Cynthia Kurtz has been working hard at distilling and releasing her body of work in Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) for the past few years. Her collection of four books on working with stories is the complete offering for practitioners, a highly detailed set of discussions, exercises and inspiration for putting this approach to work.
She describes the books this way:
Working with Stories is a textbook on Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI). It explains the fundamentals of story work and explains how to plan and carry out projects that help groups, communities, and organizations work with their stories to discover useful insights, find new solutions to problems and conflicts, and make decisions and plans.
Working with Stories Simplified is a quick guide to Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI). It briefly explains the fundamentals of story work and explains how to plan and carry out projects that help groups, communities, and organizations work with their stories to discover useful insights, find new solutions to problems and conflicts, and make decisions and plans.
The Working with Stories Sourcebook contains 50 question sets for use in Participatory Narrative Inquiry projects plus 50 descriptions of real-life PNI projects.
The Working with Stories Miscellany is a collection of 40 essays and other writings about stories, story work, and Participatory Narrative Inquiry.
Cynthia’s approach has been central to my work alongside the participatory practice frameworks I use from the Art of Hosting, the complexity theory and practice of Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang and dialogic practice as well. I deeply appreciate Cynthia’s gifts of this wisdom and knowledge into the world and especially appreciate NarraFirma, which is the software we use for larger scale narrative work. It is open source and easy to install, but invites a lifetime of practice to use well. I appreciate that platform because it is geared towards enabling stories to be used by groups for collective sensemaking, decision making and acting. We’ve done dozens of projects with this software and approach focusing on organizational culture, public health, branding, supporting learning communities, leadership development and community development.
Cynthia has been a generous mentor to my own work, challenging me and guiding me and encouraging me, and she has been invaluable to the work of many of my clients. I encourage you to support her through purchasing these books, whether by donation or when they are released on commercial platforms.
People are enjoying longer experiences, according to Ted Gioia, who has a keen eye for the trends in culture that are shaping our world and experiences. And while this is true for the individual consumption of cultural products.
BUT. As a person who spends time creating collaborative environments where people engage and co-create within organizations and communities I can attest that experiences of creating community together are becoming harder and harder, because people want to spend less and less time together. Clients who regularly asked for three-day -ong retreats now wonder if we can do the same amount of work in only one and a half. “Everyone is so busy” goes the line. But everyone is not busy. Everyone is retreating into individual immersive experiences. Even Taylor Swift shows, despite the fact that a fantastic community vibe emerges from her art and her fandom, is still a consumption experience. I worry that co-creative community activities are fading away, and have been for a long time. . The trends in consuming arts may be changing, but the trend in collaborative community is still fading away.
Spending time in deep community building activities matters. My friend Bob Stilger is championing Regenerative Responders, which is an initiative to build resilience in community from the ground up before crisis and emergency hits, so community can be ready to respond, not simply wait to receive help. The impetus for his work is in the stories he heard and witnessed from Japan after the March 11, 2011 Triple Disaster. Longform community practice develops the resilience needed for the times when it’s too late to do so. Movements like this exist all over the world, and I’ve written about Sarvodaya before, who came to my attention when they were first on the scene in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, long before the Red Cross arrived.
It shows up in sports too. My buddy Will Cromack posts today about how footballers are being deprived the immersive experience of just playing the game, long days spent kicking a ball around, training sessions that are just play, honing your craft becasue you have an endless horizon of the joy of co-creation stretching out before you. As he puts it:
Forgo the showcase tournament.
Go hit the ball against a wall.
Better yet, play 2v2 with friends.
More joy. More touches. More learning.The player’s work is to learn where to place their time and attention, and to seek challenges that invite growth. They must learn to welcome difficulty as a necessary step on the journey toward mastery, whatever mastery means to them.
There is no meaningful progress on the gentle slope with soft ground. The journey demands friction. And through that friction, players fall in love with the process.
I can get behind that: More joy. More touches. More learning. Consume good art. But create something too.
Are we living in a black hole? A delightful watch from Neil deGrasse Tyson, exploring the evidence that we might be living inside a black hole. Can we even know that? At some level, it perhaps doesn’t matter, although it makes my head spin and creates that little feeling of amazement that we are here at all. I like that.
Of much more practical concern are the cognitive black holes that we are drifting into. Three readings from this morning that have me reflecting on those. First, from the June issue of Harper’s Karl Ove Knuagsgaard writes about our relationship to technology. Us Generation X folks have our lives split into thirds. The first third, including our formative years, was pretty much digital technology free and the probably our last third will be spent being talked to by inanimate matter: “if I were forced to mention the most distinctive feature of our time, it would be precisely that: everything addresses us.”
These cognitive blackholes created by the digital world that manages us are even countered by the digital world that manages us. Having my heap of papers, notes, links, stories and ideas SEARCHABLE is a major feature of the technology in my life. I have never been able to hold a thought for long, and I’m always chasing that little stimulation brought about by novelty. Adrian Sager writes today about why people of our age and generation appreciate this feature of technology, even as some are finding liberation in deleting their digital memory.
The issue of course is whether it deadens us to the world by stealing our ability to navigate and create. Brian Klaas has written a lovely piece about this and shared the term “an illiterate in the Library of Alexandria” lamenting that “we’re engaged in a rather large, depressingly inept social experiment of downloading endless knowledge while offloading intelligence to machines.”
I don’t want to go down that black hole. But like the one that deGrasse Tyson describes in his video, though, I may already be deep in it and not able to know how deep. There are event horizons like the ones that Knaugsgaard writes about. Remember the first video game you ever played? (yup. Pong, on a Sinclair ZX-80 in 1979 in John Harris’ living room on Muskalls Close, in Chestnut, Herts.) I was 11.
A convincing 6-0 win last night for the Canadian Men’s National Soccer Team over Honduras in the first match of the 2025 Gold Cup. This biennial tournament is our de facto continental championship, held between 16 teams in the CONCACAF Region, plus a guest, in this case the soccer-washing national eam from Saudia Arabia. The tournament is held mostly in the US, although last night’s match was played in Vancouver. Canada last won this trophy in 2000. This year’s edition also serves as the qualification tournament for the 2026 World Cup, which we are also hosting along with the USA and Mexico.
Last night’s match was sweet for a number of reasons. Those of us that have watched our national team for a while will remember an 8-1 humiliation at the hands of Honduras in 2012 which ended our qualification run for the 2014 World Cup. It was perhaps the low point in the men’s team fortunes and since then we have risen through the ranks of world football, eventually qualifying for the 2022 World Cup. Every time we play Honduras, I pray for a smackdown and last night was the biggest loss we ever handed them. Our team looked fantastic. With several key starters injured, we nevertheless showed up strong, commanded possession,polayed unafraid of Honduras’ physical play in the middle and used our speed and creativity on the wings to shred the Honduras defence. It was a thing of beauty to watch.
It was also a beautiful chance to see two British Columbia based players come into their own. Joel Waterman, of Langley BC, played at centre back and almost scored in the opening moments of the game. Joel played for our TSS Rovers back in 2017. He later moved to Calgary Foothills and eventually into the Cavalry side of the new Canadian Premier League. In 2020 he became the first CPL player sold to Major League Soccer when he signed with CF Montreal. He has remained there ever since, helping the team through some ups and many downs, and often appearing as their captain.
While Joel is always a player I watch, having stopped off at our club for a season, another BC player made his mark last night. Niko Sigur, from Burnaby BC, and a player who plays for Hejduk Split in Croatia, scored his first goal as a national team member. It was the first goal from a BC raised player for Canada in ages. Marcus Haber scored one in a friendly against Mauritania in 2016, but none of us could remember the last BC player to score a goal in a meaningful competition. This lack of BC players on our national team has been an abiding concern for us at TSS Rovers and was one of the motivations for starting the team in 2017.
In other sports news the Stanley Cup was decided last night. I have followed the Toronto Maple Leafs since I was a boy, born the year after the last won a Stanley Cup in 1967. My kids, born on the west coast, don’t share my love of the Leafs, and they have developed attachments to Vancouver and, in my daughter’s case, Edmonton. Last year, the Oilers took the Florida Panthers to the seventh game of the finals and lost. This year they only lasted six games. Florida – the team that has also knocked Toronto out of the playoffs in recent years – is a very, very good hockey team. In our heightened state of cross-border anxiety, this series between a Canadian team and an American one had added significance. I feel for my friends who are Oilers fans. Losing the final to the same team two years in a row stings. It is said that the Stanley Cup is one of the hardest trophies to win in sports. You need to survive an 82 game regular season lasting 6 months and play four best-of-seven rounds of playoffs for another two months. That can include 4800 kilometer trips diagonally across North America as it did in this series, which plays havoc with bodies beaten and bruised from 60 minutes or more of playoff hockey. Florida played 105 games between October and now.
Now one of the greatest traditions in sports begins. Every player on the Florida roster will get to spend one day with the trophy, and the stories of what happens on that day are NHL legends, as the Cup makes it’s way around the world to celebrations, commemorations and all manner of hi-jinx.
Even if you are only peripherally interested in hockey, as a Canadian it gets into your blood, it becomes a cultural reference and a shibboleth around which we rally, becomes the central part of quintessentially Canadian TV shows and is taken up in spades by immigrants to Canada, even as they also bring their love of soccer to this place.
A photo of the STEVE I saw last night. If you are reading this as an email, click the post title to see the image.
You have to chase the beautiful things sometimes. Be in the right place, have a bit of luck, being open to a bit of surprise.
On Sunday I was really sick with some kind of blow-through flu/cold that laid me out all weekend. But I managed to drag myself out of bed later in the day and get a walk in. One of my favourite walks on my home island takes me down a little road below my house that hugs the north shore of Mannion Bay above the waterfront houses and then leads into Miller’s Landing, where you can choose a couple of options for places to sit and look at the sea. For me, it was Miller’s Landing beach, which was deeply exposed for the super low tides we get at this time of year. When I got down to the little bench above the beach there was a family of four standing at the railing looking out to the water. I recognized the look of people who had just seen whales.
There’s a special stance that happens when whales appear near enough that you can hear them breathe. I always find myself standing up quickly, at attention, with a shiver down my spine, because there are very few sounds in my life as profoundly moving as the breath of a whale. I asked them if they were seeing whales and they said that a pod of 5 or 6 orcas had just passed by a few minutes before. They had rounded the point and were now out of sight. I congratulated them on their luck and secretly wept a little inside that I had just missed them.
However, last night I had a chance at the only other thing that makes me shiver like that. There has been a massive series of geomagnetic storms rocking the earth’s atmosphere over the past few days and that means we get a chance to see auroras. Even though at this time of year we don’t actually get a completely dark sky, if the auroras are bright enough, they still show up in June, and they never fail to make me stand in profound awe.
I went out to my favourite spot with a view looking straight northward up Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound. Last night there were auroras, but they were fairly diffuse; a quiet green glow arcing across the head of our inlet far off to the north. Still beautiful, though. I watched them for a while wondering if it would dark enough to see any structure or movement. I was fixated on the diffuse glow, and the sounds of sea lions splashing in the dark sea below me. Nothing else was happening and so I lifted my gaze to see if I could see some planets, just in time to see a STEVE stretching across the sky. And I got that same feeling – stood at attention, chills running down my spine, watching a ribbon of super hot ions for 10 minutes stretch across the upper atmosphere hundreds of kilometres above my head.
STEVE is a phenomenon that accompanies geomagnetic storms, but is not the same as an aurora. As Aurorasaurus.com puts it, “if the ambient aurora was a symphony, STEVE would crash in with an electric guitar riff.”
STEVE has only recently been identified and scientists still don’t know exactly what they are, but it’s possible you’ve seen them. They stretch from east to west across the sky, further south than the aurora typically does. It’s not obvious what they are when you see them. The one I saw last night stretched right over my head at 49 degrees north, while the aurora appeared far away over the northern horizon. This is the second time I have positively seen a STEVE, the first time being probably 2017 or 2018 when I stepped out onto a friends deck during a party and saw what looked like a narrow concentrated band of the aurora overhead stretching away to the west. It didn’t make sense that there was no other aural activity so I thought it might be just a high cloud or a contrail illuminated by the moon and perhaps the lingering twilight. But then it began to dance and twist like the aurora. My friends at first didn’t believe me when I told them it was up there, but they were soon convinced and a whole party of people that had been dancing and carrying on stopped and grew silent at the appearance of this strange river of light flowing above us into the western sky.
I love those moments of awe. I never get used to seeing whales and auroras. And STEVE.