Tales by the Fireside

“Do you think you can tell what the character of a person is like by looking at the books in in the bookshelf?”

The man was poking about the room, picking up objects and putting them down. The room was the ground floor of the Loch Ness Barge on the Caledonian Canal - a place I had always wanted to explore. It was the venue of a story telling workshop co-hosted by the Scottish Waterways Trust. What better place to be but on the water?

It’s not the kind of barge that I grew up with living close to the Grand Union Canal in rural Northamptonshire. It might have started that way before they added decks to it.  It began life in 1937 as a steam powered dredging barge. It dredged for a decade or so before being transformed into a sea food restaurant. It now exists as an artists’ studio. How cool is that? Every so often the barge heads off up river, navigating the series of locks. We talked about whether a life on a boat meant that you avoided having to pay council tax.

I am an addict. There is no getting around it. A venue, a workshop, a note book and pencil and the opportunity to write something is all the lure I need.  

"Tales by the Fireside” is a series of storytelling workshops with the aim of creating stories about resilience and reclamation. Over the three weeks we will be creating the stories and learning how to tell them. The final event will be a fireside event at Dunain Community Woodland. Under the canopy of trees, beneath the sprinkling of a million stars perhaps, we will perform the stories we have written if we want to.

We talked about stories and why people tell them. I had a heads-up on this one being something of an expert on stories told by religions to pass on truth.

We talked about what makes a good story. It is something more than the content. The whole presentation side of it is full of tricks and traditions, the opening lines, the sweeping gestures and the theatre of audience involvement.

We got down to the first task – writing kennings.

I don’t know how I have got through my creative writing life without knowing about kennings. I make use of them frequently but never knew there was a name for them.

The word ‘kenning’ comes from the Old Norse verb að kenna, which means ‘to describe’ or ‘to understand’. Rather than use the word, the noun, the poet or the writer replaces it with a two word phrase that describes its nature or character. In epic Norse poetry the sea becomes the “whale road”, blood becomes “battle sweat” and an axe becomes a “bone breaker”. They are riddles in compact form, and sometimes you make the audience work a little to work out what they are.

We were left to come up with our own kennings. Maybe you can guess what some of these things are supposed to be.

A tongue licking tail lasher? – a dog, of course.

A wearer of many days? – an old person

A slip of silver scales? – a fish

A spell spinner? – a wizard

A spinner of thread? – a spider

The unblinking stare of the watcher of the night – the moon

OK you probably could do better. Feel free to post me your suggestions.

The next task was to use them in a story about a person or an object and a challenge to for them to overcome. The inclusion of kennings was a given. Some people, in my opinion used too many and there was no story to follow. The tutor praised everything. I am never sure I like merely being praised.

A boy, bone short and six summers old, set out one day when the yellow faced sun squatted in the corner of the sky.

“I shall catch myself a fish and eat a glorious meal,” he said.

The clever slips of silver scales, knew all about fishing rods. They knew how to avoid the hooks of poisoned promise.

And that’s as far as I got. I had planned for my squatting sun to crawl across the sky to the other horizon while the boy failed to catch a fish. I planned for my wearer of many days to pass on some sage advice. The boy chooses to think he knows better and ends up standing beneath the unblinking stare of the watcher of the night, as the slips of silver scales swim by. The nouns are supposed to be replaced with the descriptions, so the boy, the sun and hooks shouldn’t really be named. I am aware of that. For a first attempt it’s not bad.

This is all about me rehearsing for my retirement next summer. I will be filling my days with things like this. This is my practice run. There has been some talk in the household about a dog and about a PhD and about the absence of an ironing pile and the presence of a clean kitchen floor.

Who am I kidding? Even without the retirement rehearsal I would still be doing these kinds of things. Tomorrow it’s expressive movement at the Spectrum Centre.