Welcome to the Story Stalker

Creation, in my opinion, is a cooperative venture. We create by aligning ourselves with the larger creative forces that are responsible for our existence. This is the essence of story stalking, and I’m using the word “stalking“ not in the negative celebrity sense, but rather in the spirit of Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus, or Stalking the Blue-eyed Scallop.

We are a symbolic species.  Humans engage in thought in ways that no other species appear to.  We use language symbolically.  We know no other species that has a written language, or uses metaphor in the same way that we do.  We live in a world no other species can access. Ours is a shared, “virtual” reality of thought-designed stories, stories of real experience, invented stories, stories that imply hidden or esoteric meaning, stories we use to explain and organize our understanding of the world, stories about the way things are.

I’m talking about deepening our capacity as writers/artists to forage for creative nourishment, which can come in the form of beauty, mystery, magic, coincidence and synchronicity, essentially a deepening of our relationship with our own unconscious and with what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, the realm of archetype and myth.

I’m also taking the term from, The Stalker, a film by the Russian filmmaker, Andrea Tarkovsky. Only an experienced stalker can stealthily navigate the constantly changing traps and pitfalls of The Zone. One cannot use the same path twice—the environment is constantly changing, the dangers that were here five minutes ago, are over there now.

More significantly, traversing The Zone is not their greatest impediment to success, but rather the uncertainty (and fear/resistance) one feels about their deepest wish. As the characters approach the threshold to The Room, their fear and trepidation over the materialization of their answered prayers is what ultimately leads to most profound levels of revelation and self-discovery.

An artist connects with creativity through increased sensibilité— because through this heightened sensitivity, the artist discovers the capacity to receive and be stimulated by larger forces. Lord Byron spoke of the Muse as a ruthless tyrant, and I agree, I believe that genius is such an incredibly powerful and essentially amoral force, that it has no regard for its recipient, that in the case of artistic genius, one can only hold on as best they can to a force capable of both stimulating and ravaging their mind and soul; their very being.