Border Countries

By Lesley Wheeler, Henry S. Fox Professor of English, Washington and Lee University

Editor’s Note: Lesley participated a three-day digital storytelling workshop we led last August at Washington and Lee. In this piece, she reflects on what led her to transform her poetry into a video, and how she plans to work with digital storytelling as an educator.

I was fed a steady diet of stories as a child, and I became them. Many were about my mother’s childhood. She emigrated from Liverpool, England, in the sixties and married an American, so "daughter of an immigrant" has always been one of the ways I defined myself. Like her, I talked funny, held a fork differently, and felt like a stranger.

Because of my mother, another phrase I’ve always identified with is "book person." She handed me fairy tales and other books about spirited children getting into scrapes. Soon I moved on to long novels with fairy tale structures lurking behind them, including Jane Eyre. I look for those structures, still, in my own life. They’re not objectively true. Midlife is not a forest and my poems are not magic incantations. And you have to be able to change the story you’re telling about yourself, even if that shift is uncomfortable, or you’ll never grow up. Yet those stories still have power.

I was thinking about change—and, not coincidentally, reading narrative theory—when I drafted the poem that evolved into the digital story "Absentation." April is National Poetry Month, and some writers try to draft a poem a day. I had learned over the previous two Aprils how productive that can be. A daily artistic practice can crack you open. Some days I failed, but I also produced surprising poems, lines worth working on. So for April 2014, I decided to try a new twist. I would write a long poem in a section a day, mining Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale for prompts. My plucky heroine would be fictional but, not unlike me, a little younger, just entering middle age (I was in my mid-forties). She would be dissatisfied with her life, full of desires, but at the same time afraid of change. As in my own life, the quest narrative would be true and not true. She would make big decisions as she paced a figure-eight trail through the early spring woods. Her walk would take the thirty days of April, represented by sequential blossomings and a greening leaf canopy, but also just a few hours. She might emerge looking exactly the same, but she would be transformed.

I gave myself a few other constraints. I would draft a section every day, but it could be any length, jotted down in any medium. I’d try to make each one different from the last in form and style, and I’d take lots of real hikes so I could track and incorporate seasonal developments. I would also use one of Propp’s “functions” of the Russian folktale each day as a starting point, sometimes quoting from it, sometimes not. Here’s the first function, quoted from the 1968 edition, translated by Laurence Scott:

I. ONE OF THE MEMBERS OF A FAMILY ABSENTS HIMSELF FROM HOME. (Definition: absentation. Designation: β.)

1. The person absenting himself can be a member of the older generation (β1). Parents leave for work (113). “The prince had to go on a distant journey, leaving his wife to the care of strangers” (265). “Once, he (a merchant) went away to foreign lands” (197). Usual forms of absentation: going to work, to the forest, to trade, to war, “on business.”

2. An intensified form of absentation is represented by the death of parents (β2).

3. Sometimes members of the younger generation absent themselves (β3). They go visiting (101), fishing (108), for a walk, out to gather berries (244).

Poetry scholars might say I was working here in a mode between lyric and narrative, introspection and plot-building. I began to play around with punctuation and other visual elements as I composed, looking for ways of representing the border state I and my character occupied. The slash marks in the print version of “Absentation” reflect that experimentation. I eventually called the whole thirty-part long poem Propagation, in a wild flash of inspiration.

Sustaining the project was hard; revising it later and finding the right publisher were harder. My StoryCenter workshop at Washington and Lee, however, re-immersed me in the more playful state in which I’d conceived the project. I take a lot of snapshots—and in April 2017, I prepared for the workshop by revisiting and photographing local woods scenes—but I’d never worked in video before. I’m no technological wizard, either, although I’m game to try something new. I watched a lot of videopoems by way of preparation, at the Moving Poems site and on individual poets’ web pages, but still, I had no real idea what might happen, once I crossed the border into the forest.

The images that ended up illuminating “Absentation” were surprising. The original words evoke the edge of a wood, with references to paths and trails not occurring until later sections, yet photographs of literal tracks through trees ground the videopoem, as if they were latent in the printed words all along. I wrote elsewhere about how a picture of bloodroot flowers blooming brightly against dark leaf litter suddenly made sense of the “ruminating stars” line—this builds a visual metaphor on top of the verbal ones. The whorls of a fallen log also became an anchor point for my video, I think because they suggest introspection, the mind turning in on itself.

I wrote “I think” because I’m the last person who can evaluate the success of “Absentation” either as a print or a visual poem, much less assess the relation between versions in different media. I labored too long over both to see them objectively, plus I bring a ton of contextual information to the poem that’s unavailable to other audiences. Yet making a videopoem from a poem designed for print felt to me like a free translation; inspired by words, I nevertheless attempted a new piece of art whose meanings are, ultimately, different.

With help from the IT and Digital Humanities people at Washington and Lee, the students in my composition course this fall will create digital stories about their own border-crossings, and I’m excited about this experiment. These students, however, are novice authors, most of whom have little creative writing experience—for some, generating scripts for videos will be a completely new adventure. I do have in mind, however, a future assignment that will come closer to my own effort. In a poetry workshop in the winter of 2018, I’ll assign a video storytelling project to students who have already been immersed in the shaping of lines and stanzas for print media. The challenge will be to take a complete poem—a page or two of polished work—and translate it, making a new work of art that deploys its own metaphors and possesses separate meanings. I hope turning poems into videopoems teaches my workshop students some technical and artistic skills. Another goal, however, is to promote the essential work of figuring out what their beautiful words mean. What moods do they wish to evoke, and what arguments about the world do their rhymes and similes imply?   

In both versions of “Absentation,” what’s at stake are theories about time and how we occupy it. For my protagonist, linear time will come loose. She’ll think of herself as multiple people simultaneously: a girl setting out in the world; a middle-aged woman who doesn’t know if she’s pregnant and, if she is, whether she wants the baby. In a sense, that’s wishful thinking—a person has to make choices, and age, and die. Natural time, however, does loop back on itself. April comes again. I’ve lost so many chances and hopes and people, but spring persists, and that consoles me.

Plus, like many others, I’m still made of fairy tales, and it’s still fun to watch them unspool. I’m a hungry old witch in the making. I barely outsmarted Bluebeard, but managed to escape with seconds to spare. I’m also a wily girl stitching together my first videopoem. Here’s hoping I can keep slipping in and out of stories for decades to come, and keep finding new ways to tell them.

Learn more about Lesley Wheeler’s work: https://lesleywheeler.org/, @LesleyMWheeler.