Published in EDGE YK Issue 7: April/May 2013
Click on the picture to read the entire story in Edge Magazine
Fear and Longing in the Miner’s Mess
Author Archives: jgreen
Northern storytellers hit the road, spin a yarn
by JACK DANYLCHUK
Northern Journal
Tue, Jun 19, 2012
Spilling anecdotes and spouting tall tales, with plenty of body language for emphasis, a busload of Northern storytellers took to the road last week with the Northern Arts and Cultural Centre’s annual festival.
The theme this year is “Transitions,” Ben Nind, NACC director, told the opening night audience Friday at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre. “We challenge the tellers and the listeners to reveal themselves in the light, life and laughter of the stories.”
Opening the week-long festival in Yellowknife, Dawn Lacey riffed on buns; her own, “still firm at 60,” she joked, and the “overnight buns” she loves to bake: whole wheat and white, sweetened with honey, and her favourite, cinnamon, sticky with icing.
Buns were the perfect metaphor, creating an audience of hungry listeners by the time Paul Seesequasis took the stage.
Seesequasis, until recently a desk-bound arts bureaucrat, remarked on his own transition from writer to storyteller, and the difference between words on and off the page.
“I’m not really a storyteller,” he confessed, and read excerpts from his book, The Tobacco Wars, a faux history of Pocahontas, that takes Powhatan’s daughter from the forests of the New World to the fetid streets of 17th century London.
Anthony Foliot, introduced as “bard of the barge on the bay,” told stories drawn from his adventures with Skipper Dave as a deckhand with the East Arm Freighting Company. His delivery channeled the rhyming style of Robert Service and the good natured bombast of the Snow-King, the central character in Foliot’s annual winter performance piece on Yellowknife Bay.
Fort Smith raconteur Jim Green related an almost believable tale of a misplaced body, a bootlegger, a Yellowknife tow truck driver (who was an undertaker when opportunity dictated) and baffled police.
The story was lifted from a collection of stories that started as a novel but never made it to print. The book cover, a tapestry of Gold Range characters drawn by Walt Humphries, now decorates a CD that Green merrily sold at the end of his performance.
Michael Kusugak, Moira Cameron, Pat Braden, Judy Sharp, Scott McQueen and John B Zoe appeared Saturday afternoon and evening at the Heritage Centre café before the festival took to the road.
The tour passed through Behchoko on Monday, stopped in Fort Providence on Tuesday and then headed for Kakisa. The show closes in Fort Smith this Saturday after appearances in Hay River on Thursday and Enterprise on Friday.
“This is an exciting event both for the communities and the tellers from here at home and beyond,” said Nind. “Each concert is different and each story significant.”
North Paws – The Dogumentary
NORTH PAWS
Here’s another northern site I’m fond of and contributing to. North Paws is looking to tell the stories of Northern people and their experiences with Northern dogs. Above all else, it’s a site concerned with the welfare of dogs in the north. With an amazingly talented production team, this project will deliver some top notch products.
We`re looking for stories of the ancient world, stories of our living elders histories, and stories in modern times.
We want to bring to light the challenges, successes and positive efforts of people in the North who are living with dogs.
Here are some possible topics:
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Yellowknife Documentary Project
Yellowknife Documentary Project: “Ultra-cool”
I like this project because it welcomes ordinary folks to tell their Yellowknife stories. If you live in Yellowknife, used to live there, visited once and loved it or are purely a Yellowknife fan, you can get involved. The project team encourages people to collaborate to create a documentary about , what they call, “this ultra-cool city”.
They ask you to think about what you love about Yellowknife. What makes it unique? What makes it tick? What’s your best memory of the place? How has it affected your life? Then go ahead and put those thoughts on film. Make a video.
No experience is necessary. You can do it using the camera on your phone or a video camera. It doesn’t matter. “All videos and video-attempts are welcome.” Then you can share your video with others, with the whole doggone world, by uploading it to the YK Doc Project website. You and other fans can then comment on all the different video clips.
The project team says their goal “is to figure out which video clips resonate with fans.” And then, as more and more clips get added, different themes will emerge. It’s true, they will. And those themes “will inform the basis for a longer form documentary about Yellowknife”.
I like it. The fans become the filmmakers, collaborating to tell the Yellowknife story through the lens of their personal experiences, with their own voices, on camera. Living history by real people. Yeah!
Check out the site. So far, December 2011, my favorite video is the one about ravens.
Obama poem 2
Homemade Jelly
First I wanna tell you the all time number one
supreme ruler and winner of the red ribbon
for record breaking best music in my house
and that’s the ‘ping’ ‘ting’ ‘tick’ ‘tock’ ‘pock’
sounds of homemade jelly cooling in the jars
the jars cooling off shrinking the air inside
so’s the sealer lids get snapped down tight
Course by that time the kitchen is like to burst
so swole up with all those smells swapping around
it’s enough to confuse the most experienced of noses
like it was this weekend in my cabin in the woods
after I’d boiled and bottled high bush cranberry jelly
followed up with radiant red raspberry jelly and then
chokecherry jelly so strong it was pertnear black
And since I’m doing this in the month of March
I’m getting to replay all the fine outside hours
I put in last August and September and October
under a cacophony of raucous ducks and geese
sharing the berry patches with fat-sleek bears
My dog got such a snoot-full of warm bear all he
wanted was to race me to the truck, git gone
I’m thinking too about my grandson and granddaughter
getting to the age where they could be picking berries
how much I’d love to take them out in the bush with me
sharing the secrets of the berry people with them
where to find them, when to wait, how best to pick them
and how to lick your berry mustache with your berry tongue
after you bite into your berry jelly smeared berry bread
I’ll tell you what, you twist some arms on global warming
so my grandkids have some kinda future to look forward to
them and the rest of world’s mushrooming mob of grandkids
who are all going to need clean air, water, and food to eat
You do whatever you can do, kick a little butt if need be
I’ll take your kids out berry picking and we’ll make jelly
at your house and listen to the music as the jars cool down
I declare that this poem is my own work entirely and that I hold all publishing rights to it. I give Powell River Live Poets’ Guild the right to send my poem to President Obama on the occasion of his inauguration on January 20, 2009 and to publish this poem as part of “Poems for Obama from Canada” collection (or similar title) without any compensation beyond crediting me with authorship. Jim Green
Letter to Nancy Schildt
November 20, 2010
Nancy Schildt
First Unitarian Church of Honolulu
Dear Nancy;
One Sunday in October I somehow found myself not only inHawaiibut in the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu where a hot band was warming up of all things. Strange doings. Then, gradually, an almost empty building became filled with the warmth of humanity as a wonderful community came together. Then a vocal section got tuned up as well for goodness sakes. More and more warm folks filled the room. I didn’t feel like a stranger at all. I felt welcome. It felt like a fine place to be. I wondered if people were wondering about the goofy grin spread across my face. I felt so good I thought I might cry. Cry for happy.
All the visiting storytellers on Sunday felt that way. I know they did. You could feel it in their/our voices. We shared our stories with the pure joy of sharing. The way it should be. The way it was truly meant to be.
Afterwards, a young lady recently from Oregon came up to thank me. She said she had been debating whether or not to attend the Church for the first time that Sunday. She decided to come. And she was so glad she’d made that decision, she said . She was so happy to have shared that special occasion with everyone gathered there. She was overwhelmed, she said, at what had happened.
I told her that it was no great mystery. I told her it was pretty simple in fact.
“This,” I told her, “is exactly where you were meant to be today.”
And I realized while those words were rolling outta my mouth that the same was true for me. Right there in the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu was exactly where I was meant to be Sunday, October 17th 2010.
So I want to thank youNancy, and the whole congregation, for taking me in and sharing with me and allowing me to belong. What a magnificent gift.
Sincerely,
Jim Green
The Hanging of LeBeau
BIO
Jim in Alberta
Jim Green is a celebrated storyteller, poet, writer, broadcaster, and entertainer who has been living in the Northwest Territories for more than forty years. He’s a gyrating old counter-culture buzzard with a keen wit, sharp tongue, twinkling eye, and an infectious sense of wonder at this life. From Fort Smith, NWT, Jim is a jack-of-all-trades; adventurer, survivor and consummate bullshooter. His performances have been called entertaining, provocative and just a tad outrageous.
Rules of Engagement
Rules of Engagement
Now, way back in 1934 when the Twin Butte Mutual Telephone Company was organized, they had nineteen rules. Bylaws, they called them. The bylaws said as how it cost twenty five dollars for anybody to join up with the telephone outfit but since it was hard times, folks had three years to pay it off. But they had to cough up the dollar twenty a month fee plus twenty five cents a month for maintenance on top of that. She wasn’t cheap.
Another rule said everybody had to work four days a year digging post holes, resetting poles, stringing wire and stuff like that; whatever needed doing. If they figured they was too busy they had to pay two dollars a day for each of those four days for somebody else to do the work. Seemed only fair.
Anybody wanting to join up after the company was first formed had to pay for and install their own line and telephone.
So ol man Hoffman, out there, he ran her in a half a mile along the top wire of his three strand barbwire fence. Jacked up the voltage a bit with a couple more dry cells. He had two scrawny aspen poles propped up at the road allowance where he ran her up and over so’s he could get his tractor under. It worked pretty good most of the time but she’d short out pretty quick when a good rain blew in. Short out the whole party line; not just his own phone. So they made a rule about that, too. No fence post lines and you weren’t allowed to the run the wire on no trees either.
There was telephones around, Talk-a-phones, they called them, way before the Co-op phones or Alberta Government Telephones. Folks rigged’m up on fences so those quarter section lines of barbed wire became conduits linking up lonesome homesteads.
They were great daunting beasts, those bulky old boxes of hardwood, bolted to the kitchen wall. A wet-cell battery supplied enough juice to send a voice rattling off along the fence line and there was a magneto crank to fire the bell down the line on the phone you were calling.
The fence lines worked sometimes if everybody shut the road gates but communication required shouting through raging wind storm roaring but all in all it was plumb nice to get word of a school house supper, hear your neighbour found his steer or Molly Burton had a baby boy. A comfort is what it was, knowing you were connected with other folks.
excerpt from Party Line: telephone etiquette for rural folk