All Story is About Place

In 1995, when Dana Atchley and I were programming the first Digital Storytelling Festival, I insisted that we invite one person representing a non-digital perspective about storytelling. My choice was Jo Carson, a community artists, playwright and storyteller from Eastern Tennessee. Jo was the official cynic at this small gathering, and she came with a singular sense of resistance – mediated storytelling of any kind was to be looked on with great suspicion.

I remember when it came time to speak on the first morning up in the little Town Hall in Crested Butte, Jo rose and declared that all story was essentially about place. That without the grounding of real terrafirma, and lived human experience on top of it, story loses its meaning. Her caution was about de-contextualization. Healing stories uprooted from the soil that bred them could become culturally toxic in the hands of media peddlers. This had been a long, shared experience of Appalacian stories, their folk wisdom and humor turned into Hillybilly satire, their tragedy into pitying portrayals of meek and powerless victims.

Jo in working with local, mainly rural communities around the U.S. knew how damaging stereotypes could be, and conversely that is was enormously powerful and important to provide a local community with a way to tell their own story. She has helped dozens of communities to produce local plays to capture essential, complex and at times difficult tales about the meaning of their place.

In 2003-04, I lived with my family in a small town in Italy. I never really lived in a small town. To be frank, I was a stranger the whole time. Another language, another culture, I tried to find my way into the place, but I was so often just in my head. Outsider. Observer. But this feeling was telling to me. I paid attention to the feeling. I was never uncomfortable in that role.

While I was in Italy I had called my blog space, Texan-in-Exile.it. I hadn’t lived in Texas in nearly 30 years, but my exile status suited my temperament. Since I came back, I began to see that I have lived as a stranger, particularly since the death of my mother and brother, and the loss of the family home in Texas. Uprooted, a refugee, and living with a sense of distance from home as a permanent way of being.

So much of being in a place is knowing its secrets, how much the story of who said what to whom, of loves that had been lost, of old battles over trifling matters, or of simple connections that sustained, of the things and people that were as solid as the horizon, of how much had been survived and the pride that engendered in nearly everyone. Strangers can’t know these things. The knowing of the secrets is a gentle process of awareness, repeated intimacies, that come with being there.