It’s All About the Story

I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of storytelling.  You know how it goes: you buy a yellow shirt and then you see yellow shirts everywhere.  Your lawn develops a series of wheat-colored patches, and you start noticing all your neighbors’ similarly speckled lawns. That’s what’s happened to me with stories to the point where I’m pretty sure that all human communication boils down to telling and hearing stories. This post focuses first on students’ stories and then moves to the everyday stories we tell.

I’ve been invested in stories since I was five and no doubt earlier.  They’ve been my lifelong, go-to entertainment and escape.  I’ve always favored fiction although I’ve spent more time with newspapers and essays since the election: my survival strategy for coping with chronic feelings of dismay and doom.  I also want to support good journalism’s attempts to maintain a transparent and accountable democracy.  

Maybe it’s because I’m missing my thick daily infusion of story that I’ve felt so focused on it.  Also, there’s no doubt that Lucy Caulkins, the guru of innovative teaching of reading and writing, tapped into my deep faith in stories on a Monday morning last month.

As I walked into the nave of the soaring cathedral that is Manhattan’s Riverside Church, sunlight was streaming through the stained-glass windows at least 30 feet overhead, throwing a kaleidoscope of colors on my feet and ankles as I stepped into a pew.  Once seated I looked straight ahead and was held captive by the intricate carvings of the reredos (I looked up that term) behind the altar.  The longer I looked, the more discrete images, previously embedded within stone folds, revealed themselves, like an M.C. Escher print.  

That’s when Lucy stepped into the pulpit and preached to the choir (1,300 of us teachers) about how crucial it is for our students to write stories.  “It’s a very big deal to teach kids to see their lives as stories [and] that they can be authors of their own story. [They] can decide how to make meaning of what happens to [them].”  She went on to cite Sheryl Sandberg, Andrew Solomon’s Ted Talk, and Jack Gantos (see Stacey Shubitz’s excellent blogpost for more on Lucy’s address and the role of stories in student writing).  I’m sold and re-committed to spending plenty of time on narrative writing in my 8th grade classroom when I return in January.

Each day we share with others what we’re doing.  We’re asked “How was your day?” and we tell a story. “How’d the meeting go?” We describe the characters and dialogue around the room, or we narrate the conflict, climax, and resolution of the event.  But sometimes when people ask us those questions, we sense that, for whatever reason, a full story isn’t warranted, and we respond with Fine, Well, and Yes (or Sort of).  If we’re lucky or we’re willing, our audience asks us for more of the story.  When we share it, we probably feel more connected and understood.

Telling the story of my sabbatical has been playing out in different ways for me.  I was sitting outside the Rustica cafe near my house recently, highlighting notes I’d taken in a workshop.  A friendly staff person and I began to talk, and she eventually asked, “Are you a teacher?  Do you go back to school soon?” as she pointed at the notebook and pens on my table.  After I’d explained what was up, she asked, “What do you do on a sabbatical?”  

Here we go, I thought.  How much does she really want to know?  How much do I feel like explaining to her?  “Well, mostly I’m going to be a learner instead of a teacher for a few months.”

“That sounds fun,” she said, and soon she was back to her work.

I was delighted.  I’d found my handle!  I had a five-second sound byte to the now-frequent question “What are you doing on your sabbatical?” that allows people to either say, “Cool!” and move on or continue to ask more questions if they want.

My daughter asked me the same question during a recent road trip although her tone was a bit more skeptical, “What are you going to do all day?” Feeling slightly defensive, I quipped back, “You know all that stuff I do after school each day? Like yoga class, or visiting Poppy (a.k.a. my dad), walking the dogs, cooking, shopping, writing lesson plans, grading? Now I get to spread it across the day, minus the plans and grading”

“Oh,” she said falling silent.

“And,” I added, “I get to spend a lot of time reading, writing, visiting schools and organizations, and I get to travel, like now.”  I think she got it: life is busy and multi-faceted for just about everybody.

Over Labor Day weekend when we were boating with friends, one of them asked, “Is it a working sabbatical?”  For him I offered the full-blown overview of the five phases of my project-based sabbatical and its theme: to learn how literacy can be used for community engagement.  After all, he was held captive in the middle of Lake Minnetonka, so it was a good opportunity to rehearse my own understanding of this exploratory time.

I just started reading Annette Simmons’s The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling, and she uses this quote from writer A.S. Byatt to convey the fundamental nature of stories, “Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.”  I agree.

I will continue to test this idea that we’re all engaged in storytelling all the time as I interact with others and watch stuff on t.v. and the Internet.  Maybe you’ll test it too, and let me know your take.