story time

22/02/2020

Week 4’s class entailed storytelling. When you think of storytelling you naturally go towards fantasy. A princess stuck in a faraway medieval castle needing to be rescued by a great knight… No? Might be slightly influenced by Shrek and my Disney childhood but it’s a story nonetheless. Story telling can tell us about human thought, morals and even rights. It can also focus on the entire population, an ethnicity or even a single person. Everyone has a story to tell and these blogs are just the surface to my own.

The class started with a researcher’s quest on telling the story of poor black Americans and their involvement in gangs. From my own point of view asking someone what it’s like to be a poor black American can never end nicely. Getting a “fuck you” is more than polite. But as this researcher delved deeper and deeper he started to unravel the people behind the gang actions and more so learned with them, joining them in their day to day learning about each other as friends would after catching up. You see telling a story shouldn’t be from outsider perspective, unless of course the subject in question is either simply fabricated or is unable to communicate with us (animals, plants etc).

But stories don’t always have to be about the past, or even the present. Syd Mead, a pioneer in futurism told many stories of alternate futures to our own. Futures that right now we could only wish were real. His automotive design in particular intrigued me. The streamline look to his work is somewhat familiar and personally I feel his futuristic story has been told by the likes of Tesla and the new age of electric cars. It feels almost eerie to see and out of world concept come to life before my very eyes, though; at a much smaller scale (for now that is).

The thing about story telling is that it’s personal to each and every one of us. In the same way a concert can be experienced in a different way by two different people a story can be shared differently. I have often used storytelling to express myself: my emotions, my interests or even a random idea that feels important enough to bring to life and become a fully fledged STORY. It feels difficult for some people to put into words what you are feeling at that exact moment but immortalising it in a ‘scéailín beag bídeach’ can take away the personal aspect of a single person’s happy, tragic or even confusing experience. Stories are different to diaries and personal emotions because stories are meant to be shared. Shared with friends, community and the whole world; a way of education and a way of taking the ‘I’ out of our.