As I hoped, the Story Roots for Sustainable Futures intensive provided fruitful inspiration for refining and deepening my story-within-the-story — though, perhaps, not in the ways I expected.
The most surprising takeaway was how the exercises on embodiment and movement grew to feel like an intrinsic part of the story. I wasn’t initially planning on incorporating movement into my performance on day 2, but as I played with the story through that lens — not only thinking of ways to tell the story through movement, but also going on a walk and moving through space as if in the body of my stone character — I started to feel like the story would be too static, almost lifeless, without some element of movement. It’s not lost on me that this discovery is a physical metaphor for the exploration of static and evolving/“moving” stories in my framing narrative. In a similar vein, I felt that each performance and each telling of the story helped me to refine it, or focus in on different aspects — both through my own reflection and through feedback from others. Given what a generative experience this mode of embodied, ephemeral, dialogical storytelling was, I’ve been feeling like my current vision of my project as an entirely text-based, online artifact is a bit… empty, or one-dimensional.
I’ve been struggling to think about how to incorporate some aspects of what I loved about Story Roots into my project. Some ideas include:
- Video or animation to capture elements of movement alongside or integrated with the textual elements of the story (perhaps incorporating voiceovers, too)
- Abstract representations of some of the movements through visual motifs that could be incorporated throughout the visual design of the story. The motifs could also draw on the sketches I made and the shapes I found interesting during the “take a walk with your character” exercise. This would also be a way of visually differentiating the story-within-the-story from the other “layers.”
- Audio recordings, either of someone telling different versions of the story, or taking on the character of the scholar as they read and interact with different versions. Even if the scholar mostly encounters the story in the written digital form I initially planned, I could have them find one version that is only told via audio/video.
- A physical object like a book or visual artwork meant to be experienced alongside the digital story (thanks to Emily for inspiring my thinking here with her artist’s books).
- Outside of the changes made by the worm, I could write multiple variations of the story-within-the-story and randomly pick which one will be shown to the reader each time they open the story, to mimic the way that no oral story is told exactly the same way twice.
- Show the story in my own handwriting, with crossings-out and amendments
- Format the story in a way that implies more movement, e.g., the long scrolling format of webtoons (which I’ve seen used effectively to show movement and/or time passing)
- The worm, as a symbol of the fluidity of stories, could also be a good mechanism for emphasizing this sense of movement and change. I could lean into the worm’s changes even more, not just removing parts of the story, but also changing the phrasing and details from one telling to another.
Another idea from Story Roots that felt relevant to my project was the concept of thinking with (in contrast to thinking about). Thinking with stories is a way of opening up dialogical and contextualized meanings in them — whereas thinking about stories (which is what we often do in academia, and is the mode that I’ve defaulted to for my scholar character) is more a mode of analysis and can even be a form of violence. This makes me wonder how I can critically reevaluate the ways in which my scholar engages with the story, and how I can challenge the default modes. So far, I’ve been thinking of the scholar as a fairly isolated character, and I know I don’t have space to introduce a large cast in such a short story. But perhaps I could add a chorus (in the Greek theater sense of the word) to represent and stylize some of the scholar’s interactions with the world around them. Alternately, it might be possible to use their annotations etc. to show how their relationship to the text is changing, and how it is prompting them to also relate to the broader world in a different and more dialogical way. Annotations from other characters might even be introduced. Overall, this arc feels quite pertinent for a YA story, especially in the context of a future where stories (and, presumably, other things) are thought of as static and discrete.
Also, the idea of dialogical vs. disseminative storytelling, embodied by the contrast between oral storytelling vs. most modern storytelling forms (movies, books, podcasts…), felt quite relevant. One of the powers of oral storytelling is that, by sharing and listening to stories in a space together, everyone in that space is implicated in those stories in some way. This is particularly true in spaces like the traditional form of the ceilidh, in which everyone was expected to bring something to share. Given that my project has to do with agency in crafting futures and narratives, I want to consider more deeply how to create this sense of being implicated even though I can’t bring people into a single physical space as they engage with the story. Allowing each reader’s choices to influence other readers’ experience of the story could be a way to capture some of the relational nature of oral storytelling, which makes all listeners implicated in the story and responsible to one another.
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