How saying yes to a storytelling workshop delivered far more than I expected

I love participatory storytelling, and have done since the first set of digital storytelling workshops I took part in at Loughborough University in Spring 2018.  

I was there at the invitation of the wonderful Antonia Liguori, at that time Senior Lecturer in Applied Storytelling for the university’s Storytelling Academy, and now Professor of Participatory Storytelling and Public Policy at Teesside University. She’d go on to become something of a mentor and a cheerleader for me, as she has for so many others, but back then I had no idea who she was.

And only a brief understanding of what the Storytelling Academy was, too. It hadn’t existed when I studied for my creative writing master’s degree there some seven years before. An interdisciplinary research body, it grew out of research led by Professor Mike Wilson a short time after he joined Loughborough University in 2014.

Those first workshops I went to were for the Erasmus-funded ‘Europe of Our Lives’ project, aimed at upskilling people across Europe in the adult education sector in digital story-making skills so that they, in turn, could pass those skills on to the people they teach.

Loughborough Uni took the lead on the training and, with 20 or so people from across Europe arriving in town for three days of workshops, they needed extra people in the room to support them as they created their films.

One of the students Antonia had lined up to do that had dropped out and my former tutor from the master’s programme suggested me as a replacement.

The invitation came out of the blue, and I almost didn’t do it.

I was freelancing by then, juggling commissioned writing jobs and creative activities in the community with supply teaching in the primary sector, which gave me some flexibility in my working day to say yes.

But it was a voluntary role, with no payment and, instead, the promise of experience and exposure. I’d had my fair share of those already, and as a meme I once saw said, you can’t pay your rent with ‘exposure’.

Still, it did include a free group meal at a rather nice local restaurant and a ‘cultural visit’ to a museum. I love a nice meal. I love a museum. And I’d been consciously trying to say ‘yes’ more often since reading Danny Wallace’s memoir of the same name.

So I told myself: ‘I’ve been writing stories for years and years and this activity can teach me nothing about storytelling, but, still, a free meal …’ And I said ‘yes.’

I was right about the meal at the local restaurant (it was delicious and a fun evening) and the visit to the museum (also a lot of fun).

I was wrong, though, about learning nothing new about storytelling.

Over the course of the workshop, I supported people with the tricky job of writing in English – a language not their own – and carrying out actions on a computer which they didn’t know how to do. And I also got to craft a short first-person story myself, share it with a group of people who were strangers to me, turn it into a digital film and show it at the end-of-training film show.

There was the act of telling. The act of being listened to. The act of listening to other people. The connection that developed between us. The experience of having my own perspective witnessed, and accepted.

Most importantly for me, perhaps, there was voice: deciding that something I’d experienced was worth talking about, finding the right words to do that and discovering that other people were willing to listen.

And as I’ve mentioned several times before in these blogs, the act of doing that proved to be phenomenal, kick-starting a slow-burn of personal development that has changed me – as a writer, teacher and teller of my own stories, but most interestingly to me, in the way I show up with others.

It opened a door into the world of first-person storytelling that I’ve been exploring ever since – first through my own storytelling and, increasingly, through helping other people tell theirs.

Quite a good outcome, I’m sure you’ll agree, from the promise of a free meal.