Improving Our Companionship with Stories

The full-day workshop will focus on how stories work: the work they do for people, work they do with people, and work they do on people. Stories are understood as companions to human lives, and like all companions, they can be good or bad. Stories often improve life, but they also make it more dangerous.
The first session will develop these ideas of stories as vital actors and as companions. We will consider how people are affected by stories. The second session considers what makes a narration worth calling a story, versus narrations that are not stories. Stories have particular capacities, such as the ability to create suspense. The work stories are able to do depends on these capacities.
The third session moves to interpreting stories. Five responsive questions are proposed. The point of these questions is to open a dialogue with the storyteller and with the story. In the final session, we will address the most important and difficult issue: when are stories good companions and when are they bad companions? Three principles for making life-with-stories less dangerous are proposed.