The carrier bag theory of my website
I am reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, in which she suggests that before tools for cutting, piercing, and hunting, there must have been tools for carrying, holding, and preserving, since sixty-five to eighty percent of our diet at the time came from gathering rather than hunting.
She goes on to explain how hunting stories make “better” stories than gathering stories, and how we are still drawn to that same structure: stories of achievement, breakthrough, conflict, the hero’s journey. Le Guin prefers something else in fiction. She writes:
I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words holds things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.
I’d like to think about my website from this perspective as well. Not a portfolio of achievements, but a carrier bag for ideas I have collected through reading, noticing, and making. The notes, references, writings, and even my commercial projects can all sit in relation to one another and to me.
