One year into Storylisteners, let me tell you how I stumbled to an epiphany
Or how I quit two jobs just to end up where I started
The Storylisteners project is primarily community-based, and I mean that in two ways. First, it is rooted in communities themselves and not narrative theory that resides solely in paywalled journals. Second, it should build communities, including a community of practice as we refine our skills.
But this is also the scholarship component of my job, or at least the future of it. And for two years I pondered exactly what and how I was going to study storylistening. I took a year-long training in how to do “engaged scholarship,” and then I spent the first “official” year testing ways to combine research and community practice around the idea of listening for story. To be honest, I did not like where I arrived after those two years.
Then I quit my job.
Not because of the dilemma I just mentioned, but for reasons mainly focused on my family. I left academia to work at one of the most admirable non-profits I had ever come across. The work was fulfilling, my colleagues were on an awe-inspiring journey of balancing care and challenge in the workplace, my office could be anywhere. Getting that job was one of the greatest accomplishments of my life.
Then I quit my job. Again.
Five weeks later. Every morning for those five weeks, I woke up with chatter in my mind that was clear and simple: “This is a mistake.” By the end of the day, the voice was gone. The work was too good, and the life it offered too perfect, for me to have possibly made a mistake. Then the voice was back the next morning. I told my partner I was having my doubts about leaving and we decided together that we could change the need for change and fully embrace the life we already had.
I called my department chair, who is also my mentor, and asked her if I could reconsider. Because I was still teaching out the fall semester, and because I changed my mind so quickly, she was able to make it happen. At the same time, my supervisor at my new-old job handled my dilemma with a grace that surpasses understanding. Through their mutual cooperation, I did both jobs for four months to make the disruption as minimal as possible. It was gut-wrenching. It was embarrassing. It was right.
In all of that, though, I had not solved my community-scholarship problem. But the experience rewired me. My anxiety subsided. My thoughts were clearer. Not so surprisingly, I felt humbled, but as much by the grace of others as much as the “midlife crisis,” as one friend put it. And while talking to my mentor about how I could restart my research, a phrase popped out of my mouth that was so simple and so obvious that it stopped me: “I don’t have to be the expert.”
During that time of turmoil, over Thanksgiving break, I had surgery for the first time in my life. And I was struck by something I read about but never really saw for myself, the act of “narrative medicine.” The nurses especially were drawing out my story in this moment, along with bits of relevant life history, to best tend to my needs. They were storylistening. And expertly so.
I realized that while my own experiences as a journalist and life writing teacher, along with my research, brought me to a certain point along the way, there were also many other people practicing storylistening and gathering different types of information. Saying out loud, “I don’t have to be the expert” shook the sense into me that I needed.
We will listen to the storylisteners. And instead of doing it the traditional, cloistered, academic way, we will create a podcast of our sessions. I asked two of my best students to help me test out that idea last semester and we tried several approaches. Now we are building it. By the end of the year, the first season of “Storylisteners” will be ready to launch.
Each season will focus on an archetype of those who practice and refine storylistening: Healers, Seekers, Teachers, Tellers, Leaders, [we are open to ideas]. Every person we listen to will be a partner, and help us think through the episode throughout the production. That takes time, but it is a good principle of engaged scholarship and storylistening.
Why am I telling you this? There is a decent chance, by you being here at this paragraph, that you could be part of this community, as a learner and a teacher. This is the first time I have written about my quit-unquit experience, and it feels a little “bleh,” to be honest. But for me to actively listen to your stories, you need to know a little of mine.
