Storytelling Class

As something fun to do, I took an on-line storytelling class. My neighbor and mother of a friend of my boys, Noa Baum, is a professional storyteller. As the live entertainment world disappeared, she has moved things online. When an email came around about a four-week class in August, it seemed like a fun way to spend a few hours.

It turned out to be great! There were slightly over a dozen of us, from all around the world. Israel, India, Lebanon, Singapore, west coast, east coast, and Kenya. (One of the participants was my boat partner's husband, a retired teacher and current historical novelist who jumped on this when I mentioned it.) Amazing to me, when I think about it, the ability to have such an interactive experience with such a wide-ranging group. Noa used Zoom really effectively - we alternated between all together (and on the computer, I could see everyone at once without scrolling), and then breakouts, usually with two of us, switching up the pairs each time. Noa actually had an assistant in Singapore who joined us and handled a lot of the tech real time for her, so she could focus on talking or listening. For a shy introvert like me, this structure worked really well and there were minimal technical glitches.

We started off the first class with specific prompts to spend a minute visualizing (e., g. a favorite place, a pivotal moment, a special gift), and then broke off into our pairs to describe them (not a story, not yet). Noa led us through some exercises, and talked about what makes telling a story different from an anecdote, and different from written stories. We were sent off after the first class with homework - pick one of the prompts (or something else) to be the germ of your story. Then free write about it, and tell it to actual people. As story is only a story if it is told. DO NOT WRITE IT OUT WORD FOR WORD.

Each week, we worked on our stories in and between classes. Class continued to split into pairs for the telling and for the structured feedback. We focused at different times at adding color, context, change, closure, action, visuals, meaning. 

I consciously chose to not tell a story that would drive deep emotions for me. The last time I did that, at my mother's funeral, it didn't go well. I had done a fair amount of public speaking in my job, and I wrote out notes, but when I started to talk, I choked. I got through the eulogy, but with sobs and I was surprised how hard it was. And so my story for the class started fairly trivially, with a joke. But as we worked through specific areas of what makes a story a story, I saw dimensions in it and it grew in different and surprising ways each time I told it. It wasn't raw, the way some aspects of grief are, but it is true, and it resonates emotionally for me.

The last class, most of us told our stories, limited to 5 minutes each (with 5 minutes of Noa's feedback and group feedback in the zoom chat). I wasn't sure if I was going to tell my story. It seemed trivial still to me, as many of the folks were choosing really profound and pivotal moments in their lives. But finally I opted in, and I think it went well. The adrenaline caused me to go fast, and is always good, I kept in mind where I wanted to end, and left out much more than I put it along the way. 

So here is my story, more or less as I actually told it. It was surprisingly difficult not to let myself edit and re-write and edit some more as I captured it here, but I wanted to be as faithful as possible to that telling. If I ever tell this story out loud again, it will change again, because, as Noa always says, that is the nature of storytelling. 

My Story

Like many kids, my thirteenth year was miserable. We were living in Michigan that year, in the middle of a multi-country, multi-state, odyssey. My father was a rising research scientist, and as the war on cancer spooled up, he was in great demand. To me, that meant every year a new school. I had no friends, I was sad, it seemed all I did was stay home and read books.

Never-the-less, I woke the morning of my thirteenth birthday with a sense of anticipation: I knew my family would take care of me. After breakfast, we all trooped into the living room – my father, the only man in American wearing bow ties that year, my mother, dressed in her new professional work clothes for her new job, my big brother, on every sports team, and my baby sister, cute and with an English accent lingering from the year before. There was a small heap of presents on the fireplace mantel. I opened the first, and I thought it was a leather belt, but then I figured out it was a dog leash! The second one I opened was a dog collar! I lifted the third box, small, square, rattling when I shook it, and said to my parents, “there has to be a puppy in here!”

My mother soon explained: she had been to the dentist that week, and while lying back in her chair with the dentist’s hands in her mouth she had agreed to take one of his puppies. It seems the dentist’s champion golden retriever had given birth to 8 black puppies, due to a champion fence-jumping black Labrador next door. He was successfully pawning off puppies on his vulnerable patients.

That weekend, we picked up the tiny, squirmy, wiggly puppy with the non-stop little stump of a wagging tail. We named her “Worry”, inappropriately, because this dog was the biggest optimist in the world! Everything was wonderful! Everything was exciting! Something good was always happening! Everyone in the family wanted to play with the cute puppy, but she was MINE! My mother told me, whoever feeds the puppy is who she will love best, so I stepped up and took over the dog’s care.

Now, instead of wandering home alone from school to sit with my books, every day I clipped on the leash and took the dog for a walk. At first, her little stumpy legs would only take her to the end of the block, but as she grew, we ventured further and further. And as we walked through the flat, square suburban blocks of our Midwestern college town, I began to see the world through my dog’s eyes. Everything was new! Everything was exciting! Something good was bound to happen, maybe just around that next corner!

During that summer, we learned we were moving again, this time to a small town out east on Long Island. So we packed up everything, and did a long family drive, on the Ohio Turnpike, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the New Jersey Turnpike, and finally, past New York City, another couple of hours to Bellport. We passed white picket fences, and pulled up to our big cedar shingle house on the main road.

As soon as we arrived, I clipped on my dog’s leash, and the two of us headed out to explore. Just a little way down the road next to our house, we came to the water. This was salt water, but not the ocean, instead the protected bay that shelters the south shore of Long Island. I looked out at the water, at the boats bobbing on moorings there, and I knew I could get in a boat and go anywhere in the world. But then my dog picked up a piece of driftwood and dropped it at my feet. I tossed it in the water, she swam out and wrestled it back, dropped it again, shook all over, and asked me to do it again. Over and over I threw the stick, and over and over she asked me to do it again. I watched the boats, the water, and my dog, and I knew it would be ok. I knew I was home, and something good was bound to happen.