In June 2023, three members of our Creative Writing team delivered papers at the Narrative Matters conference in Tampere, Finland. This was the 11th Narrative Matters conference, attracting over 300 scholars of social sciences, literary studies, psychology, and any discipline interested in the study of narrative theory and its social applications. The conference focused on emergent methods, ideas and issues in narrative studies and brought together scholars with practitioners of politics, human resources, social care, and any profession where knowledge of narrative can be applied.
Judy Kendall spoke on Narrative academic enquiry as personal story. Her paper addressed the influence of positionality on the creative writing process and products: how positionality and situatedness in different ways inform both what we write and what we think. She approached the topic by discussing aspects of Ursula Le Guin’s anthropological novel Always Coming Home and drew on her discussion of the composition process in Conversations on Writing.
David Savill’s paper explored his use of narrative as a teacher, and outlined how he tackles the challenge of student cohort cohesion through the use of personal narrative story exchanges. He shared the results of a study into the use of story exchanges in schools, with relevance to the difficult question of how to measure experiences of empathy generated by narrative exchanges. David advocates for the use of personal narrative story exchanges in a variety of institutional settings and provided an introduction to the technique for HE practitioners of any field not already employing personal narrative story exchanges.
Alicia Rouverol (chair/panel organiser) presented, ‘The Men at Brown Creek: Lessons from a Penitentiary,’ exploring her three-year project using story with inmates at an all-male, medium-security correctional institution in North Carolina (USA) to create a play, ‘Leaves of Magnolia’, performed for at-risk youth at the prison. “Life review”, a term coined by gerontologist Robert N. Butler in the early 1960s, is the process by which individuals assess and make meaning of their lives. Most commonly used with the elderly, life review has rarely been used as an intervention with younger individuals facing life crises. She examines the role of story in ‘life review’ storytelling sessions in facilitating transformations (e.g. the potential for ‘re-storying’ their lives) for both the men and youth involved in the project. The presentation points to performance as a key vehicle for this process and explores the effects and role of collaboration in a correctional setting. She is currently at work on a book based on the work.
