Silence is Golden for Writers

Stephanie Weaver

Sitting on damp hay in the back of a horse drawn carriage while it’s raining and cold isn’t anybody’s idea, really, of a walk in the park. Especially when the odious stench of sweat and mud emanating from the horse’s rump wafts back in your direction. But something about listening to spiritual tales accompanied by the clomp-clomp-clomp of hooves on pavement was meditative, and I’m pretty glad I did it.

The stories told during the horse-drawn carriage were ones that can be found in Reverend Shirley Oskamp’s class, “Stories of the Spirit.” The basic principle of this class is to show students how myths from different cultures and traditions, even the simplest tortoise-and-hair-esque ones, can be applied to your everyday life. A major focus of the course is to enable each student to recognize and begin to articulate the myths that guide their own lives.

It is a difficult class to teach, given that it’s a class founded on the basis of story-telling, but Shirley does it with grace. She fills the two and a half hours up quite nicely by reviewing the stories the students read outside of class and then having round table discussions about the lessons we have each learned from the stories. Students are expected to keep a journal where they reflect about their thoughts on the parables they read. This task encourages one to become introspective while reading the stories.

The tales themselves are quite lovely. They teach a person to be at peace with themselves and the silence that comes with being completely alone. They deal with topics ranging from giving up all your material possessions to being empathetic toward everyone around you. They are truly a guideline for how to live a spiritually fulfilled life.

One assignment asked students to watch a movie outside of class. We then had to write a two-page paper on the movie telling about the techniques the directors used to tell the story and the meaning behind some of the visual content. Some people watched Disney classics and one girl even came up with an entirely new metaphorical spin for the meaning of the seven dwarfs in Snow White.

On the very first day of class, I was a little hesitant to even attend. I feared that’d it have a flaky vibe to it. Despite my presumptions, the class turned out to be wonderful. It was held in the chapel in Ackley. All the windows were open and sunlight cascaded across the floor. The students were in different states of recline, some sitting on the pillows that are always found scattered around the temple floor, some actually laying flat out on their bellies. Shirley didn’t seem to mind this at all. At one point during the class, maintenance workers were moving desks around on the floor above us and a lawnmower was howling right outside the window, drowning out Shirley’s voice. She didn’t miss a beat, and laughed the excess flood of noise off, since that day’s lecture was on the importance of silence.

One class, Shirley invited her friend and renowned Native American story-teller, Joseph Bruchac, to talk to the class. He told us stories of his own culture and then allowed us to ask him questions. He told us that the two most important aspects of a story were to teach and entertain. And his stories were extremely entertaining. The majority of the class found themselves laughing out loud at his interpretation of the French accent. Despite his antics, Joseph ended up teaching us a lot about how important it was to know yourself and your own cultural history before embarking on a journey to learn about others.

As a writer, this class is serving a purpose not only in teaching me about other culture’s stories, but also how one should go about writing a good tale. There are very basic techniques that I didn’t even realize existed until I took this class. One of them is simply to listen. I have a very hard time keeping my mouth shut, but it is necessary for a writer to sometimes just sit back and bask in the silence of things. One can learn a lot more about the world through the lack of sound, rather than through its presence.