Storytelling is a powerful medium to get connected to each other at a different level than usual. It’s revealing, surprising, heartwarming, and possibly shocking. Story harvesting is something that you may not have heard of, but as important as storytelling.
Harvest means that listeners capture diverse elements of the story and share them with the storyteller afterwards. Without listeners who receive a message of the story, storytelling doesn’t work. In last week’s community meeting, we did a mini workshop for how to make a story that resonates to audience and how to harvest it together.
Story harvesting is a collective practice
“Harvesters” are assigned to different roles to listen to a specific focus point. For example, one group of harvesters pays attention to repetition. If a storyteller says the same word over and over, it implies that it’s an important element that matters to him/her.
Three community members shared their fascinating and thought-provoking stories and yielded insights and realizations carefully collected by the harvesters. A story that raises a question to our social dynamics and gender issues. A story that takes you to a small village deep in mountains in Japan. A story that illustrates a wonder of serendipity that everybody can relate to.
All the communities carry so many stories untold. We would love to harvest more and more NION stories in 2019!
Picture by Alain Pham on Unsplash. Thank you <3
