I find when I do a panel discussion that the profound changes in and realizations from my thinking occur afterwards, not during. So it was when the Australian Writers Guild got me up on stage at the local RSL Club last Thursday night with Marcus Gillezeau and Jennifer Wilson.
We were competing with Zumba and Tai Kwon Do classes. Downstairs the joint was being cash-flowed by the steady press of fingers on slot machine buttons. I’d come from a day of shooting a corporate video at a fish-processing works.
The Returned Servicemen’s League came into being as a response to the valor of Australian soldiers in various wars. I remembered the RSL club in my home town in the 1950s. Squadron Leader Harvey Charlesworth (school principal) hammering away at the piano whilst my father, Lt. Bob Emery, MM, (local farmer) screwed up his face and attacked his cornet. Ten years earlier both had been scared witless in and over the New Guinea jungle. Dad carried (and played) his cornet right through the campaign. He’d won his Military Medal as a sergeant and received a field promotion soon after.
Many years later – and several years apart – we would see both my mother and my father off into the nether world at that same club. She and the RSL Ladies Auxiliary had run the dinners, the dances, the social events that held that small, coastal community together. Holding a community together was something she modeled for me, both at the RSL and as Anglican church organist and member of the church council, and as the mother of four children on an isolated farm.
Now I was in a big city RSL club arguing for the merits of ‘digital storytelling’: new media vs old media. What were the differences? What was the way forward? Is there such a thing as ‘new media’? What is the place of the author in it?
Well, my first communications medium was a school exercise book interfacing with a Post Office pen and nib and a standard school inkwell at the top of my desk. My first typewriter was an Olivetti Dora portable that sat atop my backpack as I hitch-hiked Australia. I wrote my first book of short stories on that machine. Now I had a Macbook with enough computing power to fly me to the moon and back.
I’ve always been an author. But now I realize that I’ve also always been a story-maker. There’s a difference. As a child on the farm I would create and organize vast, interactive games for my brother and me and our friends. I would create the story universe: the overarching war-game; the city; the family; the doctors and nurses scenario; the highwayman and the lady; the Cowboys and Indians scenario. The others would contribute their own scenarios, narratives, responses, within that overarching universe. These were narratives created and sustained by the participants. User Generated Content, as we say nowadays.
But I got seduced by the power of the myth of the sole creator. The writer as the individual voice rising out of the collective. The only one in the village with the skill and power to tell the village stories. I worshipped at the altar of the Great Writers. My desire was to be one of them. To join the Elect (and select) Priesthood of Story. I traveled the land with my Olivetti listening to and writing down the stories others told me. I re-told those stories as ‘my’ stories. After all, I owned the technology (the Olivetti), I had the programming skills (the ability to string sentences together), I sourced the delivery medium (the magazine). I kept the cheque.
It was fascinating at the RSL Club forum to hear how passionately the Writers Guild members clung to the myth of the creator God/writer. Joseph Campbell was evoked. My suggestion that we open up our story worlds so that others could tell their stories within them was met with fear, hostility, and a condescending dismissal of such stories as lacking the integrative art of the true storyteller to ‘make it into a story’. The raw details of the untutored recollection of events was not a ‘story’ until an author had hammered it into respectable shape. Perhaps had fitted the Hero’s Journey template over it. Only then had it passed through the fire and been stamped with the stamp of authorship, so it no longer belonged to the community but to the author.
No, ordinary people could not be trusted to tell their extraordinary stories.
I recalled a community story workshop I’d run near my home-town after major bush-fires had devastated the farms and pine forests there. Such stories! Such raw, vivid, emotion and trauma. The decision whether to stay and fight the firestorm or flee. Husband against wife. Male testosterone pumping, looking for a fight…even a fight with an enemy way, way beyond his powers. The woman’s journey into the smoke with her children, pursued by fireballs. Car crashes in the smoke and confusion. She never saw him again.
What could I do in the face of all this? I could hold space for them. I could acknowledge their pain and loss and grief and I could help them focus on the craft of storytelling. I could get them to mold ‘stories’ out of their raw experience. I began to see how ‘story’ – an artificial reconstruction of trauma – could serve as a path to healing.
That was a long time ago. But pain and trauma is always with us. It is the core of ‘story’. It is the essence of human communications. We cannot take away from people the ownership of their own experience. We have to honor it and – as professional story-makers – offer what we can to them to enable them to reach out and tell their experience. That is my philosophy of interactive story-making.
That is what I can offer. That is why I have become passionate about the potential for digital media to act as the holding space for people’s stories, and for the ‘author’s’ role as the mediator who can work with those people and their stories and create a rich and binding tapestry of human emotion linking whole communities together once again.
