Storytelling - what happened?

[romy shovelton]

Thomas

quick note here as I'm off on an early plane to N. Ireland to do the second
of our community visioning events (in Portadown etc)....  starting with
another storytelling evening this evening.

the last event was with around 80/100 young people.....

the telling the stories bit (after stones and writing and sharing with
another or two)... did seem slow to start.....  and then I decided to send
the talking stick around the circle (rather than people having to walk to
the centre for it - or take it from the last person)..... this lead to more
folks begiining to talk.... and then I sent it around again.... and
again...... (with a couple of breaks for tea/drinks)....  what happened was
they become more and more open and in the end we could have been telling
stories for much longer than the time we had.  There was some extremely
moving stuff inc. from a girl who's brother had recently been brutally
murdered (she did not say this in her story)... talking about how crazy it
was to have paramilitaries etc.

basically I just did my best to tune into where they were and go with what
seemed to be the next thing to do......

I trust and pray we can do the same this evening with the adults from the
community and business....

btw to engage people in the space when they first arrived, we did something
I've never done before - kind of invented on the spot (tho' someone else
might have done it)....  We wanted the young people to feel that it was
'their' space - not one we'd created for them..  So... put pieces of
flipchart paper in a circle which becomes a kind of hexagon type shape,
around flowers in the centre of the circle - and layed the beautiful stones
collected from a nearby beach, all around the centre of the pieces of
paper.   Then when people arrived, asked them to think about why they came,
why being together now matters and what they want out of being together
over the two days.....  they came forward and wrote this on the bits of
paper which remained the focus of our time together and was added to the
following day on several spontaneous occasions.

must dash - time for shower, porridge, feeding the dog, and getting to the
airport !

all the best

Romy

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