Tell Me Something Good

Eating Stories by Dean Shapiro

At Passover, the Jewish festival of liberation, we EAT a story. It is the great narrative of our people: we were enslaved; now we are free.

Families gather from all parts. Some clean and cook for days. Tables are set with finery (and often an extra chair or three) and Haggadot – the guidebooks that describe the steps of the elaborate seder meal, complete with explanation. The word “Haggadah” comes from the Hebrew verb “Le’hagid” – To Tell. At the center of it all rests a seder plate, gracefully holding the symbolic foods.

As we tell, sing, and ask the story of the Exodus, we eat foods to heighten the experience – matzah, the bread of affliction, salt water, to remember tears, charoset, a sticky concoction that reminds us of mortar, and maror, the bitter herb. When we bite into bitterness, we experience it directly. That way, we will recognize the bitterness of oppression when we see it in others.

The story of the exodus isn’t told in a linear manner. It is, rather, impressionistic and experiential – like the writing of Virginia Woolf or Marcel Proust, one memory or idea leads to the next. We expound, we digress, we skip, we add a footnote from someone who lived 1000 years ago right next to a question seated next to us.

According to Jean Houston, a myth is a personal narrative written so large that everyone can see themselves in it. That’s the power of the Exodus story: every Jew can identify it as their personal story. In the seder, each person should experience that they, themselves, had left Egypt – if not the literal Land of Egypt, then the confinement, limitation, and suppression that Egypt represents. That’s what makes it our sacred story.

This year, as last, my community gathered on Zoom for a large seder – well over one hundred people! Many of us are good friends who haven’t seen each other in person for twelve months. To combat isolation, to prepare us for re-integration, and to honor the spirit of the Festival (and our Personal Storytelling Class), I divided participants into breakout groups, and asked them to tell a 2-minute story based on one of these prompts:

Tell about a time when...

• You felt free.
• You had no choice.
• You went on a journey.
• You bossed someone around.
• You floated.
• You stood up for yourself.
• A pet died.
• You were in the dark.
• You hid.

What story would you tell?

Magic by Sally Jo Bannow

Stories have always been magical to me. I remember my dad reading stories to me every night before bed. My dad specialized in telling long story-jokes to anyone who would listen. He held the listeners’ attention with fun details and voices, always ending with some corny punchline. And now, like him, I’ve spent my whole life telling stories in one way or another. As a child, I wrote plays for kids in school to perform, I constantly listened to music, and lived the stories that those songs told. I imagined I was the subject of the song, and sang it with the intention of conveying the story behind the song. Later, I got friends together, and hung up a sheet to put on a play; some simplified children’s story that I had concocted.

No surprise that I ended up in the theatre as an actor. I fell in love with being part of an ensemble of theatre artists: actors, directors, choreographers, set and costume designers, prop designers, etc. I am in love with the live theatre, and with film. The idea that adults can sit down, just as I did as a child, and be transported by someone else’s journey into a deeper understanding and experience of themselves, and of another life.

The stories we tell in the theatre and on film are magical to me.

I started directing for the theatre. It’s like giving birth! Combining all of the elements of live theatre into a precisely timed live performance with all of its rising and falling of storyline is an astronomical feat.

Then I began writing plays and musicals. In this practice, the work was mostly internal, and allowed my creativity to go wherever the story led. Most of the stories I’d experienced to that point were fictional.

Then a friend introduced me to the artform called “Playback Theatre.” Playback theatre falls under the category of theatre for social justice. In this form, a teller from the audience tells a true moment, or longer story from their lives. The actors and musicians (who are all improvising), then recreate the story exactly as they heard it and perform it for the teller. There are many ‘aha’ moments, as the teller observes their experience in a new and creative way.

The thing that moves me to my core about all of these art forms, is that through the telling of these stories, the audience members reach a connection – an intimacy, and deep level of humanness.

Now, years after my life in entertainment began, I have ‘stumbled’ into the art of oral storytelling. I am in the process of learning to find stories from my own life, to craft and shape them into pieces of verbal art. It feels foreign and familiar at once. It is an art, and it is magical. It has the power to connect people who seemingly have no other connection. It reminds us of our humanity and of our shared experiences and how very much alike we are. It helps us to know each other and to find the empathy and compassion that lies deep within us all. That is a fine magic trick, indeed.

(The image at the top of the post can be found here.)

This Is Not a Lie by Bridget Murphy

I come from a long line of Irish storytellers. We love nothing more than to while away an afternoon over coffee, tea (or beer) talking… about anything.  We talk about politics, we talk about what made us mad that week, we talk about the family, we tease each other (relentlessly) over our idiosyncrasies, but our best trick is to take the last big family argument and dissect it later for jokes. People who have witnessed this marvel at my family’s ability to move past our grudges so quickly.  This, I reason, is because we love storytelling MORE than grudges.  We make a game of who can construe the best story out of the last conflict, no matter how devastating the conflict seemed at the time. Who has time for grudges when you are racing to see who can tell the best story.  We can’t wait to see who will spin our weaknesses into a story of redemption, who will make us laugh at ourselves, who will make sense of the senselessness.

When I set about trying to develop my first story for Liz Warren’s Personal Storytelling class, I planned to tell about an event that happened 40 years ago.  I had a scrap of dialogue and a few sketchy details, so I called my brother and asked what he remembered about that Mother’s day.  He said he only remembered what I had told him over the years.  And my parents, who were also there on that Mother’s day, have from what I can tell allowed their scraps of memory to be swayed by whomever they spoke to last.  I was alone to reconstruct the story from my own unreliable and vague memory. And then I got stuck.  I couldn’t figure out how to construct the story without all the facts. I began to question whether I had a story at all. 

Then I ran across a passage from Jack McGuire’s book The Power of Personal Storytelling where he makes this claim: “By engaging in personal storytelling, we unlearn a lifetime of subtle social conditioning not to think or act creatively.”  It was true.  I was surprised at how obliged I felt to tell the story accurately, chronologically, fairly.  McGuire goes on to say that the biggest obstacle for “would be” storytellers is not “the lack of memories, low self esteem or stage fright. Rather, it’s a culturally induced fear of being inaccurate, or misrepresenting things, of failing to be objective, or of committing a lie.”  

I quickly realized that in order to tell my story I was going to have to lie, well, not lie exactly, but I was going to have to somehow fill in the gaps, to make the story whole.  Stephen King once said:  "Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground ... Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world." I love this twist on the idea of the truth.  In this scenario, storytellers are going back to honor sacred ground, digging up dusty memories, carefully reclaiming and preserving the underworld of lost details.  However foggy or degraded, these remnants of our pasts are powerful artifacts that help us make meaning of our past, present and future.  Marilyn Torres says, “our stories are our birthright.” Indeed. They explain the world, each other, and ourselves.  We need to fight for them.  

And if in the end we still have holes in our stories, we can “act creatively” by cultivating devices like metaphors, symbols, and repetition to build on the emotional truth (as Liz Warren says) that lies at the center of our story.  Like any artist, a storyteller curates the details. We pick up the shards of memory and start to piece them together like a mosaic.  We decide what shape it will take and what pieces go where.  

This is not a lie.

Daniel Taylor says, “True means accurately reflecting human experience.” What I have come to understand is that storytelling is a form of meaning making.  It is a work of art.  It is true. 

(The image at the top of the post shows Bridget with her family. The one at the bottom is Bridget with her grandfather in Dingle in 1981.)

Seeking Upstream by Matthew Knotts

In a recent blog post, Liz Warren described telling a story as providing stepping-stones across a river.  Jack Maguire notes in The Power of Personal Storytelling, “An essential part… is having a clear sense of where you’re going when you tell a story - which ‘stones’ you need to reach, in what order, to go from where you begin your story to where you want to wind up.”   

I have found this metaphor useful when constructing stories.  On one stepping-stone I may want the listeners to feel uneasy or that their footing isn’t solid.  The next stone may seem too far a leap for the listener to take with you.  Other times, a wide, dry stone provides them a moment to relax and reflect on the peril they’ve come through with the storyteller.  

However, sometimes when I’m charting my path through the story, I’ve reached the other side of the river too quickly.  Alternately, the opposite bank may not hold the meaning I intend to convey.   In that case, I try seeking upstream. 

Imagine yourself walking the bank upstream from your story idea.   Which events, choices and relationships brought you to this point?  How did that river branch, and how might you take a different path to reach the opposite bank?  You may find moments which set up or explain the story better.  You may also discover this story idea was part of a larger pattern.  Finally, you may uncover other stepping-stones that you file away as the start of another story.   

The image at the top of the post of the mouth of mighty Mississippi can be found here.