Becoming a Storycatcher

In this section of the site, we will offer suggestions on becoming a storycatcher in your own life. Our first areas of exploration, those of Storycatching for Parents and Story as Legacy, appear below. Soon they will be followed by other topics including Journals and Storycatching, Storycatching at Work, and others.

Tell Me a Story

When my goddaughter was a toddler she visited me at a little house I was renting in Minneapolis. In one of those moments when adults look away for just a second, Jamie slipped through a porch railing and fell eight feet. Her head made a sickening thud as she hit the cement patio below. Her mother and I raced her to the emergency room, got her x-rayed and stitched and tried not to wince with guilt as we watched that egg-shaped bump on her forehead turn red and purple and finally yellow away in the following weeks.

A year later, Jamie visited again, this time held tightly by her mother's hand. I met them at the door ready to grab this squirming girl back from the abyss. To our surprise, she stopped at the site of her fall, peered over the edge and announced, "Jamie go boom. Big head. Kisses."

"That's right," I responded, amazed at her recall. "You got a big bump on your forehead. Remember?" Jamie touched her head thoughtfully. "What are you thinking, sweetie?" I asked.

"Jamie no fly," she said. Her mother and I laughed and swooped her into the house for cocoa.

In this scene, Jamie is learning the power of story.  She is discovering her ability to say what she remembers and make social space for herself through words, even to share wisdom. The ability to think, speak, read and write story is a profound determiner of success. Anthropologist Laurens van der Post asserts, "Ninety percent of everything we know has been passed along through story."  In the midst of every technological advancement, story remains the main conveyor of knowledge and the primary way we communicate who we are.

Story has a beginning, middle and end that makes a point, delivers an insight or shares an experience. This is called narrative. Narrative is what Jamie did with her tumble off the porch—story organized her memory. Narrative is how we remember, how we communicate, and how we assign meaning to events.

If for some reason children's natural inclination for story is not supported, communication becomes a life-long hardship instead of joyful entry into social banter. A hip young mother recently admitted, "Both of us were in the car, both on cell-phones, when I heard the baby trying to mimic us. Suddenly I realized he's going to sound how we sound. We have to stop mumbling, cut out the hip-hop slang and teach our son to speak his way into the world."

Story comes naturally in small children and encouragement is simple. Parents, families, daycare providers and teachers contribute to building story skills by speaking to children through story, helping them tell their own stories, and by reading them many, many stories.

When we pick kids up at daycare or school and ask, "What did you do today?" we are encouraging them to practice story. "And then what? And why do you think that happened? And what did Sarah and Jeremy say after that?" Every one of these prompts invites the speaker to keep elaborating the story.

And when we report our daily events, we need to model story telling. "Guess what happened to me today?... I was walking into the office when I heard a strange sound. The sound went kkkkiiiieeeeeee, kkkkiiiieeeeeee. I looked up and there was a hawk flying to a nest at the very top of the bank." By telling story, we invite our children to see the picture we make in words, experience the feelings we had in the moment, and learn what we learned. … "I hope when you grow up we will know even better how to take care of the wild things around us."

Story telling leads to that magical time: story reading.  Reading stories is the most important preparation for lifelong learning we can offer young children—twenty minutes an evening snuggled onto the sofa with a picture book. "Let your children turn the pages, point at pictures, repeat words after you," says reading specialist Kathy Harrington. "Many parents mistakenly believe that buying the latest learning software will give their children a head start, but this is only true if these aids are accompanied with time spent reading aloud together."

Being read stories helps develop speaking vocabulary and listening skills that serve as the platform for other learning. Parents know if their child is paying attention and can help him learn to focus. Parents teach narrative by emphasizing story points with voice tone and pace. And most importantly, reading is a form of loving attention. Reading, telling and listening to stories, becomes linked with a sense of belonging. Story is how we make our way into the world of people, and story is what we bring home to share.

My goddaughter is a mother now and her son is toddler in a room full of books—collections saved from Jamie's childhood and a collection that will grow throughout his childhood. Story is a legacy that begins again and again with the simple phrase, "Once upon a time..."

Cups Full of Story–the Legacy of our Words

The teacups always rested at the back of the china cabinet, and I was twenty years old before I finally touched one. I knew these cups were special, but I didn't know why. "Where did you get these?" I asked my grandmother.

"There're from the farm," she said, and the image of her Minnesota homestead sprang to mind. A big Norwegian family, stern faced in their photographs, taciturn in their language, people Garrison Keillor tells stories about: people who didn't tell stories of their own.

Grandma's teacups went to my mother, who at eighty-five is sorting the contents of her own china cabinet. "Who wants these?" she asks me, her fifty-something daughter arrived to help her move into a condo. I know she is listing her granddaughters in her mind and dividing up the collection.

"No one wants them," I tell her as gently as I can. "They are all hip, mod girls who haven't started to settle down. The cups are not meaningful to them, at least not now." I watch my mother's eyes for sadness...

"Why?"

"Because they have no story. To be valuable they have to be part of our family story, part of their childhood memories."

Story is really all we leave each other. Even the most precious heirlooms, including the ones I tend in my own home, will not last: someday they'll end up in an estate sale or a house will burn down or they will simply lose meaning. What has the most lasting value is the story of who we are, who we come from, where we aspire to go. "You want to give these girls something?" I ask, "Write your story. Tell them what it was like to grow up in the Depression, to marry during World War II, to raise children in the 1950's, to wake up to feminism in the 1970's ... Write about that." The cups sit around her on the carpet waiting to be filled, not with tea or coffee, but with my mother's life.

Story gives objects meaning, and meaning increases value. When I turned fifty, my mother had a ring designed for me that incorporates my grandmother's wedding band, a diamond from my father's aunt and birthstones representing three generations. Even diamonds and gold have value added by story.
Story is legacy. My mother is a talking history lesson of the twentieth century. And because she carries stories of her parents, and grandparent's lives, she carries a family memory that spans nearly 150 years. If I can help her save these stories, in writing, recorded on tape, transferring stories and photos in ever changing technology, I will carry a family memory of about 200 years. And if I speak these stories to my grandchild generation, they will have memories of over 300 years.

What good this will do them, how stories of family will serve them in a future I won't live to see is a mystery. What I know is that seemingly insignificant stories of my parents parents parents have meaning to me that they could not suppose; and this leads me to believe that my stories will have meaning in the future that I cannot suppose. So I gather and preserve stories and trust the mystery.

Here are suggested ways to work with story as legacy.

When you look at the things around your house that you want to bequeath family members, write down what makes them interesting and valuable in a personal way. Literally attach the story to the object. I have a Victorian loveseat that came to me because my aunt taped a card on the back that read, "For Christina, someday." I put a card in the wooden box in the corner of the living room that explains this is the chest our Norwegian great-grandmother carried onto the boat that brought her to America.

A grandmother I know set aside a year to write a letter to each of her twelve grandchildren. The letters are not to be mailed, but when she is gone each young adult will have a loving statement of her special regard.

While cleaning out her parents' estate, my sister-in-law discovered a box of old photos and swiftly went to visit a remaining elderly aunt. They spent hours with a magnifying glass and archivist pen, identifying people in the pictures.

A Jewish friend reports, "Celebrating Seder, the youngest person present asks the questions that elicit the story of the Passover. We adapted this tradition to help the children develop questions to elicit stories about our own family. When Aunt Esther broke her hip she transcribed five years of intergenerational interviews, so now we've started a notebook for everybody."

Story can also heal legacy. A seventy-five year old friend openly shares the story of five generations of alcoholism in her family because she sees the benefit of this work, "It took my grandfather his whole life to sober up, and if my father hadn't gotten sober and shown me the way, I might not have been able to do it at forty-three… When my grandson showed up alcoholic at age twenty, he had a mom and uncle ready to intervene, and a grandma carrying everything I'd learned from his great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather. Understanding the story of his vulnerability helped him out of abuse in just a year."

Even a few words can be precious. A little notebook in a purse or pocket in which you jot notes. Notations made on a calendar. Little anecdotes to accompany photos that expand or explain the scene. Something you wish you'd said in a moment long gone by can still be shared. In our families and among our long-time friends there are people who want to know what we carry in our hearts, our histories, our philosophies of life. Our invitation is to sip tea from an antique cup and speak anyway, write anyway, contributing our stories to never ending tale.