Different ways of knowing story
Meeting 'Book-Being', seeing stories as living entities, and reaching for more than my academic tool-kit
“Worlding stories are not focused on the aesthetic perfection of form, but on the integration of form and movement. They are not supposed to be “thought about,” but thought, felt, and danced with and through. They play with the ambivalence and dynamic force of meaning. In this sense, meaning will change as a worlding story lands deeper into the body, a story will have many layers of changing meaning, and some layers will only reveal themselves years after the story arrives”
“And now, you write”
Words that came into my head last week. They were not words that came from within but from without. Well, they were both within and without — what I mean is that they didn’t come from me
They came from the book I’m trying to write.
And hearing its voice, not for the first time but certainly for the first time with such clarity, made me think of something a wise friend once said; a story has its own energy and its own agency — it is a living thing. As a Storyteller, she’d know.
I’d agreed with the sentiment at the time, but I only got it with:
“And now, you write”
This book —this final outcome and primary purpose of the women of Ireland project and all the interviews I’ve done with women for it— is something I’ve been tipping away at for the last couple of years. That I’ve spent most of that time wading in a mire of false-starts, rabbit holes and half-written dead-end chapters makes utter sense after that simple but powerful instruction:
“And now, you write”
‘Book-Being’, as I’ve affectionately come to know it, wasn’t ready to be written, till now (or at least that’s how it feels, and what I’m hoping!)
As mad as some of this may sound, the current me is open to this. A new way of working for me, which I don’t always fully trust but am open to and, at least, finally listening to. I am listening for what the words and stories I have collected are wanting to form and to shape.
A year ago, I wouldn’t have heard them, wouldn’t have even thought that that may be something that was useful to do. Because a year ago I only knew about one way of working with story, narrative and words (i.e. interviews) — the academic way.
In the world of a qualitative researcher (which I was for over eight years until, as this post explains, I quit) words and stories are not seen as living things. They are chunks of information to be mined for gold. The gold being the themes, the common patterns that emerge from the narratives of interview participants. This is exactly how I have approached the doing part of the Women of Ireland project. Most of my working day is spent thematically analysing the 36 interviews this project is made up of (how I do that is explained in this post).
The goal of any dedicated qualitative researcher is to be able to explain, or at least ‘word’ the otherwise unobservable experiences, feelings, perceptions, and values that interview participants express. Qualitative analysis is done to gather such things up, organise them into themes and then interpret and explain them by way of showing how they relate to existing knowledge and theory, and how they add to or expand existing knowledge and theory in a given field of research.
“Identification of themes that connect with the theory determines the contribution of research….the contribution of…. qualitative…. research emerges from the ‘extension of a theory’ or ‘developing deeper understanding—fresh meaning of a phenomenon’.
Such an approach was, and in many ways is, the only way I’ve ever known. The only way of working with story and narrative that my academic training gave existence.
In writing the Women of Ireland project book (for I have no better title for it right now — that hasn’t been told to me yet!) one of my key aims has always been to explore How it is that we — the women of Ireland — have come to be the way we are? What has shaped us? Such a question is very much grounded in that academic—Western philosophical logic that aims to describe reality and make sense of things so that some phenomena can be explained or formed into knowledge.
Inside the halls of academia, walls decorated by wallpapering over other ways of knowing, I could see no other way — that was the only way of knowing that was available, accessible and knowable to me.
But I am outside those halls now. Outside the narrow and poorly lit, if well thought out and designed, corridors and into the great expanse of the ‘wider world’. Here I have been shown that there is a technicoloured array of innumerable tapestries; other ways of knowing and sensing that not only enrich how we interact with, and see, the world, but are of the world.
Beyond those hallowed halls, ‘science’ is not an impersonal (neutral), separate, independent actor, removed from the very thing it seeks to engage with and understand, but is right in the centre of everything. Interconnected. Intertwining. Interwoven. Interdependent. And doing it is not about delineating things down to narrow, ‘focused’ explainable (sanitised) things, it’s about giving space to the the unknowable, unnameable but feelable.
Beyond those halls, there are different ways of knowing and that matters.
“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
‘Stories have their own energy and their own agency. They are living things; a story, while you carry it, will mind you’, my friend said.
But I did not realise quite how ‘Book-Being’ and those stories of the 36 ‘Women of Ireland project’ women have been minding me until:
‘And now, you write’
That instruction was like a clearing of a fog that revealed to me every unexpected moment over the last few years that seemed to appear, ‘as if by magic’ to nudge me down a different route, show me something else, give me a different perspective, provide a new opportunity, send me the right people with the right words and the right time.
Symbols. Coincidences. Serendipities?
A being with agency shaping its story. A story shaping a being with agency:
‘And now, you write’
I began this work asking what has shaped us (as women of Ireland) but I didn’t factor in —was ignorant to— how I am being shaped by it. By this work, by the words and stories that have been shared with me, by all the things that make up the thing I call ‘Book being’.
Seeing the stories I have been given —and the story that is growing from the pot of soil I’ve planted them in— as living entities makes more sense to me now. It explains so much more than anything in my ‘academic toolkit’ ever did, or ever could, when it was the only tool I was reaching for.
It’s a toolkit I need and still value. But it can only do part of the job. It provides a building within which a living thing can be kept safe (kept static) and acquainted with, but it doesn’t allow it to fully shape its own trajectory.
My job now is to find out how to nourish this living entity and let it grow. So it can be doing in the world what living entities do; emerge, develop, transform, shape, interact, show, teach, be.
Stories come to move things in the world1, but the stories that have come my way have had to move ol’ indoctrinated academic-me first. One day, I don’t doubt, they’ll launch themselves into the world in the form of their shaping and their choosing, but only once they’ve transformed me enough to provide the right launchpad.
But for now:
‘And now, you write’
Mika, C., Andreotti, V., Cooper, G., Ahenakew, C., & Silva, D. (2020). The ontological differences between wording and worlding the world. 8(1).
Beautiful! I wrote a three part book series back in 2021, self published in 2023, (called Coming Home to Me) and to me they are their own entity... all I did was birth them... I didn't know it at the time, as all I did was stay present, show up, do the work and write... it was really only toward the end, and even perhaps after they were published, that I realised all I was was a conduit! Now they are out there helping whoever needs them .... so I loved the 'Book Being'