Red Riding Hood and the Wolf

From Menletter December 2004

By Tim Baehr

Some of you may have had this assignment from one of your grade school teachers: Now that you've read the story of "Red Riding Hood," rewrite it from the viewpoint of the wolf. The story may have been something else, such as "The Three Bears" from the viewpoint of the baby bear, or "Cinderella" from the viewpoint of one of the stepsisters. The story had to be in the first person (the "I" viewpoint).

The results were often comical, especially in the hands of clever students with a sense of humor. Every once in a while, one or two students would come up with a deep insight into the character he or she had chosen or been assigned.

In our most recent drumming and poetry gathering in Harvard, Mass., we did this exercise. But instead of folk or fairy tales, we wrote about real people in our lives. I think the results were astonishing.

Teachers and facilitators often have a result in mind when we set up an exercise like this. My expectation was that the men would write in the voices of their fathers, their partners, their children – people in their lives who could be sources of both joy and pain. I of course followed my own expectation and wrote two poems from my dad's life. One was about his smoking cigars at 14 and being caught by his dad. The other was about the loneliness of being on the road as a traveling salesman.

None of the other men wrote anything close. One piece was a meditation by a Tibetan prayer flag as it was strung up at a family gathering. Another was a complaint by a local beaver that had been plaguing the property around where we were meeting. Still another was a sensitive portrayal of a woman at a silent retreat, who had had some difficulties with her fellow retreatants. The last piece was a memo from a particularly difficult fellow employee.

The common theme in all of these poems, meditations, and essays was empathy - the kind of compassion that can be made possible by putting ourselves inside another person's (or animal's or object's) being. We may think of ourselves as compassionate beings, but the writing exercise helps make that compassion concrete. It was amazing how much each man had put aside his own personality to become someone or something else.

This is an easy exercise to do on your own, say, in your journal, or in a men's group.