When I was a boy growing up in Central Pennsylvania, every summer my mother would pack up the station wagon and drive all five of us kids 100 miles south, far out into the country, where my grandparents had a cottage on the shores of Silver Lake. The summer months were an unending stream of swimming and canoeing and bare-foot lightning bug-catching, way past dark. There were also endless days and nights of storytelling. When you live on a lake, you get lots of relatives visiting, and a boy could learn a lot about the family by hanging around and listening—especially when the adults thought you weren’t.
Because the cottage was small, we kids slept in sleeping bags on army cots set up on the screened-in porch by the lake. Night after night I feel asleep to the sound of my relatives’ voices, rising and falling on the summer air, their laughter drifting like mist across the lake.
In my mind, family vacations and the telling of family stories are intertwined so closely that you can’t have one without the other. If you feel the same way, or if this sounds good to you and you would like to start a family storytelling tradition, here are some ideas to prime the pump and get the ball rolling.
Start at the Beginning
One of the best ways to get started in family tales is by telling birth stories. We kids never tired of hearing my mother tell each of us about the day we were born. My own kids loved hearing over and over about the harried trips to the hospital and the rush of relief when the new arrival came slipping and sliding out into the world. I feel that one of our jobs as parents is to keep our children’s stories for them until they are old enough to carry them on their own. And one of the most important stories you can know is the story of your own birth.
An added bonus: if you would like to publish your birth stories on the web or read those of others, visit www.birthstories.com. You can enter your stories there and read the birth stories of others, recorded by category (longest labor, shortest labor, funniest, etc.) Before you know it, everyone will start chiming in with interesting versions of the big event, demonstrating once again that there is always another side of the story!
The Time of Your Life
Time is a tricky thing. Geniuses from Plato to Einstein to Miss Piggy have tried to figure it out and all come away scratching their heads. A wise person once said: “Time is just nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen at once.” One way to get a handle on time is to look at the events of your life using a LifeRope. This is nothing more than a length of rope with colored pieces of ribbon or yarn marking the important events of your life.
The idea itself is pretty simple: Beginning with your Birth Story, make a timeline on paper of the important events of your life. Lay these out on a length of rope with colored ribbons marking each event. As each person makes a LifeRope, stories will naturally come up. When you have them completed you can spread them out on the floor so that your child’s birth date falls on the spot on your rope where you marked the event of their birth. What you will end up with is a fascinating (and very tactile) representation of your family’s life through time. For complete instructions, see my book Creating a Family Storytelling Tradition.
You can follow up the LifeRope project with a board game called Life Stories (available at www.talicor.com). This game uses decks of cards with story prompts such as, “Describe one of your best or worst teachers,” or “Tell about one of your first experiences of living away from home.” This is a great way to pass a summer night around the campfire —and hear some great family stories to boot!
Culture, Culture
Once you have explored your birth, life and family stories, you are ready to delve more deeply into your own ethnic and religious traditions. Paradoxically, the more grounded we are in the stories of our own culture, the greater our ability to live in a multicultural world and honor the stories of traditions other than our own. For a great essay on this process, try Claiming my Heritage by Doug Lipman at www.storydynamics.com.
Make a trip to the local library or book store and search out some read-aloud stories from the traditions you wish to explore. Reading aloud and storytelling are close cousins. Both activities can bring us closer to one another and to our ancestors.
Do you hear what I hear?
Perhaps the greatest benefit of family stories lies in the simple and powerful act of listening. When we feel deeply listened to, it is possible to heal old wounds, build bridges, and re-affirm our connections to our family. True listening begins with the willingness to see the world through the eyes of another. I believe that most family problems can be compassionately addressed, if not eliminated entirely, by effective listening. Perhaps that is the greatest gift we can give each other in these summer weeks of vacation and family reunions.
Enjoy your stories, my friends…
About Robin Moore:
A professional performer, author, and workshop leader, Robin Moore was voted “Storyteller of the Year” by Storytelling Magazine and has shared his stories with more than one million people. Author of several award winning books, Robin is best known for The Bread Sister of Sinking Creek, the first in a series of historical fiction novels about women on the PA frontier. Robin serves as Program Coordinator for The Graduate Institute’s M.A. in Oral Traditions. A new session begins October 2011, visit www.learn.edu or call (203) 874-4252 for more information.