Here are two sites that offer slightly different takes on storytelling and health:

Healing Story Alliance is a special interest group of the National Storytelling Network that "explore[s] and promote[s] the use of storytelling in healing. Our goal for this special interest group is to share our experience and our skills, to increase our knowledge of stories and our knowledge of the best ways to use stories to inform, inspire, nurture and heal. We also wish to reach beyond our storytelling community to share with those in other service professions; therapists, clergy, health care practitioners of all kinds, anyone who can see the benefit of story as a tool for healing."

Medicine Chest is an online collection of traditional remedies and folk wisdom to do with health and healing. It aims to gather and record traditional know-how before it gets lost so it can be passed on for the benefit of future generations.

On this site you can upload your health-related tips, stories and information that come from traditional sources such as your own family. You can watch topics unfold as people discuss their own experiences alongside related scientific evidence and other relevant perspectives. Find stories here.

The cover article of the current issue of American Scholar, published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, carries the headline “The End of the Black American Narrative,” with this subhead:

A new century calls for new stories grounded in the present, leaving behind the painful history of slavery and its consequences

(Not surprisingly, Barack Obama is pictured on the cover and on the Web page carrying the article, and it thus seems appropriate to publish this entry on the day Obama accepts the nomination of his party for President of the United States).

Here is how author Charles Johnson, the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professor for Excellence in English at the University of Washington, Seattle, characterizes the current black American narrative:

It is a very old narrative, one we all know quite well, and it is a tool we use, consciously or unconsciously, to interpret or to make sense of everything that has happened to black people in this country since the arrival of the first 20 Africans at the Jamestown colony in 1619. A good story always has a meaning (and sometimes layers of meaning); it also has an epistemological mission: namely, to show us something. It is an effort to make the best sense we can of the human experience, and I believe that we base our lives, actions, and judgments as often on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (even when they are less than empirically sound or verifiable) as we do on the severe rigor of reason. This unique black American narrative, which emphasizes the experience of victimization, is quietly in the background of every conversation we have about black people, even when it is not fully articulated or expressed. It is our starting point, our agreed-upon premise, our most important presupposition for dialogues about black America.

Johnson begins his argument by analyzing just what a story is, asking:

• How do we shape one?
• How many different forms can it take?
• What do stories tell us about our world?
• What details are necessary, and which ones are unimportant for telling it well?
• Does the story work, technically?
• And, if so, then, what does it say?

These are the questions he tells his students they must ask of a story, adding that a story must offer “a conflict that is clearly presented, one that we care about, a dilemma or disequilibrium for the protagonist that we, as readers, emotionally identify with.”

Does the black American story meet the criteria? Yes, Johnson says, it “beautifully embodies all these narrative virtues.”

Johnson builds his argument by summarizing the horrors of slavery and subsequent oppression. He calls the Civil Rights Movement “the most important and transformative domestic event in American history” after the Civil War. In sum, “The conflict of this story is first slavery, then segregation and legal disenfranchisement. The meaning of the story is group victimization, and every black person is the story’s protagonist.”

Johnson invokes the words of W.E.B. DuBois and the success of today’s prominent African-Americans (such as Obama and Oprah) to “challenge, culturally and politically, an old group narrative that fails at the beginning of this new century to capture even a fraction of our rich diversity and heterogeneity.” He critiques Louis Farrakhan and discusses a scholarly debacle in which a 19th Century black woman writer turned out to be white, “a cautionary tale for scholars and an example of how our theories, our explanatory models, and the stories we tell ourselves can blind us to the obvious, leading us to see in matters of race only what we want to see based on our desires and political agendas.”

I am vastly oversimplifying here and drastically summarizing when I’m longing to paste the whole article into this space. Bottom line: It’s an important article not only for what it says about Black Americans but for what its says about story and narrative.

And what narrative should replace the existing one? Johnson writes:

In the 21st century, we need new and better stories, new concepts, and new vocabularies and grammar based not on the past but on the dangerous, exciting, and unexplored present, with the understanding that each is, at best, a provisional reading of reality, a single phenomenological profile that one day is likely to be revised, if not completely overturned. These will be narratives that do not claim to be absolute truth, but instead more humbly present themselves as a very tentative thesis that must be tested every day in the depths of our own experience and by all the reliable evidence we have available, as limited as that might be. … These will be narratives of individuals, not groups. And is this not exactly what Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of when he hoped a day would come when men and women were judged not by the color of their skin, but instead by their individual deeds and actions, and the content of their character?

Certainly Obama’s acceptance tonight of the presidential nomination (on the 45th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech) is a triumph of the individual.

Daryn Kagan’s online community features a daily Web cast of stories that “Show the World What is Possible.” The idea behind these stories is inspiration and triumph of the human spirit. Of course, all the stories are archived on the site and can be browsed under these categories: Animals, Artists, Business, Celebrities, For Charity, Heroism, Kids, Love, Over 60, Overcoming Obstacles, Sports, and World Events.

A former CNN anchor, Kagan devised a way to upload a quality video daily to her site without spending a dime, as she explains in this video.

Kagan is always looking for people to tell their stories of what’s possible, and she has written a book, What’s Possible: 50 True Stories of People Who Dared To Dream They Could Make a Difference. And who better to tell about the book than Kagan herself in another video.

Got this e-mail this week from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee:

John McCain’s top economic honcho (Phil Gramm) called America “a nation of whiners” and said that we’re only in “a mental recession.” Are we all just imagining $4.00 a gallon gas? Were the 438,000 jobs that America lost already this year all just in our heads? Tell John McCain that what you just paid for gas and groceries this week was no figment of your imagination.

The DCCC is collecting stories here, but I hope the organization will provide a place where these stories can be read. I would further be interested in whether they have any impact.

I must have deleted it since it was in the past, but at some point, I had posted about a session at the Skoll World Forum called Storytelling in the Modern World .

A couple of venues are available for those who’d like to learn what was said in the session.

There is apparently video, though I was unable to see it (Real Media Player rarely works on my Mac).

And Nick Temple has blogged about the session here, in kind of a bare-bones, outline form.

Erin Hoover Barnett recently reported in The Oregonian on how stories of change are healing neighborhoods through the Restorative Listening Project.

Some snippets of the article that show how these stories of change can heal:

The city of Portland is using a deceptively simple technique — storytelling — to confront the complicated issue of gentrification. And it’s bringing surprisingly powerful results. The Restorative Listening Project, run by the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, invites blacks to tell whites how it has felt to see them move into and remake inner North and Northeast Portland — for decades, the heart of Oregon’s African American community. Some question how storytelling can make a difference after housing prices already have forced out so many. Yet similar projects that grappled with much weightier issues — the horrors of apartheid, the Holocaust and World War II — show how the fundamental acts of telling and listening can heal… The Portland project is rooted in the principle of restorative justice: that healing starts when the sufferer can describe the harm and the listener can acknowledge it.

Barnett also quotes documentary filmmaker Ken Burns on how “stories reveal our shared humanity. Seeing what you have in common opens the door to becoming allies.” Burns says that hearing about someone with whom the listener can identify is “what storytelling is.”

Other links about this project:
City of Portland’s Restorative Gentrification Listening Project
Radio story on the project

Here at the conference I'm attending, I learned that the viral story of Johnny the Bagger is highly popular on the Internet and being used to inspire better customer service. It's more than just about customer service though.

While Johnny's story has inspired many, Barbara Glanz, in turn, inspired Johnny by talking about making people feel special, creating memories, putting your personal signature on your job, and changing the culture of the workplace.

The video slideshow says it best. And shows the power of story to motivate change.

Launched in 2006, the Campaign for Love & Forgiveness uses PBS documentaries, community activities, online resources, and networking opportunities to encourage reflection and conversation about how love and forgiveness can effect meaningful change in individuals and society. Through community conversations, the campaign aims to create a meaningful national dialogue that will bring about positive changes for individuals, their relationships, and their communities.

Visitors are invited to write love/forgiveness stories of their own, tell it via audio over the phone, or submit a video. Visitors can also experience stories that have been submitted.

[ A tip of the hat to Stephanie West Allen for alerting me to this site. ]

One of my most significant storytelling interests is the idea of using stories to spark change. That's the concept behind the site Stories for Change, described this way:

Stories for Change aims to connect and extend the network of workshop facilitators and organizations that have come together in community-based digital storytelling workshops. The site provides a space for members and visitors to share their favorite curriculum ideas, post the stories they create, and engage in meaningful conversations around the stories they watch. The power of community digital storytelling workshops rests in their ability to inspire, connect, and incite action within and between local groups; the goal of Stories for Change is to further nurture that spirit online.

The site provides the opportunity to upload digital stories (216 populate the site at this writing) and has a nice Resources section, featuring Articles, Case Studies, Curricula, Links, Methodology, Presentations, and Tutorials. Forums on the site enable visitors to discuss the site and various aspects of digital storytelling for change. Digital storytelling events also are listed.

I continue to be fascinated by the idea of various forms of narrative therapy and using narrative to change our lives. In an unattributed article (which may or may not be intended as a review of or excerpt from the book Narrative Therapy by Freedman and Combs) here, narrative therapy is described this way:

The Narrative Therapy is an approach to counselling that centres people as the experts in their own lives. This therapy intends to view problems as separate entities to people, assuming that the individual’s set of skills, experience and mindset will assist him/her reduce the influence of problems throughout life. This therapeutic approach intends to place the individual in both the protagonist and author roles: switching the view from a narrow perspective to a systemic and more flexible stance.

Noting that the most important aspect of narrative therapy is to empower the client, the article goes on to explain how changing the story (constructing the alternate narrative) can change one's life:

The focus of Narrative Therapy is to explore the strengths and positive aspects of an individual through his or her narrative. Therefore, the main objective of this therapeutic approach is to improve the person’s perspective internally (reflective) and externally (towards the world and others). Alternative narratives are a simple way to relate to this concept. This technique works in combination with unique outcomes. How? The individual will reconstruct a personal story using unique outcomes, therefore, focusing on the positive aspects of a previous story in order to achieve a desired outcome. This process is based on the premise that any person can continually and actively re-author their own life.

A quote from Jean Houston (not from the article) vividly captures this process:

If you keep telling the same sad small story, you will keep living the same sad small life.