Latest / The Starfish Storytellers / Episode 14 - The Power of Stories to Heal: Why the Act of Storytelling Makes a Difference with Dale Grenfell

Transcript

Episode 14 - The Power of Stories to Heal: Why the Act of Storytelling Makes a Difference with Dale Grenfell · The Starfish Storytellers

0:00
Welcome to the Starfish Storytellers, the podcast that makes a difference one story
0:04
at a time by bringing storytelling to life.
0:12
When my daughter, my eldest daughter, was in a senior in high school.
0:17
She came home one afternoon in two years shaking, frightened.
0:22
It appeared that an outsider group at school had hung an effigy on her locker.
0:30
They were leaving cryptic notes that had threats in them.
0:36
And she no sooner got inside the house than the phone rang and there was a threat over
0:41
the phone.
0:44
My husband immediately said, I'm calling the police.
0:47
And I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
0:49
I asked Julie about this group, what she knew about them.
0:54
I said, you know, before we do anything like that, I want to talk to the principal of the
0:59
school.
1:01
And I called him and he said to, we'll call in the police.
1:05
And I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
1:09
I would like to talk to the mother or father of the leader of this group.
1:16
Can you arrange that for me?
1:18
And he was very reluctant, but finally agreed.
1:22
And a couple of hours later, I got a phone call from a very distraught mother who said,
1:29
I'm surprised, but I'm not shocked.
1:34
Her story began to pour out about herself, her situation, her son.
1:42
And the bottom line was two nights later, we gathered in the living room.
1:48
There was the leader of this group, two of his classmates who were part of the group,
1:55
the single parent, his mother, my daughter, my husband, myself, my daughter's friend,
2:02
and her mother who were also impacted by this whole incident.
2:08
And an English teacher.
2:10
I got a call from this English teacher that morning and she said, you know, we know this
2:17
group, we know that we should be doing something, but we are so overwhelmed.
2:24
We just think they'll eventually graduate and go away.
2:26
And she said, the thing is, there'll be another group.
2:31
She said, I feel I have all of these kids in my classes.
2:36
And I feel like I bear some accountability.
2:39
I would like to be involved if that's okay.
2:42
So she was there.
2:45
After having done this before, we circled up, we were in a circle.
2:52
And starting with Julie began telling our stories.
2:56
With all of the emotion, the rage, the disappointment, the anger, the fear, all of the emotions that
3:05
went with it.
3:06
Each person, we just kept going around and around.
3:10
We met for about three to four hours, and at one point, one of the girls in this group
3:17
started crying.
3:19
And she looked at my daughter and said, you don't have to be afraid of me.
3:25
I'm not going to hurt you.
3:29
I can meet you at the curb at school tomorrow and I will walk with you to class.
3:36
My daughter said, well, then you'll get a tardy because you'll be late.
3:40
And she said, yeah, I know.
3:45
This is the short version of what took place that night.
3:50
Four or five months later, the high school did their annual musical.
3:54
It happened to be Bye Bye Birdie.
3:57
My daughter was in the chorus, so naturally we went to see the play.
4:01
And there on stage in a major role was the leader of this group.
4:10
He found a niche.
4:12
He belonged.
4:13
I sat in the audience and I just tears were just coming down.
4:17
They weren't friends.
4:18
They didn't have to be.
4:22
But the outcome of the two of them on the same stage enjoying something that they loved,
4:29
meaning their niche, their sense of belonging.
4:33
And how do what do I attribute that to the stories that we shared in that circle?
4:40
We didn't know what we were doing.
4:43
But much later, I came to understand the model of peacemaking circles of story circles and
4:51
of a model called restorative justice.
4:54
And they're all based, they're all about storytelling.
5:00
Storytelling is impactful on so many levels and healing on so many levels.
5:06
And this is just one incident that I would again, I tear up.
5:10
This is years and years later.
5:13
That would have been so different had those stories not been told.
5:43
Hello, my name is Leanna Henry and welcome to the Starfish storytellers.
5:55
I'm the CEO of the Black Dog Group, a Markham and project management firm headquartered on
6:00
the east coast of the US in quaint colonial Bedford, Massachusetts.
6:04
I'm your host and passionate about storytelling.
6:07
I'm actually on a mission to raise up the next generation of storytellers.
6:11
We've named ourselves the starfish storytellers after the starfish story.
6:15
The moral of the starfish story is based on the power of one.
6:19
No matter how big the challenge, each action we take makes a difference and has an impact.
6:24
One step, one starfish or one story at a time.
6:28
Every episode, we welcome a new storyteller who will share their story meant to inspire
6:33
and connect with you.
6:34
Then we'll break it down and offer tips for any listeners who are ready to tell their
6:38
own stories.
6:39
So thanks for tuning in.
6:42
Now let's get started.
6:43
Today's episode is about the power of stories to heal, why the act of storytelling makes
6:49
a difference.
6:50
And with me today is Dale Grenfell.
6:53
She's a storytelling instructor, presenter, facilitator and professional storyteller.
6:58
She has used storytelling in the classroom, on the stage, working with restorative justice
7:03
in peace circles and often just for the pure pleasure of it.
7:07
And currently she's teaching a six week storytelling course, one of many that she's done.
7:12
So we really appreciate you being our guest today, Dale.
7:15
Thank you so much for being here.
7:17
My pleasure.
7:19
So we usually like to get started by having our guests introduce themselves.
7:23
Would you mind telling our listeners a little bit about you?
7:28
My name is Dale Grenfell.
7:31
When people ask, when did you start telling stories?
7:34
I say, well, probably when I could put a few words to a sentence.
7:39
As I don't remember this, but as a small child, I'm told that I would tell stories to people
7:46
in the neighborhood, anybody who would listen.
7:49
And some of them were big.
7:51
At one point, one of my neighbors went to my mother and said, Dale said she has nine
7:59
grandmothers and she said, yeah, that would be Dale.
8:04
I figured if one was good, nine was better and they each had their own stories, their
8:08
own histories, their own names.
8:13
I, yeah, from, from as far back as I can remember, storytelling has just been just what I do.
8:22
If I may, I'd like to share what I learned about storytelling very early on from my
8:28
grandmother.
8:29
That would be lovely.
8:30
When I was about six years old, I remember I asked my mother, I said, is it true that
8:37
my grandmother had been raised in an orphanage?
8:42
And she said, well, yeah, yeah.
8:45
I said, well, tell me about it.
8:47
And she said, I've never asked her.
8:48
I don't know much about it.
8:52
So I asked, could I ask her?
8:54
And she said, I guess so.
8:56
And I love the metaphor.
8:59
My grandmother and I had a habit of sewing together.
9:02
She had an old singer and she would take pieces like pieces of a story and weave them together
9:07
and they would be doll clothes, curtains, a dress.
9:11
And I would sit on the floor with swatches of fabric and buttons and I would sew buttons
9:17
on these pieces of fabric.
9:22
One day I had the courage, I finally said, is it true that you and I, Edith were in an
9:30
orphanage?
9:32
And I watched her, everything stopped, the machine stopped.
9:37
She sort of gazed out as though she was in a whole other space.
9:42
And then she looked at me on to her lap and she held me really close.
9:48
And she said, yes.
9:50
Yes, it's true.
9:52
I don't think anybody had ever asked her.
9:56
I honestly don't, I don't think she had ever shared her story.
10:03
During that first encounter, I learned that her mother had abandoned the two girls.
10:11
She went off to become a singer and the two girls grew up believing that she had died.
10:19
I knew there was more to it than that, so periodically I would ask, tell me more, tell
10:24
me more, tell me more.
10:26
And over the years, I didn't realize, Leanna, at the time, but I was watching this woman
10:33
go from victim to storyteller.
10:37
She would, every time she told a story, it was in fleshed a little bit more and yes,
10:41
there were some shootouts and some hangings and God knows what.
10:45
But I watched as she was empowered, which is basically what therapy does, right?
10:54
I watched as she became an empowered human being, no longer the victim in her story.
11:01
And that taught me a lot.
11:03
I didn't realize it at the time, but as I got older, I thought, wow, this stuff is powerful,
11:09
really powerful.
11:11
Yeah, stories absolutely change the world.
11:17
Even if it's the greater world or our world, they change the world.
11:24
Yes, I have heard stories can save us and stories can destroy us.
11:29
They can.
11:31
That is true.
11:33
There's this meme I saw recently on social media, it had a big circle and it was inside
11:38
the circle, it said someone's life.
11:42
And then in the bottom corner, it had a dot with an arrow and underneath that it said,
11:46
what you know about it?
11:49
We really don't know people's experiences until we hear their stories.
11:56
So we're going to get a chance, after I ask you a few other questions, to talk a little
12:03
bit about the stories that you hear.
12:06
I know as an instructor, you have people come to your class and they share their stories.
12:11
And so you get to hear all of these amazing stories.
12:15
And I'm always amazed at people's experiences.
12:21
And when you give them that framework to be able to kind of structure that, all of that
12:29
memory, those memories, the history, they're able to then kind of put it back out there
12:35
in an ordered fashion where it makes sense.
12:39
And for those of us listening to the story, hearing it then helps it make sense to us.
12:45
We get to, as you know from storytelling, because I know you do it in your class, maybe
12:51
we'll talk about your class now, is, this is the earliest way that information has always
13:00
been transferred was through storytelling.
13:02
From, you know, when I saw your sort of curriculum, I was like, oh, I'm doing the right thing
13:08
because I do the same stuff too.
13:10
So, but we give a lot, you know, in the class, we give a history of what storytelling is,
13:15
because I was reading Annette Simmons book, The Story Factor, and she opens it with storytelling
13:24
is like explaining storytelling to someone is about is the same as exploring like, you
13:29
know, a stray kitten.
13:31
Like you all know what a stray kitten is, but to really explain it, you know, you have
13:36
to really dig in.
13:37
It's the same thing with storytelling.
13:38
Everybody knows what storytelling is, but if somebody wants to ask what it is, there's
13:42
so many facets to it.
13:46
So maybe we'll just dip into that now.
13:49
We can talk about some of the other stuff after is what have been some really moving
13:56
memorable stories that you've heard like are any particular students recently or a long
14:02
time ago that really stand out for you?
14:06
Well, there's two.
14:11
Not this time, the last time I taught storytelling, it just happened that the entire class was
14:17
female.
14:18
No men signed up.
14:20
So I thought, okay, I'm going to take this in a little different direction.
14:25
It's all women and women's stories.
14:29
Many of them have just been erased from history.
14:32
Did you ever have you heard of the book, the red tent?
14:35
I think I have.
14:36
Yeah.
14:37
Okay.
14:38
It's a mid rush.
14:41
It's a little poetic license on what might have happened to women in the Old Testament,
14:50
whose names we know, but we don't know their stories.
14:52
And so Anita Diamond wrote a book that just said this might have been what happened and
14:58
takes place in a red tent, which was where women went on their monthly cycles and to
15:04
give birth.
15:06
So I squared away some space in one of the sessions and I said, we don't have a red tent.
15:13
Okay.
15:14
But I have a red shawl.
15:18
So two of us would, one would take one part in the other part and we would cloak a woman
15:25
in the circle with it.
15:27
That was her red tent and she could tell a story, whatever.
15:32
And it was, you know, it was all, you're safe.
15:35
It's okay to tell your story.
15:39
I can't probably wouldn't want to go into detail, but the stories that came out, stories
15:44
of abuse, stories of abandonment, stories of courage, stories that most of them had never
15:57
told before.
16:00
And being in that red tent, even though it was just a shawl, but it was red, seemed to
16:09
open a portal to a world, to a space that they had never experienced before.
16:22
It was really moving, really, really moving.
16:26
I think we need more spaces like that to offer more spaces like that to women.
16:33
The other one actually in this circle, a young woman in the circle announced that she was
16:41
in a forced marriage.
16:44
And she was from Pakistan.
16:51
I just, here we are in the, you know, 20, what is it, then it was 2021.
16:56
I thought, what, what, what, what, this is not possible.
17:00
I mean, this is, yes, it is.
17:02
Some of them have been very poignant stories.
17:07
Again, I, the one with the women in the red tent was just really powerful, really, really
17:16
powerful.
17:17
And to know that most of them had never told these stories before.
17:20
They had never shared with anybody.
17:23
And I'm sure that, you know, based on the people that were there, there was a sense
17:28
of security and safety and, you know, like you said, you had sort of done the cloak
17:34
with the red tent and that was to signify the safe space to be able to share.
17:39
So that's, that's amazing.
17:42
Well, let's talk a little bit about you.
17:46
So you've talked about restorative justice and, you know, being very active in the
17:53
ways to really put that into place.
17:59
I'm sure that type of story, storytelling makes a big difference.
18:04
Can you talk a little bit about, a little bit more about that?
18:08
Yeah, restorative justice is something that's been around for thousands and thousands and
18:14
thousands of years.
18:16
And even now, first of all, I think that's a very important thing.
18:20
Even now, first nation groups all around the world, they don't call it restorative justice,
18:26
but this is how they settle things.
18:28
This is how they learn their teaching modality is storytelling.
18:32
It's very different than ours.
18:34
It's not compartmentalized.
18:37
This relates to this, relates to this, relates to this.
18:43
I think it's about 30 years ago, there were, I believe, two, two researchers were in New
18:51
Zealand, and they discovered among the Maori, this model of how they handle offenses, how
18:57
they handle offenders.
19:00
It's not about punishment.
19:01
It's about reestablishing harmony and balance.
19:06
It's not about getting even.
19:08
It's about how do we heal the harm that's been done.
19:12
That's the overriding thing.
19:13
How do we heal the harm?
19:17
And it's all about storytelling, all about storytelling.
19:21
Again, I did not know that that's what we were doing when we held the circle with my
19:28
daughter, but I took that model to my classroom.
19:32
At the time, I was teaching middle school, and I thought, gee, we have some bullying
19:37
issues on this campus.
19:40
So I told the students that I had, anyway, I said, okay, when an incident came up, I
19:46
can send you to the dean.
19:48
That's going to be punishment.
19:50
Or we can circle up, and they go, oh, we'll circle up.
19:53
We'll circle up.
19:55
And then we get about just a little bit into it, and somebody would say, well, you didn't
19:58
say this was going to be hard.
20:00
And I said, because it had to do with emotions and vulnerability and transparency and forgiveness
20:11
and all those things that we don't talk about as much as we should.
20:17
But once it took, once it got going, occasionally a student would even come up and say, can
20:23
we circle up?
20:24
There's something going on.
20:28
They liked it.
20:29
They really, really enjoyed it, and I think got a lot out of it.
20:32
And then later, I think it was in the early 90s, I actually heard the term for the first
20:37
time, restorative justice.
20:38
And I thought, well, that sounds good.
20:41
I got to check that out.
20:43
And then realized, oh, okay, that's what they're talking about.
20:48
Now, you worked in schools, but I think you told me you also had worked with inmates as
20:53
well.
20:54
Yes.
20:55
Yeah, I was volunteering with the restorative justice office in Los Angeles and had a chance
21:01
to work with, well, they were parolees.
21:08
And I, in prison, you don't tell your story.
21:13
You keep, yeah, you watch your back.
21:16
And so a lot of these, they happen to be women.
21:19
These women had been in prison for anywhere from four to 20 years and had to hold everything
21:26
inside.
21:27
So along with not only telling their stories, a lot of them realized that they were dealing
21:35
with accountability.
21:37
And although we couldn't get back to their victims, taking accountability.
21:42
In other words, realizing who they were, who the victim was, the harm that they had done,
21:49
and how they had, how they were changing, how they were being transformed during this
21:55
process was incredible.
22:00
A number of years later, I did get to sit in a circle with men who were, I didn't get
22:05
to know them as well as I did the parolees in Los Angeles.
22:09
But men who were willing, who wanted to meet with their victims.
22:17
And again, the power of it, I told you about the Israeli and the Palestinian.
22:27
There is another, there are other stories.
22:29
I don't know if the name Linda Beale rings about her daughter.
22:34
You know, okay.
22:35
She was murdered by South Africans and one of the perpetrator, one of the offenders,
22:42
one of the killers asked to see the mother.
22:46
And she is now his mother.
22:49
All through their stories.
22:50
I mean, imagine, I can imagine talking with the person who murdered your daughter.
22:58
And yet they are now mother and son.
23:01
All through story, all through story.
23:03
Well, I think, again, story has the power to change the world.
23:08
And it, in that story, it just talks about fostering forgiveness, you know, understanding
23:14
that person's full experience.
23:16
And I think if you don't know someone's story, then it's far easier to create the
23:22
monster and judge it's harder when you know the human side of that person.
23:31
So yeah, it, there's so much power in being able to understand it just creates that understanding.
23:38
And like we said, this episode is about healing and those are awesome examples of that.
23:45
You know, the things that you were talking about, would you call those peace circles?
23:52
The peace circle, something different.
23:55
Yeah, no, the peace circles, they can be community circles doing peace circles within
23:59
the community to establish deeper understanding of divisions in the community.
24:05
I've done them in schools and we call them peace circles or
24:15
story circles.
24:17
And they go all day.
24:19
I mean, it's the whole school day.
24:21
And what has come out, especially around bullying, around suicide ideation, it's just you start
24:28
out with very benign questions in the very early part of the day.
24:32
And then the questions get deeper and deeper and deeper.
24:36
And it's, wow.
24:39
Unfortunately, schools aren't doing them, well at least here they're not doing them as much
24:44
as they used to.
24:47
But if I were in charge, we circle up every morning.
24:53
Just get cobwebs out right early.
24:58
The stories really do create that level of understanding that you're not going to get
25:03
unless you're telling the stories.
25:05
I don't know if you ever heard this.
25:08
I have a friend here in town.
25:11
She and her husband were traveling through Europe.
25:13
This was back in the 50s, early 60s.
25:17
And they were in Brussels.
25:20
And in a train station, they found this woman sitting at a small table, sitting on a chair
25:26
with an empty chair next to her, and a little sign that said, do you need to tell your story?
25:33
And they found out that she was a Holocaust survivor.
25:37
And she said, people have stopped listening to our stories, but they still need to be
25:43
told.
25:45
And then, coincidentally, my next door neighbor, she and her husband got on a train in Paris
25:51
to go to Brussels, and that same woman was on the train.
25:57
Just listening to stories.
26:00
I think it's what Maya Angelou said, there's no greater agony than a story buried inside.
26:08
And there are a lot of people walking around with buried stories.
26:12
We've lost our portals.
26:15
We've lost our what?
26:16
I'm sorry.
26:17
Our front porches, our backyards lines, our corn markets, they're not coming back.
26:25
But the first thing I did when I moved in to my place 25 years ago was organize a pot
26:31
lock for the whole neighborhood.
26:34
And within 15 minutes, you heard things like, and the total strangers, they didn't know
26:38
each other, like, oh my God, oh, I lived in the parkway, oh, right across from me, oh,
26:43
for heaven's sake.
26:44
So the six degrees of separation just kind of narrowed down to like two.
26:49
It was absolutely amazing.
26:52
Just beautiful.
26:53
Yep.
26:54
Yep.
26:55
Yeah.
26:56
Absolutely.
26:57
I mean, that's the whole sort of foundation behind the moth is, you know, that it's about
27:03
the porch, you know, we're all getting together on the porch to be able to hear each other's
27:07
stories.
27:10
And it's important, I think, to being a storyteller, but also a story listener and being a very
27:17
active story listener.
27:18
And I find that like, when I'm really engaged with that story, I feel like I just absolutely
27:25
get to know that person in a way that I wouldn't have otherwise if I hadn't really been actively
27:29
listening.
27:30
So a lot of power.
27:32
And I, when I'm teaching storytelling, there's always one whole space in the curriculum for
27:40
listening.
27:42
Do we listen to reply?
27:45
Or do we listen to understand?
27:49
We're not taught that, you know, growing up.
27:52
We don't have good listening models.
27:55
Unfortunately.
27:57
Yeah.
27:58
It takes two.
27:59
It's a story teller, but it takes a listener to.
28:03
I mean, listening is an action, you know, it's an action verb, you know, it's a verb.
28:08
So, so talk to me a little bit about when students come to your classes, you know, what
28:13
can they expect?
28:14
I, I'm also an instructor and, you know, I sort of lay out the curriculum somewhat similar.
28:22
I don't have sort of the same specifics like you did in some of the things that you shared.
28:27
But it's always, because I, you know, it's a course.
28:30
So you have multiple classes, you know, a class specific on the story foundations and
28:36
mapping and, you know, one on all the places in the world that they're going to have to
28:41
tell their story.
28:42
You know, how do you do it?
28:44
How do you do it on social media?
28:45
How do you do it in business?
28:46
How do you do it in career?
28:47
How do you, how do you do it at home?
28:50
You know, but when you're, when your folks are coming in to tell, to learn how to tell
28:57
stories, what can they expect in your class?
28:59
And second part of the question, why is it a really good idea for somebody to take, to
29:04
take a storytelling class?
29:07
Because we, we have lost the venues, the typical venues of fireplaces, kitchen tables, front
29:15
porches, you know, the venues where story just sort of automatically happened.
29:25
My, my passion, my, my desire is that we somehow kind of like the America and Buffalo, that
29:32
we regenerate some of this interest and understanding of just how important storytelling is to families,
29:39
to neighborhoods, countries, the world.
29:42
When you look at the world, what would be different if we were actually listening to
29:46
each other's stories rather than, you know, depending on the bias?
29:54
I don't teach how to tell a story.
29:57
They end up being storytellers automatically.
30:01
And I always have to create space so that they do have a chance to tell their stories.
30:05
And once they start talking, oh my God, we wish we had much more time.
30:10
The students learned that this was, you know, this goes all the way back to cave before
30:17
we even had written language.
30:19
Stories were told on cave walls.
30:22
And it's interesting to note that as cave draw, cave artists were doing this around
30:29
the world, not knowing each other, their drawings were very similar and they're very, they're
30:38
not hierarchical.
30:41
There's no evidence of conflict on the walls.
30:44
You'll see drawings of people holding hands, of people together, but they're all the same
30:50
height.
30:52
They tell a story of cooperation, which I think is incredible.
30:58
Then they will learn about oral traditions.
31:04
This I just found out this week.
31:08
Archaeologists are now looking to include indigenous stories in their findings of how the earth
31:18
started and how it's in their mythologies that they find, oh, they're talking about the
31:24
divide here or the flood here or whatever.
31:27
They include all of this.
31:29
And it just happens that one of the women in my class is an archaeologist.
31:33
And so she said, yeah, she's been lobbying for a long time to include First Nation stories
31:40
in their research because there's a lot to learn there.
31:45
Story was the first medicine ever practiced and it still is.
31:49
It was the first teaching modality and still is.
31:54
I teach about the neuroscience of, are you familiar with Kendall Haven?
32:00
I'm not familiar with Kendall Haven.
32:03
Although I may have read Kendall Haven stuff, I didn't know it was Kendall Haven.
32:07
He's a master storyteller, but he also got involved with, I think it was Defense Department
32:15
in doing research, actually getting into the brain, seeing what the brain does on storytelling.
32:23
And what they found is, for lack of a better term, a neural story network.
32:29
And whatever comes in, and this goes to communication, whatever comes in doesn't get to the conscious
32:36
mind unless it goes to the neural story network.
32:41
We cannot not tell stories.
32:42
We are just...
32:43
Wired for them.
32:44
Oh, we're hard-wired and evolutionarily too.
32:48
This is stories saved our lives when, you know, eons and eons ago.
32:54
And then I also talk about the need to recover the lost stories of women, the marginalized.
33:00
If we are the stories we tell ourselves, then if we want equality, we have to story that
33:09
in our lives.
33:11
Also the power to resolve conflict, absolutely.
33:16
Family storytelling.
33:19
There was a consensus in this last class that most kids don't really express interest in
33:24
family stories until they're a little bit older, you know, in their middle age.
33:29
And yet research seems to indicate that it's most necessary for child development.
33:37
Children learn emotional socialization, emotional intelligence if they're involved in family
33:43
storykeeping early on.
33:46
And that, you know, we're losing that.
33:50
That's a concern.
33:51
A concern.
33:53
I also talk about final narratives.
33:58
I learned personally when people are at the end of their life, even if they're on morphine,
34:10
they often tell stories.
34:11
They use metaphor.
34:14
My mother, when she was dying, kept saying, I have to go.
34:20
I have to go.
34:21
I have to go.
34:22
Let me go.
34:24
And actually it was the hospice nurse who said, no, Mary, you don't.
34:28
You're okay.
34:29
And I said, she's not talking about going to the bathroom.
34:32
She's talking about going.
34:35
And I went in and got a towel and I put it in cold water, wrapped it, you know, wrung
34:40
it out.
34:41
Her body was hot and I put it around her head like a turban.
34:46
And as soon as I did, she went, oh, my hat.
34:51
Smiled and relaxed back.
34:54
Her story was the traveler.
34:57
I've heard so many stories like that.
35:00
And I've heard people say, oh, don't listen, you know, he's got drugs or morphine or something.
35:04
No, listen, listen to those stories.
35:06
You're powerful.
35:08
And they're their final narrative.
35:12
Very powerful.
35:15
That's a powerful way for us to wrap up actually.
35:19
They were pretty much at a time.
35:22
I didn't know if there's anything else you wanted to add before we wrap up.
35:29
I wish we had our front porches again.
35:33
Sometimes I tell students it may be a little more, take a little more effort, a little
35:40
more time, a little more consideration, but we need to create consistently the store space
35:47
for stories.
35:49
If I have people over for dinner, I'll like candles, even if it's still light out, I'll
35:53
like candles on the table.
35:55
And it's amazing how longer people will stay.
36:04
I don't want us to lose.
36:05
I don't know what the future of storytelling looks like.
36:07
I really don't.
36:08
When people ask me, I don't know.
36:09
I don't know.
36:11
I don't think because we are, it's in our DNA that we can lose it.
36:16
Will it be, will it morph?
36:18
Will it become something different?
36:19
I don't know.
36:21
I just don't know.
36:23
But it's a foundation of what right now is human.
36:28
I found that it was very encouraging to me to walk into a Moth event and see a packed
36:34
house of people who both were story listeners and storytellers.
36:41
And I think that is as a storyteller, we are called to help others tell their stories.
36:50
And I think that we can make a difference one story at a time.
36:56
One story at a time.
36:57
Yeah.
36:58
Yeah.
36:59
Yeah.
37:00
And to our listeners, whether you hear us locally from the BTV studios in Bedford,
37:04
Massachusetts, or across the globe on such podcast channels as Spotify, Apple Podcasts,
37:10
or Amazon Prime, thanks for listening.
37:13
We hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll see you next time.
37:16
Happy storytelling.