In week 6, my first self-chosen intensive rolled around: Story Roots for Sustainable Futures. It had been an easy choice for me in September, when I first read through the course descriptions, and I’d been looking forward to it since then. And it certainly lived up to the hype.
There wasn’t necessarily a lot of academic learning in this course for me – the story workshopping was more of a visceral experience and, because I’m already quite informed on sustainability, the readings were less about learning about sustainability than they were about integrating sustainability with storytelling. Interesting and relevant, to be sure, but not really new information in that sense.
I did very much enjoy the except from It Was Like a Fever, a book that I would have loved to read the entirety of if there hadn’t been such time constraints. Alas – the woes of taking six courses a semester.
However, what this course absolutely hammered home for me was the power of stories. I consider myself someone who doesn’t enjoy being in the limelight. My favourite place to be is behind the scenes, holding a dozen strings and setting the stage for others to shine. I was nervous about the storytelling ceilidh and fully prepared to hate having to perform, so colour me very surprised when I actually very much enjoyed it. Yes, I was nervous, and yes, I think everyone could tell, but I enjoyed drawing the audience into a story I felt was relevant to share.
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A brief excursion into my story and societal narratives:
The story I chose to use was one I knew from a book my mother read to me, and occasionally my brother, called Tales of Wise Women (“Märchen von den klugen Frauen”). One of them told the story of a sweet but spoiled prince who decides to marry a young woman who’s impressed him with her cleverness. The young woman agrees on the condition that he learn a trade, which he does, which ends up saving his life several years down the line.
I chose this story specifically because I wanted to tell a story in which femininity saves the day. Not a female, because those stories exist in spades, but a quality or action that is specifically coded as feminine, at least in our Western culture. There is a slew of stories nowadays in which princesses gird their loins, seize up the swords they are forbidden to wield, and become the better man. They are respected because they are good at being a man. I keep coming back to the scene in Captain America: The First Avenger where Steve Rogers sees Peggy Carter, a drill sergeant, be disrespected by a recruit and retaliate by punching him in the face, after which the trouble is over and Steve smiles, charmed. And I know we’re supposed to watch the scene and think Peggy is a badass, and she is, sure. But she’s only respected afterwards because she resorts to violence. Because she speaks the language of (superhero-movie) men. She’s a bigger, badder man than the men she’s instructing. If she’d been intimidated by this dude disrespecting her, she wouldn’t have been cool. If she hadn’t resorted to violence, she wouldn’t have been cool. In a lot of media, women are only cool because they aren’t ‘like other girls,’ and that just feeds even more into this narrative that being a woman, and liking woman-y things, is useless/shameful/weak.
I wanted to tell a story that rejects that kind of narrative. A story in which being feminine, being clever and diplomatic and engineering a way to be saved, was the way to freedom and happiness. In which men listen to women and respect their opinions and that is what saves them in the end.
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And I did tell that story. All of us told amazing stories and though we sat and listened for three hours, never once did I disengage from my peers. That afternoon, we sat and listened to the visiting storyteller speak for several more hours and I never once disengaged there, either. Regardless of how much academic learning I did in this course, I learned for life: I learned that I don’t hate performing as much as I make out, that crafting stories down to the word is important but telling stories that change in every moment is, too; that it doesn’t matter if you forget things because you can always bring them up later, and that stories don’t have to be perfect to perfectly capture your imagination.
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