Dear Reader,
“The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.” Ursula LeGuin
In Story Workshop: New Possibilities for Young Writers, I borrow author Rene Denfeld’s words about the reason resilience requires imagination. In an interview, she remarked, "I wanted to explore the role of imagination in what we call resiliency. I think we don’t pay enough attention to the power of imagination as a survival tool. If you have an imagination no one can take it from you. It is a radical act, to declare your right to imagine. In my justice work it is the difference I see between those who survive and even thrive despite horrifying trauma, and those who succumb to rage and destruction. The ones who survive are those who can imagine themselves in a different future. The same is true with children. Those who imagine survive."
Maybe it’s not a surprise that I’d be writing about imagination in a book about story for young children. It’s not rare that people think story workshop is about storytelling for children or to children or about children re-telling someone else’s story so they can learn about sequencing and dialogue and sentence structure. And it’s true that, in an incidental way, children can learn those things from a structure like story workshop. And it’s also true that our imagination is sustained and expanded through the reading and telling of other people’s stories. As LeGuin writes, “When children are taught to hear and learn the central literature of their people, or, in literate cultures, to read and understand it, their imagination is getting a very large part of the exercise it needs…. We are a wordy species. Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on. … to train the mind to take off from immediate reality and return to it with new understanding and new strength, nothing quite equals poem and story.” So it is without diminishing any of the incidental or the intentional exercise of the imagination and literacy that story workshop supports - that, in this essay, I’d like to amplify the significance of the practice of resilience that story workshop also supports - both for children, and for us. What is the relationship between resilience (and imagination) and story? How might that relationship help us survive and thrive?
Human beings think through story. In this vast, intricate, and complicated world, we wouldn’t be able to make it through a second of experience without story. Our perceptions are capable of receiving limitless pieces of sensory information. Our bodies process that information ahead of language or conscious thought in order to help us make lightning fast predictions about what will happen next, what we need to be ready for. Our bodies have already begun the story before our language has time to catch up. It’s no wonder that we need sleep - and then, even in our sleep, our brains are still processing stories in the form of dreams. The stories our bodies have learned shape how we feel, how we see, what we pay attention to, what we notice. They try to keep us safe by making things make sense.
As we grow, stories hold our beliefs and these beliefs make the world. This is something that Rebecca Solnit says repeatedly in A Paradise Built in Hell. Belief makes the world - not the other way around. If we can change our beliefs, we can change the world. But when we hold the story and the belief so deep in our bones and in our nerves, when it guides our vision and our behavior before we even know it’s there, revision is complicated. Stories that involve our public lives, our civic duties and societal norms are often the ones that don’t seem like stories. They seem to be just the way things are. And therefore, systems and institutions benefit when they remain so. Solnit found this time and again as she researched histories of disaster and recovery. “After disaster, savage crowds sometimes appear, but as in San Francisco, the most brutal acts in the aftermath of the Kanto earthquake were not to sabotage the status quo but to preserve it, with the collusion of or at the hands of the authorities.” There are always those who have an outsized stake in maintaining the story as it is, and trying to make it hard to see the way it shapes the world you experience as real, and solid, and given. After 9/11 Solnit writes, “Civil society had triumphed in the hours and days after the attacks, but it failed in the face of more familiar stories told by the government and retold by the media, again and again. ” In Paradise, Solnit makes the point, by telling a variety of disaster stories, that civil society regularly stepped in to protect and comfort the community that was theirs. People experiencing traumatic events behaved in ways that were compassionate, helpful, and sustained mutual aid. This story of human behavior in the midst of crisis was as true as any other that might have been told. We can learn to ask ourselves - how does the story that is getting the most airtime support the status quo and who benefits from its telling? What else could be true?
Ursula LeGuin writes, “All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.”
We all need to keep workshopping our stories, all our lives. The most resilient among us are able to imagine both private and public lives in which we could flourish. These are not stories free of fear, conflict, grief, and change but full of compassion and curiosity and love. These are stories that allow things to go wrong - that expect things to go wrong - within a living, open system that makes repair possible. When we are willing to workshop the stories we tell ourselves, we are capable of helping children to imagine their own.
In their book, Parenting From the Inside Out, Dan Seigel and Mary Hartzell make a pointed observation about the way our stories influence our interactions with children: “The intrusions of unresolved issues can directly influence how we know ourselves and interact with our children. When unresolved issues are writing our life story…we are no longer making thoughtful choices about how we want to parent our children, but rather are reacting on the basis of experiences from the past… We often try to control our children’s feelings and behavior when actually it is our own internal experience that is triggering our upset feelings about heir behavior.”
The psychiatrist and author of The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk, takes this idea a little further: “The big issue for traumatized people is that they don’t own themselves anymore. Any loud sound, anybody insulting them, hurting them, saying bad things, can hijack them away from themselves. And so what we have learned is that what makes you resilient to trauma is to own yourself fully. In general, as we move through the world, memories become integrated and transformed into stories that help us make sense.”
We own ourselves when we own our stories. The classroom can be such a powerful place for children to practice becoming attuned to their own stories and sharing them with others. It can be a place where we prioritize making sense of our experience. In an interview with Krista Tippet, Gregory Orr says, “When you’re a victim, you’re a passive experiencer of whatever it is that’s happened. But to turn your world into words and then shape that is to become an active soul.” We can invite children to turn their world into words. This becomes much easier when we are aware of the stories that are shaping our world. Here’s Solnit again: “Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. … We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change. … Sometimes, the situation has changed but the stories haven’t, and people follow the old versions, like outdated maps, into dead ends.”
These children understand the value of changing the story:
People maybe have a plan for what the future could be like but then when someone else shows up and says, “I want this to be a more wonderful place,” and they work a lot and really hard it can be more wonderful than they even imagined at the beginning. - Milo, age 6
You don’t have to just revise stories! You can revise what you think, too. Like your ideas and what you think is true! You have to be flexible in your brain. - Evelyn, age 6
Being flexible in our brain is a little more complicated for a 36 year-old than for a 6 year-old. But it’s not impossible. Especially when you work with children and you listen to their stories. And ask them to tell you more. To sing them and paint them and dance them and shape them into clay - as we do in story workshop. But we need each other, too. We need to surround ourselves with adults who are actively trying to see something more wonderful than they even imagined at the beginning. I love how Valarie Kaur writes about this in her book, See No Stranger, which we’ll read together in February and March in The Studio.
“I discovered that meeting regularly in safe spaces outside the walls of the institution is necessary to nurture bravery. At first these gatherings will feel like pockets of resistance, acts of survival. Then you might invite a new person to join you. And then another. And another. Soon that space might grow. Before you know it, you will not be resisting anymore. You will be embodying a different set of norms. From here, you can see the institution with new eyes and find opportunities for intervention. Or revolution.”
That’s what we’re doing together in The Studio. We’re workshopping our stories in order to embody a different set of norms for the institutions that involve education and care. You are all invited to join us. And perhaps you'll consider sharing this invitation with another.
Wishing you centered and peaceful moments of breath in the midst of the storm - from Matt and me,
Giveaway!
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Thank you, Margie!
“I understood now why so many writers and artists, while in the thick of illness, became memoirists. It provided a sense of control, a way to reshape your circumstances on your own terms, in your own words. “That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is,” Jeanette Winterson wrote. “It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”
— from Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad