Earlier this summer nearly every evening the news shows reported yet another story about a dead cat sighting. People were finding them all over town. They had been mutilated with uncanny surgical precision, the reporters said solemnly, a probable sign of a satanic cult at work.
Weeks into the sightings, the reporters gave that other western cities, including Salt Lake, were experiencing the same strange phenomenon. Perhaps an entire gang of drug-crazed, traveling devil worshippers was on the loose.
And then in mid August, my favorite news anchor mumbled through the latest kitty update so quickly that I almost missed it. Urban dwelling foxes were the culprits. They were on the increase and, driven by hunger, had snacked on the felines. Police departments from other cities that had been plagued with the problem had come to the same conclusion.
Living several yards away from a den of urban foxes, I should have known. Foxes are a force to be reckoned with. They are cunning and wily tricksters, little brothers to coyotes, and I’m certain my resident foxes were smiling to themselves at the evil cult stories that circulated while they waited for the truth to out. They are experts in the art of camouflage. Unseen and most active at dusk and dawn, they weave a peculiar kind of magic. Because of that they are known as shapeshifters.
Shape shifting is an essential part of writing. Sometimes it is our content that changes its form. We begin writing what we think is a poem and halfway through, it turns into an essay. Another time, we think we have enough material for a book, but the project turns out to be a magazine article. We begin work on a nonfiction book and right in the middle it transforms itself into a novel. In the midst of writing a novel one of our walk-on characters wants a bigger piece of the action. Suddenly we realize that we aren’t as in control of our writing as we thought. The trickster has a way of putting us in our place.
Often when we are writing memoir, it is our consciousness that shifts shape. We begin thinking we already know how we feel about an event or a person we’ve met. We have the meaning of our story all figured out, but in the midst of setting down the tale, we might discover we weren’t angry; we felt abandoned instead. We sometimes learn that the event that seemed so important that we wanted to memorialize it on paper now seems trivial, but another story we’d thought we’d forgotten until we started writing, now tugs at the edges of our awareness. Without setting out to do it consciously, we’ve grown into a bigger shape. The wisdom of the trickster demands willingness and flexibility.
Shape shifting happens when we write articles as well. We may think we know the truth about a particular subject. We have our slant figured out and our conclusion tied up and written down the confines of a query letter. When we get the assignment and begin our interviews, the truth as we first saw it begins to unravel. We’re faced with the decision of shifting the story to reflect the new information we’ve collected and risking an out of hand rejection or rigidly clinging to the way we thought it was supposed to be. If we take the safer course, we risk deceiving both ourselves and our readers . The choices the trickster hands us are never easy.
Once upon a time, I was frustrated with such major turns of events. My neighbors, the foxes have shown me how to accept changes and even welcome them. No matter how much I think I know, I always have something more to learn. I may have things carefully planned, but the shape of my writing and my life is subject to shift at any instant due to circumstances beyond my control. I can adapt and grow or insist on having my way and stagnate.
My first Christmas back in Denver six months after living on the South Dakota prairie for years, I hated the concrete and the traffic, the neighbors crowding me on both sides and the skyline with its clutter of buildings. I woke up early and decided to walk to the convenience store for a paper to fill the time before I was due at a holiday dinner. With each step through the dirty snow, I grumbled at the pollution. "I have to be closer to nature," I complained to myself. "If I don’t I’ll go crazy."
At that instant a skinny, sharp-nosed, black dog loped toward me. Before it veered to let me pass on the sidewalk, it looked me straight in the eyes with its uncannily golden eyes and nodded acknowledgement. It passed so close that I could have reached out and touched it. I turned around in time to see a white-tipped tail disappear around the corner of a building. It was the strangest dog, I’d seen. And then it hit me, it wasn’t a dog I’d encountered at all. It was a bit of wildness that had managed to adapt to city life and do quite well, thank you. The lessons of the trickster are always unexpected.
Since then I’ve seen the fox, his red haired wife and their two children often. Solitary travelers, one or the other of them manages to cross my path two or three times a month. One morning I opened my front door to find her patiently sitting in front of it, waiting to give me her silent reminder. Things aren’t always what they seem.
Write about a time a trickster entered your life. What were you doing? What form did the trickster take when it entered your life? What did the trickster do to shake things up? What lesson did the trickster bring?