Archives for category: Healing power of stories

We’re not dumb kids

December 15, 2010 //

From February 2004 through April 2005 I was Storytelling Director for Stagebridge, America’s oldest senior theatre. My job was to work with seniors who were taking stories into the inner-city schools of Oakland, California. At the time, the position was supported by a federal grant intended to support literacy programs. Though reading improvement is hard to correlate with any one thing, the researchers working with the program were able to measure a statistically significant difference between students in classes with a storyteller and those without. “We’re Not Dumb Kids” is just one of many stories from an extraordinary year.

When Jim McWilliams walked into the class, a room full of fifth graders fell silent. They knew something good was coming.

Jim was “their” storyteller. Once a month the retired lawyer came into the inner-city Oakland school to tell stories to the class. When he spoke of leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, he called them Medgar (Evers) or Martin (Luther King). They had been friends and fellow activists, not just names he read in the newspaper.

The school lay in the heart of a city pocked like a bombing target. Some neighbourhoods were so derelict they looked as if they had been abandoned, and in many ways they had been. Drugs were sold openly. Violence was so common when children talked about gang beatings or drive-by shootings they were generally not referring to television shows.

Most of the houses surrounding the school were in good repair. The streets were home to Black American families with middle-class aspirations, but many of the children in the school were from families barely scraping by or living in poverty. The hills above them were populated be comfortably middle- and upper-class white families. That kind of social disparity has high costs. The average academic ranking of the students in the school was low.

I visited the school to watch Jim in action. He started out with a short folktale, something surefire to warm up his audience. They listened, as they always did when Jim spoke, but they were listless and distracted.

Jim finished his story and looked around. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

The children answered glumly, “They’re closing our school.”

School closures were being announced regularly in the Bay Area, a curious consequence of the federal “No Child Left Behind” program that was mandating standardized tests and minimal performance standards. Schools that didn’t measure up to required standards were losing funding.

“Why are they closing your school?” Jim asked.

“Because we’re dumb kids.”

Jim McWilliams speaking with a young admirer after a performance in Oakland, California

Jim was startled, but he understood after their teacher read part of a news release. It named schools being closed because they were “underperforming”. The kids knew what that meant. They were dumb.

“Are you dumb kids?” Jim asked.

“No,” they chorused.

“So what are you going to do about it?”

It hadn’t occurred to the children they could challenge the school board’s decision. As Jim talked with them and asked them questions, the gloom in the class lifted. Jim organized students to write letters to the school board. He taught them how to protest the closure of the school and their portrayal as underachievers, how to get on the speakers’ list at the next board meeting, how to stand up for themselves, how to contact media and enlist allies. (They learned the lesson well and talked him into coming with them to the board meeting and speaking on their behalf.)

The children’s eyes were shining when we left. They were sitting tall. They were afire with enthusiasm and not because they expected the school board to reverse its decision. Jim had been clear that was unlikely.

Jim had given them something more important than winning a battle to keep the school open. He had given them a new story. They were not “dumb kids”. They were smart, socially active fighters for justice.

I don’t know how long they held onto that new story. I don’t know how many lives were changed that day. I do know a room full of children learned they could refuse to be labeled.

And that is a powerful story.

Tags Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, importance of stories, Jim McWilliams, No Child Left Behind, power of stories, role of stories, Storytelling in schools

Categories Healing power of stories, Memoir, Storytelling in schools, The importance of storytelling

The poetry of work

October 2, 2010 //

Cathryn with ukelin, instrument from the thirties

There was a time when my ex and I took the stage as part of the cowboy poetry scene. For him, it was a dream come true. For me, it was fingernails on a blackboard. Not for the other poets we listened to, whose work came from a deep place, but for me. I was always a reluctant farmer and rancher. The inequity between outflow and inflow of cash gave me high blood pressure for the first time in my life.

Our colleagues on the circuit were completely smitten by the life. I was a reluctant participant.

Even a reluctant rancher cannot help but understand the role of cowboy poetry. The poems are stories of the land, of the life, of tragedy and joy, of comedy and pain, and, ultimately, of the meaning of life. On the British Columbia circuit, rhyming was preferred but not required. Cattle and horses were royal subjects. Sheep were an embarrassment.

Some of the "real" cowboy poets at the Prince George, BC, festival

I had always been in the camp that derided country music and cowboy poetry. I believed the mockery that if you played country music (and, for me, cowboy poetry) backward you got your wife back, your truck back, your dog back, etc.

My brief experience on the cowboy poetry circuit taught me how wrong I was. There was nothing cynical or shallow about the poems I heard. There was celebration of the land, the people, the animals. There was agony over weather, death, injury, illness, and financial losses.

The poems were stories. They were literate, elegiac, funny, mournful, celebratory. They were stories of a way of life that works its way deep into the soul.

Pioneer Ranch, my home for nine years

My ex and I had both sheep and cattle. I never bonded with the cows. I adored the sheep. Still, I’m grateful for all of it—the times when all plans were halted because we had to tend to a cow, sheep or pig in difficult labour, the hours spent stretching wire for new fences, the endless rounds on a tractor as we cut, baled, and brought in the hay, the magic of Northern Lights, the wary trust of wildlife.

So in that spirit, I share with you a song we recorded on “The Bull Rider’s Wife”, with thanks to talented lyricist Fred J. Eaglesmith. The song is a story, and the story still squeezes my heart.

13 Summerlea

Tags cowboy poetry, importance of stories, meaning of stories, memoir, Personal narratives

Categories Healing power of stories, Meaning of stories, Memoir, Personal narratives, The importance of storytelling

No longer strangers, no longer afraid

August 29, 2010 //

As long as we look out at each other only through the masks of our composure, we are looking through hard eyes. But as the masks drop and we see the suffering and courage and brokenness and deeper dignity underneath, we truly start to respect each other as fellow human beings. ~ F. Scott Peck, The Different Drum

A young Cowichan woman was among the people who signed up for the first storytelling class I taught after moving to Vancouver Island. The class was being held on her people’s traditional territory, long ago lost to colonizers.

For the first three sessions she sat quietly. Although she participated in the exercises and group work, she did so hesitantly. Still, she kept coming back.

Our stories are like the florets that make up a dandelion's sunny head; each contributes to the beauty of the whole.

Not until the fourth session did she muster the courage to share her story. Through her eyes we saw the stern man who bullied her family into letting her go. We saw her family’s tear-streaked faces. We wept for her homesickness as she lay on a cot in a drab dormitory room. We ached as she was punished for speaking her language.

As she quietly but confidently told her story, she changed for us. She was no longer the nearly invisible young woman on the edge of the group. The gift of her story, painful though it was, was like opening a box. Suddenly we saw the treasure that lay within.

Her story was both personal and universal.

In the years since then, I have heard many more stories of the residential school system whose agenda was bluntly articulated by Sir Duncan Campbell Scott: “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian problem.”

At the time the system was developed, Scott was head of the Department of Indian Affairs. He is often quoted as saying the purpose of the schools was “to take the Indian out of the Indian.”

The wounds from this government-supported initiative to erase cultures, languages, and the very essence of identity run deep. Canada is not alone in being slow and inadequate in understanding why such awful wounding is not something people can simply “get over and move on”.

The young Cowichan woman’s story was an important part of the education of a small group of storytelling students. It’s harder to hang onto the sense of Otherness that divides us when we listen to each others’ stories with an open heart.

Tags importance of stories, Personal narratives, power of stories, role of stories

Categories Healing power of stories, Memoir, Personal narratives, Social myths, The importance of storytelling

Twittering a new story

June 26, 2010 //

The oil spill in the Gulf is everybody’s story, but from our distant vantage points, we are not always sure how to influence it.

NASA image on June 26, courtesy of NASA Goddard Photo and Video's Flickr photostream

I write on Day 68 of one of the world’s most horrendous environmental disasters, with little to cheer as we watch scenes of wildlife coated in sticky goo and read stories of the psychological toll on coastal residents.

The Twitter universe is abuzz with 140-character messages. The satiric BPGlobalPR taunts the oil giant with messages purportedly from BP, such as: “Keep in mind, the more your interest in the oil spill wanes, the less damage the oil does” and “We are doing everything we can to stop the information leaks in the gulf”. Others post links to breaking news or to the reflections of dozens of bloggers.

Paul Steele decided to ask fellow Twitter users (aka Tweeps) to join him with one, simple message: “Clean the Gulf”. The video starts with the ubiquitous Twitter “fail whale”, the cartoon character who cheerfully—and frequently—sails onto the screen with the message that Twitter is “over capacity”.

Spliced between some of the most wrenching photographs of the oil spill and its aftermath, people sing their pleas or hold signs with messages such as: “Save the oceans and the animals”, “Don’t blow it. Good planets are hard to find” and “We are all complicit. We must end our fossil fuel addiction”.

Will a Twitter video reverse the damage spreading like a cancer over the Gulf? Not likely, but when a dominant story is one of such magnitude and impact, we have to find a way to deal with it. So we tell stories to put it in context, stories based on the news we see or hear, the opinions of friends, and our own experience of life.

By becoming part of this Twitter video, people from around the globe took the chance to edit at least a part of their own oil spill story. The new story they created together says more than “Clean the Gulf”. It also says, “We are in this together”. It reminds those responsible, “We are holding you accountable”.

For the participants themselves it says, “I am not powerless in the face of disaster.” And that is the only story that leads to action instead of paralysis.

Tags importance of stories, meaning of stories

Categories Healing power of stories, Meaning of stories, Organizational storytelling, The importance of storytelling

Hey, Doc, I’m a story, not just a symptom

May 31, 2010 //

Having moved so many times in my adult life, I’ve rarely had the chance to really connect with “my” doctors. Some make it easier than others. They are the ones who know how to listen, who want to know the context of whatever symptoms walk through the door. They want to know my story.

A doctor who stands out in my mind took a storytelling course from me through the University of Washington’s Experimental College. During introductions, he told us why he was talking the class.

Virtual Environmental Doctor, from Wonderlane's Flickr photostream, seems an apt visual metaphor

He led Grand Rounds at the University of Washington Medical Center. He knew talking about symptoms and treatments was not enough. He wanted students to understand no one’s health deteriorates in isolation. His goal was to tell patients’ stories in a way that would teach diagnosis as an art, not just a skill. Judging from the stories he told during the course and his intense listening when others spoke, I’d say his students had a good chance of becoming better doctors thanks to his influence.

So I was keenly interested to find the story Dr. Jack Coulehan tells on the Alaskan LitSite. He writes about his internal medicine practice in a rundown neighbourhood in Pittsburgh in the 1970s. He was a young doctor, with a scraggly beard that amused his patients. “But the thing they found most strange about me was that I spent so much time listening to their stories.”

He goes on to describe his experience as a junior faculty member at the nearby university hospital. He writes, “When students tried to tell their patients’ stories during rounds, the resident would caution them to stick to the point.”

That attitude turned the people he knew into objects. They were transformed, like the self-educated, paraplegic teetotaler who was an expert on Pittsburgh history. The medical team labeled him an “alcoholic” because of his red nose and colorful vocabulary and sedated him into a “zombie who couldn’t think straight”.

Coulehan says that medical students receive mixed messages. They take classes that focus on narrative as the heart of medical practice, then enter hospitals where they are taught that stories “may actually obscure the problem” and where the technical fix and objective data overrule patients’ narratives.

In British Columbia a new program is trying to address this, by training volunteers to influence a health system that too often talks “about” rather than “with” them. Patient Voices Network has launched with a large and hopeful intention: “We expect that as experts in their own lives, patients can provide health system administrators and care providers with important information about [how] to best serve them and involve them in their own care as partners.”

One of the things volunteers have asked for is training in storytelling. They understand intuitively that change happens when we hear, understand, and honour each others’ stories. Perhaps through their influence there will be many more doctors like Dr. Coulehan and the doctor who came through my class many years ago.

[Have you had a doctor who really heard your stories? Taught physicians to tell stories? Share your experiences in the "comments" section below.]

Tags importance of stories, meaning of stories, Personal narratives, power of stories, role of stories, storytelling in health care

Categories Healing power of stories, Health, Meaning of stories, Organizational storytelling, The importance of storytelling

The unpatterned restlessness

May 18, 2010 //

When I read Hole in the Sky: A Memoir, I knew I had found an author who spoke the language of my spirit. So I looked for other books by William Kittredge. In Owning It All I found passage after passage that resonated for me. This is one of them. Fortunately, his books are still in print.

“We find stories in the unpatterned restlessness of our lives, and in the histories of the places we have lived, and we tell them and retell them, if only to ourselves, living them out and sharpening and reinventing them, discovering significances and defining and redefining ourselves. It is the most universal thing human beings do as in their secret hearts they work to achieve some positive effect in the world.” ~ William Kittredge, Owning It All

Tags importance of stories, meaning of stories, Personal narratives, power of stories, role of stories, Storytelling quotations

Categories Healing power of stories, Meaning of stories, Storytelling quotations, The importance of storytelling

The storytelling labyrinth

May 17, 2010 //

Regular readers of Story Route and those of you who are Facebook friends will likely recognize A Storied Career. It’s Kathy Hansen’s “Blog to explore traditional and postmodern forms/uses of storytelling”. Even in the middle of a cross-country move, Kathy continues to post provocative and fascinating entries on a dizzyingly wide array of storytelling topics.

So when she asked if I would participate in her Q&A series, I was honored. She sent a list of questions to choose from, all of them well crafted and designed to set my mind racing.

I’ve excerpted a few excerpts below. The whole Q&A is available on A Storied Career. While you’re there download the e-book she created with her first forty online interviews: Storied Careers: 40+ Story Practitioners Talk about Applied Storytelling

Here are the excerpts:

Can you elaborate on how you applied your experience as a performance storyteller to your new career [as a community developer]?

The realization was not instantaneous. For the first while, I had the usual worries: Someone would find out I was actually a storyteller masquerading as a community developer. Then it would be game up.

What happened instead was that I began to insert stories into presentations and to use storytelling techniques to prepare reports. It wasn’t long before I was seen as a storytelling community developer. Or was it a community organizing storyteller?

How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative?

Storytelling became the underpinning of everything I did. When I look back on the unexpected twists and turns of my professional life, I feel extraordinarily lucky. Storytelling allowed me to be happily employed, doing what I loved. Initially, I thought that meant performing and workshops. When that morphed into the world of community development, I realized I’d found my niche and have been happy in that ever since.

To what extent and in what ways do you feel these venues [Web 2.0 and social media] are storytelling media?

The various social media are a means of entering the world of story from different points. We can assume an avatar and jump into Second Life. We can try out a new story and test it on Twitter or Facebook. We can blog a different perspective and see who responds, and how. We can invent our professional persona on LinkedIn.

To me, it’s all part of the larger arena of storytelling. If we don’t fall into the trap of becoming an observer, if we actually engage and become creative contributors, we can experiment with creating new stories.

What’s your favorite story about a transformation that came about through a story or storytelling act?

Although I know many instances of transformation through a story or storytelling act, I keep coming back to two I had the honour of witnessing. Both were published in The Healing Heart~Communities and are on my Catching Courage blog.

As a transplant from the US, what similarities and differences do you observe in the storytelling environment between the two neighbor nations?

John Ralston Saul may have the answer in his extraordinary book, A Fair Country. He points out that one of the major differences between the US and Canada is the latter’s Métis roots (which he also says we ignore at our peril). Saul writes that the first European arrivals had an egalitarian relationship with the First Nations people who were already here, a relationship destroyed by latter settlers, who brought cultural genocide.

Read the whole interview on A Storied Career.

Tags importance of stories, Organizational storytelling, role of stories, storytelling in health care

Categories Healing power of stories, Health, Memoir, Organizational storytelling, The importance of storytelling

Storytelling is a healing process

May 14, 2010 //

“Storytelling, you know, has a real function. The process of the storytelling is itself a healing process, partly because you have someone there who is taking the time to tell you a story that has great meaning to them. They’re taking the time to do this because your life could use some help, but they don’t want to come over and just give advice. They want to give it to you in a form that becomes inseparable from your whole self. That’s what stories do. Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you.” Alice Walker, in an interview about her work in Common Boundary, 1990.