It has taken me a while to find them because they are in various different disciplines in their various universities - English Literature, Media, Health, Theatre. But their 'nest' is undeniably the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at the University of Glamorgan, where among many other projects they hold an annual symposium. Hamish Fyfe, Karen Lewis, Patrick Ryan, Mike Wilson, Emily Underwood-Lee and others involved in organising the event - thanks for a wonderful and stimulating weekend.
The incredible currency of the words 'storytelling' and 'narrative' at present make it hard to focus on the value of the storytelling exchange. Anything from newspaper articles to Hollywood films to letters to problem pages can be defined as storytelling and often is, but the effect of this can be to deny the special status of A Story, told to A Person (or Persons) by Another Person. Yet over-reaction against this tendency can lead to zealous policing of the boundaries of Proper Storytelling and perhaps fossilisation of certain habits and customs which have accreted in the storytelling revival. You can see this in the confused reaction to 'digital storytelling' - either there is a wholesale, postmodern acceptance that we are in a brave new dawn where everyone is a storyteller, or a deploring of the loss of human contact and community bonding.
This symposium was, in contrast, a wonderful exploration of how the kernel of storytelling is now situated in the digital era. Prof Mike Wilson's keynote on the multiplicity of the voice gave me a new way of looking at the storytelling act itself - and pricked me to think more about listenership and the voice of the listener. His and Karen Lewis' work on Project Aspect (engaging the public in climate change debates through digital and conversational storytelling) was particularly interesting in this regard. Hamish Fyfe's provocation suggested that the digital era might have the potential for new forms of storytelling to emerge, but that a cacophony of individual voices telling their own emotional and personal experiences does not necessarily add up to this. Instead, this 'new vernacular' needs to engage with the power structures that permeate the internet as much as any other place - and perhaps seek formats which enable a 'collective howl'.
Just to mention a couple more: all filmmakers seem to describe themselves as storytellers, but Chris Morris really is - or rather, he is a story-convenor. His work over the past few decades has genuinely given voice to deprived children, and student sex workers, among others. His stripped-down style allows for modern storytelling that packs a punch - and it was chastening to hear that the BBC is losing the appetite for his stories, which do not always fit into their preferred narrative structures. And Lisa Heledd Jones' work was interesting for having travelled from digital storytelling to oral narrative, and back and forward again exploring their various possibilities - storying landscapes as as to serve her community and others. Her presentation was as much a performance as a talk, which brought to life her community initiative which sought to rewrite a narrative of decline in her native village.
For me the common thread in all this was that Proper Storytelling can be digital, multivocal, multimedia, personal and many other storytelling-movement-custom-violating things, but it must be about a community and not just an individual. Sending subjective impressions and emotions out into the ether may be cathartic, but the voice must contain other voices, and have the listener in mind, to count.
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