I Was Framed!

On Saturday, I attended a “story-building” workshop at the Social Forum, sponsored by smartMeme and the Ruckus Society. The two facilitators, Liana Foxvog and Doyle Canning, were both affiliated with smartMeme's Strategy Training and Organizing Resources for Youth (STORY) board – a group with which my colleague Maryrose Dolezal (FOR nonviolence training coordinator) has worked closely.

The central focus of our dialogue was “changing the story” by “framing” our message – learning how to challenge the “story” that is told by the dominant collective in our society (educational institutions, the mainstream media, etc.) and to raise up the real story of a community or campaign that has been suppressed, ignored, revised, etc.

We discussed some of the central aspects of any good story – characters, conflict, “show, don’t tell” (imagery that paints a picture of what is happening, without having to tell every detail), and foreshadowing – and then engaged in a small group exercise to test our storytelling ability. Doyle shaped the process by telling us how she had overcome incredible transportation challenges to get to the U.S. Social Forum – a huge storm, cancelled flights, and other problems – and we were asked to use the same topic as our small group topic.

My story was similar to Doyle’s – another of the “A funny thing happened on the way to the U.S. Social Forum…” as I had long been planning to drive down to Atlanta from New York, but my car died just four days before departure. I tried to make my tale as interesting as possible, filled with details of the unexpected problems that emerged at essentially the last minute. But, well, I failed.

As a writer/editor, it was a bit of a humbling experience to have three people so directly critique my story. ("Where was the imagery?" "You call that foreshadowing?!") But it was also a helpful and enjoyable one: I’ve often heard that I’m a good but long-winded storyteller, and this five-minute exercise highlighted both strengths and weaknesses.

The best part of the workshop was the final exercise, when we broke into two large groups and discussed two specific campaigns. I joined a group that was discussing U.S. militarism in Colombia, since that is a major area of FOR’s work. Sara, who spent much of her youth in Colombia and has worked with both FOR and Witness for Peace in that country in recent years, was our group’s primary resource. With her guidance, a dozen of us discussed what comes to mind when we think about Colombia – “narcoterrorists,” the “war on drugs,” and numerous other violent images came foremost to mind.

We developed together the alternate, rich story of a people working for peace. It was an inspiring process and showed the power of developing a story-based strategy for social change. And to me, the highlight of the workshop was after it ended, when Sara turned to me and said, “All of a sudden, I have a new-found respect for the work that FOR does in Colombia.” What better workshop outcome could you ask for?