As you know, St Ethelburga's has a strong interest in story and narrative-based techniques. This blog is to update you on our work, to keep you in touch with what is going on behind the scenes, and to flag up things that are coming. We also hope you will contribute and let us know what else is going on in the storytelling world, so this blog can become a resource for everyone and help to strengthen our growing network.
At the moment we are working hard on a new resource - What's your story: The St Ethelburga's guide to narrative and story as tools for community building. This includes over fifteen different methods which can be used to bring people together and facilitate the building of relationships across different identities. These methods have been collected from around the UK and internationally, from practitioners in peace-building, community cohesion and healing from conflict. Each method will include a case-study and useful links. [If you use a method that perhaps we won't have come across - please get in touch!] The resource will be published and launched in early autumn. The aim is to increase awareness of narrative and story methods (particularly for those working in the interfaith arena), to showcase some of the fascinating work that is going on in this field, and to give pointers towards best practice.
Alongside this, we are cooking up big ideas for a follow up to the very successful Sea of Stories performances that were held at places of worship around London during National Interfaith Week last November. Our six, fabulous, faith-based storytellers worked beautifully together, and our hope is to capture that chemistry, and the new cross-faith relationships that were formed, and find a way to take that forward and share it with more faith communities. Traditional story can be a great way to share our faith with others - we all love to hear stories - and faith based stories reveal a huge amount about belief, perspective, history, and culture - but we take it in effortlessly in such an enjoyable way.
Also in the pipeline is an idea for two local community-based story projects. It is not uncommon in the more diverse parts of London, for there to be many different faith communities and diaspora groups living alongside each other but rarely interacting. We want to try out personal narrative and story to bring neighbours together, give opportunities for people to hear snippets of each others life stories, to understand each others histories and priorities in life, and begin to build relationships across these silent walls. We have several tools in the toolkit that we can apply to this aim, such as humanity cafe, living libraries, community ceilidhs, events for parents, story skills workshops, and faith-based traditional story performances. We will keep you posted on how this idea develops!
Finally, in case you didn't know already, the Society for Storytelling www.sfs.org.uk have created a special interest group for storytellers involved with faith and religion. This group meets in the Tent at St Ethelburga's every couple of months, and also helps to create our open floor story-sharing nights in the Tent (the last of which was headed up beautifully by Rachel Rose Reid telling stories of heroes and heroines). If you'd like more info about this group, please get in touch.
So.....this is a small snippet of story and narrative life at St E's. Don't for one moment think that is all we are up to! There will be more posts coming to update you on projects such as Humanity Cafe and some fabulous events coming up - SPARK True Life Storytelling Club, and a workshop we are all waiting hungrily for, on storytelling for communication with the delightful Joanna Yates.
In the meantime, here is our events page for you to bookmark. Click on the links below.
Narrative and story events page
Narrative and story background
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