The power in telling stories is a nice article by Shelley Anderson on the open democracy website. She opens with a very small story of non-violent action, a story about shopping, and then looks at the things that make it powerful
The first is that it is an oral anecdote—as far as I know, it has never been documented. The second is that the protagonists are anonymous. During my work for an international peace organisation I have come across many such stories of successful nonviolent actions. Many are personal, eyewitness accounts; others are stories passed on by older family members or colleagues. Most are unwritten and will remain unwritten. Most, especially if the main protagonists are women, are anonymous.
The third characteristic of this opening story is its ordinariness. Shopping is an act of daily life which millions of people engage in. It is an unremarkable act.
She goes on to talk about the power of such ‘anecdotal, anonymous and above all, ordinary’ stories in shifting antagonistic situations.
Now I don’t know exactly how this links up, but I lunched yesterday (in Darwin’s House) with someone who is working nationally in social services in the UK, and we spoke of the entrenched feeling of the sector, the sense of victimhood. All the efforts to find stories that will overcome or shift the pattern seem to run into a wall of despair. The dangers of storytelling in such a situation are that once the defences are breached, the feelings that pour out are tumultous and uncontainable.
Alida Gersie is a brilliant therapist who specialises in narrative and I’ve been lucky enough to have experienced her coaching. She’s written several books on storytelling and storymaking that are off the beaten track for most who work on story in organizations. But I can recall a kind of story she calls a liminal, or gateway story (I can’t remember the precise term or track down the book this second). The liminal, or gateway story is the one just under, just behind your tongue and it acts like a lock on the rest of your reservoir of stories, particularly at times of upheaval, uncertainty, despair, unhappiness. Your fear is that the gateway story, once told, will unlock an uncontrollable flood of stories so you’ll be quite determined to hang onto this story and hold it close to yourself, because there’s no telling what will happen to you if you let go of it.
We spoke of this at lunch yesterday and wondered, together, about whether ordinariness in storytelling, has an important place in helping the griefstruck to start to shift patterns. This would displace my general assumption about getting emotion into the room through jumpstarts or appreciative enquiry or whatever, and shift to paying attention to small, slightly surprising, but quite undramatic moments, as as starting point for other work. So perhaps in emotionally complex situations, we’re looking for less story rather than more, or is this where objects and small neutral ‘third’ spaces for storytelling might come in to make things a bit safer? Then, how can the invitation to share stories also become an invitation towards hope and away from despair?
This reminds of some work we did years ago with the Countryside Agency when it was being merged, training story collectors to collect the stories of the difference the Agency had made in one region. We started in the normal way by asking for turning point stories and used an A3 sheet (big fan of worksheets) based on the turning point template in the storyguide we made with the Swiss aid agency.
As we debriefed, we heard stories of impact which were, for example, knowing who held the key to the village hall, so that a meeting on a parish plan wouldn’t have to be held in the rain. Not exactly Hollywood drama, and this was a relevation to them.
We’re not going to find stories of car chases in the backstreets of Norwich.
(Norwich is a big town in the east of England.) And this became the challenge. Because the anecdotal, often anonymous and above all ordinary tales of their day to day impact were not the kinds of stories that carry easily to a meeting with Whitehall, or the Chief Executive’s keynote speech to open the annual conference.
I can’t yet, quite tie these things together, because I’ve only just started to place the small fragments side by side and see what I can make of them, but I think there’s something niggling there.
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Your thoughts on the role of ordinary stories in managing grief struck me. My father passed away early this year, leaving my mother to live alone for the very first time in her life. My mother is an incredibly strong character, and is handling her loss very well. She doesn’t seem to be depressed, she’s very firmly getting on with life. Apart from a few cracks at the funeral, her grief has not been visible at all. In June I spent a couple of weeks with her on holiday in Ireland and began to notice that in conversations with neighbours, visitors, relatives, she would suddenly turn to me (in the context of whatever conversation we were having) and say something like “your father always used to say that…” or “your father wanted to…” or “your father did…”). It was as if she was enforcing his continuing presence in our lives through these very small, ordinary stories – at times I found this memorialising almost oppressive, but I began to realise that this was how she was handling her sense of loss, and it probably provided some relief.
Patrick, I am reminded of the anthropological concept of “re-membering”. That when a person dies, he or she retains, or regains, membership in the community by having the community members share stories about them. In this way, his or her presence is kept alive.
I am sorry for your and your mom’s loss, and I do wish you comfort in your stories.
I’m a great advocate for the small and the ordinary and at the beginning of every project, I seem to spend a lot of time convincing clients that the most powerful stories are not necessarily going to come from people who have ‘great stories to tell’ and have told them often! Or people who are really impressive and at the top of the game.
It might be my background as a fiction writer that makes me always want to hunt out, and shine the light on, the tiny details. And the people who aren’t necessarily looking at ‘the big picture’ but have a great understanding of the small ones!
The lovely thing I often find too is that the storytellers themselves are amazed by the power of their small stories. One of the best memories I have was when I visited one woman whose story was part of a collection I’d gathered from families supporting a family member with an illicit drug habit. She was a mother who had lost her daughter and she carried great guilt. (Despite incredible efforts over years) When she read the story written from a transcription of our day together, she was so amazed. ‘I see I DID try,’ she said. ‘I see I DID do everything I could.’ It was the small stories she had told me, gathered together, that allowed her to change the way she saw all those years of her life.
When we meet in Singapore, I’ll bring along some of the ’smaller is really bigger’ type books and films we’ve been producing for health and community awareness. So when you pack, leave some space in your bag Victoria!
Moya, I’ll bring an extra bag!! And I’m there the weekend before with altered plans and time if you’d like to spend time together. You are right about clients thinking it’s the powerful who hold stories and this not being true. The less powerful are often nervous about getting it wrong as well.
I’m writing a book just now and so been trawling old blogs to find out what I think and know. The number of times ’small stories’ comes up in what I write is really notable, perhaps the largest category.
You’ve also reminded me, Patrick and Moya, of something I found out at a narrative conference in Wales a few years back, largely based around research into mental health and health. One person had taken transcripts of interviews with terminal patients and rendered them back not as prose but as poetry (there are references but I can’t remember them). The reactions of patients to seeing themselves as poets on the page was one of profound delight. This was one of the things in my mind when we were working on the Beyond publication with the Asian Development Bank. The possibilities for poetry there were surprisingly great, in some of the smaller stories, perhaps in part because people might have been talking their second or third languages in being interviewed by us in English, and so the words had quirks and surprises which laid out beautifully on the page.
Victoria, love to meet on the weekend. I’m arriving Saturday morning.
When you wrote about poetry you reminded me of that incredible BBC
doco about war a few years back, The Not Dead. Wonderful stuff. The poet Simon Armitage worked from veteran’s stories to write the poems that are narrated by throughout. Here’s a glimpse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DH_d6Ao8QA&feature=youtube_gdat
I remember in another lifetime (aka career) when I worked in the church. What I loved most was doing the sacraments. While I don’t hold the same religious views anymore, I continue to believe in the power of rituals to access the sacred through the ordinary. I remember one man whose wife of many years had died. Much to the consternation of the literalists, we turned the alter in the sanctuary into an alter of objects from her/their life.
As part of the process I read out loud a poem he had written for her many years before (he was afraid he would be too broken up to do so himself). In many ways it was not a very good poem—even he said so—but he was so moved (as were others) by how it sounded when I read it. I think the secret was to read the love he put into it rather than just the words, but in doing so the latter came alive with such beauty.
I guess I offer this to celebrate the power of what we often think of the ‘ordinary,’ I too have often worked with social service and education organizations who often struggle with despair in sometimes feeling they take a more steps backward than forward. Their ‘poems’ in themselves were often no match for the situations with which they often grappled but became acts of beauty and grace and healing when delivered with presence in the moment. From a narrative perspective, I coached them to drop deeper (vertically) into individual moments in their stories to find learning and meaning more than trying to work horizontally in search of a ‘happily ever after’. I found the latter yielded some triumphs and but also fueled their despair. They reclaimed their ‘alter’ from the institutions and made it their own.
Thank you Moya. That’s beautiful. Simon Armitage is an interesting poet. He wrote something great in the New Scientist in 2006 that I’ve never forgotten about how it was poetry that got man to the moon and trigonometry that helped him with the journey there.
You are also reminding me of the work that Helen Chadwick does as a composer. Dalston Songs was my first exposure to this and left a very strong impression on me. She’d gathered stories from her neighbourhood (a mixed part of east London) about what home meant to them, and threaded them into a kind of barber shop quartet (4 men, 4 women) choreographed with a capella singing interspersed with fragments from the interviews and songs from different homelands, with echoes in each of the other. Here’s her web address and the address of the blog I wrote about it at the time:
http://www.helenchadwick.com/dalstonsongs.html
http://www.sparknow.net/blog/dalston-songs/
In my doctoral study, I inadvertently discovered in listening to the audio transcripts of my interviews that the pivotal moment in the person’s story was in most all cases preceded by a certain type of life. I realized that these markers served to distance the person from their usual patterns of identity and narration just in case this opening for a new possibility were rejected. Given my work with a rites of passage frame in the study, I too saw these as liminal stories, the ones ‘in-between’, at the threshold between who we are now and who we want to become. In doing some follow up with the participants, I retraced our steps to that point again in order to move through these gateways to explore them further.
I was heartened, Victoria, to read your mention of ‘third spaces’ in working this way as it is a cornerstone of my narrative coaching work. Thanks for sharing this post with us.
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