Vancouver educator Derek Gladwin explores how storytelling is a way to overcome fear in new book
Read an excerpt from the local author’s Rewriting Our Stories: Education, Empowerment and Well-Being
STORIES ARE POWERFUL, and perhaps none are as impactful as the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves.
Derek Gladwin. Photo by Karolina Tokarski
According to Derek Gladwin, storytelling has the ability to change our self-perception and the way we see the world around us. It is a way to overcome fear.
Gladwin, an assistant professor of language and literature education in the faculty of education at UBC, uses storytelling as a way to explore critical and creative transformations in culture and society. A narrative and writing coach, he suggests that, as storytelling beings, we can all become more purposeful and empathetic by changing the kinds of stories we tell.
Whether it’s vaccine hesitancy or xenophobia, Gladwin sees “fear stories” as being the root cause of so much strife, and in his book shares ways to get past that fear.
Following is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Gladwin’s Rewriting Our Stories: Education, Empowerment and Well-Being (Cork University Press - Atrium).
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In 2015, the great American novelist Toni Morrison wrote an article titled ‘No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear’ for The Nation’s 150th anniversary issue. In it, she reflects upon a conversation she had with a fellow artist about an increase in violent conflicts around the world, including those perpetuated by her own country.
Morrison expressed how she was struggling to find a reason for joy, or even to write, because of her depression about the global pain and suffering caused by war, poverty, and tragedy. Instead of commiserating with Morrison, the artist friend simply said, ‘No, no, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. That’s our job!’
Morrison heeded her friend’s advice and concluded her article by writing, ‘There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.’ Her closing words serve, in a way, as a guide for this book.
In times of amplified fear and transition, we need art, creativity, and storytelling to help get us through the darker days – to get up and face the world each day, and to resist fear-based responses in our societies and cultures. We also need them to change our paradigms. The processes of creating and experiencing narratives draw us closer to a state of well-being – supporting positive conditions related to health, joy, and stability.
Put simply: we do storytelling. As humans, no matter where our place of origin or when in history, story is at the heart of our societies. We can choose to do storytelling as an antidote to fear. Creating and communicating our personal stories – to ourselves and others – enhances our innate voice and can empower us to engage with one another through empathy and compassion, offering affirmative narratives that bring meaning to our lives.
As Morrison teaches us, our narrative power through the stories we decide to create and tell means we ‘must never choose to remain silent, especially in times of dread’. Because we must continually live our stories, we must do storytelling. We must storytell as an antidote to fear.
Inhabiting our stories
This book begins with the premise that our lives are defined by the stories we live, experience, and tell. We inhabit our stories. Story binds our histories, cultures, and lives together. Story is magical, uncanny, and universally recognised across societies and cultures throughout history. Our stories are the fabric from which we are made and endure: they are home and we live in them.
In The Truth About Stories: A native narrative, the Cherokee author and professor Thomas King discusses the universality of story in our social histories and in relationship to ourselves. He affirms that the ‘truth about stories is that’s all we are’. Stories simultaneously define, heal, and create our lives. As King acknowledges, building on long-lasting Indigenous traditions, stories both educate and shape us into who we are in our worlds: ‘Stories are wondrous things.’
Drawing on our diverse cultural influences and perspectives, we create stories in our communities. This occurs with each other through multiple versions of ourselves at various nodal points in our lives. Our stories, and the fears and possibilities for hope lodged within them, simultaneously connect us to and separate us from other collective narratives and belief systems.
Individually, as well as part of the larger collective, we use narratives, images, and metaphors as ways to frame values and desires that ultimately cultivate greater social awareness and create meaning. Storytelling remains a primary way for people to perceive and respond to the world, supporting our own self-care through a process of education and value clarification that helps us reflect on our lives. Much like storytelling, self-care and well-being must also be considered in the context of relationship, to ourselves and to each other simultaneously, rather than only to the Western notion of the ‘self’ as an isolated and disconnected individual.
Everyone is a storyteller. Recognising our own ability to rewrite our personal narratives allows for creative spaces of personal and social transformation. The real secret to happiness, abundance, success, or whatever states of being people seek in life, lies in the ability to understand and access the abundance of storytelling and the storying process. We use narrative and storytelling to not only understand ourselves, but, perhaps most importantly, appreciate and build relationships with others.
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It is no secret that the world is currently experiencing high levels of fear, the roots of which go back to conflicts and dynamic cultural shifts during the twentieth century. In Fear: A cultural history, the historian Dr Joanna Bourke pinpoints that public policy and our private lives have ‘become fear- bound’ and that public life is largely administered through the emotion of fear.
Fear has become the primary message produced and re-produced in our society and, as an extension, in our own personal lives – spreading like wildfire throughout our families, communities, and cultures. Fear is part of a larger global pandemic. Perhaps we could go so far as to say that fear is the pandemic that causes so many problems of racism, greed, sexism, and violence.
While legitimate fears around our personal and collective safety continue to exist, such as situations of abuse of power, social injustice, illness, or the COVID-19 pandemic (and others similar to it in the future concretely augmenting contamination fear), imagined fears produced through social narratives also proliferate. Many of our stories contain a central theme of fear, which is an enormously powerful force affecting the ways we make decisions and create meaning in our lives. Fear dictates, for instance, how we choose a career, who we vote for, or how we build community.
Fear manifests itself in our personal and collective narratives. Narrative-driven stories are based on real or imagined events that we experience or that naturally weave themselves into the fabric of our lives. The narratives we believe are powerful because they combine our emotions, sensations, experiences, and imaginations synthesised into a dominant story.
An infinitesimal number of stories swirl around us constantly. The problem is that there is always a struggle over who constructs and then controls the dominant narrative, whether it is by mainstream media, politicians, advertisers, families, religion, cultural groups, or even our own minds. Stories are tools that can be harnessed for positive change or used as powerful weapons against ourselves or others. Either we control and narrate our own stories – recreating, retelling, and reframing them – or they will be narrated for us.
Excerpted from Rewriting Our Stories: Education, Empowerment and Well-Being by Derek Gladwin, with permission from Cork University Press - Atrium.
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