Archive for 'For Community' Category
Listen for the deeper story
“I was born in Ajdabiya, I live in Ajdabiya, I will die in Ajdabiya”, he says, as he takes a brief respite from protecting his Libyan home town in April 2011. “I’m actually 20 years old”, he adds, with a grin, “because you need to subtract Gaddafi’s 42 years in power. Even the grey hairs […]
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Story-places
Yes, I’ll admit it: it’s a trick, of course. But it’s a useful trick – especially for those of us who need to collect stories for organisations, communities, and even for family-history. The place is important here: it needs to be the right kind of place, the right atmosphere – the kind of ‘story-place’ where […]
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Images and stories
Twice this week I’ve been sent an email with a ’round the dinner-table’ photo, as a memento of where I’ve been – one from a business-meeting in Austria, the other from a family gathering in south-west England. Each of these photos describes a real story in itself. But what can I do with them, and […]
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Lost and unlost
As a young child, I’m told, I used to get lost quite often. I don’t think I ever did it deliberately, but we’d be in a crowd in the street somewhere, or in some crowded shop, and I’d get distracted by something and lose track of which way my parents had gone. I do remember […]
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Meeting at the river-bank
“This is like meeting up at the riverbank, isn’t it?”, he said, as we sat with our coffees after lunch at the local bistro. “You know – each of us the outsider to the others’ territory. Like we’re usually on opposite sides of the river, and we might never really meet up in person as such – […]
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Seasons
Here in my mother’s garden it’s already late summer – the last of those subtly-scented roses, the last of the summer light and warmth before the fall begins and the old statue is laid bare again. Back where I lived down south, of course, it’s just turning towards spring: a different season indeed – a […]
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Obvious
It was just one of those round-the-dinner-table conversations at first. We’d started by talking about Dr Ludwig Guttman, the originator of what is now the Paralympics, and how, when he’d first arrived at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, it was considered ‘obvious’ that nothing could be done for patients with spinal-cord injury other than wait for them […]
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Layers of story
How do we make sense of story? How can we link between the layers of story to help us make sense of some broader picture, or to derive a clearer view of some desired future? One way to do this is Causal Layered Analysis [CLA] – and it fits very well with the Zahmoo story-bank. […]
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Talking with time
Here at this place, quite close to where my mother lives in south-east England, four different times collide: centre-right, the remaining archway of the Roman-period gateway and Roman tile-and-stone wall around the town to the left, the whitewashed walls and terrace of The Hole In The Wall, the thriving 17th-century ale-house built on top of ‘the […]
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Expectations and rebels
So there they are, my mother and my brother, walking down the grassy street towards the village shops. He’s perhaps three years old, at that time, proudly pushing along his beloved doll in a battered toy pram. A frumpish, overdressed middle-aged woman looks on in horror and disgust – and finally she can bear it […]
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