Storytelling is Everywhere

Most of us love to storytell or hear stories. I know I loved and still love to hear stories from others. I grew up in a household where storytelling happened while I helped my mom cook or when I worked in the field with my dad. Growing up my much older brothers often said "when you were little you use to...." Of course, I loved to hear things about ME as a child! Now, I treasure these stories. As a child sitting with the adults I was a captive audience as I listened to their stories of the past.

We all participate in storytelling but may not call it that. Sitting around over a cup of coffee and sharing what is happening in our lives is storytelling. Calling, emailing, writing, texting, you-tube, and blogging is a way to share one's story. Using a digital frame or photo album to display personal events and invite conversation about the pictures is storytelling. Even movies is a way to explain particular events.

What makes storytelling important to us? It is a way to share an event and how the events affected us. It is a way to connect with others, celebrate, share challenges and tranfer knowledge.

Communities may not think that storytelling fits for them. But storytelling is already very common for communities. Community websites, local groups with blogs, books about local events, newspaper stories, plaques on buildings, a student thank you card about the field trip to the local grocery store, and numerous other avenues is a way to portray a community story. Snapshot stories or captions about an event or person in a leisure guide are even a manner of storytelling.

The creative side of storytelling can be inspired by using puppetry, music, drama, theatre, costume, dance, art, and several other mediums. Have you ever watched a cultural event or observed an artist at work and wondered about the story behind the tools, costume, or instrument? The curiousity the drives us to find out more about something is quite powerful and rewarding.

Alberta Community and Co-operative Association was represented at a "Growing Rural Tourism" conference where I participated in a storytelling session. Like the Co-operative Association, ACE Communities encourages the communities we work with to share stories in order to communicate successes and experiences. This sharing opens doors for communities to learn from one another. It is a way to discover more about how a community is growing, learning, and changing. The storytelling is an opportunity to understand different ways of doing things and a way to identify assets, both intangible and tangible.

Equally important, storytelling is a way that communities can raise the profile of rural Alberta and share the importance of rural communities.