How Communities Create and Sustain Stories

Wednesday, February 23^rd found the second graders at St. Mary’s Visitation School all tied up in blue ribbon, a human web of connectivity formed by curiosity, collaboration, and dialogue. 

I had been invited by their teachers to visit because the children wanted to know a little more about the publishing process following a semester of writing workshop, through which they each developed an eight chapter book.

In the first part of our time together, I narrated for them the process of writing a book, from writing the manuscript, to developing illustrations, setting up the book design, editing the manuscript, and working with a printer.   They listened very patiently as I brought out early, middle, and late versions of the Kwaku manuscript, in order to show them what a book looks like at different stages of the process.  Collectively, the class decided I should have Ayden, the class’s artist, do the drawings for another book.   And then they came to the discussion with really wonderful questions:

Brady, who’s evidently a great pragmatist, stood up with his hand on his hip and asked, “Do you make any money from this?”

“Not yet.” I replied, laughing.  “Authors and illustrators create books for reasons other than making money, I’m afraid.  There are only a handful of them every year that make enough money from a book to live on.”

As our conversation continued, many of their questions were concerned with this book as a retelling.  What did we change in the story from the original?  How were our characters different than those depicted in earlier versions?  Had I written any stories that were just the product of my own imagination?

I had to smile at these very savvy questions. Like the fairy tales that most of us grew up on, the Kwaku Ananse tales are drawn from a rich oral tradition, simply passed through memory from generation to generation for centuries.  And as the communities who first told them faced new challenges or dissipated, adopted new technologies, the stories changed too.  A detail added here, the number of characters altered, an ending changed. 

The stories we tell are in dialogue with our lives.  They cease to be told when they are forgotten, or they cease to be instruments by which we gage our relation to our past traditions, present concerns, or future dreams. Even in an age such as we live in, which valorizes creativity as a value of individuality, rather than of connectivity, every artist or re-teller inevitably interprets a text, and that interpretation is always a mirror to the cultural moment in which it rises — exploiting its fears, giving voice to its hopes, mapping out its ideals of community. 

I first encountered the story of Kwaku Ananse over ten years ago, when I was given a small booklet of traditional Ashanti stories by a dear friend from Ghana.  Nabali had, I suppose, brought them as souvenirs of his country and culture, but I felt I had been entrusted with sharing them in the ways that I could, as these were Ananse stories that I had never heard before. 

In the ten years that passed between receiving them and publishing the book, my own understanding of the story changed significantly.  Kwaku became a hairstylist, a fashionista of sorts.  This detail, while meant to be funny, was actually symbolic as well.  The spider’s quiet sort of leadership, rooted in his in-exhaustive ability to bring out the ‘beauty’ in others, was inspired by my memories of the righteous people I had known, such as Christine Daniels and Janel Ziedler, and the other gentle leaders whom I encountered within peace and justice programming in high school and college.  The Lion’s greatest flaw, I began to understand, was not his cruelty, but his narcissistic insecurity.   And in the end, the ancient myth came to new light for me as the parent of a young child, and then two young children, as a reflection of how bullying destroys communities within the classroom and beyond.

“I have written a number of stories that are ‘original’,” I told them, “but no story is only the product of the imagination alone.  The imagination is a fire that is kindled by other stories, as well as an author’s dreams and fears  for the world in which he or she lives — no story comes into the world without these aspirations, which breathe life into them.”

And as the community kindles the fire of the author’s imagination, so it plays an integral role in the development of a book.   At the end of the presentation, I asked for volunteers to lead us in a demonstration of the process by which a community produces a book. 

I gave each student a card with a role on it —“Author,” “Copy Editor,” “Printer,” “Publisher,” “Librarian,” “Illustrator,”  and so forth.  As they stood in a circle shoulder to shoulder, we collectively decided the role each person plays in the process.   The librarian is connected to the author, as the one who offers her books to kindle her imagination.  The author is connected to the illustrator, as the one who gives him a story to illustrate.  The two of them are connected to the publisher, who is willing to invest the money to produce and market the book.  The publisher is connected to the book designer, who connects text and image.  The book designer is connected to the printer, who takes that design and makes it a galley.  The printer is connected to the copy editor, who makes sure that it is a clean copy.  The copy editor is connected to the bookseller and librarian, who are the first readers of the book, and the bookseller and librarian are connected to parents, teachers, and readers. 

In the end, they were bound together in a beautiful blue web, upon which, the story of Kwaku Ananse, the little spider, could be laid. 

“The next time you pick up a book,” I said at the completion of our handiwork, “try to think of all the people who played a role in bringing it to you.”

The Anonymous Public Servant

On the wall of my office hangs a photo I return to at the beginning of each semester.

It is a photograph that I snapped as my host daughter Suci and I were leaving the Grant Memorial Lawn in the waning moments of President Obama’s Inauguration ceremony in 2009 -- of a young man who, out of moxie or despair, shimmied up a stoplight at the corner of  3^rd Street and Independence Ave. to witness the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next.  Atop the atoll of the light box, dressed in a black North Face jacket, he looks across the tenebrous swell of lives below toward the Capitol balcony, his arm curved casually about the light pole for support. 

Further afield, atop the immense dome of the Capitol Building stands another figure — the bronze Statue of Freedom.  Within my point of reference, she and the man on the lamppost are mirror images of each other—assuming the same posture, with garments the same tincture of aged bronze.  From a distance, they could not be set apart. 

From the moment the sight of them caught my eye, passages of Alice Walker’s poem “Light Baggage” began running through my head: “there is a magic/lingering after people/to whom success is merely personal.”

Walker had dedicated the poem to three Harlem Renaissance writers — Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larson.  Each of the writers had left New York to seek the heart of their craft in a life of public service.  The first became an elder within a Quaker community, the second a freelance journalist and substitute teacher, the third a nurse. 

Written as an honorarium to them, it is, however, ultimately a poem about the anonymous servant, the you and the me, the young man on the traffic light who is not merely there to witness a spectacle, but to sanction, by his very presence, a new government in our democracy.  As Walker concludes her poem she draws out this point in a beautifully rendered series of metonymic images:

if a hundred photographs survive

each one will show a different face.

someone out of step. alone out there, absorbed;

fishing in the waters of experience

a slouched back against the shoulders

of the world.

I return to this image and its lyric counterpart at the turn of every semester as part of my preparation to teach community based learning courses at Beloit, and I returned to them again today after watching footage of 25000 Wisconsinites dressed in red and black. A sea of bodies and voices crowding in and around the Capitol Rotunda in Madison, their demonstrations were aimed at addressing the passage of a budget that will deny most state employees collective bargaining rights.   

“This place is crazy right now,” my cousin Ryan told me on the phone from his chemistry lab at UW Madison, “You’d never believe it.”

For every state employee who attended the manifestation asking for his or perspective to be heard, there were university students and families, public defenders and educators from non-public institutions, children, retirees and activists standing alongside.   Each and every one of them assumed the role as a public servant . . . as did the smaller numbers those who stood on the other side of the ideological line, calling for the budget to be passed.  The beautiful, anonymous manifestation of direct democracy by people who dissipate back to their homes and lives, like a faint fragrance in the air, once the labor of standing and being counted is done. 

Both the photo and Alice Walker’s  poem are instructive on days like today; they communicate an ethos of service which assumes that responsibility is bound to flexibility, agency is bound to acts of mindfulness, and leadership is fostered, nurtured, and sustained, through largely anonymous acts.    

“Do something small, beautifully,” I tell students in my needs assessment and grant writing courses . . . and they do.  They have developed beautifully rendered  materials which have become tools within various non-profit organizations’ outreach.  No matter what the project, the students commit themselves to a painstaking design, development and editing process when it is done well . . . and it often is.

They become better writers through the process — we all do in fact — but they develop a more integrated sense of what it means to be a public servant as well.  It demands flexibility and creative problem solving when personal or organizational objectives are not coupled with means; it demands mindfulness and intentionality in all acts of communication, and it demands that we recognize that sometimes, actually often, leadership is an anonymous enterprise, as it will have been for those people who raised their voices in Tahir Square in Cairo two weeks ago, in Bahrain yesterday, on Capital Square in Madison Wisconsin today.

The Virtues of Making Our Valentines

Our house is being overrun by Flamingos. 

As much as I would love to say it’s the sign of an early spring thaw that sends them migrating our way, I can’t.   The whole leggy flock of them is of the pepto-bismo pink pipe cleaner and stock paper sort. 

In our house, February has always been a month of letter writing and card making. . . which means January is a month of busy weekends.   Sometime within the second weekend of the year we begin the process by choosing a design and message for our Valentines.  The third weekend we make a list of people we would like to send them to and buy all of the supplies.  By the end of January we start to assemble them, and finally the weekend before V-Day, they’re signed, sealed, and ready to be delivered. 

After four years, I’m happy to report we’ve almost got the logistics down to the science of a NASA shuttle launch.  Not that our kitchen resembles anything like Mission Control during the process . . . which is why the card making enterprise remains fun, and quite honestly, continues to be done. 

The design for this year’s pink ladies came from a Junior Ranger issue Miss S received last May.  She saved it in the top drawer of her bedside table for nine months in anticipation of being able to use it for this year’s Valentines.  When the season finally came upon us, she was ready. 

The first finished flamingo.
(Say that three times fast!)

It was probably due to those months of anticipation that she worked so diligently these past weeks.   Without a single complaint at any point in the process, she came up with a message and typed it on the computer, formed all the little legs and necks, cut out all the beaks, and put all the pieces together.  Now that her handiwork is done, the two hearts of each bird’s body are sandwiching its pink pipe cleaner feet and neck.  Peeping out from the top is its black billed beak and a googly eye.  Each and every one is ready to be passed on to the friend or loved one it was made for.

Despite our harried lives, we continue to make them by hand.  I could say that we do this because of the benefits it has for developing Miss S’s  creativity, coordination, or analytic skills, but I have to be honest — those ‘practical benefits’ aren’t major motivators.  I remain committed to creating homemade greeting cards for Valentine's Day out of the knowledge that in doing it, we are participating in an ancient and at the same time timeless tradition.

An Edwardian Valentine, circa 1900

It is popularly noted that the tradition of exchanging greeting cards for Valentine’s Day dates back to the 1400s on the European continent, and that the modern greeting card industry was developed by Englishman Sir Henry Cole in 1850.  Cole, notably, saw the commercial greeting card as a practical efficiency in a culture where every social relationship was mediated by letters.  A lady could spend up to three or four hours a day in correspondence—to her travelling husband, distant family members, friends and acquaintances in transit, individuals within the parish, her absent children.  A huge percentage of the labor involved in running a large household was simply wrapped up in the processes of writing.

  


The Chinese characters for 'Blessing'

My motivation for creating these cards goes even farther back than these European traditions however, to those of the ancient Chinese. Nearly two thousand years ago, the Chinese were already exchanging hand written greetings with family and friends at the turn of every New Year.  They did so in order to ward off bad fortune.  Like the ancient Egyptians, the Chinese believed that words, once inscribed, were a sacred engine of reality.  To write out in a gentle hand a blessing to a loved one was — by the very act of inscribing it — to manifest that blessing and bestow it on the receiver.    

I like to think that a little of everything we put into and onto these Valentines every year — everything that we inscribe them with — creates a little of the transcendent goodness that the ancient Chinese believed their New Year’s greetings bestowed on their loved ones.  And I’d like to believe that someday Miss S. will feel the same, long after this year’s flock of flamingos has migrated on.

Letter Writing as a Contemplative Practice

I am taking my best friend Gwa back to Santa Maria in Cosmedin when we visit him in Rome.  He doesn’t believe me that the relics of St. Valentine are instated there, but I recollect that we have seen them:  he, Miss S. and I, together.  Walking past the short line of tourists waiting to take their pictures at La Boca di Verita, we enter the church, and I direct him to a chapel along the northeast wall.  There, in a gold and glass reliquary the size of a bread box, the remains are displayed.  Next to the reliquary, a brass tent sign is standing, embossed with the name ‘S. Valentino.’  It looks rather bizarre, actually, like a title plate one might see on a banker’s desk in your local branch.    

St. Valentine’s gap toothed, jawless skull sits delicately on its bed of white satin — I would swear, in fact, that it was no bigger than my son Paddy’s—who at two and a half is in the 5^th percentile for head circumference among boys his age.  One can’t always be sure of the size of objects within churches such as this; their expansive scale makes every copse and window seem smaller than it actually is.  Without a doubt, there is an optical minimizing effect at work, due to all the Baroque grandeur at work here.  But St. Valentine’s seems the skull of a child — a tiny, corrupt vessel shirking in its smallish space.

In all truth, the nominalizations attributed to him as the patron saint of interfaith marriages and letter writers really didn’t facilitate my having formed any sort of attachment to him, but there is an undeniable heroism and wisdom that the myth of Valentine evokes for me — a call to deep and intentional dialogue.  This call to dialogue was at the heart of his ministry.

I revere this wisdom, and often return to a singular image in my contemplation of the myth of Valentine — one in which, incidentally, the figure of the man himself isn’t present: the image of a prison cell, fettered with scraps of parchment that have been hurriedly stuck in the crevices of its rude walls.  The notes possess a ghostly translucence in the gloam, yet the rain falling black around them doesn’t penetrate their ink-veined hearts, the capillaries being protected by envelopments of stone.

Letter writing is a dying art.  But then, so is the deep and intentional dialogue that it facilitates — the sort of conversations in which we are fully invested in listening with our whole bodies, our eyes falling up and down over the familiar cascade of another person’s handwriting, our minds curling around the space of his or her voice as we recline in a quiet place and draw it in.    

It is a most beautiful intimacy. 

In a world where multi-tasking is the norm, and ‘instant messaging’ and social networking allows us to ‘keep tabs’ on almost anybody we would care to have contact with with almost instant gratification, Valentine offers us an almost absurd alternative:  spend up to several hours in silence.  Commit yourself to a state of suspended conversation with an absent other—and laboriously commit that conversation down in writing.  Send it off to them, and wait for a response that may never come.

Most people aren’t willing to make the investment.  What they fail to see is that the first return of the letter writer comes through the very process of writing itself.  When one picks up a pen, he or she enters a meditative state, a state of deep listening to the self as it extends itself outward in fellowship with another human being.   Such intentional action is exhausting and emancipating at the same time — as Gwa once described the feeling of writing to me in a letter, a “profusion of energy, a real and hard endeavor.”

Though we argue throughout our visit to Santa Maria whether this is in fact a relic of Valentine or not, it seems only proper that we’ve made this pilgrimage together; over the course of the last sixteen years I have exchanged more letters with him than with all other people combined.  It began, I suppose, as a practical necessity.  For two young people in college, the seven hour time difference between Italy and the Midwest and the once extraordinary cost of international calls, made it quite attractive to drop a note rather than pick up the phone in order to get in touch.  But what began as an economy became its own extraordinary gift. 

Letter writing is a movable feast, a contemplative practice that affords each and every one of us ample opportunities to enter deep and intentional dialogue with one another, with ourselves.  Every month of February I discover this for the first time again.

Metaphors are the Darndest Things (Part Three)

“Do you know what you made, S.?” I said, hugging her and smiling.

“What?”

“A metaphor.  Saying our life was this crumpled piece of paper.  It was a metaphor.”

A serious, but earnest smile formed at the corners of her mouth.  “I did?”



"Our life is like
this crumpled piece of paper.
Nothing is smooth."

“Yeah,” I replied.  

She looked down at her lap, her face fixed in this peculiar, closeted smile.  She sat there as if creating such a mysterious thing as a metaphor were some sort of initiation rite to a secret society, a most solemn and profound experience which, despite herself, she had been tickled pink to having taken part in.

She was right to be delighted, of course, although using metaphors to express ourselves shouldn’t be regarded as a secret artisan’s craft.  Unfortunately, as a civilization we tend to treat metaphors exactly as that— a fancy figurative device, the stuff and fluff of romantic poets, greeting card engineers, song writers, and ad men. 

But they’re not.  Metaphors are the very stuff of thought itself . . . and the emotions that inform thought.  In fact in recent years child psychologists have been conducting important work in exploring  the ways that children use metaphors as a means of communicating difficult experiences or experiences for which they have no clear emotional register.   “Children often communicate their experiences through metaphors,” psychologist Marilyn Snow reminds the reader in her recent study, “Creative Metaphors of Life Experiences through Play Therapy.” 

And the fact that children liberally use metaphors in their self-expression is particularly relevant to understanding how they deal with difficult situations.  As Snow and her colleagues note, “metaphors allow the child to protect the self and project the experience on to another object, which is much less threatening.”

In other words?  Thinking of life as a rejected piece of crumpled paper is a bit safer than saying “life in this funny farm of a house and family stresses me out, Mom.”  And frankly, a bit more probable.  She has no concrete vocabulary for articulating the phenomena of ‘stress’ or ‘frazzled nerves’ yet . . . but she has a working knowledge of the frustrations that come with a crumpled piece of paper, having been in school for the past four years. 

 “S., do you know what metaphor I use to describe this family?”

“What?”

“A mosaic.  Do you remember the mosaics that the ancient Romans created to decorate their floors?  The ones we’ve seen in Italy?”

 “Yeah,” she replied.   



“Do you know that most of the tiny stones used to create those mosaics were just waste of the waste? They were chips, cut from the shards, which were themselves left on the ground after the builders had finished cutting cut each block of stone.  And each little tiny piece, in and of itself, was nothing really to look at or value.  They were dusty, uneven in thickness, sharp at the edges . . . all in all, wholly un-extraordinary junk rock.”


“Umm-hmm.”

“The thing is, even though each little tile had rough edges, even though each one was in and of itself a piece of garbage, when they were laid out together in their intricate patterns, sealed and polished they made a really beautiful piece of art. And a strong one too! Some of those mosaics have lasted for thousands of years!”

Miss S’s face brightened into a full smile.  “So we’re a mosaic?”



“I like to think so.  Especially on days like you had today, when nothing seems to go right, and everything seems to be a little rough around the edges.   On those days, I really have to remind myself that it’s just a tile, a rough, junky tile in what will be a beautiful mosaic . . . that we’re making together.”

 “Yeah,” she said thoughtfully.  “I like that!" 

“Well, nothing says you have to think about it that way . . . but if it helps you to get through those rough spots of the week, by all means.” 

I gave her a quick snuggle before I stood up.  “Love you.”

“I love you too, Mom.”

I left her room with a smile at my small victory in parenting.  Without denying her the validity of her feelings, I was nevertheless able to reframe them against the promise of the future rather than the banality of the present.

Ahh.   The power of metaphor. 

Thinking of hers, I began to wonder whether our phone number was on the school’s speed dial yet.   I quickly jotted down a note to ask the school secretary when I saw her the next day, a little anxious at what she'd say.

Part One      Part Two