Story crafting methods: exploring magic and mundane moments and capturing elusive elements

Hayes, Tracy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6330-6520 (2021) Story crafting methods: exploring magic and mundane moments and capturing elusive elements. In: Playing with words…. connecting through story, 10 February 2021, Online. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This is the second of a themed series of events: Playing with words…. connecting through story. The three events have a focus on story – I’m not talking about the traditional action-packed, heroic tales - ‘We’ve all heard all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story.’ (Le Guin,1989)
My focus here is in the smaller stories from our everyday lives – however as Ursula Le Guin (2016, p.81) acknowledges, it is hard to tell a really gripping tale of the minutiae of living, of caring for self and others, the ‘…whole amazing, complicated business of staying alive and being a member of a society’. And yet this is vital to enable us to better understand ourselves, our communities, and the worlds in which we live. In this series of events, we will consider what makes a story tellable, who the teller is (or may be) and how storytelling can be utilised to bring about change.
In this workshop we will be considering how to craft a story. We may choose to tell a tale, but it takes skill to ‘… craft something with power, something with emotion, something that lives and breathes within the hearts and minds of audiences for years to come’ (Hull, 2011). We may view our lives as continuous fieldwork that provides a repository of experiences we can explore to ‘…understand the subtleties and complexities of human reality’ (Tuan, 2001, p41). We will reflect on some of our experiences, drawing on ‘magic’ (Hayes, 2017), mundane and everyday moments and adopting a ‘carrier-bag’ method (Taylor, Blaise and Giugni, 2013; Haraway, 2004; Le Guin, 1989) to capture them within a creative non-fiction storied form.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Workshop)
Departments:	Institute of Health > Social Work, Children and Families
Depositing User:	Tracy Hayes
Date Deposited:	03 Sep 2021 12:51
Last Modified:	13 Jan 2024 11:46
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/6209

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