Vital narratives - Narrative Intelligence - page 92

Storytelling as relationship
Story is an object; storytelling is a relationship. The statement that we are lack-
ing certain genres of vital stories really means that we are missing certain kinds
of vital relationships.
A few years ago, one of the questions I asked in the context of a larger
research project on kids was, do your parents tell you stories? Many kids said
that their parents read them stories, but very few said their parents told them
stories. Children's literature can be seen as a set of tales tailored in a general
way to the needs and questions of kids. When a parent reads a child a story
(or belongs to a parent-child topic club, for example) then the relationship is
present indirectly in the reading. Parents should read to their children.
But children also need personal narratives to connect them to their rela-
tives, friends, their culture, and other world-views. It emerged in my research
that the family storyteller was often the grandmother or other relative in a fam-
ily who could tell “remember when” stories. But as families are more often sep-
arated geographically, the elder storyteller may not be able to form storytelling
relationships. This is one way in which the technologies of telecommunica-
tions might serve us well. Certainly, the disappearance of rural life contributes
to the disappearance of storytelling. Since the beginning of the 20th century,
the number of Americans engaged in farming has shrunk from 50% to 2%.
Along with them go the rural cultures that fostered storytelling.
Doubtless, many parents tell their kids stories about their own youth, as
cautionary tales, for instance. But how do we talk to our children about our
lives now? How do we speak - figuratively or literally - about our own beliefs
and ethics? One kind of storytelling relationship that children often lack is the
stories of parents' lives and work, the choices that must be made, the difficulties
that must be faced, the joys of doing a job well. Such stories help children un-
derstand what it is to be an adult, and to expose children to the constructions
that an adult must have to navigate the world.
Another blow to the culture of American storytelling has been struck by
media, beginning with radio and silent film. As every parent of a preschooler
knows, the temptation is great to allow television (the blessed kind, like “Chil-
dren's Television Workshop”) to act as a babysitter and source of education.
That is all well and good, except for the relationship part. Kids have pre-
tend relationships with characters, but that is not the same thing as a rela-
tionship with a person. This, too, can be addressed in some ways by technol-
ogy; for example, on personal storytelling websites like Bubbe's Back Porch
[www.bubbe.com] and The Fray [www.fray.com]. There are even websites for