Show Me a Story

 I do love me a good muse, and wanted to share a little more with you about Show Me a Story.  We started planning a storytelling camp because we thought it would be fun.  Like most of our ideas for The Wonder Collective, we used ourselves as our target demographic, and were excited about it because we thought the exploration was perfect for our own children, who love reading and imagining and stories of their own and really anyone’s creation.  I read a review of a marvelous book on encouraging story craft in children, from which we borrowed our title for this week of camp, Emily K. Neuburger’s Show Me a Story.   When we read our own two copies, we immediately agreed that THIS was our first theme this summer (I saw it at our Shippensburg Library last week; if your kids love stories, check it out for more ideas!). 

But as we gathered materials and brainstormed lessons and worked on building a program, we felt our souls soar with a firm belief in STORY.  Stories build our courage as they make sense of our past and our present.  Personally, building narrative is a very important tool I use for navigating my own personal tragedies and relationship with the divine and my community.  From two of my favorite modern philosophers:

Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story greases the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing wildish women.

 —Clarissa Pinkola Estes

This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.  — Terry Tempest Williams

I do realize most of the stories we create this week will have a predominate theme of silly, but the same skills we use to entertain us can be used to figure out our lives’ more serious themes:

We live in story like a fish lives in water. We swim through words and images siphoning story through our minds the way a fish siphons water through its gills.  We cannot think without language, we cannot process experience without story.

— Christina Baldwin,

StoryCatcher: Making Sense of our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story

And besides making sense of our selves (a mighty feat!), story is a powerful tool we use to communicate with others.

Stories are the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal.

—Howard Gardner, Harvard University

Why was Solomon recognized as the wisest man in the world? Because he knew more stories (proverbs) than anyone else. Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

—Alan Kay, vice president at Walt Disney

Yes, friends:

The universe is made of stories, not atoms.

--Muriel Rukeyser