFTIETH studio record I Des and a handful of classics, and it was brilliant – I especially loved Burial Bleak. His creativity and relentless curiosity were in full play. Props also to his ‘support act’ – alter ego KY-10 – half an hour of ambient techno and spoken word – the story of a seagull called Hrafn meeting with the ocean through the medium of jellyfish. Energising and enchanting and totally transporting.

Elbow was a different sort of thing – we drove down to Manchester and stayed the night as an early birthday present. This was our second time at Castlefield Bowl (after Bloc Party a few years ago) and we were once more blessed with glorious sunshine. Support act The Slow Readers Club were strong – they were new to me, but on the same sonic spectrum as Editors/Future Islands/Joy Division. Elbow emerged at sunset and played two hours of absolute belters. I was moved to tears by penultimate tune My Sad Captains; one of my favourites, and the song I used as a lullaby when my children were young enough to want such things.

Oh, long before
You and I were born
Others beat these benches with their empty cups
To the night – and its stars
To be here and now, and who we are
Another sunrise with my sad captains
With who I choose to lose my mind
And if it’s so we only pass this way but once…
What a perfect waste of time

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A quick storytelling post on the back of another Verbalise at the Brewery Arts Centre. The slots are 4 minutes, and I’d struggled to find a piece I liked that fit that time frame – despite having loads at 1-2 minutes and several at 5-6 minutes. Eventually I settled on The Talking Skull; originally from Cameroon, I think, and a story I’d known for a long time before I started telling any myself – and one I heard completely reinvented by Nick Hennessey when I was on the storytelling course.

While keeping the structure the same, Nick moved the action to the gibbets and heaths of old England, bookending it with singing and drums and a clutch of corbies. I’m nowhere near drumming and I’ll never be a singer, but his translocation of the story was so deft and absolutely something to learn from. I shifted mine to the mosses of south Lakeland and used a Baron of Kendal for the villain. It’s a fantastic wee piece and I loved telling it – and I loved exploring how the bones of a story can hang with different skins. That’s something to remember.

My son drew the backdrop for the projector – much obliged that lad – and many thanks to Ann The Poet for the photo.

I’ve just rediscovered this – posted on Youtube almost 10 years ago (!) for my friend Kirstin who teaches English at secondary school. She asked loads of her friends to record their favourite poems for her class, and this was my choice: the shattering Autopsy by Brian Turner. I don’t know why I didn’t post it at the time, but I’m very happy to do so now:

Something a little different today: I’m delighted to share this video for my friend Iain and his band Red Flag Waltz. One of the things that made working on this so interesting (apart from the song being a proper banger*) is the small fact that Iain, not to mention the rest of the band, are based in Japan. They filmed each other with mobile phones at rehearsal and sent me the footage, plus a load of shots from their various gigs. A few days later and this is what we cooked up for new single And It Goes:

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* I’ve worked on a lot of music videos, as both camera assistant and as editor. It only takes a couple of listens to know whether you’re in for a good week or a loooooooong week. Thankfully And It Goes was a joy from top to tail.

Another storytelling update! This week I told a story in school for the first time – popping down to tell The Six Blind Men & The Elephant to my son’s class, who are looking at Buddhism. It’s a lovely wee school and the kids were very welcoming, a string of high-fives lined up on the way in and the way out. I’d planned a straightforward telling with some questions to follow, but once we were in the moment I started calling on the kids for ideas of what the blind men thought of the different parts of the elephant. They loved getting involved, which is a lesson for future tellings. Afterwards we had a fantastic chat about the importance of sharing – and of knowing how other perspectives can deepen and strengthen our own knowledge – and then we went round the class, imagining how the bits of our own favourite animals might resemble something completely different. It was a lot of fun.

I was packing up when they asked me for another story, and their teacher kindly gave me the time to tell it. I shared Gobbleknoll, and this is where the fluidity of storytelling showed itself so marvellously – even as I was telling it, I sanitised the tale and teased out the bloodier elements – and I thought nothing of stopping to expand or explain something, even to spell out some words. My knowledge of the story and my prior tellings gave me the freedom to tell it for this particular audience on this particular day. That was exhilarating and wonderful and fun and right. The kids loved Rabbit and his stone shoes and his ears tied down. Gobbleknoll has nothing to do with Buddhism – I could have told The Vain Crane or The Tigers & The Strawberry – but it went over well.

I’m learning several more stories at the moment – Aioga, The Name, Three Golden Heads Of The Well – and more and more, I’m finding my own ideas and instincts stepping in. Adding a few words of description here, or a colour there – adjusting a clunky dynamic between two characters – expanding or reducing dialogue. A story is not a box with walls, but a gateway – a road.

I’m learning.

A quick post in celebration of communities, no matter how small: having finished my storytelling course back in March, I recently met up with my classmates for the first of an irregular and very informal story circle. We met at Kendal Castle towards the end of the heatwave, with just the thinnest edge of cold creeping into the evening. It seems to be a wonderful year for swifts, and a score or more of them barrelled overhead. I told The Magic Bowls, which I first heard on Jay Leeming’s superlative Crane Bag podcast, then later found online.

I’m understanding more and more the looseness and freedom of storytelling; to let the story find its own shape in the space between the teller and the audience. I added quite a lot about the man and his wife at the beginning, because I wanted more love and empathy than the written version suggests – I wanted him to have a reason to come home, rather than keep on walking. I invented descriptions for the tree spirits, with moss for hair and snailshell eyes. Jay’s version turns the burly men into barbers and I kept hold of that, because it’s perfect. I added some participation in the banquet scenes, calling on the audience for their favourite meals: ‘Yes! They had pizza there too, covered in basil and oozing mozzarella!’ Stories evolve. A storyteller needs to give them space to change and grow and flow.

I don’t know how long it took to tell The Magic Bowls – only that it was my longest piece so far, and by some distance. Perhaps 20 minutes? I probably could have timed it or something, but also: much of my joy in storytelling is how ephemeral it is. In a world where so many things are digital and pinned into pixels forever, I like the fleeting moments. I talked too fast at times I think. I need to learn to dwell in some images for longer, not least to vary the pace throughout. I reckon this will come with experience.

Our circle will meet again in a month or two – no idea what I’ll tell, but I’ve a huge list of stories to learn, stories that really sing to me; stories of trees and bees, stories of loss and belonging, and stories which might not be stories at all, half-images summoned from the depths of murky memory. Leviathans inside us all – born with stories already in the cords of our beings.

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There was a great grey lump of a hill that ate people…

…and Rabbit’s Grandmother told him never to go there, and Rabbit being Rabbit he went there as soon as he could, and he thundered his paw on the flank of that hill and called out, ‘Ho! Ho, Gobbleknoll! Open up! Show yourself! I want a word with you…’

…but Gobbleknoll knew Rabbit was trouble, and Gobbleknoll stayed shut.

So begins Gobbleknoll, a short folktale I came across in an Alan Garner collection and originally from the Sioux people. I performed it at the Brewery open mic last night, making for my first public telling, and first time performing since the Stealing Thunder storytelling course.

I added some bits and removed some bits – an extra beat in the middle, and a tweak to the end. Stories evolve. They flow like water from person to person to person, always changing and yet always water. I loved giving the story space to breathe – feeling it settle into the contours and corners of the room. It seemed to go over okay – lots of people spoke to me at the interval or after – most simply stating how good it was to hear a folktale. Adults aren’t given many opportunities to be children, and that’s one of the great gifts of storytelling. Storytelling shuts the door on the scream of life, if only for a moment.

Next up I’m reuniting with my peers from the story course… we’re forming informally, meeting irregularly in a circle to share new work. I’m preparing a story called The Magic Bowls for that one – it has the most wonderful twist.

Storytelling then. Feels like I’ve begun. If I get the chance, I’ll record my take on Gobbleknoll and pop the audio on here.

Open up.

I want a word with you.

I’ve recently finished a 10-week storytelling course run by Emily Hennessey and Nick Hennessey of Stealing Thunder storynights. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. It’s taken me a while to process to the point that I can write something about it, and in truth I am still digesting, still chewing it over.

Readers of this blog will know I have a longstanding fascination for myths, legends and folktales – that is after all the substance at the heart of The Visitors – but this was the first time I’d ever explored performance skills in any depth. I loved being challenged physically and emotionally and narratively. I loved having my barriers knocked down and becoming something of a child again – finding wonder. I loved learning how folk tales strip away the layers and layers of window dressing we pile onto our stories, opening up the bones of what a story truly says. I loved the simplicity of it; how the arrangement of those bones bring meaning and comfort and magic. Many tellers, many tellings… I learned how stories float like seeds, and different storytellers bring radically different interpretations. I learned some of how the body and voice capture the story, can make it even more simple – a gesture, an almost imperceptible tilt of the eyebrows or the shoulders.

In truth I’m still reeling with it, still counting the distance travelled in those 10 weeks. I finished by telling The Pear Drum, an old English folktale – a caution to naughty children. I loved that too. I loved watching my peers on the course tell their stories – Bridie with Toller’s Neighbours and a line of lanterns in the dark – Ginny and the Grimms, clutching a severed head and dripping three drops of blood on the stairs – Jules and a selkie story, a seal pup in an apron. Magic happened in that horseshoe of chairs.

Above all, I loved the immediacy and urgency of the dynamic between the story, the storyteller and the audience. It happens in a heartbeat and is gone. For all the work I’ve done in prose, screenplay and film, for all my work in screen editing and story editing, for all the books I’ve read and words I’ve written – I don’t think I’ve felt so connected to the pulse of story that beats in us all. Story is in our DNA, knotted in the fibres of our souls. Story is the thing that makes us human.

I don’t quite know what to do with all of this just yet – only that I want to do something, I need to do something. This course has really lit a fire in me. I want to stay alight.

D’you know what I haven’t written about for a while? Music, that’s what. I’m always on the hunt for music I can work to, whether that’s writing or editing. It must be instrumental, or near enough, because voices are distracting – it needs to be tonally consistent, but not bland, not wallpaper. I like a regular, driving pace, something to push me along, but nothing manic. And if all that wasn’t enough, I have to actually like it too – enough to listen to hundreds of times, which I absolutely will. I’ve probably listened to Come On Die Young and Lift Your Skinny Fists many thousands of times, and (old age permitting) will listen to them many thousand more. I essentially want music to carve out a cave that I can work in, and emerge, blinking, several hours later, with something done.

On the turntable at the moment:

Yes please. I love a computer game soundtrack, with particular nods to past and present favourites Botanicula, Fez and Thomas Was Alone. Creaks is another darkly surreal delight from the mighty Amanita Design, and it’s great: track after track of brooding, playful, mysterious trip-hop, true to itself and served up sleek as hell by Hidden Orchestra. I’m a fan.

Jon Hopkins next. Ritual is a brilliant record – essentially a single 40-minute piece of music that builds through phases like a rising tide, a dream, mesmeric and transporting, finally breaking and washing out into the light. It’s completely immersive.

Three records in particular have been the soundtrack for writing my new novel. I mentioned the new Godspeed You Black Emperor record in a previous post, and it’s still very much doing the rounds. Six months later and that concert is ringing in my ears. Get it listened folks.

The second is the self-titled debut record by Irish-American folk group The Gloaming. Singing in Gaelic (and thereby circumventing my no-vocal rule) this record serves a compass for me – no matter my emotional state when I sit down to write, the first notes, the first few seconds and I’m settled back into a writing headspace. Just give me a sea to sail on.

The third is Erland Cooper. I’m a fan of all his work, but in particular Hether Blether, Folded Landscapes and most recently Carve The Runes Then Be Content With Silence (which I wrote about in my last post). I’m only now discovering the vast world of modern classical, and in all truth I find a lot of it quite similar – there’s a sort of cookie-cutter piano noodling that crops up again and again. You know the one. It’s such a relief then to find groups like Jack McNeill’s Propellor Ensemble or Benji Bower and the Terra Collective. I like Cooper for the arrangement of strings, which never do quite what I’m expecting, for the snippets of field recordings and poetry, and for the odd electronic snip or surge that brings his music into a new realm altogether.

Last for now – I’m a recent convert to Christine & The Queens. Late to the party I know, and not for writing – much too involved and demanding – but aren’t they bloody wonderful?