Talk For The Craft Contemporary: Narrative Embroidery & Hero’s Journey Scroll

What does it mean to archive a life? The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of humanity's oldest stories, was pressed into clay tablets over four thousand years ago by hands that understood something we are still learning: that what we do not preserve disappears.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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When Carrie Burckle reached out about teaching a class at Craft Contemporary, I found myself drawn immediately to narrative embroidery — a form that is fluid, illustrative, and playful in ways that traditional counted-stitch work often isn't. It felt like exactly the right medium for the kind of story-preservation work I'd been thinking about: personal, embodied, and unhurried. Through this workshop, participants explore embroidery not as decoration but as documentation — becoming the archivist of their own magic, stitching lineage, labor, and lived experience into tangible, enduring form. This workshop begins with that ancient urgency and turns it personal. What are the unspoken stories, quiet triumphs, and forgotten transformations that have shaped you — and what would it mean to stitch them into lasting form?

Key Threads

Key questions this article explores:

• How does the Epic of Gilgamesh connect the ancient impulse to preserve with our own need to record the chapters of a life?

• What can the Hero's and Heroine's Journey frameworks teach us about recognizing the transitions we are living through right now — the endings, the in-between seasons, and what is quietly becoming?

• How does the act of narrative embroidery bridge past and present — transforming personal memory and lived experience into symbolic, tangible form?

• Why does making something slowly by hand, in community, feel like a fundamentally different kind of storytelling?

Marking Surfaces

Tablets

The clay tablet was invented by the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), making it the oldest confirmed writing medium. Using a cut reed stylus, scribes pressed wedge-shaped marks into soft clay — a script we now call cuneiform — before leaving tablets to dry in the sun for temporary records or firing them in a kiln for permanent storage. Contrary to romantic notions, most early tablets were profoundly mundane: writing was invented for accounting, not poetry. Tablets came in various sizes, from postage-stamp-sized receipts to large multi-tablet series, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, which spanned twelve tablets.

The cuneiform system spread far beyond Sumer, adopted and adapted by the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Elamites, and Persians. At its peak, cuneiform functioned as the international diplomatic script of the ancient Near East — used much the way English is used globally today. The greatest monument to this tradition is the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh (c. 668–627 BCE), which housed over 30,000 clay tablets, including the most complete surviving version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and stands as arguably the world's first systematically organized library. Cuneiform persisted for over 3,000 years before finally dying out around 100 CE — one of the longest-lived writing systems in human history.

Scrolls

While Mesopotamia was pressing words into clay, Egypt was rolling them up. Among humanity's oldest information technologies, the scroll dates back over 4,000 years, with ancient Egypt producing some of the earliest known examples. Made from papyrus — a reed harvested along the Nile — these scrolls carried some of antiquity's most significant texts, including the famous Book of the Dead.

Ancient Greece and Rome later standardized the scroll, known in Latin as the volumen, as the dominant book form across the Mediterranean world. Reading one was a two-handed affair — unrolling with one hand while re-rolling with the other — which is partly why the most dramatic passages were often placed at the beginning or end, where they were easiest to reach. Libraries of antiquity, including Alexandria, housed thousands of these rolls. China, meanwhile, developed its own independent scroll tradition using silk and later paper (invented around 105 CE), a format that persisted far longer there than in the West and deeply shaped East Asian book arts. By roughly the 1st to 5th centuries CE, the scroll was gradually displaced in Europe by the codex — the ancestor of the modern book — which was more compact, easier to navigate, and better suited to Christian liturgical use.

Epic Of Gilgamesh

Timeline

The Epic of Gilgamesh  ·  c. 3500 bce – Now

The ancient world

c. 3500 bce Sumerian civilization begins

In the land between the Tigris and Euphrates — modern Iraq — people build the first cities. Uruk grows to 80,000 people. They invent the wheel, the calendar, and writing.

c. 3200 bce Cuneiform writing is invented

Reed stylus pressed into wet clay. At first: grain counts and debts. Then prayers, laws, love poems. The act of archiving begins. Memory becomes matter.

c. 3100 bce Ancient Egypt unified

Along the Nile, another civilization rises — obsessed, like Sumer, with preserving what is precious against the erosion of time.

c. 2700 bce Gilgamesh rules the city of Uruk

A real king — part legend, part history. Two thirds divine, one third human. His city's great walls still appear in satellite images of the Iraqi desert.

2334 bce The Akkadian Empire rises

The world's first empire. Akkadian becomes the common language of the region — its scribes translate and retell Sumerian stories, carrying Gilgamesh into a new tongue.

c. 2100 bce The first Gilgamesh poems are written

Five separate Sumerian poems — each a fragment, a panel in a story not yet told whole. The king-who-was becomes the king-who-is-remembered.

c. 1800 bce The first unified epic is written

In Old Babylonian — titled Surpassing All Other Kings. The separate poems are woven into one arc: friendship, loss, and the search for what cannot be found.

c. 1200 bce The definitive version is compiled

Scholar-priest Sîn-lēqi-unninni assembles 12 tablets — one of the earliest named authors in history. He deepens the philosophy and adds the great flood narrative.

Burial & silence

c. 650 bce The Library of Ashurbanipal

King Ashurbanipal collects 30,000 tablets at Nineveh — the greatest archive of the ancient world. In 612 bce the city burns. The tablets shatter and are buried for 2,500 years.

c. 1 ce Birth of Christ

A familiar landmark. By now Gilgamesh has been silent for 600 years. Two thousand more years of silence still to come.

Rediscovery

1849 ce The Nineveh tablets are excavated

Archaeologist Austen Henry Layard unearths thousands of shattered cuneiform tablets from the ruins of Nineveh, shipped to the British Museum in London.

1872 ce George Smith deciphers the Flood Tablet

A museum worker reads a 2,700-year-old flood story nearly identical to Noah's ark. After 2,500 years of silence, Gilgamesh speaks again.

Now You are here

The Epic of Gilgamesh is roughly 4,000 years old — and still asking the same question it always was: What do we leave behind?

folklounge.com

Epic

The epic poem is arguably the oldest literary genre, predating writing itself. The oldest known epic is the Epic of Gilgamesh (PDF), composed in Sumerian around 2100 BCE and later expanded in Akkadian — a king's quest for immortality that also contains one of the earliest flood narratives in recorded history. It is the story that bridges clay and papyrus, tablet and scroll: first pressed into clay in Mesopotamia, its themes traveled across cultures and centuries, copied, translated, and retold on whatever surface the next civilization had at hand.

As Wikipedia's entry on epic poetry defines the genre: an epic is "a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants." A full list of world epics can be found at Wikipedia: List of World Folk-Epics.

Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, is two-thirds god and one-third man — powerful, restless, and tyrannical. The gods create a wild man named Enkidu as his equal and counterweight. The two meet, fight, and become inseparable companions. Together they slay the monstrous Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven — and for their defiance, the gods decree that Enkidu must die.

Enkidu's death shatters Gilgamesh. Confronted for the first time with his own mortality, he abandons his kingdom and sets out across the ends of the earth in search of eternal life. He finds Utnapishtim — the one mortal granted immortality by the gods — who tells him the secret of a plant that restores youth. Gilgamesh retrieves it from the bottom of the sea, only to have it stolen by a serpent while he sleeps. He returns to Uruk with nothing, and stands before his city's great walls — the only immortality, the poem suggests, that any man can hope for.

The epic contains striking parallels to later religious texts, including a flood narrative — in which Utnapishtim survives a divine deluge by building a great boat and loading it with animals — that predates and closely resembles the story of Noah's Ark. It grapples with themes that feel startlingly modern: friendship, grief, the fear of death, the hunger for meaning, and the acceptance of human limits.

The most complete version was discovered among the 30,000 tablets of the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, excavated in the 1850s. The tablets had been buried for over 2,000 years. The epic was deciphered and published by British Museum scholar George Smith in 1872 — causing a sensation when the flood narrative became public.

Sources:

• Wikipedia: Epic of Gilgamesh

• The British Museum: Gilgamesh

• Andrew George — The Epic of Gilgamesh, Penguin Classics

• The Oriental Institute, Chicago

The Hero & The Heroine

FOLK LOUNGE

The Monomyth

Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey (PDF), also called the monomyth is a narrative framework identified by mythologist Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell noticed that stories from vastly different cultures and eras share a remarkably similar underlying structure — a universal pattern of transformation. The journey is broadly divided into three phases:

1. Departure (The Ordinary World) The hero begins in a familiar, comfortable world. Something disrupts that comfort — a Call to Adventure. The hero often initially refuses this call out of fear or doubt, but eventually crosses a threshold into the unknown, often guided by a mentor figure.

2. Initiation (The Special World) This is the heart of the story. The hero faces a series of tests, allies, and enemies. They approach a central ordeal — the most dangerous moment — and are transformed by it. They seize a "reward" (knowledge, an object, inner strength) as a result.

3. Return (The Road Back) The hero must bring their transformation back home. The journey isn't complete until the gift is shared with the ordinary world. The hero returns changed, and the world around them is better for it.

The Heroine's Journey (PDF) is most associated with Maureen Murdock, who developed it in her 1990 book The Heroine's Journey — ironically, in direct response to Campbell. Murdock had actually studied with Campbell, and when she asked him about the feminine experience in myth, he reportedly said women don't need to make the journey because they are the destination. She disagreed, and wrote the framework herself.

The Hero's Journey is fundamentally about separation and conquest — leaving home, defeating something external, and returning transformed. It's a linear, outward arc driven by achievement.

The Heroine's Journey is about fragmentation and wholeness — it's a psychological and relational arc that moves inward, dealing with the split between the feminine and masculine aspects of the self, and ultimately integrating them.

Where the hero slays the dragon, the heroine typically has to reckon with what the dragon represents internally.

A Journey Of Many Transitions

FOLK LOUNGE

The Three Phases of Transition

William Bridges · Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

PHASE ONE The Ending

Every transition begins with letting go, not a new beginning.

Endings always come firstTo become something else, you must stop being what you are now.

The Five Discomforts

DisengagementDismantlingDisidentificationDisenchantmentDisorientation

The irony of resistanceThe acts meant to preserve the old situation are what initiate its downfall.

PHASE TWO The Neutral Zone

The wilderness between old and new — where transformation actually happens.

Not empty — invisibly fullThe apparent deadness conceals ongoing transformation. It cannot be rushed.

The wilderness as sanctuaryThe same Hebrew word means both. Moses, Jesus, and Buddha withdrew here on the eve of rebirth.

Attentive inactivityWalking, watching, waiting. You don't do it; it does you.

PHASE THREE The New Beginning

Beginnings emerge from the inside, before we know they have already begun.

It starts insideNot the new job — a new sense of yourself, a new idea moving you forward.

Resonance, not logicA faint intimation — an image, an attraction not yet named. Not valid, but resonant.

The loop, not the leapYou go out and away — and come around and back. "After enlightenment, the laundry."

First published in 1980, Making Sense of Life's Changes (PDF) by William Bridges was the first book to explore the underlying and universal pattern of transition

This is probably the most important and underappreciated idea in the book. Bridges first clarifies the distinction between change and transition, stating that our society confuses them constantly. Change is situational — a move to a new city, a shift to a new job, the birth of a baby, or the death of a loved one. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is the personal side of change; the inner reorientation and self-definition that a person has to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into their life.

In other words, change is an event. Transition is a process. You can change in an instant — a diagnosis, a divorce, a job loss — but the transition that follows can take years. Society often rushes people through change while ignoring transition entirely, which is why so many people feel stuck or lost even after the external circumstances have resolved.

Bridges takes readers step by step through the three stages of any transition: The Ending, The Neutral Zone, and, eventually, The New Beginning.

1. The Ending: Counterintuitively, every transition begins here — not with a new beginning. Every transition begins with one. Too often we misunderstand them, confuse them with finality — that's it, all over, finished! Yet the way we think about endings is key to how we can begin anew. Bridges identifies five aspects of the ending experience: disengagement, dismantling, disidentification, disenchantment, and disorientation. The key task is letting go of the old identity or situation, which most people resist or rush through.

2. The Neutral Zone: This is the heart of the book and its most original contribution. In this seemingly unproductive time-out, we feel disconnected from the past and emotionally unconnected to the present. The most frightening stage of transition, the Neutral Zone is really an important time for reorientation. Bridges draws on mythic traditions — including the wilderness, the desert, the underworld — to frame this liminal space not as failure or stagnation, but as a necessary incubation period where the old self dissolves and the new self begins to form. Modern culture, obsessed with productivity, tends to pathologize this stage. Bridges rehabilitates it.

3. The New Beginning: Sometimes the beginning results from careful and conscious effort, but for most people important new beginnings have a mysterious and sometimes accidental quality to them. That spark may be an idea, an impression, an activity, an experience, or a feeling. Crucially, Bridges argues that beginnings cannot be forced — they can only be prepared for, and recognized when they arrive. 

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

— Mary Oliver

Pinterest: Narrative Embroidery

Ice Breaker

What was the most meaningful transition of your life when you look back?

Inspiration

• Thread Spells

• Tejiendo Raices

• Aitor Saraiba

Project Steps

1. Take a your cotton scroll and remove threads and fuzzies, leaving a little fringe.

2. Work on the front, allowing the back to be messy (noone will see it).

3. You will have a base for about 8 chapters, you can always extend it with more fabric.

4. Use clear tape to draft or sketch the order of chapters, ideas and symbols.

5. Lean on doodle illustration sets, Chika Miyata’s & Yooco Takashima’s book for inspo.

6. Map the order of backgrounds you want to use & any patchwork you want to make.

7. Spread out the embellishments: ribbons, charms, beads or threads.

8. Stay in the flow with one thread color, Maidera Fluorescent Pink or Tree Fog Green.

9. Don’t spend more than 10m sketching, a lot will have to be simplified and abstracted.

10. An easy place to start is writing down your city and birth date with a self portrait, capturing something floral decorative to capture your arrival and something from the mood of your home land.

11. Work on one panel at a time, it is ok if you need more than one panel for your period. There is no right or wrong way to journal your experience and milestones. It does not need to be logical, uniform or perfect. It can be dreamy, incomplete and abstract.

12. Use the zig zag ribbon to make tassel to tie your scroll in the end.

Stitch Menu

Woven Wisdom

Truth worth holding onto:

1. The Archive Is Personal: Every life contains chapters worth preserving — not just the dramatic ones. The unspoken, the quietly survived, and the slowly transformed are often the most important threads to save.

2. Making Is Remembering: Stitching slows time enough for memory to surface. Narrative embroidery doesn't just record a story — it creates the conditions for that story to be truly felt and understood.

3. The Scroll As Witness: What we make with our hands outlasts us. Your scroll is conservation work — ensuring that what you have lived, survived, and become does not disappear.

Cultural Memory Toolkit

• Story Mapping: Before you stitch, draw your journey. Sketch the moments of ending, the in-between seasons, and the new beginnings that have shaped who you are today. Don't edit — let the map be honest.

• The Gilgamesh Question: Ask yourself what Gilgamesh ultimately asked: What do I want to leave behind? Let that question guide what you choose to preserve on your scroll.

• Locate Yourself: Using Bridges' three stages as a guide, ask honestly — am I in an Ending, a Neutral Zone, or a New Beginning right now? Knowing where you are changes what you need to make.

Gilgamesh spent the whole epic trying not to die — and what he lost along the way was the actual texture of being alive. We understand him. But Bridges teaches us something that complicates the romance of immortality: every New Beginning requires an Ending first. To freeze is to stop becoming. And somewhere beneath our longing for permanence lives an equally powerful longing for its opposite — for transformation, for the relief of finally letting something go.

The scroll lives inside that paradox. It is not an act of freezing yourself — it is an act of setting a version of yourself down gently enough that you can walk forward without carrying it. You stitch a chapter closed not to be immortal, but to be free. Not to stop the journey, but to mark where you've been and make some space for what is still becoming.

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