Re-Wilding Yourself and Your Stories
5 Fresh Insights on Stories in the Age of Ecological Catastrophe
Greetings Livable Futures community,
Happy July! It's always refreshing to begin a new month together.
I recently presented the Livable Futures projects and ideas at several events and received a lot of great new energy from it. One event was in Germany at a conference on religion and environment , which focused on ritual this year.
Here are 5 Fresh Insights about stories from the amazing community that came together at the conference. I hope they give you inspiration and creative energy in the month ahead.
1. Stories Matter (and I’m not talking about the one’s we’re used to)
As some of you know, I struggle with the dominance of storytelling in teaching, media, and marketing, preferring the poetic and abstract as more spacious, hopefully less manipulative offerings (there is a wonderful conversation about this and the value of “slow TV” for escaping the story trap on an episode of NPR’s Invisibilia called The Great Narrative Escape).
Wise friends from various cultures and contexts have been telling me it’s not stories that bother me, but rather the weaponization of one form of story for capitalist consumption. And I am listening. One of our most popular podcast episodes includes Emalani Case talking about her approach to stories from a Hawaiian indigenous perspective. I’ve written more about this elsewhere and OASIS, a new work we’re making in the LF community involves telling “echo-tech tall tales” improvised with communities through sound, movement and images. Wild, fun, and hopefully healing. More to come there!
2. Tell Non-Linear Stories
For telling other kinds of stories, I love this beautiful book about non-linear story structures in literature. Author Jane Alison writes, “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel—one we’re actually told to follow—and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?” Yes!
And of course there is the beautiful and oft quoted TedTalk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about the many overlapping stories of our lives and the danger of a single story about any place or person or experience.
Key Takeaway: The problem with storytelling stems not from stories themselves but from their over-simplification and weaponization for capitalist consumption. Embracing non-linear narratives and diverse storytelling structures, as advocated by Emalani Case, Jane Alison, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, deeply connected to who and where we are, can help heal our relationship with stories and reveal their true potential to enrich our lives.
3. Re-Wild Your Stories and Recover Lost Figures
Non-linear narratives, re-wilded stories, recovered feminist figures and spiraling structures abounded at the conference on religion and environment, probably because of its focus on ritual this year which is what drew me to share our Livable Futures performance ritual practices.
Highlights included a presentation by four beautiful members of the Story Commons who create Story Choirs with communities and do deep research to re-wild the stories that have been tamed by mainstream tellings. This presentation focused on what they call the Cinderella Cycle or the story of the Ash Child who is a caregiver of the flames. Sophie Gibson shared how she uses “ash child stories in the context of radical wellness and social justice rites” in her work with a women’s shelter. Gauri Raje shared Mah Pishooni, a beautiful tale of the moonlight maiden from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan that is still actively used in women’s rituals. Fleur Shorthouse Hemmings told a version of the story she learned from a Romani storyteller who carried thousands of stories in his body from his lineage. On their website, the Story Commons highlights this quote showing the seriousness with which they consider this work:
“We discern that the urge of the times is not to fix a broken system, but to acknowledge our inherent power to summon other worlds.” - Bayo Akomolafe and Marta Benavides
The re-wilding process for our stories summons other worlds indeed and I felt how much I needed it right now. Another stand out moment at the conference, was a talk by Irish writer and radiant feminist Tracy Fahey who blew us all away with her story of ancestral healing and present-day empowerment through research into the figure of the Hag in pre-Christian Irish stories and life. She recovers and re-writes the Hag to give voice to what we need now while drawing on much older wisdom. Her stories are on my summer reading list.
4. Create Stories in Community
In her workshop description of a story choir, co-leader of Story Commons Dr. Joanna Gilar writes, this is a “space to dive deeply into wonder tales and myths to explore their wild, complex, interwoven bodies, inviting stories into community and community into stories.” And I love this passage from their conference abstract for all of us:
“In a globalized world fairy tales are stories we hold in common; yet simultaneously stories whose commonality we have forgotten. The Storytelling Choir takes traditional tales and reforges them to explore their multiple history and forgotten ecological complexity, co-creating with a diverse group of storytellers and artists radical rituals of rewoven stories, performed with land and celebrating more-than-human kinships…Communal storytelling, by inviting attention to the complexities of kinship networks, can inspire ecological ritual.”
I find the Story Commons questions relevant for this community as well:
- Can the practice of collective storytelling interrogate racist and anthropocentric patterns of fairy tale imagining?
- Can collective storytelling be offered in an educational setting to create “liberatory rituals” of shared conversation and resilient creativity?
Are you getting excited!? I feel so much energy in these questions and potential for co-creative discovery.
Key Takeaway: Re-wilding stories and recovering lost figures helps to reconnect with the ecological complexity that has been forgotten in our shared narratives. By exploring and restoring these connections through communal storytelling, we can recover the richness of our cultural and ecological heritages, fostering a more profound understanding and appreciation of our lives and their ecology.
5. Generate Polyphonic Story Structures
For another perspective on stories, I was impressed by Stefano Odorico who shared his work as co-founder of the Polyphonic Documentary group, “a collaborative practice-based research endeavor,” focused on “interactive authoring tools and their potential for developing expanded and open-space ways of thinking with and through documentary. We believe that these tools have their part to play in helping to negotiate the increasingly urgent challenges of climate change and ideological polarization. Key to this is their potential for working with documentary in ways that are co-creative, non-hierarchical, polyphonic and unresolved.”
If this piques your interest, this talk by Fabiola Hanna on her related work in polyvocality in documentary film making and undoing some of the “singular authorial voice” in the form, is a lovely resource:
Polivocality as a structure has been an important part of my life and work and is probably most evident in my work with William Forsythe that we do on counterpoint in the Synchronous Objects practices. It involves finding fleeting moments of alignment and forms agreement within a rich array of complexity and diversity. I always love finding new polyphonic friends.
Key Takeaway: Polyphonic storytelling, as explored by the Polyphonic Documentary group, addresses climate change and ideological polarization through collaborative, non-hierarchical, and unresolved narrative structures. Incorporating multiple voices and perspectives in the direction of documentary fosters a deeper, more nuanced understanding of global challenges, encouraging co-creative solutions and reflecting the complexity of real-world issues.
Taking this into Your Life and Practice
Even just the idea of re-wilding a story is liberating and tugging on any thread will lead you down one of those mycelial pathways we love so well into all manner of alignments and connections that have been smooth and blunted in contemporary life. And the idea of making the stories together in community, as a chorus, in contexts and landscapes that support deep listening and multiple interpretation, I think we can all play with this in our lives and families and creative contexts. I know I’m inspired to try it out!
What stories in your life are begging to be re-wilded?
Who are the vibrant characters in your life story? Animals, plants, ancestors? Which figures from your cultural traditions need to be brought back to life?
What narratives in your life could use more complexity and intertwining threads? Which stories are your lifelines in tough times?
What's a daily story you tell yourself, and how could diving into its history unlock new possibilities?
What BIPOC stories and voices are you centering right now in the media you consume?
How do you already weave stories in your community—at work, school, socially, with family? How can you make these storytelling moments more polyvocal and rich with diverse perspectives?
Future Directions and Community Engagement
There is a lot going on! We’ve got new performance rituals in the works and lots of new content on our instragram @livablefuturesNOW. And look for a new guest post coming soon from geographer and Livable Futures collaborator Tal Shutkin on the interconnections he is mapping between his own evolving Jewish sense of place, his activism for a cease fire in Gaza, creating ecological refuges, and the Paw Paw plants in his backyard.
I’m also excited to start a new thread here in Substack on humane technology specifically so folks can opt in or out as that content develops, including more on disability-led research and CripTech arts. It might be time to start sharing about my own journey with chronic illness in this context as well, hoping to be of service to others. And I’ll make a monthly offering of in this 5 Fresh Insights format, gathering ideas from the Livable Futures universe—5 things we are reading, watching, learning, making, or appreciating—inspired by Austin Kleon’s fabulous 10 Things Worth Sharing posts here on Substack and others I read often.
If you have requests or comments, we always love to hear from you, and the more you like and comment on this post, the more other people can find our work!
So grateful for you all!
Norah