Where do stories start?

Also, why doesn’t buttercup rule the world?

Every writer I know might give a different answer to where stories start. For me, it’s always with an image. For example, with Sigrene’s Bargain with Odin, I saw a little girl, ragged and neglected-looking. She was clutching a horse’s ear in a way that looked quite uncomfortable for the horse. Who was this child? What was her story? And who was the patient horse enduring the ear-pulling?

Advance notice: If you’re in Victoria, please join me on May 2, where I’ll be reading from Sigrene’s Bargain with Odin at Russell Books, 747 Fort Street. Thanks, Planet Earth Poetry!

For me, stories are like mountain ranges. They’re there. I can see them, stamp around in the foothills and look up. I don’t create mountain ranges. Stories aren’t an exercise in construction: here’s one peak, and here’s the forest leading up to the mountain, let’s colour this foreground dark green and say the trees are mainly Western white pine with lodgepole pine and mountain hemlock at the higher elevations.

Best-selling spiritual author Richard Rudd suggests that writers don’t make up the worlds they write about at all, they just tune into them and describe them. When a friend first mentioned this, I laughed with delight; it was so in keeping with what I’d always felt.

Stories are how we make sense of life. It’s a rare soul who watches day after day slip by in smoothness and unruffled harmony. No money worries, no relationship issues. In fact, I don’t know anyone with a life like this. What I see around me is an individual in her early forties who gets so sick she can’t work anymore. How will she cope? Is she dealing with a genetically linked disease? Is there treatment for it? A teenager goes off to live with her dad. She disowns all her mom’s family members and even her mom’s friends, one of whom she’s known since birth. Why? These unanswered questions hurt like crazy. Dear friends who’ve lived on Pender Island for thirty-five years are preparing to move; their circumstances have changed. These are the facts, ma’am. Just the facts. What are the narratives we create around them?

Photo by Tualatin Soil & Water Conservation District

Take buttercup. I know it’s not an obvious intuitive leap, but bear with me. Up by the gate where I’ve buried Kira’s ashes, I’ve been trying to clear an area twenty feet by twenty of invasive buttercup and quack grass. For several years, I called the area my wild garden but it became apparent that the charming plants I’d tucked in there had been smothered, eaten and murderously disappeared by the aforesaid buttercup and quack grass. I didn’t want Kira’s site to be a miserable mess. Westcoast Seeds has a low-growing wildflower seed they sell as an alternative lawn mix. That’s what I wanted to see, some sweet pops of colour for the local pollinators, a nice sanctuary for tree frogs.

Why doesn’t buttercup rule the world? It propagates by seeds and stolons that stealth out and form new plants. The root system is the most stubborn and persistent I’ve ever encountered, worse than Himalayan blackberries. Roots that have been buried upside down for three months won’t compost sweetly, like every other plant in creation, no, these boyos send up half a dozen new plants. With blackberry, you dig the roots three times and they’re finished. The existence of buttercup has become a waving red flag to the sweetness of my temper.

However, yesterday, when I finished splitting firewood, I went up to my mud patch to work. Even though on this strip I’ve cleared buttercup at least six times, I let myself relax into the rhythm. The sun was directly on this area when I started weeding. But at this time of year, the sun’s low in the sky. Big firs blocked the rays. Pretty soon I was working in the shade and then it started to be hard to see. I’d left my weeding a bit late.

But wait, what the story I was telling myself? I was saying, wow, this is an exercise in patience. Day after day I’ve come out for ten minutes, an hour, half an hour. Not every day but a few times a week. In the growing dark, as I stabbed my trowel in, probing down and down for white buttercup root, I was feeling how root-free and friable I’d made the muck. This was a thorough job. In all its mudhole glory, this so-called wild garden was turning into a decent spot to sow seed.

Also, it was a fine thing I hadn’t wasted this effort by sowing seed before Christmas. It had been a temptation. I never expected the weeding could possibly go on so long. As well as the buttercup, the quack grass was also making a comeback. Grabbing them both in their regrowth phase was going to greatly increase my chances of success in making this a delightful wildflower area.

So when I creaked up from my weeding stool, it was a sparkly tale of encouragement I was telling myself. A Yay, you story. I scraped off my mucky trowel and banged clots of mud from my rubber boots. My weeding wasn’t remotely finished but hey, it was interesting to see how heartened this spin on the buttercup narrative made me feel.

The New Yorker

When I first went out to look for the exact right spot to dig a hole for Kira’s ashes, I’d thought behind the gate. But standing up there, looking around, it seemed to me she wouldn’t want to get stuck somewhere she couldn’t see. (I know, it’s ridiculous to talk about a small urn of ashes as if it was going to see!) Where do you want to be? I asked my Furface. The storyline was clear. There was a spot where Kira, if she were present as a dog, would be able to watch over the comings and goings on the driveway. So that’s where I dug the hole.

The last picture I took of Kira

Is the buttercup saga finished? Nope. But one story leads to another and to another. They interweave. The ragged girl who started off Sigrene’s Bargain turned out to be a significant character in the Jorrie series, the magic Young Adult books I’m having such a good time writing. The horse Sleipnir turned up there, too, old and scarred but indomitable. And no, Sleipnir doesn’t have eight legs, that’s a metaphor for speed and power. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

How can we make sense of this perilous world? Is the story I need to hear today, Have courage, things will work out? Do I believe that on some deep quantum level, everything is connected and makes radiant sense?

Be careful how you are talking to yourself because you are listening.

Lisa M. Hayes

What’s the story you’re telling yourself today? Come on, you can’t get much sillier than me telling you about buttercups!

Sleipnir, Odin’s horse in Norse mythology, who in my story, became Sigrene’s much-loved horse. Facebook image