Dom Coyote is the professional name of Dominic, my son, whose story-telling was first nurtured sat at Rosemary’s feet, hearing snippets of the latest book read aloud to him.
Category: General
Trawling the internet, researching libraries and databases, and occasionally from material sent to me, I discover things I did not know much about, or indeed at all! There can be more than one Discovery of the Day.
They’re beginning to bicker as they always do after a couple of days together … (Rosemary Sutcliff Diary, 18/6/88)
On June 18th Saturday a couple of people known to Rosemary Sutcliff visited ” … more or less separately . They’re beginning to bicker as they always do after a couple of days together, which is sad”.
… able to poke my nose out for a sniff of the garden at bed-time … (Rosemary Sutcliff Diary, 7/6/88)
June 7th Tuesday. Quite a nice day in a sultry sort of way & this evening was able for only the second time this year to poke my nose out for a sniff of the scents of the garden at bed-time.
Exploring the realm of virtual experience with Rosemary Sutcliff
The sharing of storytelling that writers do with readers is the dialogue of imagination. Rosemary Sutcliff lives, grows and acts and suffers in her stories. The worlds created in her imagination have had to stand in for the world of much everyday actuality. From her therefore we can learn what the imagination does, and how it allows us all to explore what’s possible, the realm of virtual experience.
In Rosemary Sutcliff’s world, heroes, heroines and readers alike walk a head taller than usual, as heroic warriors, to confront, like Drem in Warrior Scarlet, fearsome events as rites of passage and thus discover what is worth striving for. Readers have to expect to be spellbound in the tradition of storytelling that’s much older than reading and writing, when before the days of written records bards and minstrels were entrusted with the memory of a tribe. Rosemary Sutcliff is in this tradition; she says of herself that she’s `of the minstrel kind’. This in itself sets her apart from some of the more, apparently, throwaway casualness of some contemporary writing. In these days, when we’ve learned to look closely at the constructedness of narratives, she will still say that she knows when a story is `in’ her and `waiting to be told’.
Can Science Explain Why We Tell Stories? | The New Yorker
In the New Yorker, an intriguing article about the science of telling stories.
The interesting questions about stories, which have, as they say, excited the interests of readers for millennia, are not about what makes a taste for them “universal,” but what makes the good ones so different from the dull ones, and whether the good ones really make us better people, or just make us people who happen to have heard a good story …
… Good science is more like Proust than Mr. Popper’s Penguins; its stories startle us with their strangeness, but they intrigue us by their originality, and end by rewarding us with the truth, after an effort. It is the shock good stories offer to our expectations, not some sop they offer to our pieties, that makes tales tally, and makes comtes count. The story that tells us only that we like all kinds of stories lacks that excitement, that exclusionary power, which is the only thing that makes us want to hear stories at all.
Source: Can Science Explain Why We Tell Stories? | The New Yorker.
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 