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.
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| Chen Chen |
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.
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| David Anthony Durham |
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.
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| Monica Prince |
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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