Thanks for your homework. It was good to read all your reflections and responses.
The World is Made of Stories
Storytelling is something that human beings have done since the very earliest times. We are relentlessly social creatures who spend our days exchanging tales about ourselves and each other. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar has suggested that human storytelling - the endless round of conversation and tall tales and gossip and “have you heard about X” — evolved as a mechanism for social grooming. When we are chatting with our friends, we are doing much the same as rhesus monkeys are doing, as they grunt contentedly and pick parasites out of each other’s fur.
Whether Dunbar is right about the evolutionary roots of human storytelling, it is clear that stories are something that are of central importance to human life. Before books and films, before computers and online courses, there were stories. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were initially epic story-cycles that were recited, long before they were written down. To the present day, in Mongolia, Tuuli storytellers sing poems, stories and proverbs handed down entirely orally. In cultures that depend upon the spoken word, stories are an important way of communicating our values and our beliefs.
The poet Muriel Rukeyser, in her extended poem The Speed of Darkness, wrote, ‘the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.’ The universe Rukeyser is talking about is not the one described by science. It is the universe of human experience: our loves and hates, passions and dreams, interests and enthusiasms, fears and anxieties. It is the universe of the stories that we share with each other, that bind us together into families, cultures and communities.
Stories make us who we are.
So in this session, we’re going to think more about stories and storytellers.
Storytellers
If our lives are woven out of multiple stories, some of these are stories that we have lived through, and others are stories that we are told, that come together to make our culture.Dimiter Kenarov’s piece is powerful because of its stories: the stories about the author’s grandmother, about his own experiences as a child. It isn’t only made up of stories, but storytelling forms the backbone of the writing.
Ask yourself: who are the best storytellers you know? These could be friends, family-members, acquaintances, or the person in the fruit and vegetable shop who always chats. For the purposes of this exercise, don’t think of somebody famous, but simply somebody you have encountered and talked to face-to-face (or virtually). Write down this person’s name.
Now write a short creative nonfiction piece so that you can share this person’s storytelling skill with a wider audience. Remember that this is creative nonfiction, so it has to be true, and a story, and well-told. Write for fifteen minutes.
As you write this piece, you may want to relate a single story that the person has told you. In this case, you will be _re-_telling their story. But a lot of storytelling is story re-telling, so it is good to get used to this. You may want to tell the story of how they told you this story (in other words, to tell a story within a story). That’s fine too!
Discussion: What Makes a Good Story? What Makes a Good Storyteller?
Now I’m going to put you in breakout groups to share a section of your writing. When you have all shared, do the following.
- Tell the rest of your group who you have chosen as a good storyteller.
- Talk about what makes them such a good storyteller.
- Share some of the stories they have told.
- Discuss how they engage their audience.
Homework
This is a writing task. What stories were you told that had a big effect on you as a child? They might be family stories or myths, folktales, religious tales, scary stories, comforting stories… Choose one story, and think about the following:
1. What is the story?
2. Who told you this story? Where? Can you remember the setting in which they told you?
3. How did you feel about the story? What influence did it have on you?
When you’ve had a chance to think about all of this, write a short nonfiction piece (a true story, well-told) about this story, where and how you heard it, and why this story was/is significant to you. Remember that your writing should not just be about storytelling, but you should also be a storyteller as you write it.
Post either this piece of writing, or the writing you did in today’s class.