One of the weekly assignments for the Personal Storytelling Class at South Mountain Community College is to listen to all kinds of personal stories. One week I chose to listen to Elizabeth Ellis tell the “College Aid” story.
I am fascinated by her cadence, her humor, and her use of pauses. Though she sits, she is grounded. Her whole body holds and tells the story. I love that she is so transparent. This story, though seemingly innocuous, is filled with many themes with which a person can connect. Elizabeth is good at layering many facets of the human experience in one story. It is masterful. The more I contemplated this story, the more profound it became.
What got me thinking along this line is that someone said the story really was simple and had nothing “traumatic” or moving about it. Well, since I love Elizabeth Ellis, this irked me. So, I started deconstructing the story along thematic lines. This is no simple story. She is a master. A person hears what they hear. This is what stories do. If you want a simple little story, you hear a simple little story. But, if you dig a bit, you may find a little treasure. If you let the story move freely inside of you, it will begin to reveal its many layers. A few "simple" themes I noticed:
- Single Grandparents raising grandchildren
- A general disrespect for artists
- A general lack of knowledge about artists and storytelling artists
- The prohibitive cost for college
- The financial aid maze
- The inhumanity of bureaucracy
- Bureaucrats
- Injustice
- The lack of humor in our society, which points to a lack of humanity
- What lack of empathy looks like
- The financial cost that people go through to feed/please the bureaucratic college financial aid machine
- The list goes on
You can find Elizabeth tell this story at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGrpSV3VHHk
Let me know what other themes present themselves to you.
The photo at the top of the post is from Elizabeth's press kit.
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