Meet our Contributor: Chris Worthman
| Chris states: I write stories about adolescents struggling to become who they want to be in a world not of their making. I’m a teacher, father, champion of youthful brilliance, and author of narratives with strong characters and smart plot lines that speak to the complexity of adolescent existence and the issues that shape their worlds. I'm a proud Chicagoan of forty years, transplanted from a small town in central Indiana. I came to fiction writing after over thirty years of teaching at all levels--elementary, middle school, high school, and college. When I'm not teaching or writing, I support my neighborhood school and get outside no matter the weather for nature and urban hikes. |  |
Saving Fiction in Where the World Ends by Christopher Worthman
I discovered the novels of British author Geraldine McCaughrean by chance. I was surfing the Internet, wiling away my time, reading blog book reviews, when I came upon one for The White Darkness. Like any good review, it piqued my interest in the book (Of course, vice versa, a good review can also dash a reader’s interest). From The White Darkness, I moved on to other McCaughrean young adult novels, reading enough of them to know American adolescents are missing out on a first-rate storyteller. When I got to Where the World Ends (Herein WWE), I wasn’t satisfied when I finished. I wasn’t ready to move on. I reread it… again and again.
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WWE is historical fiction, based on a true event that I suspect even most British youth have never heard of. In 1727, eight boys and three men left their homes on the island of Hirta in the St. Kilda archipelago for Warrior Stac (aka Armin Island), a much smaller island (more like a rock sticking out of the sea) a few miles away. As part of an annual journey of two to three weeks, the boys and men—fowlers—were going to gather birds, bird eggs, bird feathers, and bird oil. Most of what they collected went to pay rent to the owner of the archipelago, who lived about forty-five miles away in Harris, Scotland. What wasn’t paid out as rent helped sustain the two hundred or so residents of Hirta.
Life on Warrior Stac was lived vertically. The rocky cliffs rose nearly two hundred meters out of the North Atlantic Sea. The fowlers ascended and descended its walls sixteen hours a day in search of birds and eggs. They lived in the larger hallowed out crevices of the stac—caves of sorts—subsisting on, as you might guess, birds and bird eggs, and using bird oil for lamp fuel.
The 1727 fowlers’ story, as both history and fiction, is that no one came to retrieve them after two or three weeks. We learn this early in the three-hundred page novel, with the remaining two-hundred-seventy-some pages about the nine months after, including the harsh North Atlantic Sea winter they survived. During those months, the fowlers continued to work, and the adolescents continued to carry on, as they’re want to do, arguing, missing home, and grasping for some substance of meaning that would explain what had happened. The younger ones cried for their mothers. The older ones jockeyed for authority. Silently and as a group, they asked what had happened, had they been forgotten, forsaken? Had the world ended? Something we might all have wondered if it were us. Something I would want my students to consider if I were teaching the novel. To step into those kids’ shoes, what must that have been like?
The 1727 fowlers’ story, as both history and fiction, is that no one came to retrieve them after two or three weeks. We learn this early in the three-hundred page novel, with the remaining two-hundred-seventy-some pages about the nine months after, including the harsh North Atlantic Sea winter they survived. During those months, the fowlers continued to work, and the adolescents continued to carry on, as they’re want to do, arguing, missing home, and grasping for some substance of meaning that would explain what had happened. The younger ones cried for their mothers. The older ones jockeyed for authority. Silently and as a group, they asked what had happened, had they been forgotten, forsaken? Had the world ended? Something we might all have wondered if it were us. Something I would want my students to consider if I were teaching the novel. To step into those kids’ shoes, what must that have been like?
McCaughrean wrote in the Afterword: “What you have been reading is a true story…and there again, it’s not. Fiction is elastic: it stretches to encircle true facts and then crimps them into shape to create Story.” That, in a couple of sentences, captures McCaughrean’s style and what she does so effectively—create stories so real it could be me or you in there. Her stories, whether wildly fictitious or holding to a historical line, read as everyday and natural as the lives her readers live, only her characters are living in the direst of situations.
What I’ve written here so far about Hirta and the fowlers is true to the historical record. The story McCaughrean wrote, although a fictionalized account of that record, reads as true. There is nothing extraordinary or fantastic in the literary sense in what she wrote. Yet, it’s as if we are reading about another planet, inhabited by imagined witches and sea beasts, and by real birds, lots of birds, big and small. Everything else about the tale, real and imagined, is mundane and depressing, with moments of environmental terror smattered on top of a cold, dreary, wet existence.
What I’ve written here so far about Hirta and the fowlers is true to the historical record. The story McCaughrean wrote, although a fictionalized account of that record, reads as true. There is nothing extraordinary or fantastic in the literary sense in what she wrote. Yet, it’s as if we are reading about another planet, inhabited by imagined witches and sea beasts, and by real birds, lots of birds, big and small. Everything else about the tale, real and imagined, is mundane and depressing, with moments of environmental terror smattered on top of a cold, dreary, wet existence.
It is the notion of what constitutes truth (fiction that conveys a truth or truths), and the role of story and memory as depicted in the novel, that keeps bringing me back to it. It is something much young adult literature is missing, that essential question, why do we tell ourselves stories, repeatedly? For our students, it is about getting them to ask more than why are we reading this. It is getting them to look at what stories we are constantly telling ourselves and why. We all have those stories. I’d like my students to recognize theirs.
No spoilers here about WWE. I’m not going to give away the plot or dénouement. I do want to make quick work of a couple of tropes that may pop into our heads when we read about adolescents trying to survive on a deserted island. First, the society the boys and men create does not break down and lead to chaos and violence. It does, however, crack and lead to disagreement, mistreatment, and emotional and psychological aggression. Quill, one of adolescents and the central character, is banished from the group for a while, and another, an adult, assumes religious authority and willingly uses it to emotionally and psychological abuse others and to hoard the most valuable resource: the tinderbox needed to start fires. Tense moments, yes, but they are reflections of the life being lived and not definitive of it.
No spoilers here about WWE. I’m not going to give away the plot or dénouement. I do want to make quick work of a couple of tropes that may pop into our heads when we read about adolescents trying to survive on a deserted island. First, the society the boys and men create does not break down and lead to chaos and violence. It does, however, crack and lead to disagreement, mistreatment, and emotional and psychological aggression. Quill, one of adolescents and the central character, is banished from the group for a while, and another, an adult, assumes religious authority and willingly uses it to emotionally and psychological abuse others and to hoard the most valuable resource: the tinderbox needed to start fires. Tense moments, yes, but they are reflections of the life being lived and not definitive of it.
Second, although there are tense moments of interpersonal disagreement and extreme physical duress, Warrior Stac life is mostly wet, cold, and mundane. The fowlers are used to the hard work and harsh conditions. They’re from North Atlantic Ocean island, and it’s 1727. They’re not used to boredom.
Other than the fact that what we’re reading really happened to boys and men in 1727, what makes this novel compelling is how much their survival is contingent on the stories the fowlers tell one another, particularly the stories Quill tells as keeper of stories, a designation bestowed on him for his penchant to respond to tension or chaos with a good yarn or anecdote. In moments like these, he asks, “Who wants a story?”
Stories become the lifeforce—individually and collectively, positively and negatively—that make the nine months of uncertainty of how and why they were abandoned, bearable,…that is, until the stories stop doing that. Stories hold the fowlers together until they tear them apart. In both cases, the stories are saving fictions.
Other than the fact that what we’re reading really happened to boys and men in 1727, what makes this novel compelling is how much their survival is contingent on the stories the fowlers tell one another, particularly the stories Quill tells as keeper of stories, a designation bestowed on him for his penchant to respond to tension or chaos with a good yarn or anecdote. In moments like these, he asks, “Who wants a story?”
Stories become the lifeforce—individually and collectively, positively and negatively—that make the nine months of uncertainty of how and why they were abandoned, bearable,…that is, until the stories stop doing that. Stories hold the fowlers together until they tear them apart. In both cases, the stories are saving fictions.
Saving fiction… Saving, in this use, is an adjective describing what fiction does for us. The term may be author John Gardner’s, although I couldn’t find anything online attributing it to him. It is used, however, by the Dragon in Grendel to describe Grendel’s reason for existence. Of Grendel, the Dragon says,
You improve them, my boy! Can’t you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves. (pp. 72-73)
As readers of Grendel know, Grendel is the monster of Beowulf fame. He, along with his mother, terrorizes the Danes until Beowulf kills him. Beowulf, in turn, is killed by a dragon, but his heroic deeds live on in the form of stories or saving fictions. As the Dragon tells Grendel, the caricature of him created by the Shaper—the clan storyteller—provides cultural and historical relevance to the Danes as a great, heroic people. Grendel’s existence is substance for the stories the clan draws on to define themselves as a people. In effect, they created a “Grendel” apart from the real Grendel to sustain them and their existence.
You improve them, my boy! Can’t you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves. (pp. 72-73)
As readers of Grendel know, Grendel is the monster of Beowulf fame. He, along with his mother, terrorizes the Danes until Beowulf kills him. Beowulf, in turn, is killed by a dragon, but his heroic deeds live on in the form of stories or saving fictions. As the Dragon tells Grendel, the caricature of him created by the Shaper—the clan storyteller—provides cultural and historical relevance to the Danes as a great, heroic people. Grendel’s existence is substance for the stories the clan draws on to define themselves as a people. In effect, they created a “Grendel” apart from the real Grendel to sustain them and their existence.
We all have our saving fiction: think creationist stories, stories about cultural and national identity, stories showing what is the true and proper way to live.
WWE’s saving fictions are not as grandiose or dramatic, not of the monster-tearing-neighbors’-limbs-off tales, where life and death hang in the balance. They are stories told to retrieve a life balance gone askew, stories of home and family meant to sustain the fowlers when it appears home and family have abandoned them. They are imaginings of love and commitment that rest not so much on truth as on hope in the face of all odds.
Quill, as keeper of stories, is called on to tell tales of Hirta life, of kin and dogs and sheep and daily life. He also brings forth myths of creation and perseverance. And he carries within him his own saving fictions of Murdina, his first crush, whose relationship with him exists only in his head. Fittingly, it was Murdina who revealed the power of stories to Quill. Her allure was her storytelling.
WWE’s saving fictions are not as grandiose or dramatic, not of the monster-tearing-neighbors’-limbs-off tales, where life and death hang in the balance. They are stories told to retrieve a life balance gone askew, stories of home and family meant to sustain the fowlers when it appears home and family have abandoned them. They are imaginings of love and commitment that rest not so much on truth as on hope in the face of all odds.
Quill, as keeper of stories, is called on to tell tales of Hirta life, of kin and dogs and sheep and daily life. He also brings forth myths of creation and perseverance. And he carries within him his own saving fictions of Murdina, his first crush, whose relationship with him exists only in his head. Fittingly, it was Murdina who revealed the power of stories to Quill. Her allure was her storytelling.
Not all saving fictions are good for everyone. Just ask Grendel. We all have these types of stories, too, or at least we have heard them: think those that set us against them or those that proffer an absolute way of being or particular beliefs, making non-doers and non-believers worthy of banishment if not death.
In WWE, they are often the things of superstition (witches and sea monsters), religious parables (Revelations and the end times), and omens of darkness. Ultimately, they strip the fowlers of reason and empathy and imbue them with fear and suspicion of one another. And when that happens, the stories of hope and longing dry up, as there is nothing left to hold onto in the face of what is happening.
In WWE, they are often the things of superstition (witches and sea monsters), religious parables (Revelations and the end times), and omens of darkness. Ultimately, they strip the fowlers of reason and empathy and imbue them with fear and suspicion of one another. And when that happens, the stories of hope and longing dry up, as there is nothing left to hold onto in the face of what is happening.
Near the end of WWE, Quill and readers are brought face-to-face with until-then imaginary Murdina. Quill and the others have returned home. Murdina wasn’t there but she returns. We have heard so much about her, that it feels odd to meet her in the novel’s last few pages. We learn, though, that it’s Murdina telling the story of the fowlers we just read. She says:
On the Western Isles of Scotland—maybe in other parts, too—the teller of a story must give credit to the storyteller from whom they first heard a tale. So. I who set this down had this story from Quilliam McKinnon of Hirta, and he told it only to me.
Thus, is the nature of saving fictions—born out of need to be told and passed on. In this case, it’s Quill’s story Murdina is telling. All this comes only after Quill had thought “the pretty lies of a storyteller had deserted him.” It takes Murdina to coax them back out and send them into the world as a measure of the strength and resolve of eight adolescents and three adults. Or was that McCaughrean? No matter. In this scheme, they are saving fictions. A fine truth for all of us to ponder. A fine idea to infuse in students.
On the Western Isles of Scotland—maybe in other parts, too—the teller of a story must give credit to the storyteller from whom they first heard a tale. So. I who set this down had this story from Quilliam McKinnon of Hirta, and he told it only to me.
Thus, is the nature of saving fictions—born out of need to be told and passed on. In this case, it’s Quill’s story Murdina is telling. All this comes only after Quill had thought “the pretty lies of a storyteller had deserted him.” It takes Murdina to coax them back out and send them into the world as a measure of the strength and resolve of eight adolescents and three adults. Or was that McCaughrean? No matter. In this scheme, they are saving fictions. A fine truth for all of us to ponder. A fine idea to infuse in students.
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