Story Mining

• Assignments this Week

  • Continue finding ways to notice and observe your unfolding stories on a day to day basis. Is there a way to capture these you can experiment with?

  • Is there anything from class you can keep tending to (Life Chapters, Your Personal Story Map, or your “I Am From” Poem)?

  • Keep updating your list of stories (and don’t forget to bring this to class!)

  • Offer your reflections to this week’s Book Club in the comments

• Links and Resources

  Mary Oliver's poem "The Journey"

  Examples of life maps 

  Dr. Dan McAdams' work around creating "Life Chapters"

• "I am from" poem prompts

  My name is:
  I am from (name the city, state you were born):
  I am from (the street you grew up on, a description of your home):
  I am from (nicknames of other significant places you've lived): 

  I am from (name your ancestry; 2-3 places from your heritage):
  I am from (historical events crucial to your unique ancestry, or customs of your heritage):
  I am from (name your parents or key family/community members):
  From (ideals or principles your family represents):
  From (a family secrets or a family struggle):
  From (a family or generational triumph or victory, or point of pride):

  I am from (3-4 adjectives describing your childhood):
  I am from (2-3 items/icons/trends that represent your generation):
  I am from (activities/hobbies/interests you did or had growing up): 
  From (2-3 games you played as a child, or traditions you participated in): From (2-3 things that happened in the world while you were growing up): 
  From (3 events that shaped your worldview as a young person):

  I am from (2-3 educational experiences or institutions):
  I am from (2-3 significant jobs/career paths you've had):
  From (any losses that have stuck with you): 
  From (2-3 important lessons learned):

  I am from (3 places in nature you enjoy, or your 3 of favorite types of plants/trees):
  From (2-3 places that have meaning to you):
  From (2-3 things you do to find balance, calm your nervous system):
  From (2-3 ways that you express your creativity):

Recommend Readings

• On Story and the Human Condition

  Excerpt from Your Mythic Journey
  By Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox

  Timerunsonandonwithneverapauseorvariation, but human time is broken into manageable units. We create minutes, days, weeks, months, and years to punctuate the unbroken flow. We mark the beginning, middle, and end of things to find ourselves in time. Personal time is limited by the inevitability of death, so we invent clocks and anniversaries and holidays and decades to create the illusion of status in a fluid universe. We divide time to conquer it.

  Our inner time sense records intensity and importance rather than duration: an October afternoon of love among the dunes may be written larger in memory than all the weeks surrounding it. When you put together the story of your life you face the central question of how to punctuate time. What moments will you isolate and give symbolic importance, single out for dramatic effect? To make a coherent story from the undifferentiated mass of your experience you need to divide the flow of time with a comma, a period, a paragraph, a section, a chapter.

  Every person’s autobiography is both unique and usual, the story of an individual life and of all mankind. We are shaped by an inescapable human condition which dictates certain events and themes that will figure prominently in every life story.

  [p. 67]

• On The Narrating Mind

  Excerpt from The Stories We Live By
  By Dan P. McAdams

  Human beings are storytellers by nature. In many guises, as folktale, legend, myth, epic, history, motion picture and television program, the story appears in every known human culture. The story is a natural package for organizing many different kinds of information. Storytelling appears to be a fundamental way of expressing ourselves and our world to others.

  Think of the last time you tried to explain something really important about yourself to another person. Chances are you accomplished this task by telling a story. Or think of an especially intimate conversation from your past. I suspect that what made the conversation good was the kind of stories that were told and the manner in which the stories were received. Indeed, much of what passes for everyday conversation among people is storytelling of one form or another. This appears to be so pervasively true that many scholars have suggested that the human mind is first and foremost a vehicle for storytelling. We are born with a narrating mind, they argue.

  Imagine our ancient ancestors at day's end, in that ambiguous interlude between the victories and defeats of the daylight and the unseen dangers and deep sleep of the dark. Home from the hunt, or resting at the end of a day's foraging for food, providing for the young, and preserving the tribe, our primordial forebearers sit down together and take stock. Before night falls, they tell stories of the day. They pass the time by making sense of past time. They tell of their experiences to entertain and enlighten one another and, perhaps, on occasion, just to stay awake. E.M. Forster, the novelist and essayist, once speculated:

  Prehistoric man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the wooly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next?

  Stories told at day's end create a shared history, linking people in time and event as actors, tellers, and audience. The unfolding drama of life is revealed more by the telling than the actual events told. Stories are not merely chronicles, like a secretary's minutes of a meeting, written to report exactly what transpired and at what time. Stories are less about facts and more about meanings. In the subjective and embellished telling of the past, the past is constructed—history is made. History is judged to be true or false not solely with respect to its adherence to empirical fact. Rather, it is judged with respect to such narrative criteria as believability and coherence. There is a narrative truth in life that seems quite removed from logic, science, and empirical demonstration. It is the truth of a good story.

• On Stories and Identity 

  Excerpt from The Storytelling Animal
  By Jonathan Gottschall 

  Humans are creatures of story, so story touches nearly every aspect of our lives. Archaeologists dig up clues in the stones and bones and piece them together into a saga about the past. Historians, too, are storytellers. Some argue that many of the accounts in school textbooks, like the standard story of Columbus’ discovery of America, are so rife with distortions and omissions that they are closer to myth than history. Business executives are increasingly told that they must be creative storytellers: they have to spin compelling narratives about their products and brands that emotionally transport consumers. Political commentators see a presidential election not only as a contest between charismatic politicians and their ideas but also as a competition between conflicting stories about the nation’s past and future. Legal scholars envision a trial as a story contest, too, in which opposing counsels construct narratives of guilt and innocence—wrangling over who is the real protagonist.  

  …We tell some of the best stories to ourselves. Scientists have discovered that the memories we use to form our own life stories are boldly fictionalized. And social psychologists point out that when we meet a friend, our conversation mostly consists of an exchange of gossipy stories. We ask our friend “What’s up?” or “What’s new?” and we begin to narrate our lives to one another, trading tales back and forth over cups of coffee or bottles of beer, unconsciously shaping and embellishing to make the tales hum. And every single night, we reconvene with our loved ones at the dinner table to share the small comedies and tragedies of our day. 

  …We spend our lives crafting stories that make us the noble—if flawed—protagonists of first-person dramas. A life story is a “personal myth” about who we are deep down—where we come from, how we got this way, and what it all means. Our life stories are who we are. They are our identity.  

  [pp 15-18; 161]

Sources
Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.Keen, Sam, and Anne Valley-Fox. Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life Through Writing and Storytelling. TarcherPerigee, 1989.
McAdams, Dan P. The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. Guilford Press, 1993.