Talking in Circles: Using North American Myths in “THE DEVIL IN MIDWINTER”

I'm happy to have Elise Forier Edie on the blog today, talking about her novella in our A WINTER'S ENCHANTMENT anthology -- as regular readers of the blog know, I am VERY fond of hearing about how other authors use and play with mythology in their work, and how myth has influenced their writing, and Elise was kind enough to provide a guest post on the topic, which for her novella, involved a heaping dose of North American Myth (something I'd really like to dig into more, personally, one of these days!)

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A long time ago, I supported my writing career by teaching English and Drama at a boarding school in Colorado.  The student body included a number of Native American youth, and one year the school hosted a faculty in-service training that focused on how, as classroom educators, we could better serve this population.

By then, I had already been to a lot of in-service trainings, and they were all pretty much the same.  They were usually taught by men, featured a Power Point presentation, with appropriate paper handouts, followed by (if we were lucky) some hands-on activities.

The workshop on teaching Native American students did not follow this tried-and-true model at all.  We sat in a circle.  Our female guest speaker laid out a dizzying array of objects, all over the room, in a lovely tableau—pieces of wood, leaves, bowls of blossoms, herbs, statues, fetishes, musical instruments, photographs, even costume pieces.  We sat in a circle while she burned sage to clear the air.  Then she stood up and started talking.  I remember she started by telling us about her family history, her grandparents and parents and her tribal relations.  And then she proceeded to continue telling stories for the next eight hours, with one break for lunch.  There were no handouts.  There were no bullet points.  There were no activities, except for a moment of prayer and singing and more sage burning at the end of the presentation.