Facebook, Boxes, Possibilities and Incivility

Warning:  This post is long and I have no idea where it is going.

When I woke up this morning I told my husband I was probably going to get in trouble.  That happens to me from time to time.  I know I'm wading into something and I brace myself for the fall out.  My husband's response to that was, "If that's what you want.  Are you planning on blogging about something controversial today?"  I told him I had been thinking about education for a few weeks and the events in my public and private life finally collided in a way that made me need to just belch it out onto the page.  So, I began with a metaphor on my Facebook page, and then I blogged about my annoyance with the current atmosphere of attacking teachers.

I expected to hear from people who read my blog, either complaining about my ideas or my experiences or even telling me that they disagree with me about teaching in general.  What I was not expecting was to get pushback from the pretty innocuous Facebook post.

This is what I posted on Facebook:

Some kids are inside the box. Some kids are outside the box. 

I have discovered that this very simplistic view of children is absolute lunacy.

I am raising a physical scientist who loves visual arts and theatre, and a a visual artist who composes music and loves the biological sciences.

My daughter designed her own box. She changes its shape, proportions and colors to suit her needs, but as far as I can tell she's never gotten inside of it.

My son didn't know there was a box until recently. Upon discovering its existence his first reaction was to laugh at the concept. His second was to look at around in a bewildered fashion and ask, "What on earth would I do with a box?"

I am privileged to have these two characters in my life.

How would you describe your child's relationship with this mysterious box?

My motivation for this post is simple.  I have always been labeled as 'outside of the box'.  I don't tend to move in 'traditional' tracks of thought and I am a bit off the wall at times...most of the time.  I accepted this very simple idea most of my life, and then I had kids.  What I discovered was that this very simple description didn't really have anything to do with the two people living in my house.  Their potential to be, do and see things was phenomenal to me.  I began to wonder when we set the 'box' and what happens to us as we grow older.  I thought about the people who were 'brains', 'pretty', 'jocks', and I began to wonder if we sold them and ourselves short in life.

What if I took the simple metaphor of the box and made the thing more interesting or applicable to what I saw?

I used to say, "People say you are either inside the box our outside of the box.  Well, one of my children built her own box and does what she wants with it and my son doesn't know there is a box."

Lots of other parents would look at me for a moment, and often they would go right back to saying their child was either inside or outside, but over time, people have begun expanding on that metaphor and they have begun to answer me with things that are interesting and probably more descriptive of what makes their kids tick.  I believe in a dynamic view of our relationship to what is 'normal' or within the bounds of 'traditional' when it comes to how we live in our society.

We are more that we ever thought we could be and the labels we use and accept often limit who we could be.  When I think of the 'box' I think of being trapped and forced to conform to something that is already here.  Then, I think of Einstein, Florence Nightengale. and Wright Brothers, George Washington Carver, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Isaace Newton, Bessie Coleman and I ask a simple question, "What would their lives have been like if they'd been put in a box they couldn't escape?"

So, I am ever expanding the idea of the boxes.

It is never my intention to offend anyone...that doesn't mean I don't offend people, it just means I'm not trying to do that.  I have a very open idea of dialogue.  I want to know what you think especially if you disagree with me.  I want to know if we can find common ground.  I want to know if there is some way for us to understand the world together, because like it or not, we are here together.

One thing I find unhelpful on all levels is incivility.  I really dislike being uncivil to someone.  it ends discourse and changes the conversation into bomb throwing.  The moment you are throwing bombs, you are not talking.  You are not listening.  You are no longer communicating in any helpful way.

This brings me to Facebook.  I have gotten in trouble on this medium any number of times.  Sometimes it is because I have waded into a conversation all unknowing and trod on someone's toes.  Sometimes it is because I don't tend to take Facebook very seriously and lots of other people do.  Sometimes it is because I am extremely opinionated and people don't like my opinions.  Sometimes people misinterpret my intent because I have typed a hastily worded reply that does sound incredibly insensitive or out of step.

I have learned to be much more careful rather than cavalier.  Even so, sometimes I end up embroiled in something that is either odd or distasteful.

That happened this morning.  I posted my, what i feel to be a rather innocuous post about boxes, on my page and I got a quick and annoyed reply from a fellow who I had accepted a friend request from because he used to go to my church.  His reply seemed rather disgusted.

He informed me that I was naive to believe that people weren't in boxes.  We were all in boxes.  Our lives were proscribed by boxes.  We even died in Boxes and that was just how it was.

I responded that my intent was to say that we are more than what we are labeled and that our lives have more to do with how we perceive the world around us than how others perceive us.  If we go forward with that point of view, our options are bigger.

He wrote back at once, demanding to know why I was a storyteller and not a painter or a mortician.  He wanted to know who I was to go about defining everyone's boxes.  He wanted to know how I could be so foolish to believe that people have so many choices.  He wanted to know how I could think I was so free to make choices in my life.  He told me I clearly thought I was as free as the birds, but even birds aren't free.  Then he threw in something about a boy who just wants to grow up and be a truck driver who comes home and watches the playboy channel.  He demanded to know why I thought I had the right to say anything about boxes.  We all live in boxes.  That's just how it is.

I have discovered that when dealing with people who have such strong viewpoints it is often best to just say straight up that it is perfectly lovely that we don't agree.  This person isn't going to make me wish for a box to hide in and I am clearly not going to convince him he doesn't have to be in his box.  If he wants to be in a box, that is fine with me, but I don't believe he has the right to try to limit my world to what is in his.

This is where things took a turn for the worst.

I pointed out that I love to tell stories and I do it because I can make a living at it.  Doing what you love means you don't have to fight yourself to go to work.  I pointed out that I do paint.  I also pointed out that I have no interest and possibly no skills in the field of being a mortician, but what does that have to do with not having choices?  I tried to explain that as adults we often feel trapped in life, but the true places we get put in those boxes occurs when we are younger.  The younger we are when we accept that we are trapped in a box, the smaller our future becomes.  I explained that I wasn't suggesting people could sprout wings and fly around a room if they thought about it hard enough, but that they always had more choices than they realized.

I wish I'd been more articulate about it.  Perhaps I should have included phrases like, 'You could be a tap dancing doctor, a sculpting sales associate who surfs, a truck driver who writes poetry, a writer who enjoys working with neuroscience.'  I didn't though.  Who thinks of such things while they are typing a quick, though lengthy, response on Facebook?

I concluded my response with,  'Who is to say what you are and aren't?  You and I have very different world views.  I am not trying to define the box.  What I am trying to do is talk about our relationship to this mysterious box and how our view of it can limit us.  You are welcome to live in a box if that is what you wish, but we do live in America and it is a free country after all.   Inside or outside doesn't suit me.

His response sounded a bit unhinged.

First, he began with calling me 'Sister', in a familiar and uncomfortable way.  I wasn't certain if he was doing this to mock me being black, mock me being a woman, or if he was being condescending, or if he thought it was endearing.  He told me I needed to go back to school because I was ignorant.  I needed to go back and take logic 101 because I wasn't making any sense.  He went on to tell me that black belonged with black, white belonged with white, and yes, green belongs with green.  He informed me that maybe, since I was such an expert on all of this, and I was as free as the birds that I should take the next few days off so I could teach a logic class.  He said he'd sign up for it and sit in the front of the class and maybe the birds could come in and pee on the floor.

It was strange.  It had nothing to do with what we were discussing an I realized we were no longer talking about boxes.  He had degenerated into insulting me as a person and insulting...I don't know, my life?

I went over to his Facebook page.  There was an image of Adolf Hitler as his identifying photo.  I went through the posts on his page.  They were unhinged, insulting and uncomfortable.  I found out a number of things from his posts that stated that his life was not going well and it was obvious he was angry.

I wondered if he'd wandered over to my page and discovered that I, a black woman, was married to a  Jewish man, and if he was basing his new responses/attacks on what was on my page.  Not a clue.  All I was certain of was that there was nothing to be gained by this discussion.

I rattled off a quick response to his post.  "I am living the life I chose.  I have a great family and I love what I do.  How is it going in your boxes?"

I posted it and then looked at it.  I realized I had strayed far from my desire to engage and I had become a bomb thrower.  I deleted the post.

I went back and deleted all of the posts from this fellow and then I deleted my responses.  Next, I unfriended him and blocked him from ever friending me, commenting on my posts, and even seeing me online.

I felt a bit better after that...at least, right at first.  Then, the crazy liberal who lives inside my head said, "Why did you do that?  Perhaps you should not have been so hasty.  This is a human.  You could have found some way to speak to this person.  Maybe, if you kept on keeping on this could have been salvaged.  Maybe you could have come to some sort of understanding.  Maybe..."

The above is also the teacher, communicator, hoper, wisher, dreamer, and lover of discussion even if it is heated or uncomfortable, that lives in my eager heart.

The person who unfriended this guy?  That person is the one who believes in civil discourse.  I don't care if you don't agree with me, but can't we talk about things like rational, normal people?  Why must it descend into dismissing someone who doesn't agree with you as stupid?  Why don't we seem to understand that brilliant people can have different world views and that doesn't mean one is more intelligent than the other?  Are we so locked in the zero sum, black and white world that we do not know that everything is GRAY?  What is wrong with us?

Then, of course, I thought, perhaps the idea of a box that doesn't stop you is too much for some people. If they cannot blame their circumstances on the boxes, who can they blame?

In fairness, there are some boxes that are hard to overcome, but somehow, we have managed with the help of the few who throw the box away.  Where would we be without Aristotle, Rosa Parks, Imhotep, the Arabic numerical system?  These are people and things that destroyed the boxes that existed at the time of their birth or invention.  They changed our whole world.

In the end, I decided that it is hard to have a conversation with someone who is only interested in telling you that if you do not view the world they same way they do you are an idiot.  I find it sad, but luckily, in my world, I don't have to stay in a cage match with this man who thinks I am a fool for believing in possibilities.

I will continue to tell stories.  I will continue to believe that we have more potential that we think.  I will strive to share that with anyone who wants to believe it as well.  I will continue to respect the folks who do not believe that, and work hard to find a nice safe box and get into it and stay there.  They are welcome to their box.  I will, however, resist their every effort to put me into one.

Incivility can only lead to bomb throwing.  Once we begin to lob verbal assaults on the people we are trying to engage, everyone loses.

Ranting...about Teachers and Teaching

Let's get a couple of things straight before I go further.

Teaching is an art form.  Teachers, like everyone else practicing an art, range from mastering this art form to not understanding how it works and doing it anyway.

Teaching is a very important job.

I love teachers and I honor them for taking on this job.  I wouldn't do it no matter how much you paid me because I would suck at it.

I'm a teaching artist.  I can be in a classroom for about a week, and then I'm done.  I don't ever have to go back, and I typically don't want to.  Teachers go into those rooms everyday and fight all the crap that comes their way in hopes of morphing the little people into more knowledgable little people before they send them on to the next year.

I have two gifted children, and I can say unequivocally that their abilities flourish with great teachers, and they languish when teachers are not good.  Because they are gifted in multiple areas, they have enviable GPAs and they do well, but there is a distinct difference in their experiences when the teachers are masters of teaching.

In North Carolina, and perhaps other places, there is some idea that non teachers who never were taught to be teachers and therefore are not certified, make much better teachers than people who have gone through educational training.  They have lots of these folks in classrooms.

I am sure that some of them are actually good teachers because they understand the art of teaching and they have transitioned into the classroom after doing things in the private sector or army that built skills that make them good teachers.  This, however, is by no means true of all of them.  Some go into the classroom with this bizarre arrogance that they are better than 'teachers'.

My daughter has one of these...transplants this year.  He announced on the first day that he didn't want to be thought of as a 'teacher'.  He said the word with a rather condescending tone.  Somehow, he is above teaching.  My daughter, who is high school, found this alarming.  If he isn't going to teach, she wondered, what on earth is he doing in a school?  Well, within a couple of days she discovered that he was doing teachers a service by not calling himself a teacher.

This man is a horrible teacher.  His ideas about what education could be are great.  His ability to translate this information into actual instruction is abysmal.  My daughter feels like the kids in the honors class are learning the material despite his best efforts.  The rest of the kids in his other classes are not doing as well.

He over explains easy concepts, but as soon as something is theoretical or complicated, he knows how to do the equations...he knows his stuff, he's a brilliant man...but he has no idea how to tell the students why it works or even how to break it down and think about it.  He has no idea how to teach the underpinnings of the theoretical math he is teaching.  He often requires them to do things he has not explained, introduced or alluded to.  When they don't do it right he seems to gloat at their lack of knowledge.

My daughter feels like he enjoys rubbing their noses in the fact that he knows things they don't know, and they have to pry the information out of him rather than him presenting it and helping them understand how it works.

He doesn't typically answer questions when a kid is confused.  He just says, 'Think about it.'

On the rare occasion he does attempt to answer a question, he often creates more confusion than clarification.

My daughter recently asked him about an explanation for why a certain function is plotted on a particular axis in a graph about the conservation of energy.  He went to the board and began talking and writing extensive equations with symbols and language that none of the students had ever encountered before.  He went on in this fashion for five minutes.  Only after he'd gone through this exercise with his back turned towards the kids the entire time did he turn around to discover the students staring at him in confusion.  He looked back at the board and then at my daughter and said, "I don't think I answered your question."  My daughter's response was, "I don't think you did either."

One of the other kids in the class attempted to condense his long rambling, bewildering speech into something that resembled sense.  The teacher looked at him and said, "That's not right."
He then moved on to something else without ever answering the question.

My daughter has a high A in this class, but that's because she spends time outside of class teaching herself physics using the breadcrumbs this fellow stingily drops, the internet and her father's recollections of the subject.

On the other hand, I was in a school in the Chicagoland area a couple of weeks ago where the principal proudly announced that she has two Golden Apple teachers.  She had me peek into their classrooms.  The gym teacher was playing this wild game called 'Midnight Coyote.' (Don't google this unless you want to see a lot of websites of people hunting coyotes with bb guns at night, which I understand is illegal, but there you have it.)  Anyway, the entire gym is set up in some kind of maze/obstacle course, the kids move about sitting on these rolling boards and some are coyotes and some are hunters.  They move through this maze in the dark with glow sticks and dim lights.  It is a kind of tagging game.  The kids had a blast.  Apparently, the version that I saw is hailed as the best set up in the area.  People come to this school to observe him work with the kids.

The other teacher was a second grade teacher.  The principal told me that she has to spend lots of time intervening with the higher ups about this teacher.  Her room was filled to brimming with books, charts and interesting games.  The kids were sprawled all over the classroom doing one on one and individual work with their books.  The teacher told me they were reinforcing basic reading skills that deal with contextual reading.  They were using a variety of books, no cookie cutter, 'everyone has to be doing the same thing at the same time' in her classroom.  There were word games and story games going on in this room.  Kids were writing, reading and interacting.  it was cool.  Her class scores off the charts consistently on the end of grade tests, but she doesn't teach to the tests, imagine.  Of course, her principal goes to bat for her and stands up to anyone who tries to make her conform.

Teaching is extremely important.  I have no quick answers to how we make education better, but I know it starts with treating teachers with more respect, understanding how important they are and paying them what they are worth.  Let's acknowledge that we need them and that they are performing a service we need.

Can we create great teachers?  Maybe.
Can we create good teachers?  Definitely.
Can we give teachers the resources they need to teach?  That's the easy one.

If we started Kindergarten teachers on a salary of 90, 000 dollars a year, we'd get a wider variety of people trying to get those jobs.  We'd also put more value in them.

Businesses have different models.  Some succeed and some fail.  We need to learn to let teachers teach us how to educate children, not impose know nothing standards on them.

Nobody tells a basketball player that there is only one way to make a jump shot.
Nobody tells a painter there is only one way to create art.
Nobody tells storytellers there is only one right way to tell a folktale.

For heaven's sakes!  Let teachers teach!  Train teachers in the art of teaching!  Get out of the way and let them lead us!

Oh, and one more thing...teachers should out earn their administrative staff.  Not because these people aren't important, but because the support staff is support staff.  The superintendent should not out earn the teachers by three or four times.  You shouldn't be allowed to be a superintendent or a principal unless you've put in lots and lots of time in the classroom.  We break education when we break teaching.

End this madness and let us rebuild our system with teachers as our model for how to proceed!


Okay, I'm done.

Dream On Storytelling Tours

In September, I had the chance to travel to Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan.  I spent two weeks telling in International Schools.  It was a wonderful trip.

I grew up in South Korea, and this trip was like visiting familiar ground in many ways.  There are only two things I think are relevant to this space about my trip.

The first is that telling to international audiences is an amazing way to become a better teller.  If you have a chance to work with an audience who doesn't speak English well, you discover that you have to draw on every single tool in the toolbox a storyteller employs to get them to understand the story.

Most of my audiences spoke English fluently.  Their exposure wasn't to a foreign language, but to a foreign art form.  It is cool to be the first storyteller people encounter.  They are astonished, excited and blown away that one person can stand in front of them and talk and transport them all over the world.  Many staff members, English speaking and not, were amazed that they enjoyed it.  So many of them were expecting it to just be for the kids.  Choosing stories that were fun, interactive, and appropriate was very important.  Every school was eager to have Dream On bring them another storyteller next season.

The one school I visited that did not have good English had a great time as well.  They were 16 and 17 year olds who were in the advanced English classes, but they understood much more than they spoke.  We had a wonderful time.  I told Carmen Deedy's Martina the Beautiful Cockroach.  The kids loved it. It was a great time.

Discovering what you need to illustrate with your body and face when your language doesn't quite fill the gap is a skill that is invaluable in the telling of tales.  I always leave those audiences with a new appreciation of how much we communicate without using our voices.  These trips also inform the work I do with audiences fluent in English.


The second thing I want to talk about is the organization that made the trip possible.

Dream On is a program that takes storytellers to the China as well as South America.  If you want to spend some time working your tush off in a foreign country, working with audiences of varying English levels,  this is the group for you.  They pay for your flight, lodging and give you a stipend for food.  They also give you an honorarium.  This is not a gig on which to get rich, but it is an adventure, and if you are up to that, then you should contact these folks.  Whatever else you get out of this, it will be fun.

So, if you are interested, contact them.  They are always looking for storytellers who are up for an international tour, and a wonderful adventure.

Bread and Butter - Negotiating the price of a show

So, you're ready to take on the big bad world of selling your art to consumers who are desperate to hire you and bring fortune to your door!  Congratulations!  Now, on to the first order of business...how do you begin?

Figuring out how much to charge, how to haggle for the best possible price, and get what you are worth is a struggle for independent artists.  We are not usually the money types.  Often, we are not the most organized of people, and let's face it, pimping yourself out is uncomfortable even if the exchange is storytelling for money instead of sex.

I cannot claim to be the expert on this, but what I can do is share some of the things Dave and I have done over the years.  At this point, it is only Dave, I don't engage in the haggling part anymore, but he uses a similar strategy to the one I employed back in the day when I was doing the selling part as well as making the art.

1)  Come up with a fee schedule that makes you happy.  i.e.  One forty-five minute show will cost 300.00.  Two 45 minute shows at the same school back to back will cost 475.00.  Three shows at the same school in the same day will cost 750.00.  If the shows have a break between them of an hour or more, there is an extra 50.00 charge.  If two schools go in together, there will be a 50.00 discount for both schools. (You get the idea, make a fee schedule)

2)  Come up with a bottom line.  This is not something you plan to share with clients, but you have to know what the bottom is, or you'll end up taking shows you don't want that pay what you feel is not right, in situations that make you furious.  What is the least amount you will accept....determine what it is and DO NOT GO BELOW IT!

3)  When speaking to a potential customer, some want to know your fee schedule.  Give it to them if they want something standard.  If they ask for something that is not standard, i.e. 'Could you design a show around this Argentinian Mask that is on our website?' then do not offer to do this for the standard fee.  Anytime they start asking for something special, decide what kind of work that is and what you would be happy charging.  START with the standard fee and then go up from there.

4)  If the customer talks a blue streak about what they want - before you start sending contracts or agreeing to a date, talk turkey about the price.

5)  Make sure you have different pricing systems for different venues.  What you charge the local church might be different than what you charge a small library which might be different from what you might charge the University of Southern California.

6)  If an organization wants to hire you and they are asking for more than you would normally do, before you agree to any of it, ask them what sort of budget they have.  They may tell you, or they might counter by asking what you charge.  Be flexible if you want to do the work, but also want to make sure you are compensated.

7)  Be flexible.  Never give your potential client your bottom line.  Build in a healthy cushion so that if they cannot match your best price, they might be able to find some common ground with you somewhere.  Just as you do not wish to go below your bottom price, they are hoping not to have to pay their top price.  Negotiations are important.  Swallow your embarrassment and pride and just go for it.

8)  The question I always get is what is the best price to charge.  The answer, as always, is up to you.  Charge what you think is best.  There is most likely a top or bottom for you in this business.  If you start getting people complaining about how high your prices are, find out what they are wanting to pay.  IF they attempt to tell you that one hundred dollars is more than plenty, then they are clearly not looking for a professional storyteller.  There are far too many people in our business who do not charge a reasonable fee schedule.  They make it hard for some folks to work because the buyers believe they should be paying less because that is what they are used to.  People get what they pay for.  Stick to your guns and press for both the recognition and compensation.

9)  Now that you have a strong bottom line, come up with a pie in the sky top line...got it?  If you have anything under five zeroes, you are not dreaming big enough.  Okay, now, come up with a reasonable top line.  It should be within at least two hundred dollars of your bottom line, but three to five doesn't hurt.  Always start at the reasonable top of your fee schedule when you can, and go down only if you have to.  Take no prisoners and give ground only when absolutely necessary.

Storytellers, like every other artist, have financial responsibilities.  We need to pay mortgages, car notes, dental bills, you name it.  We have to be compensated for what we do.  Negotiating the fee is not the most fun thing in the world, but it is a necessary one.  Sit down, figure out what you want to charge.  Figure out what you feel is your strongest bottom line and start negotiations with your top price.  Instead of the fear of approaching the money, consider the fact that you are worth every penny and more.  In fact, consider that you are worth your pie in the sky number, after that, if they are paying less than that, they are getting an uber bargain.

Money is a touchy subject in our society unless you've got gobs of it.  Few of us have gobs of it.  Let's do what we can to make sure that we have enough to continue doing what we love.

Good Luck
Happy Telling.

The Men of Kent Street - Working Title for my latest writing project

The current spate of voting rights legislation sent my mother into a meltdown.  Every time she speaks to me about it, she gets agitated and starts telling me things she's never brought up before.  I have no idea if she had forgotten the things she was telling me until the latest news about voter suppression started happening, or if she just chose not to tell me things she found disturbing.  Either way, lots of stories have started percolating out of her.

I've always known some of the stories that shaped her life.  She told me about the time she and her grandmother were on a bus and the 'white's only' section got full, and the bus driver moved the black section to the back of the bus and she and my great grandmother were forced to get up and move.  She was little, but she's always felt embarrassed by that event.  So much so that she has never, in her 67 years on this planet, ever gotten onto another city bus.

I've also known stories about the discrimination she had to deal with living in segregated Texas in the 50's and 60's.  What i didn't know about was the voter suppression tactics practiced throughout the community.

When North Carolina, the state where I reside, began scaling back access to blocks of voters that would most likely vote for Democrats, my mother was furious.  She called me to demand an answer to how any of this was in the least bit Constitutional.   She talked about watching her grandparents scrape together the money for poll taxes. She told me about something they called 'white riots' where white men would ride through the black neighborhoods breaking windows, burning crosses, going into people's house and stealing their food, putting holes in their walls, killing their chickens and doing other bouts of damage to intimidate blacks so they wouldn't register to vote.  People were beaten and all manner of violence was an ever present threat during these times.  These 'white riots' had another purpose.  Blacks had to choose between paying the poll tax, or use the money to fix your home and replace food and clothing that had been stolen or destroyed.  It also kept the black population in a perpetual state of privation,  their properties in a state of dilapidation, and promoted a sense of despair.

The more I heard about the events of her childhood surrounding voting, and the more I spoke to my uncle, the more amazing I found the parallels between some of the things going on today and some of the things that happened in the 50's to discourage black voting.

I decided I needed to try to tell this story.

I've spent the last three months neck deep in the characters, personality, and perceptions of the world of Beaumont, Texas in 1954.  When I'm not writing on the project, I'm thinking about it or contemplating how best to capture the feel of the place.  I've google mapped the entire area of the book and spent an hour virtually walking through the four blocks in which this story takes place.  I've gone by the site where my great grandparents used to live and stood in front of the lot that is now empty, remembering my own visits there when I was a child and the house was still standing.

Last night I finally finished my first draft.  Now, the editing.  I will be asking a few of my friends to give me a first reading over the next couple of weeks.  My hope is to get the book to some agents by October of this year.

My writing energy has been poured into this project more than anything else this summer, and I expect it will continue to be so for the next few weeks.

Getting lost in a writing project is a lovely thing to do.  I'm glad to be here, but I will be happy when I can leave this world which has as many loving moments in it as horrifyingly dark ones, and go get lost in some other place.  Preferably one that has lots of actual dragons instead of the much more terrifying human ones.

Be Well and Happy Writing

the stories we tell

Recently I was at the Kennedy Center participating in an arts integration workshop.  I had a wonderful time there, but the most interesting events happened over lunch.  We sat at huge circular tables and got into the art, culture and importance of what we were all doing.  This led to several heated discussions about race, religion and education.  I don't mind heated discussions, in fact, I enjoy them as long as everyone is being respectful.

At one point, I was talking to a wonderful photographer about primary documents.  I was explaining that since he uses the Preamble of the United States Constitution as the jumping off point for one of his arts activities he could check off the 'primary sources' box when looking at common core national standards for high school students.  I said, "I mean, honestly, you don't get much more primary document than the Constitution."
He said, "What about the Bible?"
I said, "Don't ever tell a storyteller that the Bible is a primary document."  (Well, actually, you can tell a storyteller that, but if you do, that's a good way to spend the next hour hearing versions of stories that predate the Bible.)
At which point he said, "Yes, but none of those other sources are true."
I said, "That depends entirely on who you ask.  How we move through the world, the way we treat people and what we do is dependent entirely on the stories we believe."
"So," he says, "you're saying the Bible isn't true?"
I responded, "I don't think what people believe has any bearing on what is true.  I didn't say we base our lives on true stories, just on the ones we choose to believe.  We fight and die for the stories we believe whether or not they are true."

This conversation sparked a whole set of side discussions about perceptions of race.  We talked about the house slaves vs the field slaves and the 'paper bag test' in the African American community.  We learned about the troubles Muslims face not only in America but in their own countries from an immigrant, talked about how the Daughters of the Confederacy spent a generation redefining the Civil War so that it was no longer about slavery, but about the amorphous claim of 'state's rights'!  We discussed the stories in Nazi German that led to Kristallnacht, and the stories that led to the ridiculous cries of 'Obamaphone' and 'Death Panels' and 'welfare recipients using their money to go on lavish vacations' and the rest of the claptrap that bogs us down as a society and prevents us from going forward.  We talked about the 'resettlement' of Native Americans and the damage done to our young people over generations by close minded, terrified, bigoted, powerful people.  We discussed how art can transform these conversations into something positive.  We discussed how giving people new hope and new stories to challenge the decrepit ones of the past was something we needed to do.

Then, a couple of days ago I turned on my computer to the horrifying news that there was a gunman shooting up an elementary school in Georgia.  My heart constricted.  I found myself hoping against hope that this was not going to be another round of horror where parents were burying tens of children, and families were going to be growing up without mothers and fathers.  Well, it turned out, that prayers, hopes and dreams all over the country were answered.  What saved them?  Stories.

Antoinette Tuff was in the office when that young man came in ready to kill and then be killed.  She talked him down with stories.  She told him the stories of her own life and anything she could think to tell him.  She let the stories of their lives bind them together, and he got to see the world a little differently because she was sitting there.  Because of their shared story, he didn't use the 500 rounds of ammunition he'd brought with him.  Because of their shared story, nobody had to die that morning in school.  Because of their shared story, no police officer was put in danger.  Because of their shared story, she survived.

 I am not a naive person who believes that if we just tell stories, everything will be better, but what has always astonished me are the people who believe that their understanding of the world is the only possible 'true' one; their needs are the only ones that count or matter, and their perception is universal.  Being able to reach another person, speak to them, understand them, and hear them is a powerful tool.  It is more powerful that weapons, because all weapons can do is destroy or cause fear, while stories can build and show us the way to belong.  They are more powerful than violence because all violence can do is break, while stories can build.  They are more powerful than hatred, because stories can build bridges across misunderstanding.  of course, the opposite is true as well.  You can use stories to cause hatred, build walls and keep people apart.  If you do that, then the thing you must always fear is that your stories will encounter other stories.  When the other stories make themselves known, they will begin to erode the basis for the fear, and many times the thing you built will come crashing down around you.  This is why repressive regimes so fear the internet.  Information and differing perspectives are dangerous to anyone who has been manipulating a story for their own benefit.

I have always believed that human beings are the sum total of the stories that they believe, but perhaps I have been too limiting.  We are also the product of the stories we share.

Be Well and Happy Telling

I'm Still Recovering From The Summer

Hello Everybody!  Back from my hiatus...sort of!  I have a few posts planned for the space in the next few weeks.

First - I spent an exhausting week at the Kennedy Center learning about Arts Integration.  I will get into the bones of it.

Second - I showcased at the United Arts event in Raleigh.  I'll give the blow by blow of that experience.

Third - I'm writing a book about an event that occurred in segregated Beaumont, Tx in the 1950's.  I'll get into what that's been like...and in truth, that's the reason i haven't been blogging.  I need to get this book done in the next couple of weeks so I can get it out to publishers fairly soon.

Fourth - I'm going to Hong Kong...getting ready for that

Fifth - We are into the crazy season of booking and making choices about things that are not going to happen for months

I joined Pinterest...I'm not one hundred percent sure what this is for, but there you have it.

I've had some wild adventures, and some wild thoughts...well, that's not terribly surprising.

I've been bogged down by the politics of my state and I am trying to keep it out of these pages, since it doesn't belong here.

Did some Vegan cooking.

Let's see, I'm sure there's more, but I will catch up on my thoughts and whatever over the course of the next couple weeks as my kids get back into high school and begin the routines of homework and bargaining to stay up later than they should.

So, all of those things are happening right now at the same time.  That's just the life.

I hope the rest of your summers went well and everyone is charged for the mad rush that seems to be fall.

I'll be back here soon dishing my limited wisdom and my dubious observations.

Be Well.
Happy Telling