Pushing it too far at Maple House
In late 2014, struggling with the challenges of Maple House’ ever-changing population of young people, and a workshop space that was often filled (because of the young people’s mental ill health) with silences and ‘elephants in the room’, I often felt my instincts to be lacking. My field notes record the challenges of dialogic storytelling in such a thick atmosphere:
I am bouncing against the walls of a three-dimensional space whose walls are injunctions. I must avoid assuming the young people’s consent, but I must also not impose on them to obligation to state it. I must be led, but not into dark and harmful places, and yet I must not skate over darkness. I must develop the relationship between them and me, but not over-structure it. (Nov 2014)
Despite the staff’s endorsement of a practice based on fluidity, flexibility and a lack of expectations, I searched for some guiding positive purpose to my workshops. I decided to work with the current group of inpatients – all young women, many of whom seemed fiercely intelligent – on creating a booklet of stories together, based on paintings.
At the first session, the girls unanimously chose Degas’ ‘Girls Combing Their Hair’. The story flowed from them surprisingly freely – all of them in agreement that the girls in the painting were not enjoying a sense of idyllic peace, but being keenly scrutinised by a group of men.
I am bouncing against the walls of a three-dimensional space whose walls are injunctions. I must avoid assuming the young people’s consent, but I must also not impose on them to obligation to state it. I must be led, but not into dark and harmful places, and yet I must not skate over darkness. I must develop the relationship between them and me, but not over-structure it. (Nov 2014)
Despite the staff’s endorsement of a practice based on fluidity, flexibility and a lack of expectations, I searched for some guiding positive purpose to my workshops. I decided to work with the current group of inpatients – all young women, many of whom seemed fiercely intelligent – on creating a booklet of stories together, based on paintings.
At the first session, the girls unanimously chose Degas’ ‘Girls Combing Their Hair’. The story flowed from them surprisingly freely – all of them in agreement that the girls in the painting were not enjoying a sense of idyllic peace, but being keenly scrutinised by a group of men.
Resistance
Enthused, I typed up their story and read it out to them at the beginning of the next session. Yet I was met by a tense and stony silence. Nonetheless, I brought out the books of paintings again. Two girls showing a small flicker of interest in Chagall’s ‘The Dream’, I chose to interpret the atmosphere of resistance as uncertainty or apathy, and to pursue my plan. The same two girls made some contributions that enabled us to bring together a story about an angry, isolated woman.
A moment arose when the character was stuck, immobile and proud, in the air, and I pushed them with questions: ‘What happens next? Does she land on the ground anywhere? What does she do there?’ One girl responded that she wanted a different way of life, to ‘change’, in some unspecified way – but it was clear that most of the others preferred to leave her there - in arrogance, or perhaps uncertainty. In fact, in the ‘One Word Round the Circle’ game we had played beforehand as a warmup, they had paused and collectively decided to leave their heroine to be eaten by a predator. Should I have listened to this, and allowed them to leave their Chagall antiheroine hanging in the air? There was a clear message in their silence and reluctance and yet – in a session focused on open two-way storytelling communication! – I chose not to listen but to plough ahead towards a somewhat redemptive ending. Following this second session I was sent the results of an informal feedback exercise the teacher, sensing their dissatisfaction, had run with the girls. In amongst some positive comments was a strong shared view of where I was going wrong: |
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The teacher suggested – and I agreed – that by ‘childish’ the girls meant something more, or other, than simply age-appropriateness:
My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that rather than the sessions being ‘childish’ in fact the girls find it easier to detach themselves from a challenging creative task which they feel embarrassed by and excuse their difficulties in engaging by criticising the task. There is a sort of critical mass of intelligent young women in the unit at the moment and maybe this extra-curricular activity is a chance for them to display some frustration with what is a very difficult personal journey for each of them. (Maple House teacher, Nov 2014)
In this kind interpretation, he hinted at two aspects of the storymaking activity which were problematic. Firstly, its sense of expectation: was I so delighted with the feminist allegory they had produced the first week that I thought I could shoehorn future sessions into a neat, safe, comfortable package with a clear outcome for me? Was I offering a gift with strings attached? Secondly, its earnestness: the girls had produced one lyrical story with, arguably, a therapeutic undertone, but that did not mean they wished (or felt able) to continue in this vein. The accusation of ‘childishness’ may have been comprised of resistance to this earnestness and expectation.
My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that rather than the sessions being ‘childish’ in fact the girls find it easier to detach themselves from a challenging creative task which they feel embarrassed by and excuse their difficulties in engaging by criticising the task. There is a sort of critical mass of intelligent young women in the unit at the moment and maybe this extra-curricular activity is a chance for them to display some frustration with what is a very difficult personal journey for each of them. (Maple House teacher, Nov 2014)
In this kind interpretation, he hinted at two aspects of the storymaking activity which were problematic. Firstly, its sense of expectation: was I so delighted with the feminist allegory they had produced the first week that I thought I could shoehorn future sessions into a neat, safe, comfortable package with a clear outcome for me? Was I offering a gift with strings attached? Secondly, its earnestness: the girls had produced one lyrical story with, arguably, a therapeutic undertone, but that did not mean they wished (or felt able) to continue in this vein. The accusation of ‘childishness’ may have been comprised of resistance to this earnestness and expectation.
Contracting in the open
In fact, I was surprised to discover that I was genuinely grateful and relieved for their feedback. The process of ‘contracting’ to tell and listen to stories had become thorny and shadowy with this group; their honest feedback had brought it into the light. It had never occurred to me to ask them openly for guidance; that they might not say ‘go away’, but actually give me useful advice. Even where their guardedness made such a direct conversation impossible, I could communicate, through my telling of stories, my own perception of what was happening between them and myself, and give them a chance to respond in kind.
So at the third session I thanked them for their feedback, admitted I am usually too shy to ask for it, but would leave a notebook in their living room in case they wanted to give more at any point. I went on to tell them about how Charles Perrault and the Grimms stripped out the biological and ‘indecent’ from fairy tales, giving them a certain message for a certain market. They had an earnest, worthy agenda – and in discussing them, I was tacitly apologising for a similar fault. The girls told me the fairy tales they knew and I told them what I knew of their bloodier, more sexual, more vigorous peasant antecedents. I shared with them my source for some of these stories – Angela Carter’s books of fairytales – and one girl (who had been particularly angry the previous week) read out some of the bawdiest ones with great dignity, to the other girls’ delight.
So at the third session I thanked them for their feedback, admitted I am usually too shy to ask for it, but would leave a notebook in their living room in case they wanted to give more at any point. I went on to tell them about how Charles Perrault and the Grimms stripped out the biological and ‘indecent’ from fairy tales, giving them a certain message for a certain market. They had an earnest, worthy agenda – and in discussing them, I was tacitly apologising for a similar fault. The girls told me the fairy tales they knew and I told them what I knew of their bloodier, more sexual, more vigorous peasant antecedents. I shared with them my source for some of these stories – Angela Carter’s books of fairytales – and one girl (who had been particularly angry the previous week) read out some of the bawdiest ones with great dignity, to the other girls’ delight.
New terms
I asked the girls if they would like to make up a possible peasant version of another fairy tale they knew. Silence. The previous week I would have just started and hoped to pull them along. But this week, I just said, ‘Maybe you wouldn’t like to,’ and waited for a minute or so. We kept on with our finger knitting/plaiting/friendship bracelets/Christmas garlands in fairly companionable silence. And then one girl did make a start – on ‘Sleeping Beauty’. She proposed the strictures of ‘One Word Round the Circle’ as a way of composing our story, but after a few rounds I loosened the rules to ‘One Paragraph’, and further loosening then occurred, without any discussion, so that individuals threw in ideas as they occurred to them, often speaking on top of each other.
The story was earthy and vengeful, in the spirit of many of the Angela Carter stories. I asked whether they would like me to write it up in ‘PG-cert’ and add it to our compendium of stories. ‘But if you make it PG, you’ll have to cut out half the story.’ So in the end I agreed to stop being like Perrault. I undertook to type up their version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ as it was:
The story was earthy and vengeful, in the spirit of many of the Angela Carter stories. I asked whether they would like me to write it up in ‘PG-cert’ and add it to our compendium of stories. ‘But if you make it PG, you’ll have to cut out half the story.’ So in the end I agreed to stop being like Perrault. I undertook to type up their version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ as it was:
The teacher expressed his wonder at the girls’ bawdiness, and how empowering this seemed to be after a difficult week at the setting.
In their feedback and their participation, the girls had given me their permission to keep working with them, along with some tacit rules: to play, to let anything go, to hand over the reins, to let their silence speak. This relationship renegotiated, I felt one step closer to being able to work without a sense of ‘purpose’ or ‘outcome’, relying on my ever-fallible instinct - something I sought to express in an autoethnographic poem: |
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