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Paper short abstract

Ambulatory storytelling provides an alternative model to the fireside or stage. Using the World Plowing Match story from tiny Peebles, Ohio, I explore intersubjective dimensions of stories that emerge while walking and talking to challenge orthodoxies around story form, ownership, and historicity.

Paper long abstract

Mullen and Webber (2011) comparatively explore the indexical potential of telling stories in the places where they happened. Similarly, naturalists are adept at storying the landscape, as they gently encourage walkers to slow down and perceive the signs of more-than-human activity. But the nature walk also offers the opportunity to recall former human world-making that has been obscured by current rewilding projects. In 2016, I and my coworker joined conservation activists Martin and Jody Newton McCallister on a walk through their recently acquired preserve bordering the Scioto-Brush Creek in Southeast Ohio. We learned of the return of beaver and other fauna, of the utility of identifying rare plants on a parcel in order to attract conservation funding, and of a 1980s-era birdhouse-making commune nearby that fell apart after the members sold out to Walmart for millions. But the tale I will explore here came out in fragments, much like Susan Kalcik's (1975) consciousness-raising stories. It offers a means to explore how a discontinuous and dialogically voiced stream of discourse formed in the minds of teller and auditors. Our group oscillated between trying to understand how the World Plowing Match came to tiny Peebles, Ohio in 1957, and a countervailing drive to recognize and exploit the humorous and dramatic potential of the "facts" as we learned them. If we view this storytelling event as a collective enactment of sociality or even verbal play, how might we then rethink larger questions of story form and storytelling rights?