In the beginning there was a word, the word, a word, I don’t know but that word doing its best o state afloat at the confluence of time and space spinning at the hot center of the minds-eye vortex had no choice but to go forth and multiply and…beget a Story
These are the first few lines of a prose poem called Story story, which will be shared in full later in this podcast. It comes from the soundtrack of a film of the same name that explores the evolution of "story" as an essential aspect of human development and history. In this episode I will share the story of Story story, what prompted it and how it evolved. Along the way we examine some threshold questions: Where do stories come from; what is their function, and most importantly, what is their power for good or ill?
From the Center for the Study of Art & Community, this is Change the Story / Change the World. I’m Bill Cleveland.
Part 1: Art and Upheaval
In the early spring of 2005, my wife Carla and I found ourselves unpacking in a small, well-appointed room in a 15th-century Italian palazzo named Villa Serbelloni, overlooking the blue expanses of Lake Como. We had traveled to northern Italy at the Rockefeller Foundation’s invitation to spend a month as residents of the Bellagio Retreat and Conference Center. I had come to write, and Carla, to paint. My book project, called Art and Upheaval, would tell the stories of artists working on what I was characterizing as the world’s frontlines, which translates literally as eleven communities across the globe facing extreme conflict and disruption.
During our time there, we shared meals and good cheer with the dozen or so artists and scholars who were our fellow residents. Many mornings Carla and I started our day across the breakfast table from a poet from Maine named Wesley McNair and his wife, Diane. Wesley’s poems, which I came to admire a great deal, were powerful, intense, and often very personal.
One morning, he shared a work in progress describing an abusive encounter between a New York couple and a clerk in a roadside store near Wesley’s home in rural Maine. Like most of his work, it was short and unsparing. By the time he looked up from the page, there was no mistaking the deep sense of violation he felt when fair weather and fancy cars heralded the annual migration of a particular species of callous interloper to his beloved rural refuge.
Over the next day or so, I pondered the story — particularly the blithely self-absorbed couple whose fast-accelerating BMW concluded the poem. No doubt, the clerk had been mistreated, and by extension, the community sullied. But I also felt an intense curiosity about what those two were talking about as they continued up the coast. Did they have any idea what they had left in their wake? Were they oblivious, or sorry? Did they argue? I guess you could say I was interested in the “other story” revealed in that disturbing scene in the store. Who were these people, and why did
