The People Up the Holler

Umwelt is a wonderful German word psychologists use to describe the collection of environmental factors that can affect the behavior of animals or individuals. Every living thing has a unique umwelt that differs from that of every other living thing. In particular, the members of families and communities have their own umwelts even though they may share much of the same environment. In a literary sense, everyone’s life story is a manifestation of his or her umwelt. That umwelt is the prism through which we see the world around us. Legal experts have long known that if ten different people view exactly the same scene and then asked to describe exactly what they see, ten different stories are likely to emerge. Does that mean that some witnesses are lying? No, they are simply recounting the events they saw viewed from the filters of their personal experience, their umwelts. The characters of these stories share the mountains and hollows with native wildlife and the spirits of other worlds. They chase their dreams to free them from the fetters of their everyday lives, but when those dreams come with too high a price, perhaps they should be left unrealized. The mountains are shrouded in mysteries that bind the people to the land, to one another and to their hopes for better lives. The characters must resolve the conflict between holding on to who they are and becoming who they want to be.