I wanted to start writing something new to feed the long-neglected blog, which has been fed nothing but “what I’ve been up to” posts for a long time. But I was not sure what to write about. So I decided to fall back on my favorite question: What if I’m wrong?
I can pose this question about many, many things, but to feed the the blog, I decided to ask it about Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI), the flavor of participatory story work I have been co-building and using since 1999 (even though I didn’t call it PNI until 2010 or 11).
I would like to be able to speak about the entire world of participatory story work, including the several and varied approaches that exist outside of PNI and that also work with stories in participatory ways. But I can only speak of my own experiences, which have been limited to the use and development of PNI. Of course, PNI itself has been influenced by all of the approaches I am thinking of, so they are here with us when we speak of PNI. But in terms of reflecting on being wrong, I think I am only qualified to talk about what is wrong with my own approach to participatory story work. (I say “my own” as a relationship of care, not of ownership. PNI does not belong to me or to anyone else. It belongs to everyone. It can belong to you, if you want it to.)
Cringe moments
To answer my what-if-I’m-wrong question, I looked back and remembered times when I have cringed, either while talking to people about PNI, or to myself, usually during a PNI project that didn’t go as well as I hoped it would. I came up with sixteen ways in which PNI does not work as well as I wish it would. I clustered my sixteen failings into three thematic groups. They were:
- The impact of PNI can seem exaggerated. I tell everyone that it has great power to create positive change, address intractable problems, and improve people’s lives. Is this true? Yes, it is. But at the same time, the success of PNI is contingent on many conditions and choices, and it can be fiendishly difficult to get right the first time. This is why I always advocate iterative work, but a lot of people seem to rush past my “you’ll get it right eventually” pitch and expect the wonders to begin at once.
- The difficulty of PNI can seem undisclosed. I tell everyone that you can do it if you try, and this, again, is absolutely true. But it’s not a smooth and effortless path. It’s a practice, and like any practice, it takes, well, practice to get right.
- The third cluster is a more existential one. I have long been enamored of John McKnight’s work on the professionalization of natural community processes, such as the replacement of community grief traditions by the services of professional grief counselors. I tell people that one of the goals of PNI is to help communities and organizations “reskill” themselves in story sharing and narrative sensemaking. But in reality, does PNI also professionalize natural community processes, ones that do still exist (to a varying extent) in some (or most) communities? Is PNI a part of the take-it-from-you-and-sell-it-back-to-you industry? It’s a valid question, and it’s one I have thought a lot about.
Moments of joy
But PNI is not all cringe; in fact, there is very little cringe in it. What there is in it, and plenty of it, is joy.
So I thought: why don’t I list moments of joy as well? After all, the best question to ask after “What if I’m wrong” is “What if I’m right?” And there have been many times over the past 25 years when I have had an intense feeling of “yes, this is working, this is doing what I say it will do.” Those moments matter as much as the moments of cringe.
So I wrote a list of answers to that second question. I stopped at sixteen answers (to match the first list), and I clustered them into four groups. They were:
- Visibility, respect, and inclusion: People feel heard, validated, represented, and appreciated.
- Discovery and learning: People find out new things about themselves and their fellow participants.
- Useful solutions: People find new ideas that gave them new plans and hopes for action.
- New vistas: People see things they could do in the future to keep gaining (and expand) the benefits of their work with stories.
A new writing project
What am I to do with these 32 stories? Tell them, of course, but how? In the past I would have spent weeks writing a 20- or 30-page blog post, then posted it all at once.
I think I will do something different this time. I think I will write this list of 32 answers as a weekly (or – wait – don’t hold me to that – biweekly at times) series, possibly alternating between cringe and joy (to avoid losing the will to write while I wait for the joy to begin). Each post will be quite short (by my standards), which might be more to the taste of my readers than the long essays I used to write. But it will still be a long essay. It will just be written serially, like a Dickens novel.
I can see the benefit in treating each moment of cringe or joy on its own. It will give me space to think more about the moment and its antecedents and repercussions. For each cringe moment, I can talk about why it’s cringe and what we can do to avoid it or mitigate it. For each moment of joy, I can talk about why it brings me joy and what you can do to experience moments like it yourself.
I can’t say that I will write nothing else but this list of 32 answers in the next 32 (or more) weeks. I’m not that methodical of a person. I will still post the occasional update (when things happen), and I have several other ideas for posts that I would like to write, and I even have a few “canned” posts (from emails) that I can throw in if a week has been busy or difficult. But my plan right now is to keep this new series going until it’s done.
These lists will be similar, by the way, to other lists I wrote here and recently moved to The Working with Stories Miscellany. The cringe moments are related to the chapters “PNI Perceptions” and “PNI Dangers,” and the moments of joy are related to the chapter “PNI Opportunities.”
But these lists will also be different from those lists in an important way. This time I’m going to write about my own perceptions and experiences, not those of other people. I will be exploring how I felt while I worked on projects and talked to people. That’s new.
Will this new cringe-and-joy series be worth reading? Who knows? I never know if anything I’m writing will be worth reading. I keep writing anyway.