Two posts in a row! Hooray! To be honest, I miss writing in the blog. It was fun. I’ll see if I can start doing it at least once a month again. However, I will need to hold myself back from writing those long essays that took up weeks of my time. Must not get in too deep. Must not get in too deep.
Anyhew, I have been thinking a lot about the PNI Institute lately. We started it six years ago, and it has not grown into what I hoped it would become. This is what I was hoping to create:
- A lively discussion
- A free online quarterly or biennial peer-reviewed journal for PNI practitioners, with papers that spread techniques, share tips, recount experiences, and play with ideas
- An annual or biannual online conference that brings people together to brainstorm, learn, talk, share experiences, get to know each other, and help PNI thrive
We have done the first of these things, with 60+ phone calls during which we talked about many things PNI-related and PNI-adjacent. In that sense the effort has been a success.
However, I still want to do the other things. (I always say “do the other things” in a JFK voice.)
On our last phone call in September, we talked about doing two new things:
- We will hold a series of three special calls, starting in January, to discuss The Future of PNI and the PNI Institute (please say that in a Carl Sagan voice). We will talk about how we could ramp up to a bigger and better PNI Institute that better supports PNI practitioners.
- I have set up a survey to find out what people want from the PNI Institute in the future. If you have used participatory narrative inquiry, or even if you are just interested in it, I would very much value your opinion about what the PNI Institute should do to support you. (Please fill out the survey in your own voice.)
That’s it!
Wait – one more thing.
A colleague recently sent me an excellent question about PNI in practice, a question that had come up in a workshop. I answered the question, and then I thought – Hey, wait a minute. I used to have a “mail bag” series on the blog, where I would post answers to questions I got in email. I stopped doing that, but it was a good way to feed the blog.
So here’s the deal: if you have a question about PNI, send it to me in an email. If I think everyone would benefit from the answer, I’ll answer it here. (Otherwise I’ll just answer it to you.) Deal?
Now, I don’t want to push this blog post off the top of the blog, because I want people to fill out my survey. So I’ll just tack my “mail bag” answer on to this post.
The question was:
In our story sharing session yesterday, we had a discussion about removing data such as a telephone number and a name that someone mentioned in their story. Some people said they thought removing the information would hurt the integrity of the story. Others said it wouldn’t. What is your opinion?
The rest of this blog post has been moved to (and revised for) The Working with Stories Miscellany. You can find it as the section “On removing information from stories” in Chapter 2, “More on Story Collection.”