Bill Graustein
First published in in the Spring 2009 issue of “The Museletter” of the League for the Advancement of New England Storytelling
For twenty years my career was in geophysical research – I was trying to understand better how the physical world worked. I’d collect samples of dirt (I’ve dug holes in 44 states) and airborne dust, analyze them for things most people have never heard of, and try create pictures in my mind of how invisibly small bits of dust would move through the atmosphere across thousands of miles and come back to earth a state, or a continent, away from where they originated. These mental pictures, in turn, helped create a clearer understanding of how both natural materials and pollutants are carried by the wind and affect our environment and our lives.
Fifteen years ago when I was in my forties, a surprising amount of money came, without much warning, to a charitable foundation that my Dad had started and named in memory of his brother. I was also named after my uncle, so this change in the Memorial Fund’s assets felt like a responsibility and an opportunity. I had the chance to figure out what charitable work the Memorial Fund could take up that would be a fitting memorial to Dad and his siblings, all of whom came of age at the turn of the last century when the world was a different place. I also had the chance to imagine something that would make me really want to get out of bed every morning.
I talked with many different people to plan the work of the foundation. They shared not only their professional opinions and judgments, but also often shared part of the story of their careers. Some of those stories laid next to my memories of the stories Dad had told about the time when he was young. To my surprise, those two sets of stories started talking to one another. I started to see the images in the familiar family stories very differently than I had as a child. I had remembered them as Dad’s explanation of how things were, but I now saw them as examples how my Dad came to see the world, and its possibilities, as he did. I used to treat the stories like enduring scientific facts, but now their meaning seemed to keep changing. One of the stories, in particular, wouldn’t lie still. I felt as if it was tugging at my sleeve, telling me it wasn’t finished and asking me to look at it again.
One day I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, when a stranger called.
“Hi. My name is Catherine Conant. . . I’m producing a storytelling festival. Would you like to be a teller?”
“I don’t know anything about telling. I haven’t been on a stage since the eighth grade Christmas Pageant.”
“I can coach you.”
I felt Dad’s story tug at my sleeve again and said, “Yes.” Over the next month working with Catherine, it became clear that, although my ‘data set’ of ‘what happened’ was unique, the process of making meaning of it, and seeing how it might fit with many different patterns of people’s experience, was universal. Once Catherine showed me how to look for stories among my own memories, I began to listen more closely for other’s stories. Working with organizations – with people and their stories – took more and more of my attention. Within a couple years, it became clear that a shift in career had snuck up on me and that it was time to quit my job as a research scientist.
As I worked with many New Haven nonprofit organizations in and their leaders over the next half dozen years I became more and more confused. I carried an expectation from doing science that I could put little bits of information together to form a picture of a whole. I found that was much more difficult for me to do when the starting materials were abstract mission statements and program descriptions than when they had been rocks that I could touch or dirt I could dig in. I could not see the vision of the future. My confusion grew until I had to do something about it.
I drew up a list of twenty people I respected, from all across the nonprofit sector – agency executives, community volunteers, foundation staff officers, individual donors – invited them each to share a meal and asked each of them the same two questions: What is your vision for what you want to accomplish? What gets in your way?
I heard over and over in these conversations that people wanted to work in cooperation with others for the common good of the community – to be a part of something larger and more significant than themselves, but that they found that was difficult in the culture of their town.
In many different ways people also said that they often felt a disconnection between their values and their work; that they wanted to find a way to express that which was most important to them more fully in their jobs. It sounded like they were looking for an opportunity, away from the press of daily responsibilities, to renegotiate the connection between their hearts and their heads; between their sense of self and the role that they played in their jobs.
I was surprised by how much yearning I heard in these conversations – these were all people whom I looked to as leaders. I expected a series of more practically oriented responses – more about the things the people did, wanted to do, or didn’t do – but I heard people talking about their being, rather than their doing. It was also clear that the yearnings were more than desires for personal fulfillment. It was as if people were saying, “Working alone I can’t create the future I want for our community.”
These themes came up so often that the question “How could we work together better?” felt urgent. I started a workshop series, calling it the Community Leadership Program, CLP for short, to see if we could find an answer to that question. I brought in some skilled colleagues to help lead the workshops, but I also took a part in leading them, because I felt that I had to be part of living into that question.
CLP is now in its seventh year and more than 130 people have taken part; the energy and interest in the program seem to still be growing. Story and listening for story have been a central part of the program since it started and we’ve learned much along the way.
A third broadly held yearning has become clear: to have a courageous and creative conversation across various boundaries of difference, including race and class. Story can shape how we, as a community, hold this conversation and the stories that come from this conversation will, in turn, shape the future of our community.
New Haven is a diverse community; people with many different life experiences make up the city. The conceptual words we use to describe our experience are based on our memories of what we saw and felt. The same conceptual words can evoke very different experiences for different people. If we gather and talk in abstract terms misunderstanding can quietly open the door and join us before we recognize it. Once misunderstanding has opened the door, mistrust can sneak in behind it. Fear, guilt and anger wait outside in the shadows.
We’ve found that when we start a gathering with story and describing the things we’ve seen, the conversation follows a different path and different guests arrive: respect, curiosity and hope.
As part of a weekend retreat at the beginning of CLP we ask participants, in pairs, to take turns describing to each other a place they remember fondly from childhood and some of the things that happened there.
We then ask what it was like to take a turn listening to other’s memories. Here are some of the responses:
- I got a vivid picture. It was fun. We explored similar memories. I was fighting the urge to take over with my story.
- It was rare to feel open to a story of a live human being.
- I could feel the warmth, exhaustion, calmness of evening and the loss of the passing of summer.
- I liked seeing the smile as my partner went into another world.
- I made my mind blank, then my partner’s words filled it with color and smells.
- I was taken by the similarities and wanted to make a connection.
We asked people what it was like to share their memories:
- I didn’t think I had much to say – I was surprised by the generosity of the listener.
- I connected with layers of experience I’d not thought of. A real picture appeared in my mind.
- It is such a gift to have somebody listen.
- I thought I’d need a lot of words, but when I looked at her face, I saw I didn’t need them.
- I was worried that it wasn’t significant, but we found commonalities in the details.
- I began to stammer when I recognized class disparities – for the first time I recognized them in my own story.
It is as if the attention, respect, and appreciation that the partners silently convey as they listen invites the tellers to go beyond their familiar recollections and helps give them the courage to keep looking when they reach the edge of what is familiar and comfortable.
Salman Rushdie spoke to the relation of story, community and leadership, in a speech he gave at Columbia University after being in hiding for three years, “Maybe they’ll agree, too, that the row over ‘The Satanic Verses’ was at bottom an argument about who should have power over the grand narrative, the Story of Islam, and that that power must belong equally to everyone. That even if my novel were incompetent, its attempt to retell the story would still be important. That if I’ve failed, others must succeed, because those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.”
Leadership is, in large part, about thinking new thoughts – imagining a future day that is unlike the past or present – conveying a picture of that new day to others, and persuading and inspiring others to live into that vision.
The story that dominates our lives is often difficult to see – if we are immersed in it, it is hard to imagine other possibilities. How would a fish describe water? Both in facilitating CLP and in retelling my Dad’s stories, I’ve see how sharing stories can enable us to understand the past more fully and imagine a different and better future. My strong sense is that the power of story to change our vision grows as the diversity of experience of those in the story circle increases.