Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Torches n' Pitchforks to launch over Thanksgiving Holiday






Editor’s Note.

As I write this, I am atop Misery Ridge in Central Oregon. It is a gloomy, and overcast afternoon, the first day of November; 11/1. Whenever I see these ones stacked upright together, I am reminded of those picket fences in my idealized college dreams. Today, in this moment however, I think of Three Fingered Jack, hidden by a rare clotting of Autumn-grey clouds.

These “upright ones” also bring me to think of pitchforks; the three pronged, hand-fashioned tools (or weapons) of a medieval peasantry. I imagine crowds stirred up into a fearful and angry frenzy, armed with pitchforks and also with torches- torches blaring together in an angry mob, illuminating and setting fire to every fear that huddles in the darkness.

Torches and pitchforks. How times have not changed! I asked some local students at Crook County High School what images came to mind when they heard of these paired objects. Their responses trickled in, then gathered momentum and force… “Fear, injustice, isolation, Frankenstein’s creature, being judged for what one was not, being outcast, abandoned, being other—”

I wish I was surrounded by a community of young writers like these when I was in high school. They may have been able to help me put words to the weighty heat that was in my chest as I navigated my teen years, groping for a word, any word that would release what I was trying to voice.

As you read the following pages, I offer a warning: take courage with you. For any community that values its children, who wishes them safety and comfort, it can be unsettling to hear what roils in the depths of them as they begin to put new words to their feelings. Caught in the middle stages of metamorphosis between child and adult, they sometimes resemble the creatures and monsters we were taught to fear as children.

Instead, it is my hope that we, as a community of listeners, put down our pitchforks for the moment. Let us dampen our torches that stain the night sky. In that darkness, huddled together for safety and warmth, let us gaze at the stars in wonder, as the pale moon rises to the East. And let us listen closely to what is rustling in the trees. Let us hear the gathering voices of our young, as they discover what is deep and rattling inside their throats. Let us hear them howl with their entire bodies… wet, squirming and outraged at anything and everything that has held their song back until now. Let us hear their howling melodies mingle together into the rising dark, and wonder at the dawn that will inevitably rise in its place.

Let us hope and pray that they greet the morning with their newfound power,

to tell us a story…

Jim Churchill-Dicks

Editor, Torches n’ Pitchforks