Now please take a minute to welcome Scott Dresser and Christie Constantine, the new residents who love the house just as much and plan to be in it forever and ever.
The postcard didn’t mention the sale price of the home. That seemed like an oversight at first, but it was actually a deft bit of Conceptual Age marketing. The price the house sold for is easy to find—in the newspaper, on the Internet, in neighborhood chitchat. Besides, the houses here are similar enough that their selling prices don’t vary all that much. So despite realtors’ persistent efforts, it’s doubtful that a postcard celebrating a high price would be enough on its own to persuade a potential seller to sign up with a particular realtor. But selling a house you’ve lived in for half a century is not simply a financial decision; it’s also an emotional one. And what better way to make that high-touch connection—and for this realtor to distinguish her services from her number-happy competitors—than with a story?
Or take another example of narrative’s role in a time of abundance. I was at the store one afternoon picking up food for dinner, and I decided to grab a few bottles of wine. The selection was good but modest—maybe fifty bottles in all. And I quickly zeroed in on three inexpensive reds. All three were about the same price—nine or ten dollars each. All three seemed roughly the same quality. How to decide? I looked at the bottles. Two of them had labels filled with those fancy wine adjectives. But the third bottle—2 Brothers Big Tattoo Red—told me a story:
The idea for this wine comes from two brothers, Erik and Alex Bartholomaus. They wanted to sell a great wine, sourced by Alex, labeled with Erik’s art, in a non-serious way for a good cause. Their goal was to pay homage to their late mother who suffered an untimely death due to cancer. . . . Alex and Erik will donate 50 cents from the sale of each bottle of Big Tattoo Red to Hospice of Northern Virginia and/or various cancer research funds in the name of Liliana S. Bartholomaus. Thanks to your support we have donated approximately $75,000 from the sales of our first release, and hopefully much more in the future. Alex and Erik thank you for purchasing a bottle of Big Tattoo Red in honor of their mother.
Guess which wine I bought?
The Story of Healing
Modern medicine is a marvel. Powerful machines, like the MRI that took pictures of my brain, are letting us glimpse our body’s inner workings. New drugs and medical devices are saving many lives and improving many more. Yet, those spectacular advances have often come at the expense of a more mundane, though no less important, aspect of care. The medical system can “completely eliminate the person’s story,” says Dr. Jack Coulehan of Stony Brook University Hospital in New York. “Unfortunately, medicine sees anecdote as the lowest form of science.”7 You’ve probably had this experience yourself. You’re waiting in the exam room at your doctor’s office. When the doctor comes in, two things are almost certain to happen next. You’ll begin telling a story. And your doctor will interrupt you. Twenty years ago, when researchers videotaped doctor-patient encounters in an exam room, they found that doctors interrupted their patients after an average of twenty-one seconds. When another set of researchers repeated the study more recently, doctors had improved. They now waited an average of twenty-three seconds before butting in.
But that rushed just-the-facts approach to patient care may be changing, thanks in large part to the work of Dr. Rita Charon, a Columbia University Medical School professor who is attempting to place story at the heart of diagnosis and healing. When Charon was a young internist doing rounds at a hospital, she made a startling discovery: much of what she did as a doctor revolved around stories. Patients explained their ailments in narratives. Doctors repeated stories of their own. Illness itself unfolded as a narrative. Narrative was everywhere. Everywhere—except in the medical school curriculum or the consciousness of students and teachers. So Charon picked up a PhD in English to go with her MD—and then set about reforming medical education. She launched the narrative medicine movement in a 2001 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that called for a whole-minded approach to medical care:
“Stories—that’s how people make sense of what’s happening to them when they get sick. They tell stories about themselves. Our ability as doctors to treat and heal is bound up in our ability to accurately perceive a patient’s story. If you can’t do that, you’re working with one hand tied behind your back.”
—DR. HOWARD BRODY,
family practice
physician
A scientifically competent medicine alone cannot help a patient grapple with the loss of health or find meaning in suffering. Along with scientific ability, physicians need the ability to listen to the narratives of the patient, grasp and honor their meanings, and be moved to act on the patient’s behalf.8
Today, at Columbia, all second-year medical students take a seminar in narrative medicine in addition to their hard-core science classes. There they learn to listen more empathically to the stories their patients tell and to “read” those stories with greater acuity. Instead of asking a list of computerlike diagnostic questions, these young doctors broaden their inquiry. “Tell me where it hurts” becomes “Tell me about your life.” The goal is empathy, which studies have shown declines in students with every year they spend in medical school. And the result is both high touch and high concept. Studying narrative helps a young doctor relate better to patients and to assess a patient’s current condition in the context of that person’s full life story. Being a good doctor, Charon says, requires narrative competence—“the competence that human beings use to absorb, interpret, and respond to stories.”9
Narrative medicine is part of a wider trend to incorporate an R-Directed approach into what has long been a bastion of L-Directed muscle-flexing. Fifteen years ago, about one out of three American medical schools offered humanities courses. Today, three out of four do.10 Bellevue, the legendary New York City public hospital, publishes its own journal—the Bellevue Literary Review. (Literary journals have also popped up at medical schools at Columbia, Penn State University, and the University of New Mexico.) The editor in chief of the Bellevue journal, Dr. Danielle Ofri, who teaches med students, requires her young charges to write up at least one of their patient histories as a narrative—to tell the patient’s story from the patient’s point of view. “That’s not different from what the novelist wants to do,” Ofri says. “I think we can take people who are basically empathetic and well-meaning and give them better skills to connect with their patients.”11
Of course, narrative competence cannot replace technical expertise. A doctor who listens empathically to her patient’s story but forgets to take his blood pressure or prescribes the wrong drug is not long for the profession. But Charon’s approach can help young physicians imbue their work with greater empathy. (I’ll discuss empathy in greater detail in Chapter 7.) For example, Charon’s students all keep two charts on each patient. On one chart, they include the quantitative information and medical lingo of a typical hospital chart. But on the other—what she calls the “parallel chart”—students write narratives about their patients and chronicle their own emotions. According to the first study to test this method’s effectiveness, students who kept a parallel chart had better relationships with patients—and better interviewing and technical skills—than their counterparts who did not.12 Stories alone won’t cure the sick. But combined with modern technology, they have an undeniable healing power. This may be the future of medicine: physicians who can both think rigorously and feel empathically, physicians who can both analyze a test and appreciate a story—physicians with a whole new mind.
“If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”
—BARRY LOPEZ,
author of Arctic Dreams
WE ARE OUR STORIES. We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves. That has always been true.
But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent, in a time of abundance, when many of us are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purpose.
More than a means to sell a house or even to deepen a doctor’s compassion, Story represents a pathway to understanding that doesn’t run through the left side of the brain. We can see this yearning for self-knowledge through stories in many places—in the astonishingly popular “scrapbooking” movement, where people assemble the artifacts of their lives into a narrative that tells the world, and maybe themselves, who they are and what they’re about, and in the surging popularity of genealogy as millions search the Web to piece together their family histories.
What these efforts reveal is a hunger for what stories can provide—context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters. The Conceptual Age can remind us what has always been true but rarely been acted upon—that we must listen to each other’s stories and that we are each the authors of our own lives.
*The answers: Question 1—$136 billion. Question 2—Chess grand master Garry Kasparov.
Write a Mini-Saga.
Writing anything is hard work. Writing a short story is really hard work. And writing a novel, a play, or a screenplay can take years. So go easy on yourself by writing a mini-saga. Mini-sagas are extremely short stories—just fifty words long . . . no more, no less. Yet, like all stories, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. London’s Telegraph newspaper once sponsored an annual mini-saga contest—and the results showed how much creativity a person can pack into exactly fifty words. Try writing a mini-saga yourself. It’s addicting.Here are two excellent examples to hook you:
A Life
BY JANE ROSENBERG, BRIGHTON, UNITED KINGDOM
Joey, third of five, left home at sixteen, travelled the country and wound up in Nottingham with a wife and kids. They do shifts, the kids play out and ends never meet. Sometimes he’d give anything to walk away but he knows she’s only got a year and she doesn’t.
A Dream So Real
BY PATRICK FORSYTH, MALDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Staying overnight with friends, his sleep was disturbed by a vivid dream: a thief broke in, stole everything in the flat—then carefully replaced every single item with an exact replica.
“It felt so real,” he told his friends in the morning.
Horrified, uncomprehending, they replied, “But who are you?”
Enlist in StoryCorps.
In the middle of New York’s Grand Central Terminal sits a strange-looking square hut. It’s called a StoryBooth, and if you’re in New York, you should check it out. For ten dollars you can book an hour in the booth and record a broadcast-quality interview with someone (your ninety-year-old great-grandmother, zany Uncle Ted, the mysterious guy down the street) whose story you’re eager to hear and preserve. It’s all part of StoryCorps, an extraordinary national project “to instruct and inspire Americans to record each other’s stories in sound.” The effort, the brainchild of MacArthur fellow David Isay, is modeled after the Works Progress Administration oral history project of the 1930s. All the stories submitted end up in the StoryCorps archives at the U.S. Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center, where they will be available for posterity. But you needn’t go to Grand Central, or even New York, to participate. The StoryCorps Web site offers StoryKits to help you do it yourself. “StoryCorps celebrates our shared humanity and collective identity,” the organizers say. “It captures and defines the stories that bond us. We’ve found that the process of interviewing a friend, neighbor, or family member can have a profound impact on both the interviewer and interviewee. We’ve seen people change, friendships grow, families walk away feeling closer, understanding each other better. Listening, after all, is an act of love.” (More info: www.storycorps.net)
Whip Out the Tape Recorder.
If StoryCorps is too complicated for your tastes, try a more modest version of your own. Find a friend or relative, sit him down, turn on a tape recorder, and begin asking him questions about his life. How did you and your spouse meet? What was your first job? When was the first time you were away from home overnight? Who was the worst teacher you ever had? What was the happiest day of your life? The saddest? The most terrifying? What was the best decision you ever made? You’ll be amazed at the stories that pour out—and you’ll be thrilled to have them recorded for yourself and others.
Visit a Storytelling Festival.
A great way to sample the incredible diversity of stories and storytellers in the world is to visit one of the growing number of storytelling festivals. At these two-or three-day gatherings, hundreds of people—some professionals, some not—take the stage to tell tales. Some of the storytellers at these events are a bit shellacked—in a twangy cornpone kind of way. But you’re almost certain to stumble upon some amazing stories and some fascinating people recounting them. Here are seven of the best festivals.
National Storytelling Festival— The granddaddy of American storytelling festivals, attended each year by more than ten thousand people.
Where: Jonesborough, Tennessee
When: October
More info: www.storytellingcenter.com
Yukon International Storytelling Festival— Now in its second decade, this festival features storytellers from the “circumpolar world”—the Yukon, Greenland, Iceland—telling stories under the endless sun of early spring. Some of the participants tell their stories in dying native languages in an effort to keep those languages alive.
Where: Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada
When: June
More info: www.storytelling.yk.net
Bay Area Storytelling Festival— This weekend of outdoor storytelling is one of the best festivals in the western United States.
Where: El Sobrante, California
When: May
More info: www.bayareastorytelling.org
Digital Storytelling Festival— A wonderful gathering with an array of speakers and entertainers using computers and other digital tools to craft compelling tales. (See “Experiment with Digital Storytelling” on page 125.) The festival was launched by digital storytelling pioneer Dana Atchley, who died well before his time.
Where: Sedona, Arizona
When: June
More info: www.dstory.com
Cape Clear Island International Storytelling Festival— Held on Ireland’s southernmost island, this festival attracts an eclectic mix of storytellers from all over the world. Most of the stories are in English, but some are in Irish.
Where: Cape Clear Island, Republic of Ireland
When: September
More info: www.indigo.ie/~stories
Sharing the Fire, New England Storytelling Conference— One of the oldest regional festivals in the United States, this event draws the best storytellers in the eastern United States.
Where: Cambridge, Massachusetts
When: September
More info: www.lanes.org/stf/sharing_the_fire.html
Get One Story.
Reading short stories is a fine way to sharpen your Story aptitude, but how can you find the good ones without poring through dozens of highbrow literary journals? One answer: let Maribeth Batcha and Hannah Tinti do the sifting for you with their innovative One Story. This publication delivers exactly what its title promises. Every three weeks or so, Batcha and Tinti send subscribers . . . one story. It’s printed as a pocket-sized booklet that’s easy to stick in your pocket or toss in your bag. The stories are usually great. And there’s an elegant simplicity to reading a single story all by itself—rather than jammed between a bunch of other stories or wedged between a ten-thousand-word article about Kazakhstan and a review of the anniversary edition of Jude the Obscure in the New Yorker. I’ve subscribed to One Story for a few years now—and given subscriptions (a mere $21 per year) as gifts. (More info: www.one-story.com)
Riff on Opening Lines.
Call me Ishmael. That’s not my name—but Herman Melville
’s famous opening line does offer some guidance for sharpening your narrative capabilities. Begin by underlining a sentence in a book or magazine. Then craft a story that evolves from this “opening line.” Or do your own form of storytelling improv by asking someone else to feed you an opening line—and then use it as a springboard for your story. You can also turn this into a group activity. Ask everyone to write an opening line on an index card. Toss the cards into a hat. Then, taking turns, have each person draw a card and, on the spot, tell a story that begins with the line on the card. In a business setting, apply this exercise to a particular product, service, or experience in your company. How can an opening line chosen more or less at random lead to a compelling tale about your offering? This ad-hoc, story-based approach might help you harpoon the big ideas swimming around on the right side of your brain.
Play Photo Finish.
Instead of using words, turn to pictures for story inspiration. Select a photo (from a newspaper, a magazine, even a dusty shoebox) and fashion a tale about what is happening in the picture. Challenge yourself not only to describe the obvious, but also to tell the “back story,” the part that isn’t there or isn’t initially apparent. Art and photography on display in museums (or on museum web sites) offer another rich source of material.