Creating the Webbd Wheel: Seeds

In which I accidentally write a book ...

Where do seeds come from?

The wind gives them wings. Animals bury them, carry them in their fur, eat and excrete them. Water moves them from place to place. They travel invisibly, silently, and surprise us when they take root.

Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay

The Webbd Wheel grew from seeds of storytelling sown more than 15 years ago.

I didn’t set out to become a storyteller, but that’s where my path led. So I began researching and collecting oral stories from all over the world. I read and reread folk and fairy tales, myths, legends, old story poems, and collections of oral tales and fragments.

Understand, storytelling is not reading aloud. It’s falling in love with a story, entering into it, making it your own and carrying it in your memory until it’s time to share it. The words are always different. The audience is always different. The storyteller is always different. All those tiny differences change the story subtly, but the bones remain the same.

I discovered stories from widely different cultures with the same bones. Details differed according to culture, place, and historical time, but it’s easy to recognize a Cinderella story, no matter where it’s told.

I realized we all share a human experience, no matter where we come from, no matter where our roots are, no matter when we’re living. Stories survive and endure because they speak to who we are and what we’re concerned with as human beings: birth, death, love, self-expression, meaning, connection, spirituality, creativity, conflict, problem solving. Stories are medicine. Stories are a how-to manual for life.

I began to add my own layers onto old stories, and wrote a few new ones, combining them with poetry I’d been secretly writing all my life.

During those years I was in a relationship with a man whose ambivalence, sexually and otherwise, was confusing and destructive. In my frustration and pain, I began writing stories about what I wanted and needed. My writing was entirely private and gave me a way to think more clearly about what was happening – and what was not.

I gave myself permission to play. To fantasize. To write erotica.

Slowly, these seeds began to grow in my creativity and mingle with all the books and poetry I’d ever read and loved.

One day, without thinking much about it, I wove together my own adaptation of the Greek myth of Persephone, an oral story I told regularly, and a short story I’d written about the legendary White Stag. I mingled those with a poem for the Autumn Equinox.

I didn’t know it then, but that day The Webbd Wheel germinated, though at first it was nothing more than a toy, a place to dream, to rest, to try to understand my experience, and to enjoy playing with stories.

I used to wear my long hair in a French braid, made by taking a few extra strands with every crossover. Writing is like that. A strand here. A strand there. A story poem from my childhood. An image from my own work. A fragment of an old tale. Speaking of braids, Rapunzel had long hair. What did she do after she got out of her tower?

And so on.

The Hanged Man was an accident, of sorts. I didn’t mean to write a book. I didn’t know I was writing a book. It took on a life of its own and I followed it. It grew and blossomed and bloomed into its own shape and color, and I watered it, fed it, welcomed and loved it.

My life changed. A lot. I left Colorado, where I’d always lived, and came to Maine. I made an entirely new start. I finished The Hanged Man and began the second book, The Tower. I started a blog. I realized I’m a writer.

From those beginning seeds The Webbd Wheel was born, 2000 pages of manuscript between the first and second book. I’m hard at work on the third one.

I want to share it.

Here we are.

(This was published with Post #1 of The Hanged Man.)