The Lewisonian Confusion
Hello friends,
And so it began. The long awaited day: the day that brought both trepidation and excitement to my thoughts; the day that officially began my reason for moving far to the south; the first day of classes!
And it was….!
Nice.
Nothing too crazy, just nice.
I had two classes presented by Dr. Sobol today, one exploring the individual styles of telling personal stories and the other focusing on the psychological benefit of stories for a person: both classes seem like they will challenge me appropriately and help to increase my awareness of the art of storytelling, but will not overload me to any unreasonable extreme.
The best news, however, is that I anticipate learning a host of new stories to share and new techniques to explore. I don’t know what will happen to my technique through all this, but I’m excited to find out, and even more excited to share my learning with all of you.
Another interesting bit involves my work with Alice in Wonderland. As you may know, I am beginning to work on creating a performance of the classic story (a story for all ages), and as part of this I am researching Lewis Carroll’s (Charles Dodgeson’s) life. Of all I’ve learned so far, what I find most interesting is the complete lack of agreement about his life. There are different stories about what “actually” happened from Dodgeson’s Diaries, later interviews with Dodgeson, interviews with Alice Lidell (the girl who stars in the stories), and the meteorological report (it is recorded as being a rainy day when the Alice stories were supposedly first told to the Lidell children who were sitting outside, or in a boat, depending upon which account you read/hear). I had no idea there was so much academic controversy over the facts of this man’s life, and it is fascinating to learn the many different stories and learn the scholar’s arguments for believing the account they support.
What do I believe? I do not know yet. I have no intention of deciding upon a story about the author of the story until I have read much more and worked with the text enough to believe I finally have begun to understand the many nuances in the piece: at which point I will probably choose the story I find most artistically interesting – the story I feel best coincides with whatever “truth” I settle on in the piece; for that, I (currently) believe, is the goal of art, particularly storytelling, to find the truth of a piece, regardless of the facts.
Best,
Lethan