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Coyote at the American River
Marion Donehower facilitates the Fairytale Group that is an integral part of our Section work in Northern California. Here, Marion summarizes the group’s activities in 2025 and gives her perspective on the year. Marion is a member of the Visual Arts Section in addition to our Section.
An Owl winks in the shadow
A lizard lifts on tiptoe
breathing hard
The whales turn and glisten
plunge and
Sound, and rise again
Flowing like breathing planets
In the sparkling whorls
Of living light.
— Gary Snyder, from “Mother Earth: Her Whales,” in Turtle Island
Queridos amigos:
This year the fairytale group ended in November. And I’m just reflecting on the last year. I wanted to find out what really was important for me – what would stick with me and mean something to me.
Two themes of the last year come instantly to mind. They are the stories and tales of Coyote and the Italian fairytales of Italo Calvino.
Creation Myths
This spring we started to work on creation myths. This theme was enriched by the Section conference we had at the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco in May 2025. The Section looked at California literature. For the first time I learned about Jaime de Angulo, an anthropologist, medical doctor, linguist, homesteader and vaquero from France and Spain. At the beginning of the 20th century Jaime lived with the First Nation people in Northern California, and he studied and learned many of their then nearly forgotten and soon-to-be extinct languages. There were at least 300 of these languages in California at that time.
Jaime de Angulo believed that Europeans cannot understand a so-called “primitive” people without learning their language. Even the term “primitive” is inexact. “We will not learn anything about them if we don’t know how they speak. And consequently, we judge them superficially.”
For the first time at the Section Conference in San Francisco, I learned about Coyote and Coyote’s importance in North America. Being born a German just after World War II and a person still learning about this vast continent of North America and especially the Pacific Rim, this was all new to me.
Coyote
Then, as we started to look at creation myths in our fairytale group, I found stories from San Francisco and Sacramento which have Coyote and Turtle as actors in creation tales. I was right away very intrigued with Coyote as Trickster.
Was he a person or an animal? He was a shapeshifter of course. And, he was a trickster who was cunning, helpful, humous, deceiving, libindinal, and often untrustworthy . . . but at the same time caring and loving and attentive. There are many trickster gods in North American stories: Spider, Raven, Fox, Rabbit—but Coyote is everywhere and the most popular one. On my daily walks at the American River, I meet coyotes and Coyote quite often. Coyotes often close to me as I walk along . . . but not too close. Old Man Coyote pretends not to notice me, but I know better. I tried to keep an eye on him, but suddenly he was gone.
I feel oddly curious about Coyote and all his foolishness and humor. He comes from a time when we had no separation of good and evil, heaven and hell. Nature, people, animals, and gods were still embracing each other.
Italo Calvino
The last couple of weeks in the group we read Italian fairytales by Italo Calvino. He is a wonderful Italian writer, very well known in Europe. I did not know that he had collected more than 200 fairytales from all areas in Italy. Calvino was impressed by the Brothers Grimm, and he did careful research in Italy, as they had done. He used many of the old fairytales and worked on them to bring them into the modern times. Although the themes for the Italian fairytales resemble the German fairytales, we found them to be very different. There was a lightness, humor, and sunshine in these stories. They were delightful and fun.
All of a sudden, the German fairytales were darker, like the forests in old Germany. In the Italian fairytales I have not yet found a wicked witch.
I’m pretty sure that next year we will continue with these Italian fairytales—although of course Coyote will probably sneak in.
— Marion Donehower
Advent, 2025
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Artwork and Poem by Jaime de Angulo