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In which we start to tell you about
Carcajou Research, Paul's incubator for
Voyageur Storytelling
Introduction
Ideas always begin somewhere. Both Paul and Leslie brought them to Voyageur Storytelling. This is Paul's story.
It is a long story, and maybe some day I will find time to tell it in detail. Carcajou Research was not the very beginning, but I think I can say with certainty that Voyageur Storytelling would not have happened without it. I think the term "incubator" used above is as good an image as any. The conception, or fertilization, came before, and the hatchling came after. The incubation divided itself into four distinct stages, of which Carcajou Research was the first, longest, and most important.
I am going to call the philosophical foundations of this whole process "daedalism", after Daedalus, the artist who designed and built wings for himself and his son by means of which they escaped from the labyrinth before the minotaur had time to eat them. From this mythological story we tend to remember Icarus, the son, who flew too close to the sun and crashed fatally. A risk to remember. But Daedalus made it through, and that success is surely worthy of remembrance, even celebration. (That labyrinth, by the way, is not anything like those on the grounds of Voyageur Storytelling. No minotaurs here: only the occasional garter or milk snake.)
And if the snake doesn't spill the milk thereby floating the labyrinth down the grykke into Lake Huron, I will return to this story as soon as I can, and tell you how the wolverine met the minotaur and persuaded him into vegetarianism, thereby saving the lives of the annual seven youths and seven maidens, who occupied the labyrinth and lived there happily ever after even though, or perhaps because, neither the youths nor the maidens stayed that way. I won't dwell on that story, however, because mine is different.