The Fabric of Story: Mythmaking as Method
- realityskimming
- Sep 8
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 24
by Chelsea Hann
About the Story Thing (2025) - 08
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"About the Story Things" is a thematic series of articles, sponsored by Reality Skimming Press. Pieces will appear every other Monday Jun 2 through to the end of 2025. Query us about contributing at https://facebook.com/relskim or info@realityskimming.com
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I used to think stories were things I had to finish. Neatly, tightly. A clean arc. An ending that answered the question. I’d try to write like that—pressing narrative into shapes that felt conclusive, even when my life didn’t.
But then came years when nothing wrapped up cleanly. My body started to unravel in quiet, interior ways—vertigo, strange dreams, a restless fog I couldn’t name. I wasn’t writing much. I couldn’t find the ending. What I did find were metaphors. Floating up through the fog. A body like a fault line. A thought unraveling like a thread. A story not as a path, but as a fabric—stitched, frayed, knotted, unfinished.
It was around then that I began craving stories that didn’t resolve. Stories that made room for mystery, not clarity. That’s when I started reading Martin Shaw. And something shifted. Shaw’s mystical approach to storytelling struck a chord deep within my languishing writer’s soul and opened my mind up to other ways of thinking about the purpose of the oldest of stories when facing life’s uncertainties. He writes, in his essay “Navigating the Mysteries”:
“The correct response to uncertainty is mythmaking. It always was. Not punditry, allegory, or mandate, but mythmaking. The creation of stories. We are tuned to do so, right down to our bones. The bewilderment, vivacity, and downright slog of life requires it. And such emerging art forms are not to cure or even resolve uncertainty but to deepen into it. There’s no solving uncertainty. Mythmaking is an imaginative labor not a frantic attempt to shift the mood to steadier ground. There isn’t any.” (Shaw, 2022)
I started noticing how often metaphor showed up in my writing life—not just as a literary device, but as a way of making meaning when nothing else made sense. The word “metaphor” comes from the Greek metaphora, which means “to transfer” or “to carry over.” (Caine, Lessard, & Clanadin, 2018) I once read that metaphor lets one idea move into the space of another—like water soaking through fabric, staining it in unexpected ways. That image stayed with me.
One metaphor I return to, again and again, is this: story is a fabric.
Fabric is full of movement. It stretches. It frays. It holds shape and then collapses. Thinking of stories this way has helped me see how writing isn’t always about building something solid—it’s about weaving. Pulling together threads from memory, from intuition, from partial glimpses of what might be true. Stories don’t always come with answers. But they can hold the questions. Some stories stretch thin and tear if pulled too hard. Others are velvet: luxurious, impossible to ignore. I’ve written denim stories, patched and utilitarian. Silk ones, slippery and hard to hold. And then there are the ones I carry like quilts—stitched from scraps, handed down across seasons of loss and joy.
I’m not the only one who works this way. I once read a passage from Lawrence and Mealman (1999) that described metaphor as a kind of collaborative gesture—something that lets us speak from the edges of what we know, that sparks curiosity and makes room for ideas we didn’t have language for before. That feels right to me. Some metaphors are like soft rope bridges: they help us cross over into new terrain, even when the footing is shaky.
There have been times I couldn’t say what I was feeling, but I could write: “It feels like fog in the chest.” Or: “This grief is a tidepool—shallow, teeming, easily overlooked.” And suddenly, the image did what explanation couldn’t. It opened a space.
What Martin Shaw’s work gave me—more than anything—was permission.
Permission to not know where a story is going.
Permission to not wrap it neatly for the listener.
Permission to treat the telling itself as a kind of listening.
Shaw calls storytelling a form of “imaginative labor,” and I’ve come to understand that as the real work—not trying to resolve uncertainty, but deepening into it. Sitting beside it. Letting it speak.
He writes that the proper response to a bewildering world isn’t punditry or moral certainty—it’s mythmaking. Not solving uncertainty, but tending to it. We are tuned to do so, right down to our bones, he says. And when I read that, something in me exhales. I spent years trying to finish the story when what I really needed was to let it breathe.
There’s a story I no longer tell. Or rather—I’ve stopped claiming it. It belongs to a cultural lineage that isn’t mine to speak from, and I’m learning to honor that boundary. But something about it stayed with me—not the plot, not even the figure itself, but the feeling it stirred.
That’s what myth does, I think. It leaves a residue. It brushes against something unspeakable inside us and doesn’t always give it a name.
And so, in its place, I started imagining something else. A shape I could hold without taking. I call it The Hollowing.
The Hollowing isn’t a creature, exactly. More like a presence. It shows up when I haven’t slept. When the world is burning and everyone’s scrolling. When I forget to eat or cry or breathe deeply. It doesn’t howl. It doesn’t knock things over. It just hums—low and endless. Like grief with no direction. Like hunger that has nothing to do with food.
I don’t need to understand it fully. That’s the gift of myth. It doesn’t demand answers—it asks you to sit still long enough to hear the questions.
Going back to Shaw, and his take as a mythologist in the old Celtic tradition, I notice parallels to how I’m also meeting myth and metaphor. Shaw doesn’t treat myths as artifacts or allegories. He treats them like living things—partial, poetic, polyphonic. In an interview with Tad Hargrave (2023), he says that storytelling isn’t just reciting words from a page. That’s literacy, not orality. The truth, he says, isn’t in the facts. They come and go. The truth is in what happens when people gather around a story together—in the “shared eruption of imagination in the room.”
That phrase still gives me chills.
It reminds me that story isn’t just what we write. It’s what rises up between us when we listen with our bodies. When we let language stay rough-edged. Incomplete. When we make something together that doesn’t need to be decoded—only met.
The longer I write, the more I believe stories don’t have to lead us somewhere new—they just have to return us to something we forgot. I think of the threads I’ve dropped and picked up again over the years. The ones I tied too tight. The ones I let unravel.
We’re not always writing for understanding. Sometimes we’re writing to stay close to the mystery—to trace the knots, the torn seams, the threads left dangling.
Maybe story was never meant to be finished. Maybe the weaving is the work.
Chelsea Hann
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Chelsea Hann is an emerging writer living in Northern British Columbia, Canada. With background in social work and early childhood education, and well over a decade of work in the field of education, Chelsea remains a curious storyteller focused on intimate moments of meaning-making. Actively working towards widening her circle of fellow artistic thinkers, Chelsea has been a guest conversationalist for the podcast Inspire Me Forward: Witnessing and Withing, and is an active member to the Reality Skimming Press Writer’s Group in Prince George, BC. She is also working on a grassroots Slow Culture collaborative project called The Lexicon of Latent Seeds (#LatentSeeds on socials). Her published education blog series Ruptures in the Margins: Storytelling Outside of Euro-Western Practices is available at www.ecpn.ca
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References
Caine, V., Lessard, S., & Clanadin, K. (2018). A Poetic Inquiry of Language and Learning.
Hargrave, T. (2023). Into the Marvellous: The Art of Oral Storytelling. Substack. https://tadhargrave.substack.com/p/into-the-marvellous-the-art-of-oral
Lawrence, R. L., & Mealman, C. A. (1999). Exploring Metaphors in Practice.
Shaw, M. (2022). Navigating the Mysteries. Emergence Magazine. https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/navigating-the-mysteries/xxx
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