A Titular Note...

I am hopelessly enamored with nouns of assemblage, otherwise known as collective nouns. No, let us back up: I'm hopelessly enamored with language—especially quirky, idiosyncratic, or otherwise plain silly language.

To return to nouns of assemblage: I cannot fathom where "a storytelling of ravens" came from, but it is the technically correct method of identifying a group or congregation of ravens. Cows stand around in herds, lions roam in prides, wolves hunt in packs, and ravens come together in a storytelling.

The word "storytelling" most immediately suggests images and concepts quite far removed from ravens. Storytelling continues to be the principle method of the transportation of ideas for humans for millennia; it is intimate, transformative, evocative. Our lives, our memories, are simply a series of stories, and we define ourselves in the telling.

The word "ravens" carries nearly opposite connotations. Whereas "storytelling" is a word full of life, memories, and the definition of our very identities, "ravens" is a word pock-marked with death. Ravens are carrion-eaters: they literally consume death for nourishment. Storytelling is an act of intimacy; ravens are flighty and distant. Storytelling creates light, life, and images; ravens wing the night robed in black.

And yet, when ravens gather, it is a storytelling. To consider "storytelling" not as an act but as a noun of congregation, we find heavily shamanistic undertones. To come together in a storytelling evokes images of humans—be they travellers or villagers—meeting in a location with the specific intention of experiencing the power of story. This reliance, dependence, or focus on the magnitude of words and their telling quite organically invokes notions of rituals, spells, curses, and invocations. What rituals have the ravens? What spells might they cast? How do their images, the negative of ours, better define who we are? What stories might they tell us?

The work to be herein contained is not a celebration of ravens, nor do I have the answers to these questions. Rather, this is a celebration of stories, and I offer these questions up not for their answers, but for the stories into which they may breathe life.