Blog


We are each of us no more than collections of star dust, spinning stories from our heels, as we walk the paths of our lives and get to love this world for one certain time...


Haha! I'm in a podcast! In conversation with the wonderful writer Joe Williams.
https://feeds.captivate.fm/moving-with-the-pen/ 

 In June 2022 I left a good job working for a good company doing good things. After completing the Storytelling Beyond Words programme with the School of Storytelling in Dec 2021, I couldn't ignore the itch to be engaged in something that would take me deeper. I have been so blessed, after taking this leap, to be able to do and discover all the things that have been possible in this year funded by the Arts Council's DYCP grant. I have:

Worked up 17 new stories ranging from 15-45 minutes in length, which I can readily perform and offer whenever ears and hearts have need of them. Including:

 

Created 3 storytelling shows/experiences:

Fate, Faith and Fortune with Fiona Eadie, performed at Ruskin Mill, Llangollen Story Café and Sidmouth Folk Festival, with post show discussion.

Dolls Trolls and Iron feet with Lu Orza and Mica Sinclair, performed at Emerson College and Oxford Storytelling Festival

The Fairy Tale Ceilidh with Paul Hutchinson and Matt Norman, performed at the Trinity Rooms and coming soon to The Pound Arts Centre


Designed and delivered the following programmes:

The Loving Wolf Story Space at Rose Castle, as part of their Princeton programme of interfaith reconciliation and conflict resolution training.

The Loving Wolf restorative stories workshop at the Restorative Justice Council’s Annual Conference.

Feed The Wolf – a retreat exploring stories and creativity for wellbeing and resilience, co designed and delivered with Mica Sinclair.

Storytelling and personal experience workshop at UCL.

The Tree of Stories workshop and discussion for the Understanding People Project – exploring storytelling within restorative practice.

The Loving Wolf restorative stories workshop for Norfolk Youth Justice Team

Restorative Stories – an online series of workshops exploring the wisdom of stories from all over the world for reconciliation and peace

Storytelling and the power of images in restorative practice for the Restorative Justice Council’s CPD Symposium

Storytelling and the power of personal stories for the Royal Borough of Greenwich’s Restorative Approaches conference

The Wonder Night Café – a monthly storytelling discussion evening, running April – July 2023 in Star Anise café, Stroud

Stories for the Heart – a weekend retreat exploring how we can use stories to support ourselves and our wellbeing

The Tree of Stories full day workshop at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace

The Caravan conference at Hill House – a gathering of restorative practitioners, conflict resolution trainers, mediators, storytellers, therapists, artists, peace workers and reconcilers who I brought together to explore the connections in their practices and how storytelling can support what they do.


I came away from each of these events with a sense of wonder that, in offering stories and making space for discussion and reflection, I get to spend time with people opening up all sorts of wisdom, reflections, revelations, insights and poignant movements of heart and understanding.

 I am so excited to see what will happen next, and to reflect further on all the people I have met and things I have learned in the past year.

Affirmation

What I love about storytelling work is that every time I offer something, the response of the people I share stories and discussions with affirms my belief that traditional stories have great healing qualities.

When I met with the restorative facilitators who work for the Understanding People Project, we never got going with the workshop I had planned because as soon as I told a short story, we were off into a whole morning’s discussion of how healing and important it felt just to have that experience as adults – to be allowed to safely sit and listen, with no obligation to be doing anything more than absorbing the story, to and have the door into our imaginations opened wide. The simple experience of being told a story was so nostalgic, unfamiliar, soothing, creative, imaginative and heart opening for one practitioner that they were weeping without knowing why.

The feedback I have received from sessions I have run during this DYCP funded year is heartening and enlightening about the applicability and poignancy of working with stories.


Reflections

From Sept 2022 to July 2023 I was supported by funding from the Arts Council’s Develop Your Creative Practice grant to develop my work with traditional storytelling and facilitation. These 11 months have felt like being given the resources to landscape and plant a rich, sweet, wild garden. To try and summarise how much has happened, and the amount I have learned about the power, depth and applicability of traditional tales, about facilitating groups, and about the whole wonderful complex muddle that is being human, is not easy to put into words. I feel like, through the conversations, reflections and discussions I have been privileged to facilitate or participate in this year, I have been gifted a glimpse of a stretching ocean full of a thousand currents, waves and hidden depths, every shade of blue, green, purple, grey, brown, white, stirred up and revelling in storm, sunlight, rain, mist, wind and calm – an ocean that stretches far beyond sight – alive with all the emotions, thoughts, and experiences of people.

 

At times in this year I have worked with the concept of the Tree of Stories, a story which explores the image of a mythical tree laden with as many candles as there are moments in history that deserve to have been witnessed – from the tiny private personal moments that are significant in an individual’s life, to the moments that shape global history. This story invites us to think about what it is that makes us who we are, and what it is that connects us all, what the stories are that we need to hear, what the stories are that we can offer, and what are the human moments that make up each person to which we can all relate.

 

It has been a real privilege in the course of developing my work, to delve deeper and deeper into the power of sharing our experiences with each other via images, or ‘picture language’.

This might be by sharing different interpretations of the same image in a story - for example, in the fairy tale of Finist the Bright Falcon, when the Falcon is barred by a locked window set about by barbs, for one person this might represent the breakdown in communication with a loved one, for another it might represent an internal impulse to deny oneself the work you truly want to do. These experiences are deeply person, but if we explain to others that they feel like being shut out by a window stuck around with barbs, our companions are given a felt insight into what we are going through.

I was fascinated to hear a couple, who come from different countries and so communicate with each other in English as the shared language, talk about how important it is to them to use images - metaphors and similes - when trying to communicate complicated emotional things that they can best express in their mother tongues, because it takes them closer to the truth of the matter than English allows.

Through exploring this in exercises in multiple workshops this year, I have been learning a lot about how we can use pictures to break down divides and distance between us. If, rather than using an abstract – “I am angry”, “I am sad”, “I don’t’ like..” – we communicate with an image – “this situation makes me feel like a wasps nest is in my chest”, “like I’ve fallen off a cliff”, “like I’m stuck deep underground” – the listener is immediately transported into a felt experience and so shares, momentarily, how it is to be us. And I love how the rich complexity of the images in traditional stories and wondertales, give us so much to work with that we can interrogate the personal experience by applying the features of the story image. 

Mon 20 Mar 2023

Washing Machine Cycles - observations on the heart

It seems to me that, at the heart of all relationships, especially our most intimate, there is a tender mix of pain and love. And in the meeting points of these two things we find lines of either fear or delight.


We are so afraid of the risk of hurting, or even losing, each other. Sometimes this fear cripples and squashes us so terribly that the actions we take mean we hurt or lose each other.


Our vulnerable hearts, full of this soupy mix of pain and love, long for us to be able to go to those we love and say, “here is the whole, vulnerable, hurting, loving heart of me. It is messy and complicated, coloured with the hundreds of layers of thoughts, feelings, experiences, wounds, longings, joys, hopes and boundaries/capacities that I carry. My heart is afraid of being hurt. More sharply, it is afraid of hurting you and how it would hurt in response to hurting you, or break if you find me unforgivable. I want to meet you in love. I want you to love and understand and care for me. I want to know how to do that for you safely, whilst also being able to be my own mess, and complicated, and sometimes struggling with knives and knotted ropes that cut and bind me, or you, and make it all hard - I want for this fierce mess to be forgivable. And lovable.”


When we are afraid of revealing our hurt, or when the fear of hurting another and, in so doing, hurting ourselves, gets too strong, our ability to communicate can become like a washing machine, a sealed vault, a fire, or the feeling of drowning - choked on what cannot find its way out of the heart onto the tongue, or what we pull back from our lips and swallow down in case it burns instead of building bridges.


Dear Hafiz, thank you for my favourite poem of yours, which includes the line “most speaking really says ‘I am hungry to know you’” and between the lines of which I also read “I am hungry to be known”. We want this so much - to understand and be understood, and we are so often flopping about like fish out of water trying to find it with those we cannot see face to face but feel are close because our this era of technology tells us they are only a heartbeat away.


Behind the instant messages, the voicenotes, the posts, the shares, the tags, the likes, the emails and the sometimes phone calls, lies the hope, the longing, the desire to see each other and be seen; lies the pain and love that says, “please hold me and value me. Please help our hearts meet and be warmed together so we can feel safe, so we can relax for a moment knowing we are held by each other, unconditionally, in spite of - or perhaps because of - the complicated, vulnerable mess of love and pain that we carry inside, spinning around on its handwash cycle for delicates.

Sat 18 Mar 2023

What's on my mind is the question of why traditional stories are so useful as a starting point when we want to explore our own experiences.

I had an inspiring conversation with Emma Crick de Boom, the Reconciliation Enabler for the Diocese of Coventry, yesterday. And I've since been trying to put into words why I am passionate about offering traditional stories in workshops where I'm facilitating people sharing their personal stories...

It seems to me that, in hearing a traditional story, the listeners are given a whole world of metaphor, image and fictional experience to resonate with.

I love the follow up question:

What moment or image in the story stays with you most strongly?

Often the answer to this question is an indicator of what is alive for each person in their own story right now. For example, in the story of Prince Lindworm - (a wonderful fairy tale with a huge amount to offer - please have a listen to Martin Shaw’s powerful version) - is it the moment when the queen eats the wrong flower, or when the prince first meets the serpent, or when the shepherd’s daughter dresses herself in the 12 night gowns, or when the serpent sheds his first layer of scales… etc?

The second follow up question:

Why does this moment in the story stay with you?

OR - When in your own life have you had an experience that felt like that moment in the story?

is a beautiful way into opening up personal memories.

The traditional stories offer us mirrors and a shared metaphorical language for talking about experience. This metaphorical language can de-personalise what is being discussed, which can be useful for the emotional safety of those in the conversation, and it also brings a rich realm of imagery which helps us find the universal in our experiences. For example, how each person has experienced a moment which felt like shedding a skin of scales will be deeply personal and particular to their story, but the idea and feeling of shedding a skin, is something we can all connect with...