Reflection on the Stories-in-Motion In-Person Workshop
Santa Fe – Sept. 30 – Oct. 3, 2021
Joe Lambert/Hanna Seydel, StoryCenter

StoryMap of Movies from the Workshop

Joe
Deciding to re-locate this past July was a big deal.  After 45 years of living in one area, one state, one way of being that grows out of a distinct place, in this case, the San Francisco Bay Area, to my new home of Santa Fe, New Mexico, meant I was removing myself from the deeply familiar, and beginning again to define myself  in relation to a completely different geography – physical, human, and psychological. 

In the online way of doing our work, the place didn’t matter, a zoom room was the same here as in Oakland.  The pandemic has offered a separate dislocation with place, in my work life, I no longer needed the ceremony of shared air, shared context.  I just logged on and went to work.

Hanna

I had done various workshops with the StoryCenter before, but only online. I had met Joe only briefly in the Bay Area before he left and still didn´t know his partner Brooke in person. Therefore, travelling to Santa Fe, meeting them, staying at their new home and doing a full workshop in person seemed very exciting. When I arrived in Santa Fe, I immediately felt that it was a special place. A place with a history that seems very important for understanding the U.S. today. It is a place so different to Germany, where I am from, that you can still find similarities.

Last year I started working on a PhD project about storytelling as a participatory method in urban development processes. Through a Fulbright scholarship, I got the opportunity to do a research stay in the Bay Area – a very important step for me personally. Since I am here, I have been learning a lot about the Bay Area way of life and more about American history. I am fortunate to be learning from a diverse group of people. With that in mind, the workshop was an exceptionally intense time. I became to know so many different characters, mainly through their stories, which in a way created a special connection. Being there, working on their stories, also on mine, was a way to connect more than through a normal conversation or let´s say a conference about storytelling. I feel like I can reach out to any of them in the future. I read about the power of storytelling to create a shared identity or at least a feeling of belonging and connection before, but this time I could experience it myself.

Joe

I knew in the choice of where I decided to buy a home with my partner Brooke, that I wanted a place where we could bring people back together.  So it was not a big surprise that I scheduled a workshop at what I felt the soonest possible moment that people might risk travel, shared space, and up close interaction.  This workshop was part of my arriving, to feeling settled into a future made more distinct by the act of hosting others in our creative process.

I also wanted the workshop to function as a way for me to investigate, and celebrate, the amazing location I now inhabit.  Santa Fe is a destination precisely because of its evident beauty, and active creative community, but perhaps more profoundly because it has a thousand layers of culture, of physical history, that unveil themselves slowly, stories beneath stories beneath stories.  So that the feeling of walking around the hills, or  a street in a neighborhood, and being attentive, mimics the process of our own journey down into ourselves, where we peel later after layer of knowing by poking at our myriad memories, and the emotions that emerge.  

Hanna

In addition to the people, the place was very important to all of us and the stories we told. There were two layers of place. One was the place we did the workshop in: “The Commons”, the other one was Santa Fe itself. The first afternoon for me at the commons, before the workshop started, I decided to sit on the main plaza to get some work done. The moment I opened my laptop, the first person came around. We chatted a bit about how beautiful this place is and how lucky I am to be visiting. Then another person, that I met before came and we talked about the indigenous history of the area, when another person came and shared his knowledge. That is how the afternoon passed on. I had already learned a lot about the commons and the area around Santa Fe, when we came together to eat dinner. During the workshop, being there at the commons, having an open space to work and a relaxed atmosphere during our story circle influenced everyone. When the voice for words was no longer there, we could listen to the birds, when we needed a hug, there was some sitting close by, and we could always wonder around, get inspiration and take some picture within the commons itself. Another layer of space was Santa Fe and its surrounding area. Some people participated in the workshops because they had a special connection to this area: An important memory, a shared moment with loved ones, the history of ancestors or a place of retreat. Given the history of indigenous tribes, Hispanics, and current White settlers, we were all confronted with thinking about our positionality.

Joe
We tried to find the right balance between allowing these little trips around the area, with the feeling of being hosted in a communal setting.  The Commons, the co-housing community where we live, was designed precisely to embrace you – to make you feel like you’ve wandered into an oasis of some kind.  At the simplest level the architecture of the Commons, the paths winding through, and the common area, is a place that invites intersections of the residents.  But there is something more.     From our first day in the garden of our house, to the following days in and around the Common House (a shared kitchen, dining room, library, and other rooms), the workshop participants were given the sense the Commons has created sanctuary as well.  A type of calm, a type of friendliness, that one associates with any well-designed retreat campus. All the better for a workshop dedicated to creating in motion, in moving through and documenting place, and seeing how that might shape an important story we had to tell.  

I like to think surprise is always out in our world. If you can call on your childlike fascination with what’s right there before you, that looked at again and again, gives you a discovery, shows you something you somehow missed.  In this way, metaphors are abundant in every place, if you just allow them to reveal themselves to you. And the approach of the workshop was to encourage the closer look, the look behind and around, the macro establishing shot, and the micro detail. We saw this come out in the stories that were created, people taking in a vista (the sky, the clouds, alone here are an endless inspiration), or an image o corner of a corner of a dollhouse, or part of a figurine from the Folk Art Museum, and the stories were transformed. Would the stories have felt equally transcendent if illustrated with photos that we would have found in our normal lives, in our known spaces, it is hard to say.  What’s clear, in all the stories, is that the process changed the way the participants saw their stories being realized.  

Hanna

In the end, we were all fascinated by Santa Fe, its mountains, and the plants that thrive in a harsh environment and showed us how to be resilient. This workshop opened up many layers of our relationship to space and connected people with very different stories by sharing them with each other.

Joe
And hopefully they left with fresh awareness about how place and context shapes the conception and realization of any story we have to tell.