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.
I met my friend Aryana on the trail this morning heading to the pier for some coffee and a walk. She said “you’ve been on Bowen for a while now, right?” I looked at my watch and saw the date. Twenty-four years ago today we were busy packing up our three bedroom co-op townhouse in the West End of Vancouver, and bundling our 4 year old daughter and nine month old son into our 1996 Honda Civic. We were getting ready to follow the moving truck to Horseshoe Bay and then over to Bowen Island.
If you have followed along at this blog and others, you will know that I began writing about my experiences of the island almost right away. There was a few months of hand coding html pages for the Bowen Island Journal before I switched over to blogger. That blog kept a good record of the first 15 years of our time here. In about 2017 I consolidated all my writing and just starting writing Bowen Island blog posts on this blog with their own tag.
I love the occasional dive into these archives. They remind me of my curiosities and what had my attention even in the swirl of change that a small community experiences. Perhaps for my 25th anniversary on Bowen I’ll draw these together into some kind of publication. My friend Pauline LeBel would love that.
Bowen Island these days is very different than it was 24 years ago. There are more marine mammals around: sea lions, orcas and humpback whales are now regular residents in our waters. The businesses in the Cove have come and gone, but at the moment there are some wonderful cafes (Like Tell Your Friends on the pier) that are my regular haunts. The Pub is in a new building, The Snug and Docs are where they always were. The library long ago moved to the old General Store. The Ruddy Potato is where it was when it opened the weekend I moved here.
There are new neighbourhoods and new trails and some places I used to go are now fenced off. Some other things never seem to change much. People still complain about the heavy toll tourism takes on our village. The ferry runs at a relatively random schedule. No one likes it when various layers of government do things, except now that we have to build long neglected infrastructure, there is a tenor of discontent that we didn’t do it sooner. Facebook has replaced the Phorum, but the same songs are sung by the chorus.
We have a new municipal hall and community centre, where I will be going tonight to watch Singing In The Rain complete with cartoon and short film trailers, just like in the old days. Tomorrow I will be singing with my choir at Tir-na-nOg, a theatre school for young people that found a home about 20 years ago after rambling across various space on the island.
We have a cougar now, as evidenced by the numerous sightings reported by Islanders and the deer carcass that was stewing in the ditch near my house (but which was thankfully relocated today). The last bear to visit here was about 14 years ago, but there are coyotes and racoons and skunks in addition to the endemic wildlife. The barred owls are breeding like rabbits.
This morning on my way to the Cove, I had my usual June trail breakfast of salmonberries and huckleberries plucked from the bush. We’ve made some amazing moves to protect lands that were long fought over, especially the Cape Roger Curtis lands that now sport a lovely waterfront trail that winds along the shoreline in front of a couple of huge houses that no one will ever live in and a few slightly more more modest houses lived in by actual Islanders. The Bowen Island Conservancy has protected a bunch of south shore waterfront in perpetuity and Metro Vancouver has bought the rest as parkland. They have also done a marvellous job on a waterfront park on Dorman Point. We have also been encompassed by a UNESCO Biosphere Region and we are developing relationships with our hosts, the Squamish Nation, who blessed the name of the island on our sign in a ceremony back in 2020. We live on Nexwlelexwm, and Sempuliyan, one of the family that held us in ceremony on that date, referred to us as Nexwlelexwm uxwimixw, the villagers of Bowen Island.
Affordability has only gotten worse here, but the Bowen Island Resilient Community Housing Society is in the processes of building an affordable rental building with 27 units behind our new amazing community health centre, which sits next to our new amazing fire hall and emergency operations centre. A seniors building, Snug Cove House, is going up across the road meaning that long time islanders like me might have an option to live a long life here as our mobility decreases and our needs increase.
We still have a local newspaper, with its own cartoonist, the inimitable Ron Woodall. Visual arts are still a huge part of life here and there is live music most weeks to listen to at the pub or in the various venues around the island.
Years ago, there was a swan that lived in the lagoon by Mannion Bay. Everyone loved this swan from a distance but also everyone hated meeting this swan up close. My daughter called it “the ornery swan” becausee it nipped and bit people and made a bunch of noise when its perfect little world was disturbed in any way. But from a distance, the swan struck a beautiful image, a still white bird floating majestically on the still dark waters of the bay or the lagoon.
When the swan died, we held a little memorial for it and I wrote a song with a call and response chorus that somehow captured why we loved that bird and how he was so much one of us.
Islanders now gather round
The swan, the swan was swimming
The swan lays dying on the ground
And the swan swims here no more.Gathered on a wintery day
The swan, the swan was swimming
On the rocky shores of Mannion Bay
And the swan swims here no more.Where salmon leapt upon the weir
The swan, the swan was swimming
Where ducks and geese all lived in fear
And the swan swims here no more.All who came to know that bird
The swan, the swan was swimming
Defied the warnings they had heard
And the swan swims here no more.Islanders have come and gone
The swan, the swan was swimming
We had the swan to reflect upon
And the swan swims here no more.A stately bird of grace and poise
The swan, the swan was swimming
Beautiful and mute of voice
And the swan swims here no more.For this wild creature was one of us
The swan, the swan was swimming
A mute and silent blunderbus
And the swan swims here no more.Who are we without the swan?
The swan, the swan was swimming
A part of us is dead and gone
And the swan swims here no more.The tide rolls in and fills the Bay
The swan, the swan was swimming
But the waters here are still today
And the swan swims here no more.Now eagles chase the gulls away
The swan, the swan was swimming
And things have changed on Mannion Bay
And the swan swims here no more.
That kind of gets at the red thread of this place. Twenty-four years.
An ochre sea star on the beach at Mannion Bay/Kwilakwm, on Bowen Island during one of this week’s midsummer low tides.
Most days I read through posts from my blogroll and other places on the web and publish a short set of links and notes. At the end of each week I roll these up into a post which is also sent to everyone who subscribes by email.
Here are this week’s notes. Click the links below to discover interesting places to explore:
- June 21: sounds of longing. One trans person’s experience in the USA and a beautiful new album of Persian music.
- June 23: black holes. Are we living in a real black hole? And what is the price of the cognitive black holes we live in?
- June 24: the long and the short of it. Seems people are enjoying longer cultural experiences, but having shorter collaborative ones.
- June 25: supporting creation. Freeing up time for play and creativity in life, music and sport.
- June 26: the deep history of meaningful work. Some quotes for inspiration and some long essays on how we evolved civilization from our big goofy brains.
You can subscribe to this blog by email and good old fashioned RSS. I use NetNewsWire to follow interesting writers on the web. It works with most blogs, including those published on Substack and Medium.
This is an interesting article from Rebecca Roache Aeon today: “What’s so awkward about awkward silence?“
“…conversations are shared endeavours. A conversation is something we’re creating with whoever we’re talking to, and this is undermined if one or other of us is silent for too long. In a 2011 study on conversational silences, the psychologists Namkje Koudenburg, Tom Postmes and Ernestine H Gordijn compared conversations to dancing: the ‘harmonious exchange of information through smooth turn-taking’ in a fluent conversation is satisfying in a way similar to coordinating one’s movements with those of a dancing partner. Dancing, like conversation, becomes awkward when it’s malcoordinated. Koudenburg and her colleagues found that people experience rejection when silence disrupts the flow of conversation. They explain: ‘people are, due to the evolutionary importance of group membership, highly sensitive to perceiving exclusion’. In other words, silences are uncomfortable when they make us worry that we don’t belong.”
I have two unresourceful patterns when I’m engaging in conversation. One is that I spend a lot of time listening and thinking about what is being said. I often have thoughts during these silences, but the conversation moves too fast for me to get them in. I am deeply sensitive to interrupting others and being interrupted and so I am loath to do so. So I sit on my thoughts and sometimes chain them together into the questions or ideas that I offer. I might write notes with me pen to track my thoughts. And sometimes they never come out, and other times they flood out as I try to catch up to everything that has flowed past. I don’t think either of those moves are helpful!
Other times, you can’t shut me up and I will go on and on stringing together thoughts and ideas and questions as they tumble out of my brain when it gets locked in the default mode network. Ideas associate themselves like a Glass Bead Game and they all come out, probably in a not so helpful way. These downloads are often met with confusion in my conversational partners. When I am in this mode it is very hard to regulate my verbiage. I have learned to ask for space and will say things like “I need to just think out loud here for a minute, can you indulge me?” Other times I will invite interruption, welcoming it like a life preserver thrown to a drowning man.
But I generally relish the silences in conversations when we are all in the sam flow. I love conversing in circle where we deliberately slow down the conversation and explicitly use silence as a tool that everyone has access to. In circle there can be unfamiliarity with silence as a part of the conversation, but there is minimal awkwardness per se, because the silence is ritualized and normalized.
Of course I live in a culture much like the one that Rebecca Roache lives in. Silence in conversation – well, in small talk really – is awkward because it isn’t the norm of the ritual of small talk in many Anglo-American cultures. While I understand and enjoy small talk, I like to be in a place with someone where we get deep enough that some silence is welcomed. This morning I ran into a friend on the trail who I ahdn;t seen in a while. We connected with a hello and how-are-you-doing but both of us have history together of going deep around life issues and it quickly went there. We paused and became quiet together and shared important news with one another in a loving, connected way. There was nothing awkward in the silences. The container changed and the silence became a critical part of the conversation.
Roache summarizes her article with the set of thoughts that became clear to me as I was reading her essay:
“Something that emerges from all this is that it’s not silence itself that is awkward (or not). The capacity of silences to be awkward or comfortable is set against our efforts to connect with and understand other people, to be seen by others in the way we wish to be seen, and to be accepted. Running through all the aspects of awkward silence we’ve explored here is a common thread of anxiety about how well we’re engaging in connection and understanding with the people we interact with. In a comfortable silence, like the ones you enjoy with those you know and love, that anxiety isn’t there. With them, you don’t struggle to connect and understand. You’re already there.”
That is the essence. It’s hard to tell what part of this is me and what part is the culture I am soaking in, but I notice the chatter that happens oftentimes becomes a shield against connection. Our world right now is suffering from a deficit of trust. It takes a long time to cultivate connections across differences and early moments of connection – through small talk, mostly in my culture – are so influential in whether or not a channel of openness emerges.
In facilitation practice making space for silences can be important because it may both lead to, and reinforce a deeper connection between people. This is much easier to do in small group facilitation than it is is large group process work, but it can be a useful way to use the power one has as a facilitator. I remember one large gathering I did with about 120 people, and many diverse and simmering conflicts that were rising to the surface. I called for 15 minutes of silence. These people did all have spiritual practices and asking them to be silent was a call to their practitioner selves, but even so many told me how difficult it was to sit in that silence. The result, however, I believe, was a general ability to be willing to slow down and reflect for the rest of the gathering and let the silence do the work of opening up resourcefulness between them.
The awkwardness is information. The response is trust. If trust can grow, the silence can become a powerful part of the dialogue, and the space can do its work.
Our back door, created by my friend and fellow islander Burns Jennings who died in February. We asked him to design a door that signifies a crossing into our family home. He was proud of this one.
"Every day is perfect if,
when you wake, you hear birds
in the garden..."
- Ann Margaret Lim, "Birdsong of Shaker Way"
That’s what we call it traditionally on Bowen Island, Juneuary. It is a traditional period of rain and cooler weather that drenches the coast for a while in June, around the summer solstice. Every year, there are a few hot days in May that fool us into believing that the summer has fully arrived and then most years, there is this period.
There is birdsong, but the spring dawn chorus of warblers and grosbeaks and rattling flickers has dulled a little. Instead there are the little questions that the towhees ask, and the resonant guttural calls of ravens going about their business in the tree tops. In the aftermath of rain, there is calm and settled grey that hangs over and before the mountains, sometimes sending wispy tendrils of mist across the ridge lines.
The ground smells amazing. Every flower releases its perfume to the damp air. The mock orange and the chamomile in our garden fills the space with scent. Raspberries demand to be picked, the final blush of spring’s peas swell with the rain. The lettuce is in its glory and the beans seem to grow while you watch.
On our little island a quiet grey weekend day like this one tends to dampen the number of visitors, except for those who are insistent on heading into the woods or up the mountain for a hike. That’s all good. It’s nice to have a bit of quiet in the Cove, and sometimes a cloudy grey day quiets the groups on the trails too. The rain brings reverence.
Yesterday we marked the passing of a well-loved Bowen Islander, Burns Jennings. Burns was a talented athlete, artist, craftsman and coach. He touched everyone around him all the time because he was one of the very few people I know who realized that his soul had been deposited in a time and place that allowed him to live life fully and completely. He feasted on opportunity to generate gratitude so that he could live with generosity. He never waited for a chance to act if it meant that he could create a thing of beauty, be it a piece of furniture, or a community based football club, or a perfect strike on a chinook salmon, or carving powder on bluebird day at Whistler.
His legacy was best captured by the fact that about 400 people showed up in the school gym to watch a slide show of his life and hear stories from close friends and families. And that was followed by a soccer tournament with 80 folks from 12 to 60+, including myself, which was a huge testament to the love of football he instilled in all of us.
Burns’ memorial was just one of a bunch of things happening on the island this weekend. Today, as I walked down to the village to get some supplies for making tortellini, there was an open house at the firehall, and our choir Carmina Bowena gave an impromptu flashmob performance of some of our repertoire. Yesterday a marimba ensemble was playing somewhere, there was a performance of Decho: River Journey by Theatre of Fire, there was a wedding.
Lots of little touches of community this weekend. Just the kind of thing for which Burns would have expressed deep gratitude.