See a photo of Amy Zalman, her bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Amy Zalman, Question 2:

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/ narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

A: My love of words and stories has no beginning; all I know is that some of my favorite childhood memories are of lying under our dining room table and reading books, or reading by flashlights after hours in bed, or riding my bicycle back and forth to the library with a basket full of books. I spent a lot of hours alone; stories kept me company.

My professional engagement with narrative comes out of the war in Iraq. The communications firm I owned then was on a team competing for a military contract to produce info-tainment products for Middle Eastern audiences. It felt somewhat surreal to sit around a DC boardroom table with military intelligence folks coming in and out, Madison Avenue advertisers, defense contractors, and social scientists all trying to come up with soap operas and comic books and roadside billboard ads to dissuade Iraqis from “terrorism.” There was minimal understanding of the Middle East, a poorly understood global media environment, and a lot of money flying around. Together these produced communications ideas that ranged from slightly mad to offensive. Obviously, there was something deeply misguided about how the United States was trying to communicate with foreign publics, but I didn’t know quite how to articulate it. One day, I picked up a book in a local bookstore with an essay by literary theorist J. Hillis Miller [pictured] in it on narrative. In it he said,

A story is a way of doing things with words. It makes something happen in the real world, for example, it can propose modes of selfhood or ways of behaving that are then imitated in the real world. It has been said, along these lines, that we would not know if we were in love if we had not read novels. Seen from this point of view, fictions may be said to have a tremendous importance not as the accurate reflections of a culture, but as the makers of that culture and as the unostentatious but therefore all the more effective policemen of that culture. Fictions keep us in line and tend to make us more like our neighbors.

That was an “a-ha” moment for me. The U.S. government had been saying repeatedly that the United States had to “tell its story better” to the rest of the world, to Muslims in particular. But we did not at an institutional level understand at all that there is no binary “us” and “them” but rather many different stories of world history that actually involve all of us, but assign radically different meaning to history, and that propose different visions of the future.

Miller’s reminder that stories produce social reality gave me a way to think about what is wrong with going around the world “telling our story” as a way of generating a productive international environment. “Telling our story” presumes we have monologic relationship with a passive, blank slate of a world. To produce a future in which everyone feels like a stakeholder requires tapping into others’ existing narratives and finding ways to insert new storylines that shift away from unproductive paths. This seems to be a better route than hitting people over the head with stories about liberty and freedom, as if they had no native vision of this fundamental agenda shared by all modern people, although we express that intention in different idioms.

Shortly after reading Miller’s essay, I completed a paper I called “A Narrative Theory Approach to U.S. Strategic Communications.” I presented it to a military audience, and I have been fascinated since then about the potential for insights from the worlds of poets and artists to inform national security strategy. That potential is insufficiently explored, and as a line of inquiry it lets me live at the intersection of things I love most — language and poetry, international affairs and cultures, and strategy.