What stories do teenagers tell?

Last week I was musing about what stories teenagers enjoy listening to.  But what about the stories they tell - either in response to stories I tell, or more informally in other parts of a workshop?

Well, it's a universe, just as it would be for adults.  It's also likely to be heavily influenced by the kind of stories I have told to them - and, of course, what my ears are open to really hear.  However, I am starting to discern themes and types.  I also perceive common influences on their storytelling style, cultural material from films and books and popular culture that they sometimes weave into their stories, often very creatively.

So here are some.  I'll take younger teenagers first, 12-15s.  I'm going to put them in a (biased, subjective, approximate) hierarchy of greatest to least interest as stories:

• hero tales of misfits and outsiders finding their role in life - or failing to do so
• folktales of the granting of wishes, special powers
• stories about bullying, isolation
• true stories of family mishaps
• urban myths, usually ghoulish
• novelistic stories of the experience of 'being a teenager'
• stories with subverted endings - where the baddie goes unpunished, or the heroine turns out to be corrupt
• tales of judgment, punishment
• action adventures high on technology and short on realism, except sometimes (and strikingly) in realistic relationships between characters
• destructive stories where everyone is killed off and nothing ever really changes

And older teenagers, say 15+ - much of the above but also:

• love stories
• personal tales of how one came to be the way one is, or how a character in a story came to be the way they were
• vampire/horror tales
• stories of personal mishaps and troubles

A lot of this reflects the experience of other tellers who have worked with this age group - but some of the items on these lists I haven't encountered in the literature.  I'd be very interested to hear from you if you have worked with teenagers using storytelling and have any thoughts.

"Was that a true story?"

I will shortly be presenting my first conference paper outside the university - hopefully it won't be too intimidating a venue for this debut, as it's a postgraduate symposium just down the road at the University of York's Dept of Theatre, Film and Television (TFTV), on 2nd June. 

The question I've chosen to tackle in this short paper is one of the things that has surprised me most about storytelling to teenagers: their frequent response to a fantastical story being 'Was that a true one?' Younger children rarely ask this (being less concerned about the difference between reality and fantasy, perhaps), so it takes me aback that their older counterparts often do.  Can a 15-year-old really think that a woman was transformed into a whale?  Or does she actually mean something else by her question?  And what implications does this have for the storytelling exchange between a teller and their teenage listeners?

This is the abstract I've drafted - any thoughts welcome in advance of the symposium!:

‘Was that a true one?’ – teenagers and traditional stories

Cath Heinemeyer, PhD student, York St John University / York Theatre Royal

I use traditional stories and myths as the basis of much of my practice-based research into storytelling with teenagers.  It could be argued that I am importing material, and genres, that are fairly alien to most young people, rather than drawing on their own ‘grounded aesthetic’ (Walcon 2012).  Indeed, the reaction after a story finishes is often a disoriented ‘Was that a true story?’, or variants thereof.  Implicit in this question is some or all of the following:

•          A querying of my authority to tell that particular story; 

•          Unfamiliarity with story conventions;

•          Musing whether this story is a useful source of knowledge and/or worth passing on;

•          The need for a conversational and psychological bridge back into ‘normal’ communication and ‘reality’.

Traditional motifs can, however, act as a ‘rhetorical convention’ (Kershaw 2007), allowing young people to explore possibilities beyond the constraints of their own assumptions.  Tolkien described this story reality as a ‘secondary world’ or ‘sub-creation’ (1968).  In this paper I draw on my work with groups of teenagers in both mainstream and alternative education settings to exemplify how traditional material can provide a surprisingly powerful springboard for young people to tell their own stories.

My experience supports Zipes’ (1995) view that young people benefit from gaining a sense of mastery over story motifs and archetypes by comparing or layering stories over each other.  This contextualises their intellectual concerns about ‘truthfulness’; it also gives them distance from the magical world of the story, as well as from their own daily lives.  In contexts where young people feel safe to draw on aspects of their own personal experience, I describe how certain individuals and groups have moved from this position of ownership of traditional story structures to generate powerful contemporary stories.

What stories do teenagers like?

When I tell people I am researching storytelling with teenagers, the most common question is then, 'What sort of stories do teenagers like, then?'  There is a scepticism in the question: surely it's a matter of competing with films and horror or fantasy fiction?

for example.....!


Well, yes and no.  And I don't know.  In a way it's a 'shadow' question to my main research questions.  The stories which do something for teenagers do themselves act as a key to the 'bigger' questions of what storytelling can do for teenagers, how teenagers engage with storytelling.

My instinct has told me two things from the start, and experience so far has confirmed these. 

Firstly, that I should choose stories which contain all of life.  That is, adult themes such as betrayal, disappointment, violence, abuse, sex, love, exclusion, conflict, should be in there.  These things are present in most of the world's fairytales and mythologies, and the stories help to make sense of them.

The other night I watched a brilliant documentary on the BBC iPlayer, 'Tyger Takes On Porn' - about young people's ever-increasing access to pornography and how it's affecting their relationships.  Watching it, I was thrown back into all my own adolescent anxieties about fitting in, keeping up, being normal.  It reminded me how readily teenagers take on the dominant cultural narratives and how ill-equipped they are to challenge them.  This reinforced for me the fact that sex, for example, should be woven into the plots of stories so that all its myriad sides can be seen as part of a whole story, whole lives, whole relationships.  This might just act as a counterweight to the story of sex which tells young people they must conform to certain trends or stereotypes. 

Secondly, that stories for teenagers should not be neatly wrapped up, or have a simple moral.  Rather, if time permits, they should be involved and open and multi-faceted, like myths.  There should be multiple points of entry and potential identification.  I am guided here by my own reaction to storytellers I listen to.  Hearing the wonderful Jan Blake tell the West African epic of Sogolon over two hours, my friend and I spent another two hours in intense argument and debate over the characters' decisions.  I was struck by the dilemmas of the parents in the story; she was intensely concerned whether the hero had abused or rescued the heroine... Nothing was tied up, everything was up for interpretation.  This is what teenagers need too, I think.  Not parables, but new landscapes in which they can explore what happens to X when Y does Z and whether it was Y's fault or indeed F's, or maybe it was fate or society....

These two 'principles' are not research, however - they are beliefs, or even preconceived notions.  To test them, I'd need to try other kinds of stories as well, where there is perhaps a simple message.  There might well be a place for the simple metaphorical tale  - for example, therapists who use story often choose these kinds of tale (see for example G.W. Burns' (2005) 101 Healing Stories for Kids and Teens: using metaphors in therapy) - but I am not drawn to them when faced with a teenage audience.  And it's very hard for a storyteller to tell a story she doesn't feel like telling.

And yet I have to confess that teenagers often seem to like telling them.  At the Young Storyteller of the Year competition I heard the story of the giant Fear who gets smaller the nearer you go to him, told and received with great enthusiasm.  Teenagers, like anyone, like what they recognise.  Sometimes, if I tell a story that seems too 'different' or morally ambiguous, the reaction will be simply 'that story was weird'.

So what marks out my practice as 'research', then? How will I use my practice as a vehicle to answer this 'shadow' question?  I try to pay attention to what surprises me.  I have been struck by the response of two different groups of teenagers with additional needs to the hero myths of various cultures.  I have been just as struck by the uproar with which another group responded to a story ending which did not please them - which violated their sense of what was a 'proper' story.  These 'janglings', where a group makes its collective feelings known, are one thing. And on a finer-grained scale, it's the old thing: in the eye contact between me and the listeners, the moment-to-moment shifts in mood and attention, that you always attend to anyway as a storyteller.  It's a matter of attending to it more critically, storing it away for reflection afterwards.

Next on my reading list is Gail de Vos' annotated bibliography 'Storytelling with Young Adults: a guide to tales for teens'.  I am interested to see whether her choices of material chime with my instincts and findings so far. 

More musings on copying and retelling

On Friday I attended a seminar led by my main academic supervisor Matthew Reason on 'documentation and disappearance' which raised further thoughts around copying and retelling (see previous posts). 

One theme we discussed is the ephemerality of performance - how the telling of a story, say, can never be repeated or fully documented, so there is a little bit of loss, or death even, at the heart of it.  We fear this and make many and varied efforts to capture and retain the essence of the experience.  This struck a big jangling chord with me.  Of course I have to document my workshops for the purposes of my research, but is there another deeper and more basic reason for it?

Last week I held a workshop with a group of Key Stage 3 pupils with additional learning needs.  I hadn't seen them since November, that's six months ago now.  That time I told them the Sumerian myth of 'Lugalbanda' and the group made a poster retelling the story visually - since then, the poster has remained on the classroom wall.  So I wasn't that surprised that they all recalled the session, but I was astounded by one boy who retold us the whole thing in great detail.  He gave many visual details which I had put into my original telling, but his words were all his own, and they were fluent and moving.  There was stunned silence and then applause.  He put his head in his hands, as if overwhelmed by the effort he'd just made. 

This was, of course, like a birthday present for me, and his teacher.  We got it on audio tape.  We were delighted that it had made such an impression on him, and that he had revealed such a talent.  But what exactly was delightful about this?  He had stuck quite closely to my version of the story, rather than making significant interpretations of his own.  This happens quite often, particularly with classes less familiar with drama and creative work.  

You could say the poster, and the retelling, were as much for the gratification of myself as storyteller - to assure me that my work was not ephemeral and pointless - as for the young people.  Maybe he felt my strong desire to hear the story back from him, and this was the cause of his exhaustion afterwards. 

I suppose the other question for me is: if a young person deeply absorbs and retells the details of my version of a story, are they also unquestioningly accepting my version of its causality, morality, themes?  How can I find this out?  And what does it mean for how I ought to tell?  Ought I to leave more 'blank spaces' for the listeners to fill in their own details? 

There could be a role for this simple absorption of a story.  Over a lifetime we integrate and reexamine all these stories which influence us, and create out of them what we need.  But I must admit it is gratifying when this process (rarely) materialises in front of your eyes.  I have had workshops where young people have moved well free of my telling and its moral arc, and used it to generate new material of their own - and this is where a real sense of the rightness and value of a story come in.  But I can't make this happen if the conditions are not right. 

I continue to believe that retelling is the first step towards transformation, rewriting of the story and (in a small way) of oneself, but it has become a bit more of a problematic idea for me. 

Storytelling/retelling/reading/copying/transforming

In his talk at the 'Storytelling and the Voice' symposium (see previous post) Prof Mike Wilson explored Walter Benjamin's distinction between 'reading' and 'copying', from his 1928 essay 'Einbahnstrasse' ('One-Way Street').  This idea generated a lot of discussion.

Reading, according to Benjamin, is like soaring over a landscape in an aeroplane - you might miss an awful lot of detail, as well as what it actually feels like to be in that landscape.  Copying - say a notable quote or a poem - is like walking along the paths of that landscape on foot - feeling its scale and texture, noticing everything.  I do a lot of copying out of texts myself for the same reason.

Mike suggested, and we discussed, the similarity between this 'copying' form of close experiential reading and the retelling of a story - which involves re-walking the whole path of the story.  You feel the story a different way in retelling than in listening to someone else tell it - you are listening to it in a more dynamic way - because you both know and don't know what's coming next.  And as most storytelling is retelling, most storytelling is therefore, also, close reading.  Of course, in this form of reading is a personal transformation of the meanings in the story - or maybe better put, the reteller adds their own layer to the story and passes it on in this new form.  This is how all stories passed from one person to another (whether orally, digitally or in writing) contain many voices, not just that of the current teller.

In workshops I lead with teenagers, I almost always follow my telling of a story with an 'assimilation' exercise which is very akin to this copying process.  This might be retelling the story in pairs, passing a ball or stone between you - or round the circle, if it's a small or confident group.  Or it might be drawing images, writing key words, in a free-association process, and then reassembling these into a group poster.  This poster might be a chronological retelling of the story, but more often it isn't.  Groups usually choose to group the images and words thematically.  This process is a sort of group negotiation of what characters, symbols, places and themes are most important in the story.  Here's one from a group of young teenagers with additional learning needs:

The story is the true one of William Kamkwamba, a 14-year-old Malawian boy who helped his village during a famine by using rubbish from the scrapheap, and his own engineering skills, to construct windmills for electric light, water pumps and mobile phone batteries.  The most important themes, for this group, appear to be William's large and hungry family, the rubbish tip and the windmill itself.  That is, William's problem, his resources, and his ultimate achievement.  Other groups might home in on something else - the bullying William experienced, his expulsion from school for not being able to pay the fees. 

On finishing it, the group immediately wanted it to be put up on the classroom wall, and the teacher cleared another display there and then to accommodate it.  I will make use of it as a starting point when I return to work with this class soon.  Returning their story to them is the next round in the retelling game, and then we can layer other stories on top.

This poster is a group retelling, which is also a reshaping, of the story.  It is absolutely a form of literacy.  I started out this PhD feeling anxious about having to be seen to develop pupils' literacy through my work in secondary schools.  This anxiety is now much diminished - as I see (by walking the path, you might say!) how much pupils' sense of agency seems to be boosted from mastering a story by retelling it.  

'Storytelling and the Voice' symposium at George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling

Since I began this PhD back in October I've been searching for the 'storyteller-academics' - those who are storytellers themselves, but are studying it with open minds from without as well as within.  That is, those who are exploring and challenging the boundaries of storytelling, yet always keeping at heart the understanding of what it is and feels like. 

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.

A Storyteller's Agenda

One Monday 10th March the iCAN centre - which hosts my PhD - organised a discussion seminar on 'Narrative and Adolescence', part of a series of really stimulating events on 'narrative and...' exploring the status and roles of narrative in our culture. On previous occasions the gap has been filled by 'mental health', 'food', 'visual arts' and so on, but since the theme for Monday was 'adolescence' I was given the opportunity to present, as a performance, some of my practice-based research to date.

'Findings' might always be a tricky quantity in a practice-led, arts-based PhD, but I do aspire to claim relevance, some generalisability and certainly communicability for my research.  The challenge was to find a sufficiently tentative format to present my thoughts, questions and inklings so far.

I decided to assign the audience the role of a group of teenagers, and I led them through a 'typical storytelling workshop' from start to finish, explaining to them my difficulties and observations as we went along.

I don't know whether it 'worked' or not but it was an interesting experiment for me, to give a sort of scripted performance as a means of discussing academic research.  There was, for both me and them, the relief of an (unscripted) story in the middle of it.

A key point I wanted to make was the following: while the storyteller's tenet that 'listeners will take what they need from a story' is partially true, I have come to realise that the storyteller inevitably shapes their response to it - in fact, sometimes (e.g. with a shy group who are unused to storytelling or drama) I have found that it's very difficult for listeners to get any independence from the storyteller's version of the story's moral arc.  So the storyteller needs to take responsibility for choosing and then shaping the story in such a way that difficult themes/choices/moral issues are given a context that makes them meaningful.  Whether (s)he thinks consciously about it or not, (s)he will imprint his/her own agenda on it and therefore on the minds of the listeners.

One corollary of this is that I need to develop my skills in helping groups transform stories to their own ends.  The second is that this realisation has made me a) plan my stories more carefully than I used to and b) think more explicitly about why I choose certain stories and what my agenda is in structuring them. If I'm going to lay this agenda open to challenge, I should first of all look at what it is!

So, to conclude my talk at 'Narrative and Adolescence', I compiled the underlying values I am, like it or not, consciously or not, trying to transmit when I tell my favourite stories.

A Storyteller’s Agenda

Cath Heinemeyer

These things that are inside you –

Your anger, your uncontainable longings, your lostness, and your newness to yourself –

They are heavy and good and necessary.

The world would stop turning without them.

So cup them carefully in your hands;

Do not sell them,

Or spill them on the ground for the world to spin twisted fables from.

We face terrible things and awesome challenges. You may have a poor inheritance.

So resourcefulness is everything;

Feel it resonate in others here present.

Keep your eyes and ears open and your instinct tuned,

See the human in everything.

And be persistent!

Don’t aim to please but to endure;

Don’t consume but generate…

It is these things that will enable us to prevent – or transform – the deluge.

Arrogance is a hindrance,

Prejudice is a burden.

People are complex systems but every cause has an effect.

What you give will come back to you,

What you take will be taken in double measure.

No matter what surrounds you, even in the closing moments of your tragedies, you always have these choices.

But first rise above that ‘you’, that ‘choice’,

Float high above them and view the whole landscape.

See its lofty vantage points and its sullen swamps,

Its mires and its traps set by the powerful.

But others have trod this country before and left signs.

The things that are inside you are good and true –

Even the unspeakable things –

Here in this moment we will cup them in our hands together.

After that it is up to you.