When an Old Story Refuses to Conform to the Modern Demands
Sweeney Doesn't Want to Comment on Your New Year's Resolutions
It’s early on a snowy Monday morning and the ridge to the west is lit with a rosy dawn glow. My fourth grader is finishing up some homework about new year’s traditions around the world.
While the school stuff matters, it sure would be nice to play in the snow before the bus comes rather than endure another worksheet.
As we enter this second week of what the Gregorian calendar declares is a new year, I’m feeling this sort of ambivalence seeping into everything.
Generally speaking, I go along with the rationalist, agreed-upon reality that sets the shape of time and space, but I keep finding myself lingering on those Instagram posts that remind us there is a different way…
I do not plan to start anew
in January
that is for spring
this is the night
in the dead of winter
where I pare back excess
to reach the bones of my life
so when I am reborn
I am reborn as only
my most essential nature
These are the mythic tensions that have my attention right now (but which refuse to fold themselves to suit my narrative)
… This is where the post I intended to share with you went astray. Astray over 2000 words and more than eight days of revisions.
Sigh. This is NOT what my Substack newsletter writing experience is supposed to be like. And it rarely is this hard. But I tend to learn the most from writing the posts that feel like an utter waste of time.
In my original vision for this newsletter, I wanted to bring you back to two versions of the Sweeney story I wrote in 2022 and 2023.
Lost in the Wild, At Home Within was a “traditional” retelling of the tale. Sweeney, the pagan king who rebelled against the coming tide of Christianity, attacks Saint Ronan, throws a psalter in the lake, kills a novice priest. That same saint levels a curse upon Sweeney - he will sprout feathers and live out his days in exile in the wilds of Ireland. Neither bird nor man, he loses himself and finds himself when he is forced to leave everything behind.
Two women who only appear briefly in the original (I based my retellings on Seamus Heaney’s rendition of the epic poem, Sweeney Astray) captured my imagination. In Two Worlds, Two Women: A New Perspective on the Mad Sweeney Story, I give you a conversation that just might have followed the eponymous character’s funeral.
For whatever reason, these characters have been lingering at the edges of my personal mythic landscape since the end of the old year. Wondering what they were here to tell me, I started to play with how Sweeney, his wife Eorann, and the trickster Mill Hag could help me explore the various ways we embrace - or reject - the resolutions that come with a new calendrical year.
Seemed like a great Myth Is Medicine topic! What would Sweeney, Eorann, and Milly do?
This story, which contrasts the “civilized” world and the wilds beyond, offered both sides of the “new year, new you” debate (such as it is).
But it just didn’t work.
Losing my sense of wonder by the day, I became hellbent on making it work, even when every revision sounded more and more convoluted and contrived.
With every writing session, I flattened out the women’s characters and twisted Sweeney into a number of new directions that were barely anchored in the text. All in service to point I thought I was trying to make.
At last, I realized I wasn’t myth working.
I was myth taking.
I was doing the thing that I most try to avoid as a lover and a student of these old stories: appropriating a plot and its actors to become self-serving mirrors for my own stuff.
In my own shabby, desperate attempts to say something “the same but different” about the hustle of January 1 and the trouble with forcing wintertime bodies and longest night minds to suddenly perform at springtime pace, I grabbed the first available mythic beings and shoved them into a half-baked modern narrative.
Since I had already done the work to tell their stories previously, I was telling myself it was fine to cherry pick the details that suited my purposes and hope no one noticed when I was forcing characters from 1000 years ago to do my bidding.
Plus, I was willfully ignoring that Sweeney, Eorann, and the Mill Hag would have found that poem at the start of this post to be utterly strange.
The people of early Ireland would have celebrated the new year on the last harvest of Samhain, the start of the Celtic winter. We can’t just blame Pope Gregory for the decision to begin in the darkness. Trendy as it might be to declare it all starts in the spring, older wisdom reminds us that seeds first grow in the quiet black of the earth.
Revisiting a myth and asking it to cast new light on a modern malady isn’t inherently bad, of course. I have spent years doing that very thing on KnotWork Storytelling.
The remix is alive and well, and it’s necessary, as there really isn’t anything new under the sun.
But in this noisy, hot-take-saturated media landscape, a weak tea rehash of a powerful, nuanced story to fit my American woman existence is just… gross.
And so, I ask Sweeney, Eorann, and Milly to forgive me. I ask them to stay nearby so they can help me continue to explore the tensions between being wild, unwild, and freed.
And, I am grateful I “wasted” all that time on a story that refused to be told
As you probably know, I am a writing coach.
That’s actually the second in my list of self-styled job titles. The first is story healer.
In my first conversation with potential clients I describe how I am focused more on process than on outcome. We must heal our stories before we can craft and share them.
This means that the “junk” that comes through early in the process of writing a book or developing the signature idea that becomes a powerful new professional offering, is all just valuable organic material that can be composted to eventually grow “the real thing.”
As I move into this new year (and every opportunity I have to start anew throughout 2024), I can remember the time I tried to force a story to suit my needs.
And, I can remember that it took time to come up against this truth.
Time to develop your ideas is exactly what my online community, the Writers’ Knot, can give you.
In the Writers Knot, we meet weekly to continue works in progress and/or explore the new prompts I craft for every session. Occasional writers’ salons are the place to share your work, ask questions about the creative process, and get some laser coaching on your own writerly struggles.
When you join the Writers’ Knot and make the commitment to your own stories - personal, mythic, or something else entirely - you give yourself space to make the mistakes that are necessary for good writing to emerge.
Registration is open now. We begin together on January 17.
I hope you’ll join us.
Have questions about the group?
I have opened some space in my calendar over the next few days to discuss whether the Writers’ Knot is a good fit for you.