The Story of Storytelling, Part 4: Skinwalkers

Some of the best things in life come from the most unexpected places. Last spring I decided to write a sci-fi version of a skinwalker tale. I have this odd habit of attempting to write short stories in the horror genre. Atmospherics and psychological fuckery fascinate me and horror stories always seem to be the best way to work on those particular bits of storytelling. In the run-up to last year’s Fox Valley Folk and Storytelling Festival I learned about the ghost story set the guild does on Sunday night. I thought it would be fun, so I thought long and hard and tried to come up with a story I could tell. Finally I thought, “You know, it would be cool if I could adapt that short story I just wrote. But it’d be really hard to tell a sci-fi ghost story and have it make any bit of sense.” It took me at least five minutes to realize the obvious. Namely that I could just tell a skinwalker story. To the uninitiated, the skinwalker legends come from Navajo culture. The shorthand is that they’re basically evil shaman who morph in to coyotes or wolves and chase travelers. As with most such stories they often chase travelers but can never quite seem to catch them. Oddly enough, I became fascinated with skinwalker stories in high school. See, my youth group used to do an annual summer missions trip to the Painted Desert in Arizona and work with various Navajo groups. They still do the annual trip, but they don’t always go to Arizona any more. The summer after my freshman year was the last year they did the Arizona thing and the veterans regaled us with stories that they’d picked up. So it was in church that I learned of skinwalkers. I’ve come across skinwalker tales a few times since them and they always follow a similar pattern. The teller of the story was traveling, generally in a car in the middle of the night, when they saw a freaky half-man, half-beast creature which chased after the car. The creature is always capable of traveling as fast as the car, but can never quite catch up. Then at some point it simply disappears. It’s an easy enough progression. The trick is in creating the atmosphere. So for mine I created a fake friend named Jim who was a full-blood Navajo who invited me to visit his family one summer during college. Jim and I ended up hanging out with his family far later than planned and had to drive back to Phoenix for an AM flight, which required driving through the desert in the middle of a pitch-black, moonless night. Now, the entire point to a good story like this is the atmosphere. The teller needs to build and release tension properly. This was a problem for me last summer, since I was still an extremely stiff storyteller. You can’t be stiff and build an atmosphere. It just doesn’t work. Of course the point is moot, since I didn’t volunteer the story last year. I decided this year to give it a shot. But by the time I auditioned it in guild the ghost story set was full. So Mike told me to tell it in one of the other sets. Specifically the first Sunday set. So I’d be telling a ghost story at 11 am on a Sunday. At roughly the same time we were working out the kinks on the FVFSF sets we were also getting ready for the following week and telling a guild set at the Spoken Word Café. It was going to be a ghost story set and I had volunteered “Skinwalkers.” Now, this is an interesting issue since I didn’t really care much for “Skinwalkers.” I had a hard time making the story do what I wanted. It was the whole atmospherics thing. But, by the same token, getting a chance to tell in front of an actual crowd is pretty damn neat, so I figured I’d take any chance I could. Sunday morning rolled around and all I could think was, “Wow, this is about the least creepy possible situation.” However, I was telling the story and all of the sudden I had a thought. See, part of the tension comes from Jim, who’s driving during the story, turning the headlights off in the middle of this trip through the pitch-black night in the Painted Desert. He does it twice. On the second, of course, when he turns the lights back on we find out we’re not alone. So Jim turned the lights off the first time. I stopped, improvised a bit. “Now we’re all friends here, right?” I asked my audience. Gwen Hilary, who was one of our featured tellers for the weekend, was sitting up in the front and she kinda snapped to attention and said, “Oh, yeah, yeah,” for which I am eternally grateful. Seriously. Once I had this confirmation from the audience I said, “So I can tell you that I screamed like a little girl.” This got a few laughs. “Skinwalkers” had suddenly taken on a whole new dimension. Anyway, Jim turns the lights back on, then a few minutes later turns them off again. This time he turns them on again and at the very limits of the beams there’s a skinwalker standing in the road. The Sunday morning of the festival the skinwalker then leapt up and somehow landed in the bed of the pickup truck we were driving. It started clawing at the roof and pounding at the back window. Of course before it could get in it disappeared. We got back to Phoenix, Jim’s uncle laughed at us for having overactive imaginations. The next morning it was his turn to freak out when he found big scratches in the roof of his pickup. Again, simple story. It’s all about the tension and release. I had that first moment of release, but I didn’t have the tension quite right. Several of us met for dinner before the set at Spoken Word. By the time we were done with dinner everyone had arrived at the little restaurant, but we made our way over to Stage Left in waves. I had to wander over to my car to get my other shirt, since I wasn’t going to tell in a Peacemakers t-shirt. I hopped up on to the stage for an impromptu sound check and discovered that the gain on the mic was set such that it picked up interesting things. One of the big things was the dull echo of my hard rubber soles on the stage. “This is good,” I said. “I can use this.” I had an idea. Jim turned the lights off. I screamed like a little girl. He turned them off again, and this time we both had a moment of panic when the lights came back on. Then the skinwalker just disappeared. I didn’t want anyone to know where it had gone this time. Because when it disappeared I could turn to Jim, I could very quietly tell the audience that I was about to ask Jim if he’d seen the thing in the road, too, all while I was raising my left foot, toes pulled back towards the sky. I could distract the audience with my quiet, regular voice, all the while preparing. Preparing to slam my heel in to that strange, echoing stage, to say at the same moment, “Bam!” The crowd jumped. Everyone was locked on me as I watched that skinwalker stride towards the bed of the truck. No one was prepared for my one, final improvisation. My hands were up, mimicking the swaying of the truck as Jim swerved from side to side and tried to shake the beast. They copied the motion of its claws as it reached forward and latched on to the roof of the truck’s cab. They were out in front of me, perfectly innocuous, almost unnoticeable as my right hand formed a fist. So the crowd again jumped when the beast tried to break the window and my fist pounded the side of the microphone. The room was silent and still as I delivered my last lines. “I still don’t really know what happened that night,” I told my audience. “But I can tell you one thing. I haven’t been back to Arizona since. And I don’t plan on going back any time soon.” It was my finest moment as a storyteller so far. During intermission Mike Speller, who can tell a fine ghost story himself (I love his adaptation of “The Monkey’s Paw”), said to me, “You can take a pause like none other. You could have heard a mouse fart.” I don’t think Mike was expecting that out of “Skinwalkers.” I don’t think anyone was. Hell, I don’t think I was. Check that. I know I wasn’t. There was one person in that audience who mattered slightly more than everyone else. Jim May. He said he liked my delivery. Said I should come back to tell again at the Spoken Word Café. All this from a story I was, at best, kind of meh about. I've learned several things. First, never give up on a good idea. Second, don't just tell the story once and assume it's as good as it will ever get (for better or worse). The Creative Zen Vision:M and Vision:W have built-in microphones and I've started to record myself telling my stories so I can hear what I sound like. It's a useful exercise. Although it has limits, since I've now learned that there's a whole different vibe playing off a crowd than standing alone in my living room. But I've already improved "Words of Wisdom." I decided to drop a joke that always seems too forced. Sometimes subtraction counts as an addition... Oh, and one of these days I’ll get my $25 share from the tip jar from that night at Stage Left. I’ll officially be a professional...