On Gathering

Building relationships between things is a form of authorship too.

Oral histories, like publications, bind people. After a conversation, all parties maintain ownership of what transpired, and they continue to hold ties to one another.

Stories are entrusted to storytellers by the elders. But these storytellers are not meant to repeat the narrative verbatim; they are expected to understand these stories and, through them, reflect on what the community needs to hear at any given moment. This temporal gathering, both in and around a story, acknowledges the personal subjectivities al... See more

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), Le Guin posits the first human tool as the basket, not the spear, thereby recasting the first protagonist as a gatherer, not a hunter. Not only did this address the deeply gendered roles of these two parts, it also changed the singular hero to the plural collective, from he to we. “Before... See more

In an interview with Roxana Fabius, Patricia M. Hernandez, and me for The Scalability Project (2020), adrienne maree brown described relationships like a spiderweb—diaphanous yet strong, thick yet porous. “A web allows things to fall through, like a sieve,” she said. “Some things are not meant to be caught.” I like to think of these webs as citatio... See more

History written by the victors offers glimpses of marginalized figures, for whom we need to “fabulate” stories to “strain against the limits of the archive” and “represent lives… through the process of narration.” Building relationships between things is a form of authorship too.

Gathering is, in this way, not the act of aggregation alone. It is not an automated collection or the formal acquisition of works for an institution, nor is it the plundering or extraction of resources from a neighboring region. It is the tender and thoughtful collection of goods for your kin, and a moment for reunion, for celebration, and for intr... See more

Perhaps gathering stories is radical because it refuses to give the gatherer all of the credit. The collector-collection dynamic is deliberately broken. The person who puts it together is only one of many parts.

Brown also built upon Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1984), declaring, “I believe conversation is not a master’s tool. I believe being in a circle, in a community, is not a master’s tool.” Here, she describes gathering people to share stories as a web, a network, as a finding aid for like-minded voices.