The Story
As we approach the release date of Love Across Difference: Learning Through Story and Dialogue, this portal for Commentary and Reflection will feature short excerpts from the book.
We hope they peak your interest. Since stories are at the heart of everything we explore in the book, we’ll begin there.
From: Chapter 2 The Story
“A miracle of stories is their ability to convey knowledge that we don’t know we need in a manner we can easily incorporate, without ever knowing what we are learning or even that we are learning.”
I don’t remember ever hearing Catherine start a conversation from a theoretical perspective. It was always an anecdote or, more often, a question that served as our prompt. Catherine was incredibly generous with her stories—her special gift was inviting you inside them. And when listening to your story, she had a way of giving back more than she received. You always felt like you were collaborating with her, actively enrolled and tapping into a personal and collective experience at the same time. You were a co-creator and actor.
Catherine thought that a good story wasn’t about convincing you of anything. She always tried to unfold the story in a way you could experience personally. Then she felt you might just convince yourself. She was especially good at encouraging her listeners to empathize with or to imitate the subjects in her stories, and thus enact those tales themselves.
Catherine and I typically began our exploration of stories through the lens of language. Beyond etymology and rhetorical mode, we focused our attention on the use of metaphor. These devices are common in all forms of writing and speech, and they often invite and inspire stories by offering a different way of understanding what is happening and what it may mean.
Used judiciously, metaphors are particularly helpful in accessing challenging topics, like navigating emotion, providing emphasis, simplifying the complex, accentuating differences or magnifying beauty. A metaphor can help us navigate a dilemma or conflict and show us a way forward, without wallowing in the mess of the moment.
Metaphor provides the means to connect our senses, memory and vivid walks into imagination. Creatively, it threads the needle of meaning, coaxing out treasures that have lain dormant in the garment folds of our lives. Metaphor can evoke both aesthetic charm and harsh reality, but always in a style that invites us to rethink and revisit our feelings.
(1) Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Coyote Wisdom (Rochester, Vermont: Bear & Company, 2005), 68.