History is a huge part of our being, and creating stories based on our own history is a great way of remembering those who came before us and the contributions they made.  We wouldn’t be where we are today without our ancestors and predecessors.

             The story we chose for this assignment was an ancestral tale for the Lewis family. It is the kind of story that is told over and over and changes with each retelling. We decided not to attempt and construct an entirely historically accurate account of the events because that would probably prove impossible. Instead, we chose to make a new comedic tale of two cosmic explorers that was based on the old Lewis family tales. We kept the basic important elements but tweaked them a bit to meet our needs. The island became a planet, the dog a space monster, the boats spaceships, and the severed hand a half-finished piece of knitting. By choosing to consciously change the story, we were able to pay tribute to the Lewis Clan and their history while also creating something unique.

For our script, we took the history of the Lewis family and of how their crest came to be and turned it into a fantastic adventure set in space.  The Lewis family really did fight to claim a piece of land from an enemy clan.  The fantasy treatment that their story received while writing our script is similar to another historical family: the family of the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia.  The 1997 film Anastasia, directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, takes the story of this family and turned it into a fantastic adventure involving magic and devil worship.  Both of these historical stories based on families were given a fantasy twist.

            The characters in our script portray an accurate representation of the context.  A tribe leader would have done whatever was needed to claim land for his people, and that’s exactly what the real Lewis clan did and what Captain Lewis in our script did.  The Lewis clan sacrificed a hand for their land, whereas Captain Lewis sacrificed his wife’s knitting.  The hostility between clans is also present in our story, and hostility would have been a very prominent attribute of enemy clans during the 11^th Century.    

In the graphic story, The Veil, history is told from the perspective of a young Zoroastrian girl. Because it is coming from a little girl, the events are portrayed in a very simplified manner. She does not discuss the political complexity of the Islamic Revolution and the economic or sociological effects it had; She talks about what mattered to her. All she cared about was that she was separated from her friends, she had to wear a veil, and any of her attempts to follow her own religion were called blasphemy. When history is recounted, the priorities and biases of the teller always come through. The choice is whether or not to embrace that and show historical events in a personal way.  This story has personal significance for us because it is based off of Taylor’s family, but at the same time we were able to write something that was entertaining and enjoyable instead of just writing a history book.

Josh Allen and Taylor Lewis