{"id":2103,"date":"2022-06-20T05:19:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-20T13:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=2103"},"modified":"2022-06-20T05:19:00","modified_gmt":"2022-06-20T13:19:00","slug":"the-importance-of-folklore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2022\/06\/20\/the-importance-of-folklore\/","title":{"rendered":"The Importance of Folklore"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tonight I\u2019m reading Simon J Bronner\u2019s The Practice of Folklore. <\/i>Essays toward a Theory of Tradition<\/i><\/a>. I want to rant about the importance of folklore and folkways to our lives. They help us reach out to people and share. They are also magically important in novels, which is why I\u2019m researching the theory right now.<\/p>\n

In a chat somewhere online a few days ago, someone stated very firmly that they had invented a fantasy world and that what we knew of this world didn\u2019t apply. In theory, this is true. In practice, however, we (human beings) have things that connect us to the world., In novels, storylines that kinda reflect what we think we know are easier to read. If we think that very green grass means much rain and wonderful grazing (I\u2019ve been dreaming of Ireland) then if we have a wet climate with much grass and a character walks out onto it and it\u2019s hard and dry and fractured, like the Australian outback during a drought, it will be really hard to envisage the world. If we talk about living in houses and how deep the foundations are and then show those houses floating, foundationless, in mid air, we will be fretted and want to find easier reading. One way that some of the bets writers hold worlds together while still challenging what we think we know is to use folklore, popular culture, and folkways. Michael Chabon\u2019s The Yiddish Policeman\u2019s Union<\/em><\/a> does this rather wonderfully from one direction and his The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay<\/em> <\/a>does it just as wonderfully from another.<\/p>\n

And yet\u2026 most folklore studies are descriptions of folklore. I have a pile of photocopied jokes from my father and I used it when someone asked me for a piece on folklore, twentysomething years ago. I described the collection and gave some examples of the jokes. That was my father\u2019s folk collection. My own is food and foodways. I have a rather nice little collection of community cookbooks.<\/p>\n

These descriptions and studies are tremendous for writers. They are such vast resources. Nevertheless, it\u2019s studies such as Bonner\u2019s that teach us how to use folklore most effectively. I\u2019m reading Bronner\u2019s book now in order to better analyse fiction, but I own the book as much for my own writing as for my analysis of others.<\/p>\n

The more we understand the role folklore, folkways and all their related subjects play in our lives, the more fuel there is for writing and the more joy there is in reading. And now you know what I\u2019m working on for the next three months. Folklore and folkways in just one writer\u2019s work. It\u2019s part of my big project, the sequel to my Story Matrices work. And it\u2019s so much fun. If I can understand theories of tradition, just think of what it does for my own novels, how enriched my worldbuilding will be.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s one single extra big and very important component. Nancy Jane Moore reminded me that I promised a post today and told me that it was Juneteenth. Juneteenth is very alien to me, culturally, because I\u2019m Jewish Australian. Australia\u2019s colonial heritage is very different from that of the US. When the US was enmeshed in civil war, we were still a bunch of British colonies. We have our own history and our own days that are equally difficult, but none of them are Juneteenth.<\/p>\n

When I find something that foreign and that interesting and that holds that much historical importance, one very good way to explore it is by understanding the folkways and folklore associated with it. It\u2019s a part of cultural respect.<\/p>\n

I can’t tell you what to do or think about Juneteenth, but I can tell you that if you want to understand it, you look at the words and the traditions of those whose day it is. That\u2019s step one in learning to tell stories about people from different backgrounds to ourselves. It\u2019s not a matter of learning a date and noting that it\u2019s important, it\u2019s a matter of finding out why it\u2019s important, how it\u2019s important and what cultural fabric surrounds it. Bronner\u2019s book doesn’t talk about Juneteenth at all, but his chapters on other subjects help give me a path to follow as I respectfully start learning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tonight I\u2019m reading Simon J Bronner\u2019s The Practice of Folklore. Essays toward a Theory of Tradition. I want to rant about the importance of folklore and folkways to our lives. They help us reach out to people and share. They are also magically important in novels, which is why I\u2019m researching the theory right now. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[335,6],"tags":[171,530,175,528,529],"class_list":["post-2103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-fiction","tag-books","tag-folklore","tag-holidays","tag-michael-chabon","tag-simon-j-bronner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2104,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103\/revisions\/2104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}