Telling your story, standing on holy ground

{Contributed photo/Barbara Presnell}

In April, I taught a memoir-writing class at the John Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC, near Murphy. There, one of my students, an 87-year-old retired minister, told us, “My grandson wants me to write my story. But he doesn’t want to know when I was born, when I got married, where I went to school. He wants to know about me, who I am, what I value, what has driven my life.” That, he said, was why he was taking the class. He wanted to put that down in words before it was too late.

He’s right, of course. Birth certificates and resumes tell a two-dimensional story, but they don’t say who you are. Who you are, who we all are, is a complex tapestry of place, experience, family, things that have happened to us, things we have made happen. For those moments, we look at the threads of our lives, its colors, weaves, and patterns.

Maybe like my student, someone in your family wants to know your story. Maybe you’ve done something that changed your life—hitchhiked across America, fostered ten children—and you want to share your experience with the world. Or maybe you’re writing for yourself, to bring together the unraveled ends of your life and understand them, or let them go.

{Contributed photo/Barbara Presnell}

I didn’t grow up in one of those families where folks sat on porches after dinner, strumming guitars and banjos and telling stories to the children at their knees. Sometimes I thought I was deprived not to have that porch, deprived to have been born into a family where nobody sang on the porch and even the piano was out of tune.

Until one day I realized: maybe there was no porch, but there were funerals and family reunions. There were summer afternoons when all the women and half the men gathered in the kitchen because the corn was in and had to be put up. Somebody would start. “Remember that time when lightning hit the tree outside Granny’s house?” “Remember Uncle Teke jumping out of the plane?” And stories would begin to spin around the kitchen or the funeral parlor, and we young cousins would lean in for every bit of detail we could hold on to.

Still, it took me a lot of years of living and telling other people’s stories to realize I had some of my own. They crept out at first, reluctant. Who am I to be listened to? Who am I to think my story matters? It took even more years for me to figure out what my story was, what part of it I was willing to share, what part of it stayed with me.

Then last winter, as part of a book study at Grace Episcopal Church, I read and discussed with others the book, Love is the Way, by Rev. Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America. I read his stories of growing up Black in the South, of his grandmother whom he cherished, how she chopped collards, served up rice and gravy, fried chicken and pork chops, making food that was good for the soul “soul food.” And telling stories.

Of his own stories and those of all the various people he’s met in his ministry, he says, “Whenever someone tells their story, you are standing on holy ground. You behave differently, hear them differently, and react from a different place. It’s so much harder to hate when someone has shown you their heart.”

I hope you will join me and others for four Mondays in July (10, 17, 24, and 31) from 10:00-12:00 a.m. for a workshop called, “Finding Your Story, Writing Your Life.” We’ll meet at 202 N. Main Street, Lexington, NC.

Follow this link to register

Limited scholarships—both half and full—are available, so don’t let the registration fee stop you.

Contact Amanda Feliciano at info@artsdavidsoncounty.org if you want to apply.

You can’t know someone until you know their story, Curry says. You can’t know yourself until you know your own.