Ethical Storytelling, Ethical Living: Give Us More

On Friday, January 12 -- just before the entire nation was again plunged into cruel and damaging winter weather, freezing in the Midwest and flooding here, in the Northeast -- I was honored to participate in a panel discussion on Ethical Storytelling. 

Curious about what role ethical storytelling might play in a country in which the leading Republican candidate for President has been proven to consistently lie? Read on.

The discussion was a grand finale to the University of Southern Maine's 10-day winter residency for the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program, serving over 50 MFA candidates. The panel was moderated by author David Anthony Durham, many of whose nine novels generously provide us with Black-centered histories of the Civil War, the colonization of the west, etc.; and in addition to me included Chinese-American queer poet Chen Chen and choreopoet scholar and artist Monica Prince.

Chen Chen

I was privileged to be the old white queer on this esteemed panel.

For all four of us, ethical storytelling invites some sort of active response.

The world is always in need of repair, and our writing serves nothing if it ignores that.

David Anthony Durham

Or, as in a quote from author Sigrid Nunez recently sent to me by my beloved, "And Beckett was right; Eloquence about disaster will not do."

I extrapolated my (shared) philosophy of working to improve performance in everyday life through improving our creative crafts -- a philosophy that arises from the discipline of Performance Studies, and was thus at the heart of our mission at Opera House Arts in Stonington. In short: if we better understand and practice the craft of ethical storytelling, the better citizens we become.

Monica Prince

We tell stories about ourselves and others all the time.

It doesn't have to be gossip to be swapping stories on someone.  And especially in our common realm of politics -- the place to which we bring our differences to create solutions to shared problems, such as climate change -- how can we practice a set of ethics that do no harm?

Because that is indeed my personal definition of ethical storytelling: crafting stories in any form that are not exploitative and do no harm. Stories that do not exploit others' stories; stories that do not exploit your own story; stories that do not exploit strategies, such as gratuitous violence or sex; and perhaps most importantly, stories that do not exploit one's own privilege in attempts to achieve greater fame, wealth, power or control.

As artists throughout the world are aware, perhaps the best way to get to this non-exploitative space is through the craft of listening to one's own voice not in solitude but in the context of others. Of family. Of community.

Honing a craft is a kind of intentionality: we bring our full consciousness to it. What if we considered these four points as we hone our crafts of storytelling, whether on the page or stage or in meetings, classrooms, family discussions?

• Listening 
• Honest response
• Consent
• Accountability

These are actually four practices in the art of improvisation as well -- and really, isn't everything about our lives improvised in response to someone or something else?

The practice of "honest response" exposes my belief that truth and honesty are distinct from each other.

Truth is, as German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt so beautifully noted, is created and understood between us. This is why it is so fragile.

Honesty, on the other hand, is the individual practice of creating the truth between us. It has much to do with the intentionality we bring to craft, and a kind of sincerity, an adherence to the facts AS WE KNOW THEM that in turn creates fairness and straightforwardness in our conduct.

And so my four points of ethical storytelling: listen; practice honest response; gain consent; and practice accountability for who you are, what you do, and what your impact is on those around you.

Chen Chen, Monica, and David all amplified these in their own beautiful words as well.

Chen Chen was especially eloquent on the art of deep listening: don't hesitate to check out both of their two poetry volumes. David, who has written a number of historical and fantasy novels, was very interested in how ethical storytelling relates to our actions in the world. And Monica, who practices the art of choreopoetry introduced to the world by Ntozake Shange in her 1975 play, "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf", caring for each other as we perform is at the heart of the form.

I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to reflect on this vital topic alongside these esteemed colleagues for a group of young writers seeking their MFA's in Creative Writing.

How does ethical storytelling play a role in your own life? #giveusmore

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#stonecoastwriterscenter

#mainewriters

History Has Its Eye on Us -- but WTF is "History"?

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Congress.

An insurrectionist attempt to overthrow our government, led not by immigrants or wage laborers or formerly enslaved people or foreign terrorists but by the white male President who had just been voted out.

Same guy who almost 50% of the country appears to support for re-election.

I am surprised that this somber "anniversary" was not more well marked -- in the mainstream media, or on social.

As writer and philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, in a quote that bears frequent repetition, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I worry almost incessantly about our nation's lack of historical education. 

American philosopher and educator John Dewey published Democracy and Education over 100 years ago, in 1916. Yet his thoughts on the critical role of public education in modeling, building and sustaining democratic freedoms remain relevant today. He wrote:

"The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience."

We are all equal as learners and learn best together in communities of other interested learners. This is why the U.S. institution of free public education for all -- once unique in the world -- is so entwined with universal suffrage.

If you don't know and you can't learn, your vote is meaningless -- or worse.

With the nation's divisions and acrimony heating up as we careen toward the 2024 election, in few areas is our need to deepen our understandings of the past more critical than in our how we view the institutions and contexts that launched the nation's first -- and we hope only -- Civil War.

Because many of these same dynamics and tensions continue to plague U.S. society.

I was so aware of this in a recent visit to the new International African American Museum in Charleston, SC.

Schools are not the only, nor even, for many, the best learning communities.

Located on Gadsden's Wharf where an estimated 40% of African captives entered this country, this Museum "honors the untold stories of the African American journey at one of our country's most sacred sites:" documenting "a journey that began in Africa centuries ago, and still continues today" -- shaping every aspect of our world.

The Museum surrounds visitors with the African diaspora, immersing you in vivid, side-by-side examples of the ways African cultures are alive in today's U.S. music, art, design, fashion, food, and more. These cultures differ so dramatically from western European cultures that one can sense the tension between them even on the museum floor.

Did you know that white Europeans became the minority population in South Carolina, where the Civil War was launched, as early as 1708?

South Carolina planters' envious duplication of British systems of brutal enslavement to cultivate sugar cane in Barbados created the state's huge reliance on enslaved labor to develop its "Carolina Gold" -- rice -- and thus its enthusiastic participation in the trade of enslaved peoples.

Yet South Carolina's former governor, Nikki Haley, now also a Republican presidential candidate, could not accurately answer a question regarding the causes for the Civil War, nor why her state was the first to secede from the Union.

The story in which the Museum immerses its visitors is one of both triumph AND trauma.

We as white Americans too often don't know or disregard the degree of trauma the enslaved ancestors of today's African-American population endured. And we avert our faces from their continued economic, political, and social oppression. At the same time, we aren't well learned enough about the triumphs of innovation and ingenuity and resistance that helped these same people to survive and to extend the legacy of African cultures into the U.S.

I continue to seek out these voices and experiences in multiple ways. I believe we need to immerse ourselves in understanding the experiences that make up the fierce, jagged mosaic of this nation.

As several of the exhibits noted: despite every effort to annihilate, enslave, and oppress African Americans in the U.S. -- they are STILL HERE. Still determinedly connected to place. Still honoring their ancestors, their ancestry, and the land they have had continuously to fight for.

On the anniversary of January 6, with a Presidential election looming -- I urge you to go, and to take your children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews and students, to the International African American Museum in Charleston. Or to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Or to read a novel by Jessmyn Ward. Or to watch the award-winning movie, 12 Years A Slave, based on the true story of an African-American man born into freedom who was kidnapped and sold as a slave.

Experience the brutality, the greed, the trauma and denial and triumph on which large parts of U.S. culture -- including Trump's MAGA movement -- are erected.

Educate yourself and others deeply before you vote.

"I think it's important that every institution in this county, every American, take the responsibility of upholding democracy seriously. And everyone needs to be doing everything that they can to ensure that a) Donald Trump does not succeed and b) the MAGA movement is extinguished."

-- Michael Fanone, a Capitol police officer whom the January 6 insurrectionists beat and tasered, causing both a heart attack and traumatic brain injury, quoted in Politico

#january6

#democracy

#africanamericanhistory

#survival

#insurrection

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