At one of my previous positions, I had started a conversation with a local storytelling group about partnering on a curated storytelling series. This conversation happened a month before the outbreak of the pandemic. The series went on more or less as planned, albeit in a much larger space that allowed for social distancing. I credit that series with helping to breakdown perceptual barriers about our venue and who it as for and contributing to the further development of a relationship between under served segments of our community.

A couple weeks ago, Arts Midwest posted a piece about facilitating story circles by Ben Fink. I have written about Fink and the work he did at Appalshop in Whitesburg, KY a few years back. The Arts Midwest piece contains a guide for hosting a story circle, including a link to download the materials. In my former position, we hadn’t used the story circle format, but according to Fink the community can experience similar outcomes.

There are a number of rules for participation he outlines, but one of those appears to be key to the experience is:

And finally (this is important) everyone is asked not to share the story they think of when they hear the initial prompt (more on prompts below), but to listen carefully to the stories that come before theirs, and then to share a story that complements, complicates, contradicts, or otherwise responds to the stories they’ve heard so far.

Near the end Fink provides the following insight from his decade experience participating in story circles:

In a story circle, people who tend to dominate discussions learn to listen, knowing they’ll have their turn to speak and be heard; and people who tend to hold back find themselves speaking up, knowing that no one will interrupt or talk over them. At the end, when the group reflects together about the stories they’ve just heard, they inevitably discover elements of a “story in the center of the circle”–a story that they find, to their surprise, they all somehow share.

The rules and guidelines – and the facilitation guide makes a distinction between the two – are designed to achieve this sort of result where the garrulous listen and the introverted are allowed the space to speak.