Teen anxiety is on the decline in northwest Washington, but still high

Originally published in the Salish Current

Childhood best friends Rowan and Vivian are growing up in an era of increased teen anxiety. Luckily, the two teens have each other.

Following a few stressful years during the COVID-19 pandemic, teens in Northwest Washington are experiencing less anxiety. According to data collected as part of the Washington State Healthy Youth Survey, 62% of 10th graders in Whatcom County reported feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge within a given two-week period in 2023, down from 72% in 2021. 

Lindsay Anderson is the Mental Health Coordinator for Nooksack Valley School District, northeast of Bellingham. She says that the pandemic was a major cause of stress for families in her rural district. 

“Initially when we first shut down in 2020, some of our families who had already been dealing with hardship and adversity prior to the pandemic were like, ‘We know how to deal with hard things. We can roll with this,’“ Anderson said. 

“But the longer we continued to not be physically present at school, the harder it was for families for whom school was a really important source of not just education and friendship, but also two meals a day. School was where they had extra trusted adults, a hub of family supports, especially in our rural community.”

For these lower-income students, Anderson said, a major cause of anxiety during the pandemic stemmed from uncertainty about whether their family would have enough money to pay for their basic needs. Although such stressors continue following the return of in-person schooling, some of this worry has been alleviated. 

The stress of the pandemic was experienced somewhat differently within Native communities, said Thrisa Phillips Jimmy, a mental health provider at the Lummi Tribal Health Center. Many important cultural ceremonies such as Canoe Journey and summer pow wows were canceled for several years during the pandemic. 

“These ceremonies are a big, important part of our lives,” said Phillips Jimmy. “Canoe Journey in particular gives us a time to gather and work as a team. It also has a cultural component called ‘protocol’ involving specific dances and songs.” 

Phillips Jimmy said that the cancellation of important ceremonies during the pandemic triggered some intergenerational trauma in Native communities, who were reminded of the time not that long ago when the practice of many of their cultural traditions was forbidden. From 1883 to 1978, participating in Native religious ceremonies was a crime in the United States. “These ceremonies are healing. When we don’t have a way to heal, that creates another kind of trauma,” she said.

Hailey Henderson-Paul, the school counselor at Friday Harbor High School, said that teens in the San Juan Islands face a unique set of stressors. Lack of affordable housing has long been a cause of stress for lower and middle income families on the islands. Henderson-Paul said many families had even less stable employment and housing during the pandemic, which caused more of her students to miss school. 

There are only about 270 students at Friday Harbor High School, and being a ferry ride away from other communities means that teens on the islands are more isolated. “This is a place where everyone knows everyone,” said Henderson-Paul, “That has its pros and cons.” 

Larger trends

“Yes, the pandemic was bad. But these trends were developing before that,” said James Harle M.D., a child and adolescent psychiatrist and the director of the Sendan Center in Bellingham. 

Even though trends in the short term are improving, Harle said mental health among youth has been declining for decades. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the United States is in the midst of a youth mental health crisis. And according to the World Health Organization (WHO), youth mental health has been declining throughout the globe.  

“Some anxiety is healthy,” said Harle, “but the dividing line is the degree of distress. Is it interfering with their day-to-day functioning? Their schoolwork? Their peer relationships?” Harle said that persistent anxiety often leads to depression.

Nooksack Valley School District conducts a Student Universal Wellness Screener every year, and Anderson said that this survey has been helpful in revealing some of the sources of teen anxiety. 

Some teens, said Anderson, are anxious because they are worried that they can’t keep up with their coursework. Many of them report difficulty asking for help because they are afraid of the stigma associated with falling behind. Instead of asking for the support they need, they “fly under the radar,” said Anderson, which can then cause them to fall further behind. 

If left unchecked, academic anxiety can lead to school avoidance. “But the longer they're out,” Anderson said, “the harder it is to come back. Avoiding the thing that makes you anxious tends to perpetuate the anxiety cycle.”  

Anderson also notices elevated levels of anxiety amongst her district’s Spanish-speaking students, some of whom are concerned about their family’s immigration status. The severity of this anxiety tends to fluctuate with the political context. “I remember that vividly, especially in 2016” she said, “And I know it's popping up again.” 

Anderson has high school seniors who are afraid to apply for financial aid to attend college. “​​Some of them worry that if they fill out the FAFSA for this coming season, and their parents are undocumented workers, it could put them in harm’s way. They are afraid it will put their parents at risk of deportation.” 

She also says that many LGBTQ+ students have higher rates of anxiety due to harmful rhetoric and bullying. 

Phillips Jimmy said that it is impossible to separate teen anxiety from the larger social challenges of our time, including political instability, climate change, and an increasing sense of hopelessness about the future. 

In addition to all of these stressors, Harle said there are also cultural trends at play. He pointed to the work of John Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, in attributing the rise of youth anxiety to two main trends. 

The first, he said, is algorithmic social media. Many teens are being exposed to anxiety-provoking content that they may not have the tools to handle on their own. “Until fairly recently, we haven't been aware of all the dangers of life online,” said Harle. Many teens, he cautioned, are being underprotected in the virtual world. 

This is coupled by a second trend: overprotective parenting in the real world. Many children are not given enough opportunities to take risks, make mistakes, or encounter difficult situations on their own, so they lack experience in effectively working through challenges when they arise. Well-meaning parents, said Harle, are doing a disservice to their children by not giving them an appropriate amount of space to develop their independence. 

Finding support

Access to mental health providers in Washington State varies across counties. Harle said there aren’t enough licensed mental health providers who work with children and teens to meet the need in Whatcom County. For rural families in the Nooksack Valley, transportation might be a barrier. For recent immigrants, language might be an issue. In small communities like the San Juan Islands, it can be difficult for families to find a provider when they need one, especially one who accepts insurance or Medicaid.

There’s a lot that families, schools and communities can do to support teens before their anxiety becomes problematic. Some social media may have protective benefits, helping teens connect with one another and form communities online. But social media can also be harmful. The American Psychological Association recommends monitoring and limiting your child’s use of certain kinds of platforms, especially platforms with a “like” function, which have been shown to be particularly problematic (especially for girls), and platforms that use artificial intelligence to promote excessive scrolling.

If you know a teenager who does experience anxiety, the best evidence-based intervention, said Harle, is called Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). This is a method of shutting down the anxiety cycle through voluntary, gradual exposure to the thing that’s making a person anxious. 

“There is a lot of nuance to this work,” said Harle, “I call it ‘small steps of brave practice.’” Harle also works directly with parents to help them discern when it’s appropriate to do things for their children, and when it might be more beneficial to let children do things for themselves. He gave the example of a child who doesn’t want to order for themselves in a restaurant. 

“If you step in and order for your child, the problem is that you’re indirectly validating that fear. It might not be intentional, but the message is that ordering at a restaurant is potentially dangerous.” He recommends the resources at Let Grow, a national movement which advocates for “real-world ways to get our kids back to having some adventures, solving some problems, and blossoming.”  

Anderson brings as many mental health resources to the Nooksack Valley School District as she can, including parenting workshops on positive discipline. She also sees a need for social programs to help reduce financial stress for low-income families, such as food, housing and transportation assistance, and legislation that would make people’s work schedules more conducive to raising children, such as more flexibility and paid time off. 

Phillips Jimmy said that adults can help teens who have a sense of despair about the future by validating their experience and letting them know they are not alone. She likes to remind young people that they have made it through difficult experiences in the past, and they will have the tools to make it through difficult experiences in the future. 

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is also a helpful resource, with local chapters in Skagit, Whatcom and San Juan Counties. Their Ending The Silence Program in schools teaches students about the warning signs of mental health conditions and what steps to take if you or a loved one are experiencing such symptoms.

“Teens are in a season of life where they're getting ready to launch from their adults, and there's a lot of push and pull,” said Anderson. “It can be really hard to parent teens, but they need trusted adults way more than they might show in their actions or say with their words.”

“A trusted adult doesn’t have to be a parent or family member,” said Anderson, “It could be a teacher, coach, or mentor. I know a lot of kids whose parents can't help them in the way that they want to. And having that extra layer of support is really important.”

Southern Resident Killer Whales Visit Penn Cove for First Time Since Captures

Originally published in the Salish Current

L pod swims into Penn Cove on Nov. 4, 2024. L-25 Ocean Sun is closest to the camera. (Jill Hein)

For the first time in 53 years, the Southern Resident killer whales have been observed in Penn Cove, near the town of Coupeville on Whidbey Island. 

The last time the Southern Residents were seen at Penn Cove was during the captures of 1970 and 1971, when they were corralled into net pens and the calves taken and sent to marine parks around the world. Between these two captures, 11 calves were taken and five whales died. 

According to Howard Garrett, longtime whale activist and co-founder of Whidbey Island’s Orca Network, following these traumatic captures, the Southern Residents had not been observed in Penn Cove. That is, until recently.

Not only did the Southern Residents recently visit the cove, but according to observers, they spent hours “pacing,” swimming back and forth, near three different sites that were important to the captures: the site where the net pens were set, near the dock where the calves were hauled out of the water, and in front of the inn where members of the capture team lodged. 

Lots of Fish, Lots of Black Fish

There are two ecotypes of killer whales in the Salish Sea: the transients, also known as Bigg’s killer whales, that eat seals and other marine mammals, and the Southern Resident killer whales (SRKW), who eat salmon. 

The SRKW have spent more time than usual around Whidbey Island this fall, because 2024 has been a record chum year in Central and South Puget Sound. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife had predicted a return of 486,562 chum to Central/South streams, but that estimate has now nearly doubled to 900,000. 

Scientists aren’t entirely sure why chum runs are so much stronger this year, but it is probably related to higher survivability out in the ocean: cooler waters and an increased food supply available to the fish. 

“People have been talking about how many fish they’ve seen jumping down there,” said Garrett, referring to the Possession Triangle just south of Whidbey. “Everywhere they look, there are salmon jumping out of the water. And there’s a pretty good correlation between lots of fish and lots of black fish.” Black fish is another name for killer whales. 

As of this writing, the SRKW have been observed in inland Puget Sound for 28 of the past 32 days. They have spent much of this time around the Possession Triangle. Garrett said that during their stay in the area, the whales have been displaying a lot of foraging behavior: they are spread out in singles, pairs and groups of three, taking long dives. “They're just searching every nook and cranny for fish,” he said.

Two-day Visit

The SRKW are made up of three pods: J, K, and L pods. It was L pod that made the historic visits to Penn Cove on November 3 and 4. 

L-25, or Ocean Sun, is the oldest SRKW, at an estimated 96 years. She is the last surviving SRKW who was alive at the time of the Penn Cove captures. Notably, she was present when L pod ventured back into Penn Cove.

According to an account from Rachel Haight, whale sightings coordinator for the Orca Network, L pod first entered the cove on November 3. They swam at a quick and steady pace, with a lot of spy hops and breaches. Howard Garrett said that this is not a typical foraging behavior, but more of a “tight, social” behavior. L pod went about halfway into the cove before turning around and leaving. 

On November 4, L pod visited Penn Cove again. It was a windy day, with gusts up to 60 mph. The orcas swam into Penn Cove against the wind, surfacing high in the chop and again doing a lot of breaching as they made their way into the cove.

“This time,” wrote Rachel Haight in the Orca Network in her report, “they went deep into the cove and spent hours hanging out.” 

First the entire pod was seen porpoising, rising above and dipping below the water, near the Captain Whidbey Inn, where members of the 1970-71 capture teams lodged. 

A little later, L pod drifted east and formed a resting line, not far from the San de Fuca dock. This is where the whale calves were put into slings and hauled out of the water.  

“That would be the spot where the calves were strapped onto the side of a seine boat and staged,” said Garrett, “while arrangements were made for a truck and transport.”

Then, L pod split into two groups. L-72 Racer & her adult son L-105 Fluke broke away and went deeper into the cove, pacing in front of Captain Whidbey Inn. They spent an hour and a half swimming back and forth just out from the dock at the inn.

Meanwhile the larger group, including L-25 Ocean Sun, drifted south and spent two hours pacing, just north of the Penn Cove mussel rafts, not far from the exact location where the captures occurred.

Garrett knows the location of the captures because he was guided there by John Stone, who was present during both the 1970 and 1971 captures. Stone was the teenage son of the owner of the Captain Whidbey Inn.

As it started to get dark, L-72 and L-105 rejoined the larger group. When Haight and other observers left, all of L pod was still pacing in the area near where the net pens had been set. 

That the whales spent multiple hours resting and pacing near three places most associated with the captures–the Captain Whidbey Inn, the San de Fuca dock, and just north of the mussel rafts–strikes Garrett as uncanny. “That’s just too much correlation to not be connected. I can read a lot into it, but anybody can.”

Of course, one can only guess at L pod’s motivations for entering Penn Cove and lingering at these particular locations. But one thing is clear, said Garrett. Judging by the whales’ behavior,  “They weren't foraging. They weren't hunting.” 

Map showing L-pod’s locations compared to important sites related to the captures: the site where the net pens were set, near the dock where the calves were hauled out of the water, and in front of the inn where members of the capture team lodged. (Rachel Haight)

“There’s a Larger Message Here”

The 1970-71 Penn Cove captures were documented by local newspaper photographer Wallie Funk, as well as Don McGaffin on King 5 News. The public outcry that followed helped put an end to orca captures in Washington State in 1976. 

According to historian and author Sandra Pollard, records are not complete, but between 1965 and 1976, something like one third to one half the SRKW population was either captured or killed. When the first census of the SRKW was taken in 1976, there were only 71 whales left in the population. When the SRKW were listed as endangered in 2005, the National Marine Fisheries Service said that the SRKW had still not recovered from the dent in the population caused by the capture era.

One of the calves captured in 1970 was Tokitae, who was later identified as L pod whale by her calls. She spent 53 years at the Miami Seaquarium, in North America’s (and possibly the world’s) smallest orca tank. 

In the mid 1990’s Howard Garrett, along with wife, Susan Berta, launched a decades-long campaign to bring Tokitae home. Starting in 1996 and up until Tokitae’s death in 2023, the Orca Network hosted a ceremony on August 8 every year on Penn Cove to commemorate the 1970 capture. 

For Berta, L pod’s return to Penn Cove was deeply emotional. She said this event is important for the entire town of Coupeville. “I know the people in Coupeville have felt troubled by this part of our history. And now, we feel like maybe it's been forgiven. Maybe the whales have found a way to forgive us.”

In 2017, members of the Lummi Nation joined the campaign to bring Tokitae home. The Lummi have a kinship bond with the SRKW, and the word for killer whale in their language is qw'e lh'ol mechen, which translates to “our people that live under sea.” They claimed Tokitae as a kidnapped relative. 

Raynell Morris of the Lummi Nation, who formerly worked with the nonprofit Sacred Sea, was part of a coalition called Friends of Toki, which made plans to retire Tokitae to a sea pen in the Salish Sea. The coalition was in the process of applying for permits when Tokitae died in August of 2023. Tokitae’s ashes were returned to the Salish Sea in a private ceremony in January 2024.

Ellie Kinley, a Lummi commercial fisher who also works with Sacred Sea, said that L pod’s return to Penn Cove feels like a powerful gesture toward healing. She said, “I truly feel that Ocean Sun was telling the story of the capture to her pod. I feel it's all just part of the healing process. I hope that everyone gets the feeling of healing from this news.” 

 L pod’s historic visit comes just as another SRKW, K-26, Lobo, has been reported missing, presumed dead. After the loss of L-128, a newborn calf, earlier this autumn, the total SRKW population now numbers 72. 

“We clearly have more healing to do,” Morris said, “We know they've been hungry and starving and now they're doing this in Penn Cove two days in a row. There's a larger message here.” 

Morris said the biggest thing we can do to help the southern residents is to breach the four Lower Snake River Dams to increase the supply of chinook salmon available to the SRKW. “It really is the time for the people to come together in a strong way,” she said, “And work together in a strong way, and tell the truth. I think these are all messages to us.” 

Kinley agrees. “We can still do better,” she said, “We need to pick it up a notch.” 

Commercial Salmon Fishers Struggle with Low Prices

Originally published in the Salish Current, then republished by NPR, Cascade PBS, & Washington State Standard

Dana Wilson (Lummi Nation) and Warren “Buck” Gibbons discuss market trends outside of Gibbons’ locker at Squalicum Harbor. The two friends have been fishing for salmon alongside each other for decades. (Bonnie Swift / Salish Current © 2024)

With the commercial salmon season coming to an end, 2024 is shaping up to be a lean year for commercial salmon fishers up and down the West Coast. That’s largely because prices for salmon that fishers receive at the dock are at an unusual low. 

Warren “Buck” Gibbons lives in Bellingham, WA and has been fishing for sockeye in Bristol Bay, Alaska since 1976. 

“When the salmon market first crashed in the early 2000s,” he said, “we thought all we had to do was pedal the bike a little bit harder and catch more volume. Well, we're peddling the bike as hard as we can, trying to bring that volume on board. But at some point you can only pedal the bike so hard. We’ve reached that point.”

In a good year, Gibbons said, a Bristol Bay sockeye fisher can gross $300,000-400,000 (they take home less after expenses), but when prices are as low as they were this summer, they’ll gross about $100,000 (again, their take-home pay is less). 

For a fisher working on a smaller scale, for example many tribal fishers, the situation is even more grim. Fisher Dana Wilson of the Lummi Nation said that with prices so low, it hasn’t been worth selling salmon for the last couple years. He now keeps his entire catch to feed his own family, and relies mostly on crab for income.

Benchmarking

Dock prices in Bristol Bay and elsewhere are down because supply has been up, demand has been down, and costs in the supply chain have risen. All of these forces have put downward pressure on the price that fishers receive for their catch.  

 The salmon industry is exceedingly complex, which makes it difficult to generalize enough to name trends. There are five species of wild salmon on the West Coast, each with its own niche (or niches) in the retail market. Fishing regulations and the global seafood trade add an additional layer of complexity. The price of salmon at the dock can vary day by day, and dock by dock, and is usually determined in a private agreement between fishers and buyers.  

A useful benchmark for talking about dock prices is Bristol Bay sockeye, because this price is publicly documented. In 2021, the price for Bristol Bay sockeye was $1.75 per pound. By 2023, it dropped to $.82 per pound. The 2024 price hasn't been released yet, but Gibbons said that it would probably come back up to $1.25-$1.50 per pound. Dock prices for other species of salmon have followed similar trends. 

Bumper Years

Dock prices have declined in recent years in part because there’s been a surplus of wild salmon. While most of the West Coast is in the midst of a salmon crisis, with more than a dozen Washington species on the Endangered Species List, sockeye runs in Bristol Bay, Alaska have been strong in recent years. 

In 2022, 74.8 million sockeye were harvested in Alaska, mostly in Bristol Bay. This was a record high. Gibbons said that when the 2023 fishing season opened, there was still a lot of sockeye left over in warehouse freezers from 2022. 

The USDA recently stepped in to buy up some of this surplus. This serves the double purpose of helping to stabilize prices and making this highly nutritious food available to national food and nutrition-assistance programs.

The surplus problem appears to be coming to an end. 2024 has been a slower salmon year in Alaska, with catches for every salmon species below expected, and, alarmingly, fish much smaller in size. The triple hit of low numbers combined with low weights and low prices has been especially difficult for Bristol Bay fishers.

Impact of Farmed Salmon

The unusual Bristol Bay sockeye surplus of 2022 explains the recent crash in salmon prices, but the decline actually started decades ago, with the introduction of farmed salmon. 

In 1988, Bristol Bay fishers received more than $2/lb for sockeye at the dock. By 2001 that price declined to under $.50/lb. As farmed salmon came onto the market, wild salmon prices crashed. Today, three to four times more farmed salmon is produced in the world than wild salmon harvested. Farmed salmon is primarily imported to the US from Chile, Canada, and Norway.  

According to data provided by John Simeone, an independent consultant who specializes in natural resource supply chain analysis, imports of farmed salmon from Chile have grown to dominate the market in the last couple years. 

Jessica Gephart, a professor at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences who specializes in the global seafood trade said, “These super productive farms with lower labor costs are often able to compete better on price.” 

Buck Gibbons says it’s part of the nature of a wild fishery to be a little more colorful and chaotic. “Here you have this ragtag coastal fleet of fishermen who are all independent businessmen, who all march to the beat of their own drum, but it's not nearly as efficient as a factory farm.” He also pointed to inconsistency on the quality of wild salmon versus how well farmed salmon are handled and packaged. 

For some consumers, wild salmon carries a premium, and they’re willing to pay a little extra for it. But for others, the lower price and cosmetic perfection of farmed salmon determines their decision at the supermarket. 

A color fan shows pigments used to give color to the flesh of farmed salmon. (Bonnie Swift / Salish Current © 2024)

Through a Loophole

Another possible contributor to the increase in supply is competition from wild salmon caught in Russia. Since 2022, there have been sanctions on Russian seafood directly entering the United States, but at first there was concern about a loophole which allowed Russian fish to enter the US after it was processed in China.  

In 2023, sanctions were expanded to include fish processed in other countries, including China. According to a 2024 investigation by Al Jazeera, enforcement of the sanctions remains difficult, because the “mandatory catch licenses showing where the fish is coming from are easily manipulable PDF files.” But this investigation focused mainly on white-fleshed fish exports from Russia, such as halibut, pollock, and cod, and didn’t include any data specifically about salmon.

But according to data provided by John Simeone, competition from wild salmon from Russia is less of a factor than competition from farmed salmon in Chile. John Simeone maintains a data dashboard which shows that even if the sanctions were violated and wild salmon from Russia was imported to the US via China, the total value of imported salmon from China was about $215M in 2023. By contrast, the total salmon imported from Chile in the same year was $3B. So total imports from China are only about 10.5% of the total imported from Chile. 

Supply Chain Costs

Increased costs in the wild salmon supply chain have also helped push down dock prices. Alaska seafood industry economist and research analyst Andy Wink said that costs of unloading, trucking, processing, and cold storage have all increased in recent years. 

Information about these costs is difficult to obtain, because there are no publicly traded seafood processing companies on the West Coast. Trident Seafoods, the largest seafood company in the US, declined to comment for this article. So did Icy Straits Seafoods. Bornstein Seafoods did not return a phone call. 

Wink also points to inefficiencies on the retail side, such as the extra labor costs of having a person behind a fish counter, and “product shrink” due to fish expiring before it can be sold. If supply chain costs are up and consumers aren’t willing to pay more, then the difference tends to hit dock prices.

Lower Demand

On the demand side, global consumption of seafood is down. Seafood is a relatively expensive protein, and following the post-COVID economic slowdown and increased inflation, consumers are leaning toward less expensive proteins such as chicken and pork. A decrease in demand pushes prices down.

High interest rates also make it more expensive for fish buyers to buy fish and hold them, so that makes commercial buyers more cautious, and lowers demand. Also, Wink says, the Japanese yen has been weak the past couple years, which hurts demand for sockeye.

This is the complex tangle of variables that has lowered salmon prices at the dock: a surplus of wild fish, competition from farmed fish, increased costs in the supply chain, and lower demand due to larger economic trends. 

Seeking Solutions

Buck Gibbons and Dana Wilson pointed to changes at the policy level which could help stabilize their industry. They suggested adding the fishing industry to the US Farm Bill, so fishers could receive something equivalent to crop insurance.  Wilson also suggested placing federal limits on farmed fish imports. 

Both fishers said that an important part of their work is educating the public on the environmental and health benefits of choosing wild versus farmed salmon. 

For Wilson, the choice to eat wild salmon is also a philosophical one. “Don't you want that fish that has left that stream, gone all the way out to the ocean, eaten whatever it eats in the ocean, then brings all that back? And you get to enjoy the benefits of a fish that has lived a natural life? Instead of a fish that swam around in a swimming pool, living in its own feces?”

To illustrate this point, Gibbons brought out a fan of paint chip colors that he got from a salmon farm. “This is how farmed salmon get their color,” he said, “from a pigment that goes in their food. Otherwise, their flesh would be gray.”

Andy Wink pointed to changes in seafood retail that could make it more efficient. If consumers could switch to buying frozen salmon filets, rather than fresh (or thawed), it would reduce seafood counter labor costs and product shrink due to expiration. These changes could lower costs for retail vendors and therefore take some of the price pressure off fishers. 

For those willing to put in a little extra effort, Jessica Gephart suggested finding a fish vendor through the Local Catch Network’s Seafood Finder, a national database of sustainable, local, community-based seafood retailers. Or, she said, buy from a fish monger who has direct relationships with local fishers.

If you live in Bellingham, you can buy fish directly from fishers at dockside sales at Squalicum Harbor on the first and third Saturdays of the month from 10am-2pm, year-round. Dockside sales also happen casually at other harbors. When you buy salmon directly off a boat, you’ll pay less and the fisher will keep more, so everyone wins. 

Storytelling Species

Some nights when I’m putting my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to bed, she asks me to tell her the owl story. It’s a very short story about a time when I was driving late at night and accidentally bumped into a snowy owl with my car. I was able to slow down before it hit my windshield, so it had been a relatively light bump.The owl had been standing in the middle of the road, and jumped up in the air as I had come around a corner. When I stopped my car to get out and look for the giant white bird, it was gone. I tell my daughter that the owl probably flew back into the forest to be with its friends. My daughter loves the owl story and asks for it again and again.

One night when she asked for this story, I tried an experiment, and subtracted much of its usual narrative structure. I talked about the concept of a speed limit, and about how cars that are going too fast will sometimes hit animals. I told her about the habits of nocturnal species like owls, and about snowy owl migration patterns. As I had predicted, she quickly lost interest, and eventually interrupted me. She wanted the story, not a list of facts.

Why does my toddler already prefer stories to non-stories? Some would say that, because she’s human, this preference is built into her DNA. Have humans evolved as a storytelling species? If so, why? Why would storytelling have helped us survive and reproduce in our ancestral environment? 

Not everybody believes that humans have evolved as storytellers, but there’s a growing body of scholarship to support this view. Literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall surveys this research in his recent book The Storytelling Animal. And Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist at UC Santa Barbara, also touches on the role of the arts (including storytelling) in human evolution in his book Human. Both have some compelling ideas about the possible biological role that storytelling might have played in human evolution.

Let’s start with the explanations proposing that storytelling gave our ancestors a practical advantage. Then, we’ll work our way towards theories of how storytelling improved their minds. Gazzaniga suggests that, deep in human history, storytelling provided a survival advantage by facilitating the exchange of crucial information and skills. Stories, in this view, served as conduits for the transmission of knowledge such as how to find food, shelter, and water, and how to avoid enemies and predators. A skeptic, however, might say that this kind of information could just as easily be passed along in non-narrative form (a list), so there would be no need for humans to evolve as storytellers. 

A slightly stronger argument, I think, is that storytelling provided a survival advantage by increasing group cohesiveness. Both Gotschall and Gazzaniga point out that oral storytelling necessarily brings humans together, in both the literal and figurative sense. Storytelling in groups facilitates a shared, single focus of attention, and such physical and mental proximity would have been likely to strengthen social bonds. Stories can also be used to teach codes of conduct, and might have helped our ancestors rally around a common set of values. For reasons that are easily imagined — fewer intra-group conflicts, better coordination in hunting, child rearing — a more cohesive group would have had a survival advantage over its less cohesive neighbors. While the story-less would die out, the storytellers would live to tell another tale.  

So we have two explanations so far: stories conveyed information; stories helped us bond. But maybe they did something totally different. Maybe stories helped us to, ahem, better reproduce.

Gottschall and Gazzaniga (drawing on the work of Geoffrey Miller) conjecture that storytelling served as a fitness indicator to attract potential mates, much like a peacock tail, which provided our early ancestors with an opportunity to display their skill, intelligence, and creativity. A good storyteller might have risen above his or her mate-seeking competitors in the group. And if a talented storyteller was better at attracting good mates, then that storyteller probably had more offspring, and then there would be more little storytellers running around…

Many theorists agree that storytelling probably helped in all those ways. Some argue, though, that storytelling’s most important contribution happened inside our heads. Gazzaniga argues that storytelling, and aesthetically-driven behavior more generally, served to increase neuro-cognitive organization in early humans. (Here Gazzaniga pulls from the work of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides.) In the words of another prominent scholar who writes about literature and evolution, Brian Boyd, “A work of art acts like a playground for the mind.” Stories, like playgrounds, are fun to engage with, but as any storyteller will tell you, the act of creating a story demands a certain amount of mental exertion. While playgrounds provide us with opportunities to strengthen our muscles, storytelling adds wrinkles to our brains.    

But storytelling provides more than just a mental playground. Which brings me to the most compelling theory about possible evolutionary advantages provided by storytelling: Keith Oatley’s flight simulator theory. This theory comes up in Gottschall’s book, and goes like this: stories provide a low stakes environment for humans to practice navigating risky scenarios, especially emotional scenarios, just like a flight simulator provides a safe space for a new pilot to practice the dangerous task of learning to fly an airplane.

Gottschall puts it succinctly: “Fiction [storytelling] is a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life.”

The flight simulator theory is at least in part based on recent studies of the human brain. In an oft-cited 2012 opinion piece in New York Times, The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction, Annie Murphy Paul writes that in fMRI scans, stories light up parts of our brain that process language (Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas), but also areas of the brain that have little to do with language, like areas the process movement and emotion. When we listen to a scary or sexy story, our brains activate our bodily representations of what those stories feel like. And this provides a unique learning environment, in which we cognitively benefit from a rich experience, without having to take the risks associated with it.

And, Gazzaniga writes, the more stories we hear, the more experiences we become familiar with. So when we do run across a tricky situation, we have a wealth of background information to help us deal with it. 

But a flight simulator is doing more than providing a pilot with background information. A simulator allows a new pilot to rehearse a set of skills, which leads to enhanced performance, regardless whether the training is explicitly remembered. Stories work in a similar way, and over time this process fundamentally reconfigures our minds. Boyd writes, “Exposure to a single story told once will not transform a mind substantially, but many repetitions, or many different stories, can improve our capacities for social cognition and scenario construction so valuable to us in the non-story world.” 

Or, echoes Gottschall, “The constant firing of our neurons in response to fictional stimuli strengthens and refines the neural pathways that lead to skillful navigation of life’s problems.” 

The theories are pretty convincing that storytelling provided early humans with an evolutionary advantage, but some biologists nevertheless hold that storytelling played no functional role in our evolution. Stories, they say, are just like drugs, and humans use them to escape the boredom and brutality of real life. It’s not biologically useful; it’s just for kicks. These thinkers argue that the brain may not have evolved in order to be good at storytelling, but that there are glitches in the brain’s structure that make it vulnerable to storytelling. (Just as fingers did not evolve in order to type on a keyboard or play the piano, but they happen to be very useful for those purposes now.) My toddler’s predilection for narrative, in this view, is just the result of a series of lucky accidents in human evolution. 

After doing the research for this post, I am prone to think that our species-wide penchant for storytelling is indeed an adaptation, and not just a quirky by-product of evolution. And if the literature had failed to convince me, my daughter’s seemingly innate appetite for stories would have.

But these are all still open questions. Evidence for both arguments is still coming in, and we are a long way from having proof for one theory or another. In the meantime, toddlers all over the world are demanding stories with good strong narrative structures when we put them to bed.

The Commitment Story

I have been lucky to have mentors throughout my life. As a young adult, there was one family friend in particular who took me under his wing. His name was Scott Gorman, and he died a few years ago. In his obituary, he is described as a humanitarian, arts organizer, writer, activist, and the first person without a college degree to win a Fulbright scholarship. Scott was what some psychologists would call a “highly generative” person — that is, he made a positive, lasting impact in his community, particularly among its younger members. And his life offers a lesson in how we can use storytelling to become generative people too.

This is the third in a sequence of three posts about what I’m calling our “personal myths,” the stories we tell about ourselves, how we came to be, and where our lives are headed. The first two were about crafting and editing our personal myths. Here I will describe a set of common narrative patterns in the life stories of highly generative people like my friend Scott. These patterns in personal myth-making deeply shapes our lives. 

The narrative patterns of highly generative people are, briefly: (1) a sense of being advantaged in early life, (2) witnessing the suffering of others, (3) moral steadfastness and continuity, (4) redemption, (5) conflicts between power and love, and (6) a pro-social vision for the future. We’ll come back to them in some detail soon. 

Like a lot of generative people I’ve known, Scott was an amazing storyteller. His most powerful tales starred himself, as an unrelenting, engaged citizen, who worked for fairness, beauty, and peace. Scott once told me that his parents were both dead by the time he was a teenager, and that because he had overcome some substantial hardships in his youth, he felt compelled to help others, especially those more vulnerable than himself. 

Turns out that the way Scott related his life story is typical of a highly generative person, at least according to Dan McAdams. McAdams is the author of a 2006 book called The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (which I will draw on heavily for my discussion here). In a body of research spanning almost 30 years, McAdams has shown that highly generative adults in the United States tend to tell uncannily similar stories about their lives, which feature the six themes I mentioned above. 

In the year I took off between graduating from high school and enrolling in university, I moved back to my hometown of Anacortes, WA, where Scott lived. I renovated Scott’s garage into a livable writing studio and stayed for six months. On the day that I had my wisdom teeth removed, Scott picked me up from surgery, drove me back to his house, brought me a pot of medicinal tea, some ice cream, and set me up with Lawrence of Arabia on his television, which he knew I hadn’t seen yet. So while I recovered on his couch, I also mended a significant gap in my cultural education. This is just the kind of mentor that Scott was: he was there when you most needed him, and he anticipated your needs before you were even aware that you needed anything. It genuinely made him happy to take care of his friends.   

McAdams’ research helped me put a finger on something I’d only suspected about Scott: that his ability to communicate his life in narrative terms helped him to achieve his goals. In Scott’s personal myth, he was a hero (a narrative role), working to create a better future for his community (a narrative outcome), and he always framed obstacles as temporary and surmountable (providing narrative tension). This kind of personal myth has the power to sustain generative people, giving them the confidence and commitment to make continuous contributions to their communities. And across a wide range of individuals, generative people’s life stories are remarkably similar to one another, to the point that McAdams has coined a term for the genre: the commitment story.

Redemption

A common narrative pattern -- the most common, in fact -- in a commitment story is redemption. Redemption, or what McAdams calls a redemption sequence occurs when a person transforms their suffering into a higher and more positive mental state. For example, when they transform fear, guilt, anger, or shame into happiness, joy, or excitement. Generative adults, McAdams found, create these transformations much more often than their less generative peers. Scott did too. When his wife of ten years left him for another man, he somehow managed to interpret the ensuing divorce as a favorable turn of events. 

This tells us something important: the number of bad things that happen in a person’s life matters less than whether those bad things are interpreted in a good way. Redemption sequences are not synonymous with simply telling happy stories -- a highly generative person’s story does not avoid accounts of suffering, but tends to construe suffering as leading to some sort of benefit. People who do more good in the world are better at turning lemons into lemonade. 

Five Additional Common Themes

Yes, yes, adding some positive twists to your life story seems like an obvious place to start in your process of becoming a better citizen. If you feel better about yourself, you will likely have more creative energy to put towards helping others. But McAdams’ research suggests that the path is less straightforward than that. Not only do generative people’s stories have a marked prevalence of redemption sequences, they are highly likely to contain five additional common themes. And to me these don’t seem immediately evident. They are: 

1. A sense of being advantaged early in life. The story begins with a blessing, or some sort of privilege.

2. Witnessing the suffering of others. There is an early recognition that the world is not safe, and life is not fair. 

3. Moral steadfastness and continuity. As older children and adolescents, the generative person internalizes a set of core values. Throughout the person’s life, these values remain constant and unquestioned. As McAdams puts it, “Their narrative identities rarely give the starring role to the searching, self-doubting existentialist hero.” 

4. A perceived conflict between agency (power) and communion (love). The trick here is that the more power the hero gains, the more able the hero will be to make a larger positive impact in the world. This ongoing back and forth between power and love drives the plot and gives the hero’s life story much of its narrative suspense.

5. Articulating pro-social goals for the future. The story has a hopeful ending, in which the hero’s good work will live on after the hero dies. 

The six themes of a commitment story function in concert to create a certain type of individual, one who feels especially compelled to help others. For example, McAdams suggests that the contradiction between 1 & 2 sets up a moral contrast in the generative person’s life, which goes something like this: “I was blessed, but others suffered. Because I was fortunate and because others were not, I should make the most of my good status and work hard to make the world a better place.” The highly generative person is what McAdams describes as a “blessed protagonist who ventures forth into a dangerous, unredeemed world.”

To be honest, I’m not sure if all of these themes were there for Scott. I don’t know whether he considered himself to have been privileged at an early age. And did Scott perceive a conflict between power and love? I wish he were still alive so I could ask him. Scott’s personal myth might not have perfectly fit McAdams’ model, and this reminds us that model is just that: a model. But generally speaking, these are patterns that we can consciously insert into our own life stories, in the interest of leading more magnanimous lives.   

Is There a Pattern for Less-Generative Life Narratives?

While I was doing research for this post, I wondered if there was a similar model for less generative people’s life stories. So I wrote to McAdams and asked. His answer, in short, was no. He wrote:

“There is no clear prototypical narrative for people low in generativity. Part of the reason for that is that people can be low in generativity for so many different reasons — from economic hardships to trauma to mental health issues to just plain being selfish.” 

Although there is no prototypical life narrative for the less generative person, McAdams went on to point to two common themes in their life stories: the presence of contamination sequences and vicious cycles. The opposite of a redemption sequence, a contamination sequence is coded for when positive events have negative outcomes. And a vicious cycle occurs when the protagonist struggles with issues early on, and then continues to struggle with those issues, and they never get resolved. These are patterns that we can consciously avoid when we’re crafting our personal myths, lest they lead us down a less generative road. 

Towards the end of those six months that I lived in Scott’s garage, he gave me a silver whistle in a small black box, and told me that if I ever needed anything, I could blow the whistle, and he would come to my aid. I haven’t used the whistle yet, but I know someday I will, when I need his particular brand of guidance.  

Just as we look to mentors, like Scott, for personal examples of how to live a profound and satisfying life, we can also look to research like McAdams’ for more generalizable guidelines. I think it’s wise to diversify the venues from which we seek life advice, because gosh darnit, great mentors like Scott can just up and die on us. Though their legacy lives on…

Change Your Story, Change Yourself

Let’s consider an unfortunate hypothetical situation in which a person reaches his or her mid 30s or 40s, and things aren’t going so well. This person’s self esteem is low, they are having a hard time finding work, or a romantic partner, or whatever… there are so many ways that things can be less than perfect in mid-life. What should this person do if they’d like to make some serious changes in the way they experience the world? 

One suggestion is succinctly summed up by Maria Popova, who, in a review of psychologist Timothy Wilson’s newest book, Redirect, suggests that we approach life changes as narrative challenges. “Our experience of the world is shaped by our interpretations of it, the stories we tell ourselves,” Popova writes, “and these stories can often become so distorted and destructive that they completely hinder our ability to live balanced, purposeful, happy lives, so the key to personal transformation is story transformation.”

Last week I wrote about the creative process of formulating our lives as stories, which starts to occur during that torturous and twinkly era of early adulthood. This week I’ll focus on how narrative psychology is applied in a more therapeutic context, especially during the later part of adulthood, when we can find ourselves in the doldrums, feeling stuck in unhealthy patterns, and wanting to make edits to the stories we’ve already spun about ourselves. As I mentioned in my previous post, the narrative layer of our identity is continually evolving, and it is possible to intentionally make changes here. This post is about techniques for doing so. 

Therapy

Seeking professional help in any kind of transformational process can really speed the process along. If you take this first approach, and seek the help of another, well-qualified person, you will likely find yourself telling a lot of stories about yourself to this person. As narrative psychologists McAdams and Adler write, therapy of most kinds is easily understood in narrative terms: our stories about ourselves reflect our personal struggles, and therapy involves working with these stories in order to revise and edit them. To change a person’s story is in effect to change the person, and many therapists are aware of this.

Some therapeutic methods, such as narrative therapy, make editing and revising a client’s personal stories explicit. In their book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, White and Epston, grandfathers of narrative therapy, propose a therapeutic process in which the editing and revising of one’s personal stories is undertaken literally, using letter writing and a variety of other exercises, such as co-authoring a certificate of Graduation from the Blues.  

Practitioners of narrative therapy liken themselves to investigative reporters, whose aim is to uncover the events in their clients’ past, and to help their clients externalize problematic stories in order to consider them as entities distinct from themselves. A therapist can also function as a mirror of sorts, as someone who can reflect your stories back to you, and help you see things that you otherwise might not see. By encouraging clients to draw back from their stories and reflect critically upon them, narrative therapists empower their clients to re-author their stories in ways more conducive to personal well-being. 

In giving clients a safe space to talk about difficult experiences which they may have avoided in the past, therapists provide opportunities for making sense of those difficult experiences and integrating them into their evolving sense of self. McAdams and Adler argue that on a meta-level, therapy can do much more: if the experience of going to therapy is retrospectively added to your personal myth as a turning point, when things in your life changed for the better, it can add a positive twist to future developments in your story. 

DIY

Therapy is not for everybody. A second approach is to use a narrative toolkit for undertaking the hard work of personal transformation on your own (it is personal, after all). If you are interested in coming to a new understanding of a particular set of difficult or traumatic events in your past, and doing it by yourself, Timothy Wilson, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, has proposed a set of story editing techniques that do not require one-on-one sessions with a therapist to achieve their effect. He outlines these techniques in the book mentioned above, Redirect.  

As the title suggests, Wilson’s book outlines a set of techniques designed to redirect people’s narratives about themselves and the world in more positive directions. He places his strategies into three categories: story-editing (making desirable changes to life stories), story-prompting (this one requires a second person, who uses subtle prompts to help you redirect your interpretation of traumatic events in more positive directions), and the do-good, be-good principle (start by making positive changes to your behavior, then your narrative will change to match your behavior, and your happiness will increase). 

Wilson proposes that story-editing is most useful for people who have recently experienced an important event, maybe an event that is still unpleasant to think about, or doesn’t make sense yet. These DIY techniques are helpful for creating a coherent interpretation of such an event. Here’s how the first writing exercise works: 

Find a quiet place to write. Recount the situation, move away from it in your mind, and watch it unfold from distance. Try to see yourself in the event, and try to understand your feelings (as if observing yourself). As Wilson says, ‘Don’t recount the event, take a step back and reconstrue and explain it.’ Write about what you see and why you felt what you did. Do this for 15 minutes, three days in a row. 

Like White and Epston, Wilson claims that this writing exercise works best when people are able to gain some emotional distance from the difficult event, so that thinking about it doesn’t overwhelm them, and they can analyze the event with a degree of dispassion. This will allow them to better reframe the event, and to find new meaning in it. Wilson calls this the “step-back-and-ask-why” approach, and claims that through fostering greater emotional distance, this technique can help to blunt the event’s traumatic impact, and help people avoid similar situations in the future. 

The same goes for pleasant experiences: if you can understand why something happened, you will be in a better position to make these things happen again. Pursuers of pleasure beware: Wilson warns the step-back-and-ask-why approach can also have the effect of blunting your experience of happiness.

A second story-editing exercise proposed by Wilson is the Best Possible Self Exercise. Here’s how it works: 

Think about your life in the future, imagine everything has gone as well as it could and you have achieved success in all your goals. Now write about what you imagined. Write about how you got there. This exercise is intended to help you create a more optimistic story about your future, which can help you cope better with obstacles as they come up.  

Narrative Choices

Let’s turn back to our hypothetical friend who’s not doing so well. Maybe they will seek a therapist to help them review and reflect upon their past experience, and by doing so they will feel more empowered to make changes to their personal myth. Or, perhaps they will take the DIY approach, and do a story-editing writing exercise on their own. In either case, what they’re doing is creating change in themselves by exploring and changing the story they feel themselves living within. Stepping back from their life, they will realize that a lot of what happens to them is determined by circumstances which they cannot control, but within any circumstance, they can make choices about who they are and who they want to become. 

Those choices are in large part narrative. Living life well, with meaning and purpose, is not just something he will stumble upon, but a deeply creative act, which will require a certain amount of imagination and artistry. 

Crafting a Personal Myth

Crafting a Personal Myth 

I love telling stories about other people’s lives, but when it comes to telling stories about my own, I usually get embarrassed and flustered. Part of my dilemma is that I have had a disparate mix of life experiences, and sometimes it’s difficult for me to string them together into a single, coherent narrative. 

Depending on who I’m speaking with, I tend to narrate different versions of my past. And, usually, the story I tell becomes a dramatized version of events, with heightened ups and deepened downs, lessons learned, and projections about how my past will continue to shape my future. And slowly, as I creep into adulthood, these narrativized versions of my past are becoming smoother, more consistent with one another, and easier to tell. 

This post isn’t about one story in particular; it’s about the stories that we all tell about ourselves, who we are, and how we came to be. This post raises the stakes in our discussion about craft, because the same skills required to tell a good story in general (eg on the radio) also enable us to formulate what some have called a good strong story about who we are. Research has linked high levels of narrative complexity in a personal myth to correspondingly high levels of ego development, and openness to experience. So, what are some ways to better craft your own personal myth?

Narrative Psychology

There is an entire wing of psychology, narrative psychology, dedicated to the study of similarities and differences in people’s life stories, and the varieties of narrative identities created through their construction. Reading some of the research in this field has helped me to understand what’s happening when I’m telling stories about myself and my cheeks get all red. It has also helped me to become more self-aware, confident, and articulate in these situations. I will summarize my findings here, in hopes that, in the course of mythologizing your own life, you might find these pointers as helpful as I have.

Prominent narrative psychologist Dan McAdams at Northwestern University puts forth a model in which a person’s identity develops sequentially in three layers: actor, agent, and author. This model provides a framework for understanding how and when our personal myths are first constructed, how these myths play into our evolving sense of self, and why the mythic or narrative layer of our identity is generally considered to be more amenable to changes than layers that develop earlier in life. 

The first layer, actor, comes to the fore in early toddlerhood. Studies have shown that as children we begin to recognize themselves in mirrors as early as 18 months, which probably corresponds to the time when we begin to develop a sense of self-awareness. McAdams calls these little self-aware toddlers actors, because this is when we start to gauge our behaviors and form traits based on the feedback we receive from our caregivers. 

Perhaps because traits are established at such an early age (or perhaps because we are born with them), they are pretty stable over time. Even and by the age of ten, most kids will have a pretty solid description of themselves. By the age of thirty, I can now safely report, traits can feel as if they are set in stone (though even stones can be lifted!). 

The second layer of identity begins to develop around age five or six, when a child begins to see herself as a motivated person, with goals and plans to achieve them.This little kid with an agenda is what McAdams calls an agent.

The third layer of identity starts to take shape in our late teens and early 20s. There is a lot going on in these years, obviously, but chief among them is that we are expected to become more adult-like. McAdams calls these young adults authors, because this is when we first start to narrate our lives as stories. Young adulthood is when we first begin to craft a personal myth, which explains our origins and our destiny.

A commonly held notion, according to McAdams, is that we choose our goals and have our traits. In other words, we feel as if we can change our goals without too much fuss, but our traits seem like an essential part of ourselves. The underlying assumption here is that the outer layers of our identities are progressively more pliable than the inner layers, because our identities develop in a tree-like fashion wherein the newest layers form in the outermost rings. We develop our life narratives after our traits and goals are already in place, so this outer layer of our identity feels much more plastic.* 

Crafting a Personal Myth

There’s nothing objective about a personal myth. There is no impartial storehouse of autobiographical information that magically morphs life events into myth-shape. Rather, crafting a personal myth is an interpretive operation, which draws on a highly selective and reorganized version of the past. Our personal myths are full of biases, distortions, and mistakes. These mistakes aren’t necessarily conscious, it’s just that certain embellishments are inherent to the storytelling process. In order to narrativize the past, we have to smooth things over a bit, sharpen pivotal transitions, add drama, tension, resolution… these are just features expected of good stories! And why not tell good stories about ourselves?  

At the heart of the literature surrounding the personal myth is a liberating suggestion: it is not through experience alone that we become who we are, but through the creative act of storytelling that we glean a sense of meaning, identity, and power from our past experience. Of course, the quality of our attachments in early life is very important in determining aspects of our characters, but even if our past experience has bestowed us with certain traits, the narrative part of our identity is open to constant reinterpretation. McAdams likens this part of ourselves to a revisionist historian, who uses the selective, creative, and adaptive powers of the storyteller to create an evolving sense of identity. In an email to me, he wrote,  

“People are constantly editing and amending their stories as they go through life, through conversations with others, introspection, and many other means. Many forms of psychotherapy — from psychoanalysis to cognitive behavioral therapy — aim, in one way or another, to alter the person’s narrative of life.” 

That’s good news for all of us. In crafting our personal myths, McAdams writes, we can go so far as to make new facts about our lives, draw new conclusions about ourselves, derive new themes, motifs, causal connections, meaningful insights, and life lessons. 

As time goes by, your personal myth will probably start to feel more cemented, and yet, at any given moment, you have the opportunity to make changes. This moment, right now, is as good as any to look back and reevaluate which experiences have been the most formative for you, and the meaning that you’d like to draw from them. In focusing your attention on the creative act of narrating your life, you’re giving yourself permission to craft the story you want to be living in. 

*After this post was published, McAdams wrote with a correction. In contrast to my portrayal of dispositional traits being set in stone by adulthood, research has shown that traits can change quite a bit over time. However, he added, it is true that they do become somewhat more stable as we grow older. 

Ending Stories

Because stories are the medium by which we express and absorb meaning, they can have a healing quality. It’s not surprising that storytelling is becoming more widely used in medicine, especially in end-of-life care, where the need for meaning-making tends to spike, the focus of care is less curative and more palliative, and the physical, psychosocial, emotional, and existential aspects of wellness are viewed in a more integrative way. 

Using narrative in end-of-life care goes by various names: dignity therapy, life story work, life review, client biography, to name a few. These are all different versions of a similar process, and here’s how they work: a nurse, a therapist, or sometimes a volunteer, sits with a patient who is near the end of life. The patient is asked to tell their life story, and their story is recorded, transcribed, reviewed with them, edited, and given back to them and/or a loved one. Storytelling interventions at this crucial juncture have been shown to have positive impacts on patients and families; for the community the resulting stories offer an insight into death and its attendant reflections. 

For the Patient

For the patient, having their stories recorded and transcribed offers the opportunity to create something that will survive their death. In a piece about dignity therapy on NPR’s Morning Edition, Alix Spiegel interviews Harvey Chochinov, creator of dignity therapy, who says that for many people, the most difficult aspect of dying is the idea that they will completely cease to exist after death. The ‘legacy’ or ‘generativity’ document that Chochinov’s patients receive in dignity therapy is meant to abate the fear of being forgotten. This, in turn, creates a sense of having contributed to the wellbeing of future generations, and thereby buoys the patient’s sense of dignity. 

In one study about the impact of dignity therapy, family members reported that the intervention improved a patient’s sense of meaning, purpose, quality of life, and preparedness for death (see that abstract here). This suggests, at a fundamental level, that listening is an act of love, and the aim of these biographical interventions is to create a supportive environment where the patient feels safe to express themselves (‘Listening is an Act of Love’ is the slogan of StoryCorps, and the title of their first book.) Older people in care homes tend towards the lonely end of the spectrum, and for them this kind of intervention offers an engaging form of companionship, albeit brief.  

Another study shows that the process offers the patient a chance to reflect over their life and reorganize their prior experiences. This might seem like something everybody does at the end of life, but for many people it does not occur easily or automatically. Storytelling is a safe place to work through difficult emotions, and a biographical intervention offers a final opportunity to resolve problems encountered earlier in life. Sometimes we all need a helpful nudge in the meaning-making direction, and telling one’s stories can instigate a tremendous unburdening, a catharsis which in turn can ease the process of letting go and saying goodbye. 

William Breitbart drives the point home in Alix Spiegel’s story, mentioned above: "The prevailing mythology is that you die the way you live, and you can't change yourself in any way. The fact is that the last few months of life — because of the awareness of death — create an urgency that facilitates growth and change." 

For Families and Loved Ones

For a dying person’s kin, the stories they receive can be helpful during the bereavement process. In many cases, people use excerpts from these transcripts in funeral ceremonies, and many family members anticipate finding long-term comfort in their beloved’s transcript. If a family member is invited to participate in the interview process (à la StoryCorps), it can strengthen the relationship between the interviewer and the dying person. And the information conveyed in the transcript can be important for generations to come, because it preserves a thread of a family’s oral history. 

For the Community

But what do these end-of-life stories have to offer to community as a whole? Could these documents offer us clues as to what is most important in life? Some experts on death and dying argue that at the edge of life we see life most clearly, and so the life stories of those facing death can represent a valuable insight into what is truly important and precious.  

Content varies greatly from person to person, but there are some common themes. One study on biographical approaches in end-of-life care did a qualitative analysis of such transcripts and coded their ‘core values’ by theme. Here’s what people near the end of life focus on most: family (observed in 92% of transcripts), pleasure (36%), caring (32%), a sense of accomplishment (26%), true friendship (22%), and rich experiences (16%). Notice what’s missing from this list: grudges and disputes, monetary and material wealth, physical appearances, the stress of school and work… all things that can occupy our attention on a day-to-day basis, and much of which becomes trivial in hindsight. Should we in turn take a moment to reflect on our own values, and make more of an effort to integrate them into our lives at an earlier stage?  

If you know somebody who is close to death, a grandparent, for example, consider taking your recording equipment for a visit. I neglected to do so with my grandfather, who passed away several years ago, and I thoroughly regret it now. I think he would have relished an opportunity to put his story down, and maybe it would have made his dying easier in some way. I’m sure my family would have cherished such a recording, mostly for the cache of family history we lost when he died, but also as a token of his particular quality of wisdom. Now that my grandfather is gone, I realize that the sound of his voice is something that my own child will never know. 

And when you come to face your own mortality, however far away it might feel, consider setting down your story in oral or written form. You might have a lot of stories to tell, and it might be difficult to choose from among them. But certain kinds of stories will be more valuable than others, both for you and the people around you. As a helpful framework for your story, consider the insights of Ira Byock, who describes four messages which help establish closure in any relationship: forgive me, I forgive you, thank you, and I love you. If your story touches on these four messages, you’ll be making a steady approach to the more difficult message, which is also important: Goodbye.

Promises, Promises

Some people have superpowers, and Ira Glass's superpower just might be framing and introducing stories. My friend Will and I have been so awed by this superpower over the years that we finally decided to concatenate a bunch of Ira Glass intros, listen to all of them back-to-back, and see what kinds of lessons we could glean. We decided to x-ray that uncanny knack he Glass for duct-taping us to every story This American Life presents.

This exercise is hard for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s like turning on the song of the siren and trying to not get hypnotized. While we were working on this, we had to remind ourselves, “No, we’re not here to listen to the stories. We’re here to listen to the introductions.” Glass puts you right in that place where you care about what happens next. The process is incredibly frustrating, and that’s because Glass is doing his job incredibly well.

Another reason the exercise is hard is there that Glass doesn’t use a formula—it’s not like the introduction to a sitcom or an NPR news show. He does, of course, use the structure of “'Act... Title of Story...” then give the name of the storyteller, as well as a couple other details—the location, maybe an important character or two, and the basic setup. But these are not the elements that get us hooked. 

We noticed two elements occurring over and over in every introduction: a promise and a consistent sensibility.  

Glass is a master of promise. Let’s focus on this aspect first: there’s a promise in nearly every sentence of every intro, which builds into one big promise, and the story is what ultimately delivers on that promise. Here’s one of the introductions, as an example, with our comments in bold:

Glass: “Act 1: Hasta la Vista Arnie. Scott Miller was not an experienced therapist back when everything you’re about to hear took place. (I’m about to tell you what he was.)

He was a beginner, a grad student, starting off at a local psychiatric hospital, when this patient came in. (I’m about to tell you more about the patient.)  

A guy who had been doing ok, leading a more or less normal life, when one day, the guy snapped.” (Curious? Don’t worry, you’ll get details on what I mean by this.)

Scott Miller: “He would go on and on babbling about how he was the Terminator.” (Are you even more curious? Better listen to the story then...)

It’s a little like carrying a candle into a magical cave where every step shows you something that makes you want to take another step inside.

The other element, sensibility, is a bit more complicated to describe. It has to do with the kind of thing Glass promises: authentic, human-level drama. Listening to these, you get the sense that the discoveries Glass promises are the kind of things that he genuinely cares about. You see this sensibility in the foreword to Glass’ book The New Kings of Nonfiction. Whenever he describes why a piece has been selected, these are the words that consistently appear: discovery, curiosity, empathy, transparency, human drama, and pleasure. 

Here’s another example from the concatenation; this time our comments, in bold, attempt to pull out the sensibility that is inherent to the intro.

Glass: “Act 1: ‘I’m the Decider.’ You know there are all kinds of situations where we step in as reluctant proxies. (It’s good to help other people, even though sometimes it’s not convenient.)

As a favor to friends and family, taking over a chore that they don’t want to do, taking their kids or their pets off their hands for a while. (It’s good to help other people with their everyday responsibilities.)

Doing something because it’s the right thing to do and nobody else is stepping in. (Sometimes other people won’t step in to help when it’s needed, but it’s good if you do.)

That’s what happened to Davy Rothbart, more or less.” (Meet our story’s main character, who is about to do a good thing, by stepping in to help somebody.) 

This story is about Davy Rothbart trying and failing to help a friend. But notice that Glass’ intro doesn’t give away the main character’s ultimate failure in the intro, but focuses instead on his sense of duty, which is the positive vein, and the thing we can all relate to.

So there is no formula per se, but there is the perpetuation of promise, and more promise, and more promise. Alongside a genuine appreciation for the generous, altruistic side of human nature.  

We can all mimic this, of course, in our own ways. You don’t have to be passionate about the same things Ira Glass is. Take the energy of what you love about your story, and exude that in your introduction. Then don’t reveal too much. Just promise us that what’s coming next is worth sticking around for. 

Co-written with Will Rogers. Host intros pulled from the following This American Life episodes: 263 Desperate Measures; 327 By Proxy

How to Tell a Heartbreaker

I’ve been trying to finish Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for a year and a half now, and can only get through one chapter before I have to set it down. It takes a month or so before I have the energy to pick it up again. These kinds of stories take tremendous effort to absorb, and yet these are important stories and we should know them.

But how do we convince our listeners to listen to stories that yield an immediate jolt of sorrow and shame? 

One way is to couch them in more hopeful narratives, as evidenced by pieces like this, which tells the extremely difficult story of Chief Joseph within a more buoyant, contemporary framework.

What NPR’s Alex Chadwick accomplishes in this piece is amazing. His first strategy is to set the story in the present, so that it is not simply a retrospective piece, like many documentaries. The action here is ongoing, so as listeners we have an investment in how it will unfold. 

It begins when a local archaeologist proposes that the government officers of the Clearwater National Forest and representatives from the Nez Perce tribe take a trail ride along the historic Nez Perce Trail together, so that the tribe can explain some of what is in the forest to the federal employees. This comes after many years of poor relations between the two groups, and the Forest Service is hoping that stories from the Nez Perce might provide a missing link in the broken chain of communication between them. 

Chadwick tags along, and we are privy to the small steps these two groups take towards reconciliation during their four days on horseback together. We listen to their ceremonies, their discussions along the trail, reports on the weather (rain), and descriptions of the passing landscape. We hear them enjoying each other’s company around the fire, their singing, and the periodic awkward silences between them. Through the first half of this story, we become increasingly convinced that some kind of peace will be brokered here. 

It’s at this point [11:00], that our narrator Chadwick brings in the agonizing story of Chief Joseph, his people’s flight through the mountains, and their eventual capture. And this is Chadwick’s second brilliant strategy: he withholds the central trauma of the story, and approaches the difficult material only after he’s established a positive tone for the piece. As listeners, we get our lesson in the gruesome side of American history without feeling trampled by it, because we are already feeling optimistic about the present-day part of the narrative. We can absorb the tragedy of the Nez Perce War, because we have already been given a sense that something is being done to understand and remedy its fallout.  

On the fourth and final day of their journey, there is an exchange of gifts, and the tribe is eager to broach the difficult subject of maintaining the historic trail in collaboration with the Forest Service. There is an openness which neither side has experienced before. As they reach the end of their ride, there is an acknowledgment of the lingering bitterness and anger felt by the tribe, but a mild sense of transformation is also palpable. 

When you are given a heartbreaker to tell, you can try these two tricks: set the retrospective action within a current, ongoing narrative, so that your listeners have a stake in the story’s outcome. Then postpone the most painful part of your story, and embed it within a chorus of brighter notes. Getting acquainted with history is crucial to the ongoing reconciliation process, and stories like this will make the learning process more accessible to a wider audience. 

This story reminds us that history is not over, or as one character in the story, Ben Horace, says, “Even today, we’re still on a journey. We need to have courage.” 

Native America: Our Nation’s First Nations, (19 min, starts at 2:30). Hearing Voices. Host: Alex Chadwick; producer: Carolyn Jensen Chadwick; editor: Christopher Joyce; engineer: Suraya Mohamed.

Adapting for the Ear

We often don’t think about it, but most stories that we listen to have been written beforehand. While some stories are easy to read aloud, the typical written story undergoes some key changes when it’s adapted for the ear. I thought it could be an interesting Marshall McLuhan-esque exercise (the medium is the message) to compare two stories by the same author, one written and another spoken, and to examine how each is composed to better suit its medium.

I recommend reading The Lost Father in the New York Times first, then listening to Vietnam's Postwar Legacy on All Things Considered. In both, Karen Spears Zacarais tells us about what it was like to grow up without her father, who was killed as a soldier in Vietnam. In the written story, she compares her own childhood experience to children who have lost parents in today’s wars, while in the spoken story, she recalls her personal journey to the place where her father died in Vietnam.

Both are beautiful, both touching, but they are also quite different, not just in form, but in content. While the most obvious differences are seen at the surface level, some are more radical, perhaps because different media are better suited for telling different kinds of stories.

Zacarais does, of course, make the changes we might expect, namely at the level of language. In the written story, her words can be a mouthful and her sentences long. In the spoken story, she simplifies her vocabulary and shortens her sentences. The result is that the spoken language packs more of a punch. Compare, for example, the opening sentence of each story:

WRITTEN: As the daughter of a soldier killed in action, I'm worried sick about this generation of war-torn families.

SPOKEN: As a young girl I grew up envisioning my father’s death.

Sentences are shortened, diction is narrowed. But a more profound change comes at the level of genre. The New York Times story is an op-ed. While it draws on her personal experience, it continually parallels our contemporary collective experience. This type of call for political action works well in print, but wisely, Zacarais decides to tell a different story when she writes for the ear.

In the All Things Considered story, the sole focus remains her personal experience, namely her journey to Vietnam. This shift in genre (from op-ed to memoir) is well suited to audio for two reasons. First, the story remains grounded in space and time, making it easier for the listener to follow. Second, she uses physical descriptions and details to communicate her ideas and emotions. In contrast to the written piece, the audio story does not feature a call for political action. A call for action isn’t necessary. We are profoundly affected by her experience, then left to draw our own conclusions.  

Finally, the narrative structure of the two stories is quite different. Very little is resolved in the written story. Zaracais finishes with a question, leaving us suspended in mid-air. In the radio story, the narrative arc has more of a flex, and we breathe a sigh of relief as Zacarais comes to the end of her journey in Vietnam. Compare:

WRITTEN: I'm troubled by the nightmares that surely await this generation of battle-scarred children. I know they will grow up longing for just one more embrace. And like me, they are doomed to spend their lifetimes asking, wasn't there any better way?

SPOKEN: But never again will I envision Vietnam as a god-forsaken place. I won’t dwell on its blood-soaked soil or Daddy’s cries as he lay dying. Instead… I’ll remember that my father died in a beautiful land, fighting for the freedoms of a loving people.

These two stories illustrate a few good tricks for adapting a written story for audio. Use simple words. Shorten sentences. Remain grounded in space and time. Rely on physical descriptions and details to communicate subtle ideas and emotions. And, perhaps most difficult, create a strong narrative arc by cultivating a sense of tension and release.   

The Lost Father (634 words), Karen Spears Zacarais, 
New York Times, April 21, 2004

Vietnam's Postwar Legacy (3:32), Karen Spears Zacarais, 
All Things Considered, October 21, 2003

Audio Danger

Let’s start with something that’s tremendously obvious. One thing you can do in audio that you can’t do in print is use recorded sound. But producers don’t record sounds for stories just because they can—they do it because a good set of field recordings can turn a regular story into a much better story. My friend Brett Ascarelli, reporter for Radio Sweden, is great at using field recordings to transport her listeners to new and dangerous places. 

In Sweden they get a lot of snow. One of the biggest concerns in cities like Stockholm is that icicles and chunks of ice can fall off rooftops and land on people's heads—accidents that can prove fatal. During a heavy winter, building owners call in special teams that clear ice and snow from rooftops. Have you ever been on the slanted, slippery roof of a four-storey building to scrape ice and shovel snow? No? Give Ascarelli five and a half minutes of your time and she’ll take you there. The in-scene sound in this piece is so crisp that you might be able to hear how cold it is up there. When I listened to Ascarelli’s nervous voice, I got that fluttery feeling of looking down from such a height.   

Notice the excellent quality of these recordings. Ascarelli’s on-location voice is crystal clear. The voices of the men she interviews have depth and texture. You can clearly pick out a telephone ringing in somebody’s pocket. This is at least in part due to the quality microphone that Radio Sweden has on hand, but it’s also due to Ascarelli’s skill in handling her equipment. 

Beginning radio producers tend to be shy with their microphones, holding them somewhere unobtrusive, attempting to be discreet. But for the best quality tape, you must shed your microphone phobia and get nice and cozy with the source of your sound. When I listen to this piece, I can see Ascarelli’s microphone quickly jutting back and forth between the space directly in front of her interviewee’s mouth and her own. 

While you’re listening, try to imagine this story without the field recordings. If Ascarelli’s rooftop adventure were solely recalled in the studio, this story just wouldn’t have the same effect. You wouldn’t be able to hear the empty sky above your head, or feel how far you are above the ground. 

Brett Ascarelli We Don’t Answer on the Roof (5 min 30 sec), produced in March 2011 for Sveriges Radio International, Stockholm, Sweden.

Also check out her story about checking gravestones and this one from the Venice Biennale.

Good Stories Make Good Lectures

Wade Davis is hands down one of the great storytellers of our time. Holder of the oxymoronic position of “explorer-in-residence” at the National Geographic Society, Davis is best known for his controversial work in the 1980s on Haitian zombies. Since then, he has traveled the reaches of the globe, thoughtfully documenting diverse spiritual traditions.

For a bullet train introduction to Davis’s repertoire, I recommend his 2010 lecture, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. This is part of a series of Seminars About Long-term Thinking (SALT) hosted by the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco.

This is a lecture, not a story. But it’s a great lecture precisely because it’s full of great stories. 

Part of what makes it so much fun to listen to is that Davis stays close to that old radio adage, “Show. Don’t tell.” A particularly captivating story starts at 16:39, in which he details a modern reenactment of an ancient Polynesian voyage across the Pacific. Davis describes the Polynesian wayfinders as 

… sailors who can sense the presence of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible horizon simply by watching and studying the reverberations of waves across the hull of the vessel, knowing full well that every group of islands in the Pacific has its own unique refractive pattern that can be read with the same perspicacity with which a forensic scientist would read a fingerprint. 

Many of his sentences are this long and this dense, which usually doesn’t feel good to the ear, but Davis, with his scrupulous attention to detail, and his voice lunging into each story, manages to keep us engaged in spite of his very writerly, academic diction. He is also good at summarizing his ideas with poignant analogies: “Take all the genius it required to put a man on the moon, apply it to the study of the ocean, and what you would get is Polynesia.” 

 Davis hits the ground running and wastes no time in driving home this central tenet: that the world into which we are born does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just a model of reality. Four or five times he asks the question, “What does it mean to be human and alive?” and each time it feels more relevant than the last. I don’t know about you, but I love that fundamental question, and am fascinated by its many, many answers.

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, SALT. [1hr 20min]

Fresh Air Extraordinaire

A while back, I wrote a post about the expert kindness of Ira Glass, where I said that Glass’ gentle touch was the secret to his success in a risky interview situation. But I’d like to revise my argument here, to take into account the tactics of another interviewer par excellence, NPR’s celebrated Terry Gross.   

Terry Gross is kind, don’t get me wrong, but she’s not gentle in the same way as Ira Glass. She has a way of probing her interviewee about their apparent contradictions, or their less than noble deeds, and once identifying a difficult point, she does not stop after a single question, but tends to push the point, and then push it again. Somehow, her persistent jabs do not come across as attacks. 

How is this possible? Is it the neutral tone of her voice? Is it her genuine curiosity? Is it that her critical questions are preceded by and interspersed with praiseful ones?

In this interview with Robert Hass, which centers on a recent reprinting of Walt Whitman's poem “Song of Myself,” Gross addresses a conflict between Whitman's huge ego on the one hand and his great mystical exuberance on the other. That Hass is then obliged to defend poor old Whitman against the arrowlike questions of Gross, and does so with such casual eloquence, is what makes this interview as affecting as it is.  

After introducing her subject, Gross begins the interview with an easy question: Why is "Song of Myself" so important in American history? This gives Hass the opportunity to get comfortable in the interview, and to relate some basic information about the poem, its style, Walt Whitman's education, and some historical context around its (first) 1855 publication. Her next question is also an easy one.

But her third question is a little more challenging. She opens the door to the more contentious territory carefully, by asking for Hass's opinion of a third party's critique of the poem. Ralph Waldo Emerson, she says, who was an early champion of Whitman, eventually got tired of his constant list making. “How do you feel about that?” she asks Hass, “That constant list making?” Hass laughs and says, “I think everybody gets tired of that.”

But the next question is more personal, and downright difficult: "I always find that when I read Whitman I never know which part is a huge ego and which part is this great mystical exuberance. What do you think? Do you feel that way too?" 

The difficult questions about Whitman’s character continue from here, and each one gives Hass the opportunity to more fully elaborate his understanding of the poet and the poem. If Whitman’s appears to be a personal narcissism, says Hass, it’s only that he means to write about himself for everybody’s sake. What a paradox! Hass is suggesting that Whitman’s ego is some kind of exuberant selflessness. This is the jewel that Gross has been working towards with her hard questions. 

The progression in this interview is one that Gross uses often: she starts by surveying the territory, then asks for an opinion about a third party’s critique, then comes in with the more personal, rigorous probes. By establishing a neutral tone from the start, and prefacing her tougher questions with more welcoming ones, her interviews achieve a sense of vulnerability and intimacy, without being contentious.  

Imagine that Gross didn’t push the point about the big ego. Then all we would get from this interview would be, Isn’t Walt Whitman lovely? Isn’t he great? But instead we get, Wow, what a brilliant and complicated person. Which I think is way more interesting. 

I stand by my claim to the importance of kindness. But we should all take a lesson from Gross in identifying the difficult questions and creating a comfortable atmosphere in which they can be approached in a nonthreatening way. This technique will take your interviews somewhere more profound.  

Terry Gross interviews Robert Hass about Walt Whitman’s poem, "Song of Myself." (24 min) Fresh Air, July 15, 2011.

Sonic Spotlight

Writing for radio is much like writing for the stage. The decisions you have to make are very similar. You have to set a scene, develop characters, and create a strong narrative arc. The format is also quite similar. You need to indicate entrances and exits, music breaks, and the like. 

As a playwright, you would have a variety of visual tools to add weight to the events on stage, like costumes, a set, and blocking. The spotlight, for example, is a great way to amplify the important elements of a scene. But in radio, all of your dramatic queues must exist in the realm of sound. What is the audio equivalent to a bright beam of light, focused on the speaker centerstage?

Let’s call it the sonic spotlight. 

The producers of This American Life have mastered the spotlight effect. Ira Glass has written about it in TAL’s comic book, Radio: An Illustrated Guide. Listening to their shows, I have probably heard it at least twenty times. But it’s become such a popular audio maneuver, that these days you hear it on other shows too. Recently I found it on Radiolab’s 23 Weeks 6 Days. Before we get to the spotlight, though, let me give you a brief synopsis of this super, super story.  

This is a first for Radiolab, where we spend the entire hour on a single story. Our two main characters, Kelley and Tom, have a daughter who was born at 23 weeks and 6 days, just on the edge of being viable, or capable of living outside the womb. When their daughter, Juniper, is first born, Kelley and Tom are not sure whether she will make it, or whether it is ethical for them to take extraordinary measures to save her life. In this hour, we are walked through the ups and downs involved in (... spoiler alert) keeping Juniper alive. 

Here’s how the sonic spotlight works. Our example starts at 6:38. Kelley has gone into premature labor. Atonal, tension-building sound drifts underneath Kelley and Tom’s voices while they recount her cramping, bleeding, and journey to the hospital. As listeners, we grow accustomed to the ambient sound, to the point where we kind of expect it. But suddenly, the sound drops (7:11). 

The ambient sound (or music, in most cases) dropping is equivalent to the lights on stage dimming down. This is our cue to listen in, that an important moment is pending, a spotlight on the speakers. Because the sound is gone, Kelley and Tom’s voices sound very close and immediate. The spotlight is on them, and they use it to say something really important. 

The doctors aren’t able to stop Kelley’s bleeding, and her life is in jeopardy. Kelley grabs Tom’s arm, says, “Don’t let me die.” We can hear Tom’s voice that he is scared, and Kelley is sure that their baby is dead. Then all of a sudden... the baby’s heartbeat appears in our headphones, accompanied by another layer of slowly rising ambient sound. This feels like the lights coming back up on stage. We relax, because the audio insinuates that the baby is still alive, and Kelley is going to be okay.  

Easy, potent. Take away the extra sounds (or music) when your speaker says something important. Then when your weighty moment has passed, bring it back up. We will listen closely in the interim. 

23 Weeks 6 Days (60 min), produced by Radiolab in April 2013.

Thanks to Jonah Willihnganz for the stage metaphor, pulled from his "Your American Life" course syllabus, which he taught at Stanford. This syllabus is a treasure, and has provided the inspiration for several of my blogposts.

Ditch the Narrator

It’s time to get a little bit personal. This week I’m going to write about one of my own stories. I had more fun producing this story than any other story I’ve produced.

It’s called People Find the Drum who Need to Find the Drum, and it hails from waaaaay back in the Stanford Storytelling Project’s archives—Hannah Krakauer (now a close friend) and I made it in 2008. It’s about a visiting artist at Stanford, John-Carlos Perea, who leads a ten-week course on pow wow music. He teaches his students the history of pow wow music, then how to play the drum and sing. We followed the course for several weeks, and witnessed the transformation that the students underwent during this time. 

In the process of scripting this story, Hannah and I scratched our heads and labored intensely over how to tell the story of Perea and the students we’d interviewed. We sorted and resorted our piles of transcripts, and went through several writes and rewrites of the story’s narration. And then, one evening at my house, over our tenth cup of tea, it dawned on us: this story was better without a narrator. The characters could tell their story themselves.

Our narrator was just getting in the way. She felt like a person in a white coat, observing the facts, but not affected. The third-person perspective was subtracting from the story’s emotional immediacy. 

The decision came when we realized that all of Perea’s students were telling different versions of the same story, and that Perea’s interview and music could be used to weave the students’ perspectives together. It was one of those moments where we both leaned in and raised our eyebrows. Deciding to switch to a non-narrated story, we poured an eleventh cup of tea and stayed up until three in the morning to finish the piece.

Storytelling guides will tell you to decide early in your production process whether to use a narrator or not. When we gathered the audio material, we hadn’t been planning on making a narrator-less story, but by a couple strokes of luck, it worked out. 

Here’s why:

1. We asked our interviewees to introduce themselves. (Around 9 min, one character appears who does not introduce himself. This is Ben Burdick. Sorry Ben!) Then we asked them to share a little bit about themselves. That way a narrator didn’t have to relay this basic information for us.

2. We asked all of our interviewees the same list of questions, and were surprised at how similar their answers were. This made it relatively easy for us to weave a variety of perspectives together along a single narrative arc.

3. We weren’t afraid of having too much material to work with. We had hours and hours of raw tape for this piece, which made it possible for us to comb through and find the logical connections we needed in order to create a seamless, coherent storyline. 

But you don’t have to rely on luck. You can plan all of these things in advance. Because we didn’t plan a narrator-less story in advance, we missed the opportunity to exercise a few more tricks. For example, we didn’t tell the people we interviewed about our plans to not have a narrator. Then we could have asked them to please keep that in mind while they spoke, i.e. to respond to our questions in full sentences. And we didn’t ask our characters to describe where they were, what was happening, and what things looked like. Such sensory details would have developed our scene and grounded our story.   

Deciding not to have a narrator presents a puzzle-like challenge that for some producers can be fun. And it can be liberating for your characters, who will speak for themselves.  

People Find the Drum who Need to Find the Drum (23 min), produced for the Stanford Storytelling Project by Hannah Krakauer and yours truly.

Short Pause

Sometimes when I’m reading an article or book, I take a moment in the middle of a paragraph to think about what I’m reading. Sometimes I’ll even read a good paragraph twice. It’s like my brain needs a moment to organize and process the information it’s acquiring. But when we listen to a spoken story, we can’t necessarily take that pause when we need it. 

As writers and producers of spoken stories, we have to anticipate those moments when our audience will need a moment to think about things, and give it to them. These are the pauses that give the audience space to make meaning, to move from witnessing the story to understanding the story. 

Or, in the words of the wonderful Ira Glass, “An image will stay with you a little longer if we put in more of a pause.” 

A great story by Snap Judgment shows us how powerful the pause can be. Jayne Larson, an actor and producer from Beverly Hills, spends a few weeks as a chauffeur to a princesses from Saudi Arabia. Larson’s story is told in short vignettes. Each sketch details a scene, a character (a princess!), a bit of action, then finishes with a reflective moment, where Larson tells us what she learned or how she was affected by the event that just took place.

At 4:45 Larson begins a sketch about driving a young princess through the campus of UCLA. I recommend giving a careful listen to this vignette. Pay attention to the use of tiny pauses that give emphasis to particular images and reflections and how those pauses create opportunities to absorb and reflect. 

An experienced storyteller knows when to pause for emphasis. But with some interviews, you might not get the pauses where you want them. The good news is that we live in the digital age, and if you need a pause where there is none, one can easily be dropped in. You can move your pauses around.

There is one small catch, which is that you can’t just use silence to fill those pauses. If you do, it will call a lot of attention to itself, distracting the listener from the story. You have to insert the particular silence of the room, the microphone, and the equipment that you used (and maybe, as in the case of this story, some music for mood and emphasis). Before you start your interview, record a few seconds of ambient sound. Then when you edit your story, you can cut and paste this ambient sound into your story, and in turn expand certain events or magnify moments of reflection.

It doesn’t take much. Just a second here and there.

Saudi Princesses (8 min), featuring Jayne Larson, produced by Anna Sussman. Episode 403 of Snap Judgment.

Note: Thanks to Ira Glass for Radio Tip Number 7.

Hello Space, Goodbye Time

There’s a strong impulse right now to organize stories by space, rather than time. It seems a natural extension of our communication technologies to map our environments with stories, and (attempt) to chronicle the fantastic volume of human experience that takes place all around us, all the time. 

I think this trend in storytelling is also part of a broader cultural move towards organizing our lives according to space (eating local foods, supporting local economies, flying less). But the impulse to put a story on a map can be taken one step further; it can be applied to the structure of a story itself. You can organize a story by the space in which it took place, rather than by the order in which it unfolded in time. Careful, though: when space becomes the supporting structure of your story, you’re unlikely to end up with a traditional narrative arc. And if you don’t have that, then you might have to find something else to keep your listeners in their seats.  

Out of the Blocks does a great job finding that something else. As a tour of the 3300 Greenmount Avenue block in Baltimore, it’s an experiment in spatial story structure that employs some innovative modes of capturing listener interest. Host Aaron Henkin literally walks us down the block. We visit a hair salon, a restaurant, tattoo parlor, pawn shop, check cashing business, licensing office, and meet a passel of characters on the street. Through these interactions, we develop a regard for the diversity that’s present in this tiny plot of urban space. But there’s not a lot of action or suspense in this story, and it risks becoming a list-like parade of character portraits. A promise of another kind keeps our attention through the hour: 

Wendell Patrick’s luxuriant use of sound. 

This story holds our attention not by the usual hook of plot suspense, but by sonic variation. Sound, either through intensive editing, manipulation of voices, or wonderfully immersive music, places emphasis on certain passages, provides chapter markers, and cultivates the continual promise of surprise. Through this assemblage of sounds, we develop greater insight to and greater appreciation for each person we meet.

A shining example of this is a phone conversation starting at 14:35. A woman at the licensing office answers the phone and quickly tires of her customer’s questions. We hear her become frustrated as the conversation escalates, and she hangs up the phone. “Thirty-one minutes and thirty-seven seconds with this chick on the phone!” she says (at 15:35). This cues us into the kind of editing that Patrick put into this piece: that thirty-one minute conversation took only one minute for us to listen to. He literally cut 97% of the original tape, and yet through the snippets that remain, we get a great sense of this woman and her day-to-day frustrations at work. And portraits of such microcosms keep coming, and keep expanding, and always with as much of a sonic twist. The widening quality of each vignette keeps us curious, and we come out of the story with a real appreciation for this single Baltimore block. 

This is not to say that you can’t create a story that is organized by space rather than time, and have your traditional narrative arc too (I’d love to hear it!), but this is to say that if you want to investigate a particular space, and you find yourself creating a story without an arc, then there are other modes of generating promise. 

Out of the Blocks (52 min), Aaron Henkin with music by Wendell Patrick, Hearing Voices, July 2012

Showing & Telling

There are certain stories that make me ache. Stories, usually, about a person’s suffering, and their ability to accept, endure, or overcome their pain. Sometimes my whole body will flush and I’ll cry. It’s not necessarily sadness, but the entire spectrum of emotions visiting me at once. A good story of this kind hits me like a lightning bolt of human experience. Hence the ache afterwards.

Claire Schoen’s Children Sometimes Die had such an effect on me. In a series of three 1-hour documentaries, Schoen introduces us to some of the difficult questions associated with death and end-of-life care. This story probes a topic that is so charged with pain that it is almost taboo. But Schoen reminds us that even though we might not want to think about it, “sometimes children do die,” and discusses what we as a society can do to “help them on their journey.” Schoen’s careful balance between showing and telling imparts this piece with both emotional and intellectual resonance.  

The hour centers on Brittany, a 13-year-old girl who is living with cystic fibrosis, and Lamante, a 5-year-old boy with severe cerebral palsy and obstructive airway disease. Both are raised by their adoptive mother Dawn and both “live in the shadow of death.” Brittany is facing a decision about whether to get a lung transplant, and Lamante is having such difficulty breathing that his caregivers aren’t sure that the benefits of continued treatment outweigh the distress of his everyday life.

The story of Brittany and Lamante is interwoven with the institutional perspective of pediatric palliative care: doctors, child life specialists, and healthcare administrators from around the United States describe the challenges associated with their work. The alternation between one family’s story and the reflection about the institutional context within which their story takes place is part of what makes this such a potent documentary. 

Achieving a seamless connection between specific instance and general significance can be one of the most difficult tasks in writing a radio script. In this piece, the movement between storytelling and reflection occurs in five-minute chapters. First we receive the sensory and emotional account of Brittany and Lamante, then this is balanced by the intellectual and analytical narrative of the healthcare professionals. 

There is a synergy at work between the showing and telling in this story. Without the story of Brittany’s panic attacks, or Lamante’s charming smile, the larger perspective of pediatric palliative care would not have much emotional relevance. In turn, the doctor who explains that children often do not have the words to express their fear about dying lends Brittany and Lamante’s story another layer of depth. 

Brittany does not let her disease define her, and she doesn’t let it prevent her from dreaming about her future. Her situation is heartbreaking and her cheerful resilience is incredible. That she should look so closely at mortality at such a young age seems unfair. But then the doctors who care for dying children on a daily basis remind us that though it is rare, a child dying is a part of life. Stories like this help us learn to confront such wrenching possibilities in a new way.    

Children Sometimes Die (1 hr), Claire Schoen, Part II of III in ‘Heart to Heart, ’produced for Public Radio International, 2003

Combing the Dragon’s Hair

I heard a story once about a professor who had trouble getting enrollment in a course, which was titled something along the lines of, ‘Representations of the Mythopoetic in Prose and Poetry.’ So few students enrolled that the course was nearly canceled. The following year he taught the exact same course, but this time he titled it ‘Combing the Dragon’s Hair,’ and it filled up right away. There was even a waiting list.

You know the old adage about not judging a book by it’s cover. It’s true, we shouldn’t judge people, courses, or stories by their titles. But we do, and so does everybody, because there’s something in human nature that gives tremendous weight to first impressions.

The secret ingredient to a good title might be as difficult to pin down as what’s behind Ira Glass’ incredible host intros (and there is some definite overlap here), but there are two important things it’s safe to say up front: the more playful the better, and descriptive is not necessarily best. 

Radiolab has mastered the art of the alluring, allusive title. We’ve collected an instructive sample here (see below for links). Notice that each of these only hints at the subject of its story, and that most are either riffs on familiar idioms or puns. Check it out:

1. Rippin’ the Rainbow a New One 

2. Why are Bad Guys Bad? 

3. Leaving Your Lamarck 

4. In the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt 

5. One Good Deed Deserves Another

6. Rocked by Doubt 

Now here are those very same stories, but I’ve given them less fun, more descriptive titles:

1. Isaac Newton Unlocks the Mystery of the Rainbow 

2. Shakespeare on Cruelty in Human Nature 

3. The Effect of Good Maternal Care on Baby Rat DNA 

4. The Search for Truth in a Historic Photograph

5. A Classic Thought Experiment on Strategies of Cooperation and Betrayal

6. One Geologist’s Religious Doubt and the Toll it Took

A lot less appealing, eh? What is the principle at work in Radiolab’s enticing titles? 

The first thing I notice is that many of Radiolab’s titles are twists on English idioms. While they do have a familiar ring to them, they aren’t just tired turns of phrase. Take ‘In the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt,’ a riff on the Bible’s ‘valley of the shadow of death.’ This story is about a man who obsesses over mysteries until he solves them. It centers on the riddle of a photograph taken during the Crimean War, titled ‘Shadow of the Valley of Death’ (another variation of the familiar phrase!). Which is to say, there’s a lot going on here, overlapping references on multiple levels. So it sounds familiar (but not quite), and it is full of intimations (but not explicit).      

Second, many of Radiolab’s titles are puns -- they are deliberately playful. Take ‘Rocked by Doubt.’ This piece opens as producer Lulu Miller stumbles across a geologist in the desert; he gives her a lesson on ancient oceanic sediment deposits, then confides in her that he is struggling because he has recently come to doubt the existence of God. So there are rocks in this story, and a lot of doubt, and the main character is “rocked by doubt,” i.e. shaken, or “wracked by doubt.’” But this simple pun is so much more fun than our descriptive “One Geologist’s Religious Doubt and the Toll it Took.” Mine gives too much away. 

Which is all to say that too much information in your title kills the promise of a story’s central revelation. And promises, as we learned from Glass, are a central tenet in listener-recruiting technique. Of course, your title should have something to do with the discovery that you’ll uncover, but it doesn’t have to be a plot summary. It should capture the essence of your story, without revealing its twists and turns. And if it has a slightly familiar (but fresh) ring, and it’s fun (or funny), all the better! 

Radiolab stories discussed in this post:

Rippin’ the Rainbow a New One

Why are Bad Guys Bad? 

Leaving Your Lamarck 

In the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt 

One Good Deed Deserves Another

Rocked by Doubt