Archives for category: Meaning of stories

Storytelling and science

July 5, 2010 //

It’s been two decades since I copied the quotation below from Jim Nollman’s book, Spiritual Ecology. At the time I wrote it down, I substituted “storyteller” for “artist”.

I was prompted by the question so many children asked when I told stories in schools, “Is that true?” I finally settled on this answer: “All of my stories are true, but not everything in my stories happened.”

That always seemed to satisfy the young questioners. They grasped intuitively what adults often seem to forget, that we can find truth in a dance, a painting, a story, a poem. It’s not a truth that can be counted, nor an experience that is suited to experimental processes.

But then, frankly, neither is the physical world scientists subject to measurements. Scientific research starts with a hypothesis, which is, in a sense, a story about the way some substance or process or creature or interaction is expected to behave. Stories start the same way, with speculation about the way people will behave.

Both are influenced by the life experience of the observer, whether scientist or storyteller. Both are subject to the surprise element. Both can be turned on their head when a scientist or storyteller comes at the research or story from an entirely different perspective.

So while I still like this quote, I no longer see the worlds of the scientist and the artist as separate and distinct. Both test hypotheses. Neither can successfully separate from the larger context. Both are essential to our lives.

An artist also asks questions. But instead of utilizing rigor and skepticism to provide experiential answers that exist in a direct causal relationship to those questions, he or she focuses upon a medium that provides the experience directly. The artist works to convey a perceptual message in a manner that requires no operational definitions and no rigid rules of correspondence to expel the subjective perception of his or her own consciousness. And whereas a scientist thrives on absolute answers expressed as numbers, an artist thrives on process. A scientist seeks to expand humanity’s frame of reference; an artist seeks to expand humanity’s depth of insight. ~ Jim Nollman, Spiritual Ecology

Tags importance of stories, meaning of stories, role of stories, Storytelling quotations

Categories Meaning of stories, Storytelling quotations

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

What color/colour are your stories?

June 9, 2010 //

Artist Isa D’Arleans is originally from France but has made her home in Seattle for many years. I met her when visiting a friend there. She is vivacious, talented, and a deep pool of thought.

Recently, she started a blog, Live In Colors that explores what it means to be fully alive. She is also refreshingly candid. Recently she was interviewed by King5 TV in Seattle and spoke of a long, dry spell—how she endured it, what it meant, how she is emerging.

So when Isa asked me to write a guest post for Live In Colors, I thought about what colors meant in terms of my own storytelling and what storytelling means in terms of living fully, vibrantly, joyously.

Here’s a brief excerpt from “Stories color our lives”:

What color are your stories? (Paint Dripping, courtesy of Photos8.com)

When I’m feeling blue, I tell stories about sad times, poignant times, bring-on-a-tear times. When I’m happy I spin sunny-yellow stories about successful times, joyous times, life’s-a-bowl-of-cherries times. If I see red, I tell stories of anger, of betrayal, of how-could-you-do-it-to-me disappointment.

We all do that because storytelling is in our bones, our breath, our DNA. We are story-making animals. We figure a child has acquired language when she can string together sentences in a rudimentary narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The rest of the post can be found here.

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

Categories Meaning of stories, Memoir, Personal narratives, 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

Science as story

April 13, 2010 //

“There is no conclusion in science; it is a continual and recursive process of story testing.” ~ Paul Grobstein

Eggs Benedict. Boiled eggs. Fried, scrambled, poached, coddled eggs. Huevos rancheros, omelettes, eggnog. Just listing them makes me drool. Yellow and white killers in a crusty shell? Or nature’s little health miracle? It’s all in the science, and science is all in the story.

For many years, I worked with organizations and systems that worshiped at the feet of science. This was generally defined as peer-reviewed studies published in peer-reviewed journals. The “gold standard” was the randomized clinical trial.

The minor gods in service of the ideal were quantitative methods that produced numbers that could be compared, graphed, and used to substantiate or reject the need for some project, methodology or program.

Qualitative methods were suspect, dealing, as they did, with the messiness of human nature. Results were often dismissed as interesting but no more valid than an informed guess.

Of course, both quantitative and qualitative methods produce useful stories that summarize current knowledge. What neither produces is Truth, that shy and elusive deity who is sought but never found.

The humble and much-maligned egg from woodleywonderworks ' photostream on Flickr

Take, for example, the simple and much-maligned egg. After years during which eggs were dangerous to our health, scientists have exonerated the humble barnyard gifts.

During the egg-as-demon years, I had numerous disagreements with colleagues and friends who insisted research was objective. They viewed my refusal to give up eggs as an attack on the scientific method and an absurdly unhealthy choice.

What was really at work in my stubborn brain was the sense that research is based on stories, and stories change. I just waited them out and quietly went on eating eggs.

So I chuckled when I ran across an essay by Paul Grobstein, a neurobiologist, biologist, philosopher, and educator at Bryn Mawr. In “Science as story telling and story revising”, he writes, “the scientific method cannot validate universal claims; so scientific stories should never be regarded as candidates (or competitors) for ‘Truth’. And they are true only insofar as one is satisfied with the provisional, i.e., with a story that summarizes all observations made up to the present.”

I wish I had had a copy of Grobstein’s essay to hand out during my years in community development. Whatever methods we used, qualitative or quantitative, to evaluate the projects and programs in which I was involved, the best we could offer was a story.

The story was based on what we hoped would happen at the outset, mixed with what we observed along the way, and blended with what we learned as we reflected on the whole process. Into that mix we threw the stories of other researchers, evaluators, and participants who had contributed their observations, learnings, and reflections.

To be honest, I have to say that the people with whom I shared those stories over the years were very receptive. But it might have eased the worries of others, particularly those who were allies in the search for ongoing funding, if I could have shared Grobstein’s observation with them: “As summaries of observations, scientific stories are only as good as the breadth of observations they summarize, so the more people contributing observations the better. In addition to the observations, however, one needs the stories to summarize them, stories that in turn influence what new observations are made and what significance is attached to them….The more people, the more observations, the more stories the better.”

In the search for the Holy Grail of Truth, science’s latest stories are important. They are also incomplete, based, as they are, on current observations filtered through the lens of experience and belief the scientists brought to bear on their experimental methodology.

Maybe we should think of research findings and qualitative evaluations as interim truths. It would help us remember a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein:

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Grobstein, P. (2005). Revisiting science in culture: Science as story telling and story revising. Journal of Research Practice, 1(1), Article M1. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/9/18

Tags importance of stories, meaning of stories, Organizational storytelling

Categories Health, Meaning of stories, Organizational storytelling, Storytelling quotations, The importance of storytelling

Bite till the blood runs

April 5, 2010 //

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle. ~Ursula Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World

For two seasons I traveled the American school route in Germany and England, telling stories to military offspring. The principal approached me before a performance in one of the German schools. It was a tough group, he told me. “Better you than me,” he said, in a voice that intimated he was throwing me to the lions.

They filed in with all the chaos that accompanies a school on the edge of out-of-control. One boy in particular stood out. He slouched into the room with that boneless walk only a teenager can muster. Second row from the back, third seat in, he planted his lanky form. Feet stretched across the narrow aisle, arms crossed, face set, he sat poised to retaliate against the students who would inevitably graze him while trying to clamber over his legs.

He also set the tone for the next 45 minutes. Others would cast side glances his way, to see if it was acceptable to listen or if verbal tomatoes were called for. The first story had to work. Two minutes in, they would accept my offering or eat me for lunch.

Doing a last-minute set shuffle, I chose a short tale guaranteed to settle and center a middle-school audience. I don’t remember what it was now, only that the group was stretched tense as a rubber band aimed in my direction. The story worked. They didn’t fire.

So I told them a fish story to keep them still. (Fish Face from Andy Welsh's photostream on Flickr)

The second story had to keep them hooked, so I chose one that had never failed, “Tayzanne,” from Diane Wolkstein’s extraordinary collection of Haitian tales The Magic Orange Tree. There was nothing noble in the choice. The story is disturbing, haunting, dark enough to calm even a roomful of adolescents. I used it as a club, to dash any troublemakers into silence so I could finish the program and get out of there intact. I’m not proud of the motivation, but it worked.

The lanky boy sat forward and listened, to “Tayzanne” and every story that followed. His compatriots took their cue from him, and the session ended without mishap. I had no illusions that the group was transformed by the stories, but we had all survived without undue injury to their spirits or mine.

A year later I returned to the school. The students showed no recognition of the middle-aged woman who had spun tales for them the year before. Once again, the boy with long legs and attitude slouched in and posted his challenge across the aisle.

When I began the first story, he looked up, his eyes fixed and calculating. He leaned forward and stared. At the end of the story, he shouted, “You the lady that was here last year?”

“Yes,” I replied, expecting the worst.

“Tell that fish story,” he said.

“Yeah,” the others chimed in. “We’ve been talking about it for a year. We still don’t get it. We want to hear it again.”

It was the only story they wanted to hear, the only story they would allow me to tell. When it ended, they peppered me with questions I didn’t even try to answer. Instead, we shared the mystery, the possibilities, the strangeness of the tale and what it revealed about us and about the culture from which it comes.

I left that school with an exhilaration that returns to me as I write. The long-legged boy and his friends reminded me to love the questions. The answers are never clear. They change with each telling of a story, with each hearing of a tale. They change when the events of today mix with the experiences of yesterday.

I have learned to embrace the mystery. I have not found answers, which are as elusive now as when I first understood that the spiritual certainty of my childhood had cracked in the face of a growing appreciation for the questions.

I have learned to be comfortable living in the middle, biting life until the blood runs, knowing Ursula LeGuin was right. “In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.”

This essay first appeared in The Healing Heart: Communities as part of a longer piece, “Seven Lessons”.

Diane Wolkstein’s collection is still a favorite among storytellers: