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Interactive Storytelling 13th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling ICIDS 2020 Bournemouth UK November 3 6 2020 Proceedings Anne-Gwenn Bosser
Interactive Storytelling 10th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling ICIDS 2017 Funchal Madeira Portugal November 14 17 2017 Proceedings 1st Edition Nuno Nunes
In this revised and updated edition of the StoryCenter’s popular guide to digital storytelling, StoryCenter founder Joe Lambert offers budding storytellers the skills and tools they need to craft compelling digital stories. Using a “Seven Steps” approach, Lambert helps storytellers identify the fundamentals of dynamic digital storytelling – from conceiving a story, to seeing, assembling, and sharing it. Readers will also find new explorations of the global applications of digital storytelling in education and other fields, as well as additional information about copyright, ethics, and distribution. The book is filled with resources about past and present projects on the grassroots and institutional level, including new chapters specifically for students and a discussion of the latest tools and projects in mobile devicebased media. This accessible guide’s meaningful examples and inviting tone makes this an essential for any student learning the steps toward digital storytelling.
Joe Lambert founded the Center for Digital Storytelling (now StoryCenter) in 1994. He and his colleagues developed a computer training and arts program known as the digital storytelling workshop. Joe and his staff have traveled the world to spread the practice of digital storytelling, to all 50 U.S. states and some 48 countries. Lambert is author of Seven Stages: Story and the Human Experience (Digital Diner Press). In 2017, he celebrated his 34th year as an Executive Director of StoryCenter, having evolved his work in the 1980s in the performing arts to work in digital storytelling and media education in the 1990s.
Brooke Hessler is Director of Learning Resources at California College of the Arts, where she teaches multimodal inquiry and writing. Her scholarship has appeared in the International Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Community Literacy Journal, Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom, A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, and Digital Storytelling in Higher Education: International Perspectives, among other journals and collections. An award-winning instructor of media arts-integrated courses, her digital story work has included long-term collaborations with K-16 educators, community arts activists, museums, and survivors of natural disasters and domestic terrorism.
Taylor& Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com
digital storytelling
capturing lives, creating community
5th edition
joe lambert with brooke hessler
Fifth edition published 2018 by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2002, 2006, 2010, 2013, 2018 Joe Lambert
The right of Joe Lambert and H. Brooke Hessler to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Life on the Water, Inc. 2002
Second edition published by Life on the Water, Inc. 2006
Third edition published by Digital Diner Press 2010
Fourth edition published by Routledge 2013
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Lambert, Joe, author. | Hessler, H. Brooke, author.
Title: Digital storytelling : capturing lives, creating community / Joe Lambert & H. Brooke Hessler.
Description: Fifth edition, revised and updated. | New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. | “Fourth edition published in 2013 by Routledge”—T.p. verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017055435| ISBN 9781138577657 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781138577664 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781351266369 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Storytelling. | Literature and technology. | Creative writing. | Digital storytelling.
Classification: LCC LB1042 .L36 2018 | DDC 372.67/70285—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055435
ISBN: 978-1-138-57765-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-57766-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-26636-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Minion Pro by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
Visit the authors’ website at www.storycenter.org
For Dana Atchley (1941–2000)
Artist, Friend, Digital Storyteller
Your final exit was beyond reason. Your vision will live on.
See you on the flipside
Taylor& Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com
Foreword
Grete Jamissen
My journey with digital storytelling began 12 years ago, when I was involved in an innovation project at my institution, Oslo University College of Applied Sciences. Our aim was to create a better dialogue between researchers, students, and the surrounding community. A natural approach was to focus on how researchers communicate – not only their findings, but also their questions and motivations for research. And here my journey took a serendipitous turn, both in my professional career and in my personal job commitment.
One of our young collaborators had been to California and experienced a digital storytelling workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling, now StoryCenter, in Berkeley. He suggested that we invite researchers to make digital stories to be published on the university website. As it turned out, this was a bit premature and researchers were not ready for this personal and narrative turn in communication. As project leader, I was invited to the screening of the stories from our first pilot workshop, where senior faculty members shared stories about turning points in their professional lives. I was blown off my feet and joined the next workshop, where I created my first digital story – about how I became an action researcher. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that my story is about how research “subjects” – in this case, old people in a neglected and poor area in downtown Oslo – took center stage and benefited from the opportunity of having their voices heard in the public debate.
What really set me off, however, was not the opportunity for research communication, but the learning process I went through in my struggle to condense this life-changing experience to a three-minute story. What was it really about, and what was it really, really about? As a teacher since 1971, I have always looked for ways to support learners as active participants in their learning, rather than as passive recipients of information. As ICT entered Norwegian classrooms in the 1980s as something other than programmed instruction in a behaviorist tradition, I observed children using the new tools in creative writing processes. I wrote my master’s thesis in 1985 focusing on ICT as a tool in the hands of the learner in a social constructivist tradition more than as a tool for effective content presentation.
In my various jobs, in the computer industry and in educational institutions, this approach to ICT for learning purposes has been my touchstone. I still recall how colleagues in the innovation project made fun of me and of my excitement at having finally found, in digital storytelling, the answer to the challenge of reflective learning.
As a university college, we prepare students for the professions of the welfare state, to become nurses, child welfare professionals, teachers, and so on. Such professional skills and identities are complex: at once technical and social, cognitive and emotional, experiential and theoretical – in other words, “the art and science” of professional work. Practice placement constitutes a large part of these programs precisely to help students develop the personal and artistic aspects of the work.
Traditionally, however, reflective reports from placement are descriptive and analytical, representing the scientific rather than the artistic dimension. Thus, we have long been looking for an approach to support reflective learning and we were thrilled to find digital storytelling as one answer. It has the capacity to help students learn from experience and support the personal and artistic dimension of their professional identity by not only allowing, but actually asking, them to keep a personal focus. In looking for theories to make sense of our experience, I came across the concept of Poetic Reflection, which immediately resonated with me as a way to communicate what is not so easily put into words. An old Norwegian book on learning from placement describes poetic reflection as a combination of the personal logs and diaries that are not meant for sharing and the informative facts- and theorybased reflections that are meant for the public sphere. Poetic reflection, as we use it with digital storytelling, is intended for sharing but strives to keep the focus on personal experience and reflection.
For the last 12 years I have been able to follow up this experience. In this process, I have been actively engaged in building a community of practice of digital storytelling in higher education in Norway as well as participating in an inspiring international network. As Joe and Brooke discuss several places in this book, digital storytelling was quickly adopted by, and is gaining momentum in, higher education worldwide, building on the inspiration from StoryCenter and adapting it to a wide variety of practices. My institution’s contribution to such adaptations has been to meet the challenge of large classes by developing a guided story circle practice where students are self-reliant and learn how to listen attentively and give feedback – a practice with huge transferable value to other areas of their education and future professional work.
So, what is it with digital storytelling? Why do we keep doing it, and why is it that more and more colleagues join us in exploring and developing it? If you saw the sparkle in the eyes of the students involved in storytelling workshops, you wouldn’t need to ask that question. Hearing them say how awareness of their personal emotions is an important dimension in their professional work and studies, and that digital storytelling makes them reflect more deeply, is all the inspiration you need as a teacher. They also stress the social and constructive process and say that the feedback from their peers enhances their reflection. Listening to the stories of peers inspires them to rethink their own experiences. And our teachers, experiencing a digital storytelling workshop for the first time, are blown off their feet just as I was
in my first encounter 12 years ago. They see qualities in their students that are new to them and they get a better understanding of the students’ actions in their practice placements.
A while ago our source of inspiration changed its name from the Center for Digital Storytelling to StoryCenter, thus underlining even more strongly what has been the message in all previous editions of this book: that the core of the work is not digital, but storytelling. By now the digital is such an integrated part of our lives that it is not even worth mentioning. So, with the generation of students called “digital natives,” even if, upon close investigation, they may not be all that native, things have definitely changed. We no longer need to spend our valuable workshop time teaching editing software and this allows for more time and greater focus on reflection and the creative process.
I had not been involved in digital storytelling for long before I had the opportunity to meet and be inspired by Joe in person, first in an attempt to create a European branch of CDS in Copenhagen in 2008 and then at my first DS conference in Obidos, Portugal, 2009. The main breakthrough in our collaboration, however, was the Fourth International Conference on Digital Storytelling, “Create–Share–Listen,” in Lillehammer in 2011. I had the privilege of leading the Norwegian planning group, a triple helix group with representatives from higher education, small businesses, and the public sector, with Joe as supportive guide. For me, this was the beginning of an exciting worldwide digital storytelling working group and, of course, more conferences: Ankara in 2013, Athens in 2014, Massachusetts in 2015, and most recently the Untold “unconference” in London in 2017. The higher education deme there identified assessment, sustainability, and research as the three most important areas to discuss in the development of digital storytelling – in addition to ethical issues which were the focus of another deme at the conference. So, we still have questions to discuss, many of which are addressed in this edition.
Another, even more tangible, outcome is Digital Storytelling in Higher Education: International Perspectives, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. In organizing this book, my fellow editors and I relied on the four scholarships of higher education identified by Ernest Boyer in his seminal report Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, published by the Carnegie Foundation in 1990. Not surprisingly, we easily identified relevant and exciting projects to cover all four scholarships: teaching and learning, discovery, integration, and engaged collaboration. You will also find many examples of applications of digital storytelling in all these areas in the book you are holding in your hands.
My digital storytelling journey started off with an ambition to reform and enrich research communication and, while this was premature then, I now meet an increasing demand from my fellow researchers and faculty members. In the last 10 years, narrative has become acceptable and respectable, both as a research methodology and as a communication approach. This is exciting and in no way straightforward. Developing the personal professional story will only happen as a result of exciting dialogue with colleagues.
In my recent role as a retired Professor Emerita, I am also lucky to still be invited to workshops and meet new groups of students. Only last week I met an international
group of Social Work students making and sharing stories of important turning points in their lives that have shaped their identities and motivated them to do this work. To be part of this process, observing how they benefit from story work and how brave they are in sharing and giving feedback, really gives meaning to working in higher education.
I will be forever grateful for the work of Joe and his colleagues at StoryCenter for creating and generously sharing the basic values and steps of digital storytelling that have made this journey possible.
—Grete
Jamissen Professor Emerita, Multimedia Studies, Oslo and Akershus University College
Acknowledgments
On behalf of my collaborators at StoryCenter, I would like to graciously thank a number of people for their contributions to the development of this book over these many years.
To start with, I recognize the thousands of storytelling participants who have shared their lives and stories with us, whose courage, trust, and honesty continue to inspire our work.
My colleagues and I have the greatest job in the world, and in every workshop we expand our circle of friends. We must recognize that this book itself has seeds in two projects. In 1996, we were given support by Apple Computer, under the guidance of Ralph Rogers and Kelli Richards, to create the original Digital Storytelling Cookbook. Then in 1998, the Institute for the Future, led by our friends Kathi Vian and Bob Johansen, gave us support for a white paper on digital storytelling, called “The Creative Application of Digital Technology to the Ancient Art of Storytelling.”
The original work in 2002 on this particular book was made possible principally as a collaboration with Emily Paulos, the Managing Director at StoryCenter. Her support and guidance has remained vital to the ongoing process of evolving this text. I want to thank all the staff at StoryCenter, Daniel Weinshenker, Andrea Spagat, Stefani Sese, Allison Myers, Rob Kershaw, Amy Hill, Root Barrett, Andrea Paulos, Mary Ann McNair, and Rani Sanderson, as well as former staff members, Caleb Paull, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Theresa Perez, Ary Smith, Zoe Jacobson and our numerous other collaborators. My work is driven by the efforts of this family of coworkers, and I thank all of them for their commitment to the general development of the practice of digital storytelling. For the help on the fourth edition, I thank Patrick Castrenze, who helped shape and advise our approach. I want to give thanks to Erica Wetter and Mia Moran of Routledge for their work on this fifth edition.
Over the years digital storytelling has evolved beyond our studios and our workshops with practices in numerous contexts. We look back to recognize the importance of our collaboration with countless organizations and individuals. Some of the names include: Warren Hegg and the Digital Clubhouse Network; Glynda Hull at UC Berkeley; Ana Serrano and the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto; Daniel Meadows and the team at Capture Wales from the BBC; Helen Simondson and the
Australian Centre for the Moving Image; Burcu Şimşek in Turkey; Geska Helena Andersson, Simon Stromberg, Grete Jamissen, Nikolene Lohmann in Scandinavia; Pip Hardy, Tony Sumner, Clodagh Miskelly, Alex Henry, and others around the UK; Federica Pesce and Melting Pro in Rome; Erwin Schmitzberger and Cilli Supper in Austria; Pam Sykes and Daniela Gachago in South Africa; the entire network of the New Media Consortium; Aline Gubrium, Yvonne Mendez, Vanessa Pabon, and others, in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts; Carroll Parrott Blue, Charlotte Hamilton and Rubén Durán at the University of Houston and Houston Community College, respectively; Stephanie Goss and our dear friends at Asian Pacific Wellness Center; as well as our other Board members, Nina Shapiro-Perl, Walt Jacobs, Nikki Yeboah, Kristi Laughlin, and Anand Kalra; California State Librarian Greg Lucas, and program associate Janet Coles, for their support of California Listens; and all of our partners and clients around the world.
I would like to thank the following individuals for permission to reproduce illustrations in the text: Zahid Al-Amin (Interlude 6); Rosalie Blakey Wardell (portrait of Dana Atchley); Roberto Gerli (Chapter 11 images 7–13); Monte Hallis (Interlude 1); Rob Kershaw Chapter 11 images 1–6); Wynne Maggi (Interlude 2); Thenmozhi Soundarajan and Thiakavalhy Soundarajan (storyboard in Chapter 10).
This book of ideas, inspired by the digital storytelling workshop, grew out of my collaboration with Nina Mullen and the late Dana Atchley.
My former wife Nina Mullen spent nine years as the Co-Director of the center in San Francisco and Berkeley, and traveling the world teaching and representing our organization. As co-parent of my amazing children, Massimo and Amalina, she continues to make this work possible for me.
Of course, now that Massimo is 22, I consider him an able digital storyteller, and digital storytelling facilitator, but mainly a person with a vision for change and hope through mapping the world around him. With Amalina, she is fabulous as a voiceover recording coach in our workshops, but I now also see her as a Bodhisattva-inwaiting and current future scientist-scholar-athlete, and the only person who can really leave me without words. I am working as hard as I can to make a world for them that values compassion as much as competition.
As for Dana, he remains the person for whom this work is dedicated. Miss you, brother. Your dream lives on around the world.
I want to give a very specific thanks to Tatiana Beller. Once upon a time, a child was given up for adoption at birth in 1972. As her father, for 40 years, I wandered the desert carrying a psychic empty space, wondering who this person was, and had become. After we met, and I met her son, my grandson Sebastian, and I saw these mirrors of myself, much changed in my life. She is now a central part of this work as a collaborator, teacher, filmmaker, and daughter to me. Such a story. Hijole!
And, finally, to Brooke Hessler, my love and collaborator. Here’s to making our life, one story at a time.
Introduction
5th Edition
Welcome to this book. You, my reader, are why this book exists. I want to know your story. I want to know if I can help you help others find their story.
If you are new to these ideas, I want you to become a story worker – someone that listens, supports, cajoles, and collaborates. If you already do all of those things, in relation to people’s stories, then I want you to become better at it.
And if you find little new here, I want you to call me. We have to talk. I am ready to listen. Seriously.
How to Use This Book
With our decision to publish with Routledge in 2013, we reached a much broader audience, an audience that over that last four years gave us one central piece of feedback. Could we have more of the book speak to the students they might assign this book as part of a classroom text?
The book started as an autobiographical reflection of a community arts-based practitioner working mainly in community, and then, later, educational settings. Much of the original writing was directed at my fellow community arts facilitators, as likely to work in an informal after-school setting as a classroom. With this edition, we are putting more emphasis on how digital storytelling can serve students in formal educational settings. I have asked a longtime classroom educator, Dr. Brooke Hessler, to join me in reorienting the book toward the student jumping into digital storytelling for the first time. You will find a new chapter by Brooke Hessler about using digital storytelling as part of one’s educational journey. And we have added a very practical chapter about mobile media.
As for what remains, you can still read as if Chapter 1 refers to the Why of this work, Chapter 2 refers to the What we mean by story, Chapter 3 refers to the When of our history, and Chapter 4 as the What Else, as in how our work connects to
a spectrum of participatory media and story-work practices. When you arrive in Chapters 5 through 14, you really are in the how-to part of the book. Chapters 15 to 17 are about the ways that digital storytelling has become a global movement, spanning sectors and approaches, but sharing a common commitment to ethics and activism (including new conversations with Dr. Hessler about education, and a discussion with Laura Revels about doing work in the context of Alaska Native public health).
We are also maintaining our Interlude sections – the stories about people working with another person on a particular story – with international contributions by Burcu Şimşek of Turkey, Rani Sanderson from Canada, and Nikoline Lohmann from Denmark.
You can, of course, jump around in any order if you are looking for specific ideas or useful material, but if questions remain, feel free to email me at joe@story center.org
Story in the Eye of the Storm
I am writing this introduction as the second of two enormous hurricanes comes sweeping across the southeast United States. Along with recent earthquakes, scorching heatwaves and huge fires, we feel like we are passing through some biblical narrative of end-times.
A border was crossed in the United States in 2016. We moved from a country led by Obama, to a country led by Trump, a country stretched between ever more polarized perspectives about the meaning of citizenship. An astounding moment. That fierce political whiplash would have been enough, but add to it the ups and downs of 2017 news cycles, with daily doses of the surreal, and, well, it made us feel all like we were bobbing along in the middle of a psychic tempest.
By mid-year, many Americans, like us, were feeling bruised, in our minds and in our hearts.
Everyone comments how, in the middle of a crisis, people rise to perform their best selves. They gather in solidarity, selflessly, with genuine compassion. They lift each other up off the ground, stand between the vulnerable and that which threatens. They awaken the spirit of human dignity. Despair becomes hope with every rescue, with every counseling session, with every chipping in of a neighbor to carry out the debris, nail up a board, celebrate the reconstruction. Together. Every story matters.
The circles of storytellers that I, and my colleagues around the world, gather in our community centers, classrooms, and public spaces are asked to become their best selves. The most respectful and kind, supportive and encouraging, the most decent, person they can be. It is the precondition of success in a workshop environment, in any teaching environment.
We will not share our stories in places where we meet dismissive, caustic, or confrontational opinions. We will go silent. And that silence corrodes on everyone. On everything.
Witnessing each other’s story is an analgesic for modern times. I have yet to have an experience where the story circle, and the moving of an idea to the completion of a document, a digital story, has not created this sense of calm, of hopefulness. Story work is the quiet place around which the storms can blow.
This is what keeps us committed.
The Movement Matures
In the last four years, digital storytelling has continued to grow as an international movement. We have seen major international conferences in Ankara, Athens, Valencia, Spain, the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, and most recently in London. New books, new dissertations, new articles, and presentations seem to be emerging from all corners of the world.
What has become striking about these developments is the depth and maturity of our little niche in the field of participatory media. We now have hundreds of practitioners, with a decade or more of consistent methodological development, of testing, adapting, and innovating on the original StoryCenter model. The areas of content being addressed seem also to expand by the day, as we discover efforts across the curriculum in education, and across community-based contexts.
And, while we are constantly working to take an expansive view of digital storytelling to include various new technologies, new approaches, new integrations with other practices and approaches, we have also been trying to work toward definitional and theoretical clarity about our historical approach and methods. At my organization, the emphasis has been on deepening our practices through ever more consistent and rigorous summation and assessment, and exchanging case studies in the nuanced improvements on each part of our process.
While I have always felt there were simple ways to explain this model, and simple ways to differentiate it from other models, I hope you find our considerations of our practice filled with potential for endless complexity. Like any skill, like any craft. I know I am still learning – about how best to listen, how best to hold space, how best to collaborate, and how best to inspire, across cultures and locations, with the endlessly diverse expectations of finished products and use of stories.
Finding Home
I have always felt that home was an odd construct for me. As the son of two activists who defined themselves by their relationship to the events of the world, to their service outside of home, how could it be different? Home was the waystation, the platform, the resting spot, not the source, the center, the essential. Something is changing in me, is settling, that makes the great campaign of my work less and less about the next place it takes me, but more about how it can assist me in this process of return.
I always feel the need to recognize how much my personal life washes over my efforts to sum up my work, and build the connections with the larger digital
storytelling community. In a book about the way our personal stories collide with our processes of learning, of working, of connecting in communities, how could it be different? We all recognize the ways our stories inform our values, our preferences, our focus and energy.
I am sure being a listener to so many people has aided me in holding a space for change, big change, as I journey from middle age to the last third of my life.
When I think about the changes in my own life in the last four years, what can I say – my life is profoundly different.
Four years ago, I was married to Nina Mullen. In December of 2013 we separated, and then divorced. We endeavor to make home for our children, Massimo and Amalina, in two places, sharing the tasks of support and encouragement as positively, and effectively, as we can.
Four years ago, I had not met Tatiana Beller. My birth daughter, born when I was 15 years old in Texas. Raised in Mexico and the United States. Mother to my grandson, Sebastian. She has become a vital part of my life, and an active part of my organization.
I had not met Brooke Hessler, who joined me in California last year as my love and partner.
I find myself at peace with all these changes, as happy, as flourishing, and as at home, as I have ever been.
Stories arise from change. Change from within. Change from without. In entering my seventh decade of existence, I am confident that the quiet work of reflection will become more dominant than the change that occurs as I travel around listening to stories. But I know the external world assures us all of change, as we rise to so many new challenges, so many new urgent natural, social, and political emergencies.
A surprise around every corner. And a new story.
I look forward to hearing yours.
The Work of Story
Why tell stories? This is the basic question to ask at the beginning of a book about storytelling. Stories are what we do as humans to make sense of the world. We are perpetual storytellers, reviewing events in the form of re-lived scenes, nuggets of context and character, actions that lead to realizations. But the brain you are using to listen to me talk about stories and storytelling is very different than the brain you have when you hear me tell a story. Here is a story.
We had this sofa chair. Brown Naugahyde. An embossed weave stamped into the plastic, and a cigarette hole burned into the arm. I loved that chair.
I remember my dad sitting in that chair one afternoon. A book in hand, glasses perched on his nose. Cigarette in the ashtray.
He raised his head and looked at me.
“Remember that story I told you about the guy in San Antonio. The painter?”
“Yeah, sure,” I answered.
I had remembered the story. Natividad – a character in my father’s stories of union organizing in San Antonio, Texas – a Mexican-American artist. One story told about how he had painted something critical of the local Catholic bishop on the wall of the cathedral. He then sat across the street to watch the nuns try desperately to wash the paint off the wall. Another story was about Natividad’s studio up above a storefront near downtown. The staircase was no wider than two and a half feet. Despite having to lug his canvas up and down the narrow stairs, the artist had chosen the place precisely. No cop in San Antonio could fit his rump in there to chase him.
My dad would laugh and laugh. And I would laugh with him. These stories made my father happy – ingenuous ways to make those redneck authorities in Texas squirm.
“What about him, Dad?”
“Nothing.” My dad smiled. “I was just thinking about him, is all.”
He took a puff of his cigarette. His eyes returned to the book.
When I am explaining an idea to you, I want to be clearly understood. I want very little distance between my intended meaning and your perceived meaning. To accomplish this, I need to be precise. I need the ideas to be substantiated by argument, where each example, each concept, builds upon the other, toward a coherent conclusion.
But when I tell a story, reflecting on a moment in time, and reflecting on that reflection, I am not so concerned about interpretation. Perhaps I imagine my meaning is evident. While I might hope you would read something similar to me about what this story tells about the source of my political views, I am not trying to convince you to share them. I want you to relate my experience to your own.
Much more important is that my feeling is evident. Unconsciously, I am sure I tell stories that I hope would endear me to you, or at least create an emotional connection between us. An intimacy. When I am in conversation and drop into telling a story, something changes about my choice of words, about the way I describe interactions, impersonating the characters, pulling out the details, feeling, even as I recite my memories, how the actual events worked upon my psyche, how they changed me.
The Biology of Story
What gives real memory [organic and biological instead of an image of a computer-like brain] its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency. It exists in time, changing as the body changes. Indeed, the very act of recalling a memory appears to restart the entire process of consolidation, including the generation of proteins to form new synaptic terminals. Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes short-term memory again. When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections; a new context.
(Carr 2010: 191)
My exploration of story has always coincided with an interest in cognition and memory. Over these many years I have found myself lost in some popular press discussion of the advancements in neuroscience, and the evolving discipline of neuropsychology, specifically the biology of our sense of self and the role biochemistry has in emotion and identity.
We have many ways of thinking of story from a biological sense. The hunter/hunting party returns from the hunt and explains how to catch the next big meal. The mother shares her birthing story with a teenage daughter, and explains the process by which she kept the child alive through a long, cold winter. Story becomes a teaching tool for survival. And one could argue that the human race stills uses story for this reason, to put the stakes of survival, and the emotions that come with it, as the basis for attentive consideration of a remembered event. Many of the stories we have in our work in public health are life-and-death cautionary tales about the results of our own unfortunate or disastrous choices, or those by a person exerting power over us and with those for whom we have primary relationship and attachment.
We now know the general pattern of brain activity that causes short-term memory to become long-term memory. We know that sensory experience is mostly forgotten, moments after we hear, see, touch, smell, taste it. Based on the research of psychologist Brenda Milner, we learned that to remember we move sensory information from a slower part of our brain that senses back to the fast-working hippocampus. The hippocampus is integral to a complex process of consolidation of the memory over days, weeks, and years. The process, as far as we can tell, requires rehearsal, reviewing the experience again and again in our minds. The new neural pathway that is forged in the cortex through this process becomes long-term memory. The more we rehearse, in our conscious mind, but also in our dreams and subconscious, the deeper the pathway, the more the memory is sustained (Kandel 2006: 129–33).
We all think of this as the essence of learning; you repeat something again and again until it sticks. This works for physical activities (playing an instrument, using a fine tool), as well as for mental activity (doing multiplication tables or following directions). Practice makes perfect. Repetition creates retention.
As it turns out, if we have an affective relationship to the sensory information –if that information is connected to the part of our brains that processes our emotions – then the pathways become even stronger. The memories associated with our most important life lessons are inevitably those with strong emotional encoding at the moment, as in traumas or events involving those close to us. When we describe these events, and their meaning to our lives, we inevitably drop out of argumentation and into story. Story in this sense works biologically to ensure the total recall of those events we have ingrained as being of greatest emotional importance to us.
In retelling, we set the scene of the learning, not only to help the listener have a rich context for the meaning, but also to simply return us to the sensory and emotive environment that burned the memory into our neurons. As we remember the scene, we actually are linking back to the sparking neural pathways that were formed in the strong associative memory (Rappoport 2006, Siegel 2012).
The Hollywood Century and the American Myth
Myth is an imaginal story or statement that addresses existential human issues, and that has behavioral consequences. This is in line with Joseph Campbell’s proposal that myths are “motivated from a single psychophysiological source –namely the human imagination.” Myths often, but not always, employ symbol and metaphor; they are usually, but not always, expressed in verbal narrative. Myths can be cultural, institutional, familial, or personal in nature; a “mythology” is the interwoven (and sometimes contradictory) collection of myths held by a culture, institution, family, or individual. Unlike such related terms as “scripts,” “attitudes,” “beliefs,” or “worldviews,” the word “myth” is able to encompass the unconscious as well as the conscious dimensions of the concept. (Krippner n.d.)
Life and death, moments of clarity, decisive events that change us; these are not just the subjects of life recalled, these are the essence of our oral traditions of myth and
folktale, our literatures, and, in the last century, the immersive media of the screen and recorded sound.
We first know story through our experience, but the stories told to us become part of our tribe, our community, our culture, and are formed into myth and archetype. We see our own lives in the plots of the journey, the romance, the mystery. We see our identity and those of our most important relationships in the characters of the hero, the lover, the seeker, the wizard, the sidekick, the beast. We know them as they reappear in our sacred texts: the Bible, the Quran, the life of Siddhartha the Buddha, Anansi the Spider, as well as our epic and children’s narratives, The Odyssey, King Arthur, and the Brothers Grimm. We know how they work in westerns, sci-fi, detective stories, and romantic comedies.
Myths have always served our coming to terms with developmental processes –our place in the world, selfhood, partnering, parenting, death – the stories that held us, that spoke to us, that gave us patterns we could be assured of in considering the choices and changes that are part of our lives. But in the recent centuries, the myths that bound us as tribes, as cultures, that gave us the particulars of our definitions of good and evil, speak to the process of dissembling identity as we left the farm for the factory.
Much of twentieth-century literary and media history was to assist in the development of how societies and individuals could process their vast exit from agricultural life to the city. As human experience changed, we searched the old myths for patterns to help explain our feelings of dislocation. We also created new myths and archetypes. The machinery of mass media was to put the project through all genres of storytelling. With Disney and others, they borrowed directly from the folktale to contemporize children’s stories to the experience of modern existential alienation, showing us hipster heroes and wise-cracking damsels battling corporatist monsters and dictatorial tyrants. The western showed us how to bring frontier ethics into our chaotic urban experience, mapping the pastoral ideal of self-sufficiency and familial integrity onto a suburban ideal of the single-family dwelling, and the sense of embattlement with the savage and wilderness with the relationship between civilized suburb and lawless inner city. Science fiction, for instance, provided a way to take our fear of sweeping technological innovation and overlay the mythos of the hero’s confrontation with the evil genie let loose upon the world. Crime and mystery narratives gave us ways to examine the psychology of social dysfunction through a mythic presentation of the detective as shaman. And romantic narratives helped us to explore difference, juxtaposing characters of different class, situation, and culture, negotiating the chaos of prejudice and simmering fears of the other that exploded as cities crammed a multiplicity of tribes into close proximity.
Implicit in these mass-media mythologies was a sense of both nation-state signification and a new universalism; the American century could also be defined as the Hollywood century. The U.S. imperial mythic landscape also served American exceptionalism in the battle with the totalitarian Other. Our stories were more than reassuring forms of entertainment assisting with our social transitions; they brought with them the values of democracy and a particular sort of individualism that was perceived as the inevitable ethos of all the planet’s peoples and societies.
As presented by our dominant medias, the American ideal continues to be an unquestioned pinnacle of human progress.
And, as has been true with all dominant ideologies inside a culture, we took on the characters as our own. Rather than the collectivist ethos, we saw ourselves as individually responsible for our fate. We saw the signifying success of our own specialized career, our own successful family, single-family house, two cars, and endless stuff to continually validate our status. And, as an empire, we exported (and continue to export) those expectations as far as we could/can reach.
Our Ordinary Stories Become Extraordinary Journeys
Inherent in the individualism of citizen democracy is that every story matters. In practice, twentieth-century media culture also can be seen as the triumph of the ordinary person. Traditional cultures took individual experience and mythologized the hunt into the hero’s journey or the animist characterizations of mysterious forces in nature. Feudal societies privileged the lives of kings, gods and saints, magi and warrior-heroes. Industrial culture gave us the lifestyles of the rich and famous. But the forces of industrial class struggle and the democratic impulses it created stressed that even the most plebeian character had a powerful story to tell. Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and their contemporaries, created stories about the people, in which the people became their own heroes. The newly literate laboring classes could see themselves in the stories, and a tradition of working-class storytelling has continued through their literary progeny. In Western industrial culture these traditions emerged. At the same time, a feminist literary tradition, a tradition of representations of the racially oppressed, stories of outcasts and marginalized peoples, of the silenced and invisible, of all kinds, emerged as well. By the 1920s and 1930s these stories became increasingly written not as outsider celebrations of the ordinary by authors of the “Other” but by working-class men and women, storytellers who lived racial, class, and gender oppression themselves.
People had the idea that their stories mattered, but, in form and attitude, the narration of these lives did not necessarily take on self-mythology. The natural orientation of many, if not all, of these stories was heroic melodrama. (In those countries where the success of social revolutions created an “official” social realist proletarian culture, simplistically drawn melodrama were all the stories were allowed to become.) The storylines were simple: an evil oppressor tortures the masses; heroes rise from the mass and, through a mix of individual smarts and their leadership of collective action, the oppressed conquer the oppressor. Transformation occurs, but not the kind of transformation that reveals new insight, or advances depth of understanding. The power to take the actual life and make a document for personal, and community, ongoing transformation needed another impetus.
Precisely as the industrial landscape created a proletarian literature, psychology and the other social sciences gave us concepts about the relationship between the individual and society that suggested the role of myth, and therefore story, was hard-wired to our subconscious.
Sigmund Freud and the large cohort of specialists delving into the science of our minds and behavior learned very quickly that what we thought we knew about ourselves wasn’t the half of it. Maybe not even the tenth of it. Our conscious minds are in fact slaves to our subconscious in ways we could not, and still cannot, easily grasp. It is not easy to understate what this insight did to Western storytelling. Just as our instinct for fairness and social reform was telling us to value individual stories, we also learned that as individuals we were essentially puppets of our developmental bodies. Our mammalian urges for safety, food, and reproduction were driving as much of our decision-making as were the cognitive faculties we associated with our rationality.
Perhaps this is the point. Freud’s insights fit nicely into the collapse of religiousbased dogma about human “uniqueness” in the face of the Darwinian certainty of our mammalian ancestry. Darwin made Freud possible. What makes a story a contemporary story is that it substitutes God-given fate for subconscious personal history. There not because of God’s will, but because of good (or bad) will generated by context, parenting, and the luck of biochemistry.
In literature, almost all the Western canon was informed by psychology. Having been trained in theatrical literature, as much as I focused on the social playwrights of the twentieth century – Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller – I was also privileged to study the psychological realism of August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams. All these authors inhabited their stages with characters driven by demons within the family history. And, while they were critiqued by the social realists as hopelessly individualist, it was clear by the postwar period that even proletarian characters needed complex personal lives from which we could read their journey as against the “system” as well as against their demons. Think of Marlon Brando’s character in On the Waterfront.
Freud’s colleague Carl Jung, and then later contributors like Joseph Campbell and others, helped create a sense that we all had a “personal mythology.” We learned we have a hero’s journey myth in all our lives. A journey that allows us to confront demons, come to terms with ego, and place ourselves as victors over our demons and deficits.
This concept of personal mythology became more frequently used in the 1960s and 1970s to suggest a framework for psychological intervention and individual transformation. We should know our myths – those we tell about ourselves and about the world we inhabit, and if they do not suit our healthy existence we should seek to change and/or reframe them. Many practitioners of the concept of personal mythology found that the recounting and shaping of personal stories was precisely what enabled resiliency from earlier traumas.
For those psychological practitioners and theoreticians concerned with a more inclusive democracy, it was not difficult to see how coping with the demons of systemic oppression – family dysfunction, violence, sexual abuse, substance abuse, low self-esteem, learning disorders and disabilities, general lack of agency, etc. – meant the project of understanding and reframing the myths of the oppressed was central to the social project. As En Vogue sang, “Free your mind, the rest will follow.”
Story Work in the Age of Media Ubiquity
While we do not question the psychological benefit derived by story work, ours has not been a fundamentally psychological endeavor for personal transformation. People come to our trainings to express themselves creatively. StoryCenter is self-described as an arts organization, focused first on creativity. Our storytellers’ aspirations are limited, based on the time we have to engage them. We are not dedicated to long-term reclamation of individual lives. We do not have any examples of facilitators working with individuals for several years, compiling one story after another to allow for a complete re-vision of a person’s operational myth, and the little myths that left them stuck in their healing process, as one would expect with psychological treatments.
At StoryCenter, we became aware that one small story in the form of film has totemic power for the storyteller. The story allows some shifts in perspective about the events in our lives, and we believe that those shifts are particularly useful to work in identity. The process of identity construction in the twenty-first century will be as accelerated, fluid, and dislocating as has been virtually all aspects of our current economic and social experience within our societies.
Story work, whether through the contemporary narrative-oriented traditions of counseling and psychotherapy, or through various arts practices similar to ours (PhotoVoice, expressive arts, drama and movement therapy with a textual or story component, creative writing therapies, journaling, etc.) is as important to our emotional survival as our strategies for healthcare and recovery, diet, and sustainable use of energy/resources are necessary for our physical survival.
The work of digital storytelling is to support the continued construction of a healthy, individual identity. We share this goal with all educators, social service providers, and agents of social change.
As media workers, we recognize the particular dysfunctions caused by dominant media. Part of what accelerates social dislocations is our ubiquitous screen culture. This culture is driven by massively centralized engines of entertainment, information technology, and telecommunications industries. All three work to read the pulse of society and serve us with content and form that we seem to desire, but all inevitably replicate their worldview into the products and services. They are counting on the shaping of our desires and fears, they need to connect to our intimate selves in order to sustain our attention, but their real goal is to shape our identities as Homo consumerus.
And we resist as we can. But the effort to unplug, or at least take perspective, is making us crazy. The project of human survival and success as a species will be as much about keeping people from going completely bananas in the face of media ubiquity as it will be charting the policy path to sustainability. We are losing ourselves in the face of massive change in the way we interrelate. We are seeking adaptive reactions. We are finding ways to unplug and retreat to pre-information technology, lifestyles, and ideologies. And, while many of these approaches may be ingenious, they do not seem to be equal to the task. We need to wean ourselves from screen culture twitch and the jittery, deficit-disordered, deeply insecure, fragmentary
identities that come with it. This will not occur because of total abstinence, but by ascribing more humanistic possibilities to these tools. We need to claim the screen machines, not as a fuel for our addictions but as a tool to make ourselves whole.
Reframing Our Personal Myths
Our old myths gave us solidity. They gave us a meta-reference to our understanding of good and evil. They still play this role, but they are only part of the massive chatter that nurtures and sustains us now. If I grow up as a Pakistani-German living in Dusseldorf, or an Aymara Bolivian living in São Paulo, Brazil, or a Sri Lankan in South Korea, I negotiate both rooted identity and my global identity on a minuteby-minute basis. But even if I am a relatively homogenous suburban WASP in the Simi Valley of Los Angeles, I can have a hip-hop side of me, as well as a curious attraction to an esoteric form of Thai spirituality. Which are my operational myths: WASP-ish conservator of Western tradition, hip-hop gangsta questioning authority, or Buddhist monk retreating from the noise? In the end, they are my own, and whether they evolve in stages, or manage to integrate into a single mash-up identity, the creative process of narrating a story with image, voice, and sound becomes a way to mark these changes and make sense of them.
But what does that look like? How does the process of story turn into personal mythology?
Another version of the story:
I see him there. Sitting, book in hand, glasses perched on his nose. Cigarette in the ashtray. His ghost looks up. “Remember that story I told you about the guy in San Antonio, the painter?”
What do I do with those memories? Of course I remember. All his stories. The hundred ways he outfoxed authority, the endless quixotic adventures of a union organizer in Texas. They filled my childhood with the romance of having fun while fighting the good fight.
And I remember his ulcers, his addictions, and the final heart attack that stole him from me at 17. I remember his sadness, his longing, what drove him to keep fighting, drove him out into the world, also took him away from those he loved dearly. He did not process attachments. Never sad, rarely angry. His body broke down, even if he never did.
I spent a life trying to be like him. To be a peaceable warrior with a smile on my face. To make some sacrifices for the causes I believed in. To endure the stress and strain. But for the sake of my own children, I also learned to cry. To let go of the cause just enough to be present for them. To be present for myself. His ghost is still there. He is still speaking to me.
The expression of the myth of my father can serve as inspiration to social action or as cautionary tale. My story becomes a remapping of the meaning of these primary relationships to serve whom I need to be now. The story becomes a way to find, if not a re-statement of rooted identity, at least a new center of gravity.
Looking back at the many thousands of stories I have heard, the vast majority end as texts that address these kinds of re-negotiations. Our storytellers take the current moment’s anxieties and fears, hopes, and aspirations to reframe a story about a core relationship. The retelling of an incident of trauma, or a situation of achievement, or even a seemingly mundane interaction is made to service the establishment of new equilibrium – a homeostasis – in the storyteller’s sense of self. That equilibrium may not be stable, but the story becomes a successful marker, a lingering positive feeling. You have returned to some critical part of your past, a part that hung like a shadow over your identity, and you have begun to make sense of that experience.
As suggested, story has many jobs: as a learning modality through memory, as a way to address our connection to the changing world around us, as a form of reflection against the flood of ubiquitous access to infinite information, as the vehicle to encourage our social agency, and, finally, as a process by which we best make sense of our lives and our identity.
What story cannot do is completely simplify the messiness of living. Story is essentially an exercise in controlled ambiguity. And, given the co-constructed nature of meaning between us as storytellers, and those who are willing to listen to our words, this is story’s greatest gift.
We can feel whole about impermanence. We can bear to be ourselves.
Stories of Our Lives
A story can be as short as explaining how you misplaced your keys this morning, or as long as a multi-volume autobiography. Many people have entered our workshops with ideas appropriate for a television mini-series instead of a two- to three-minute digital story. In the coming chapters we will talk about shaping the content and form of your story, but before you consider crafting a tale you need to decide what story you want to tell.
Every day, with virtually no effort, you tell stories to other people. At the water cooler, the dinner table, walking your child to school, you find yourself reciting an event from memory to make a point, to give a “case” where the attitudes and actions of the characters provide insight to your audience. These casual storytelling experiences well up out of us as naturally. But ask most of us to jump on stage, or pick up a pen, or turn on a camera or microphone, and tell a story, and our minds tend to go blank. Authorship from our own life experience suddenly forces the questions about what role the story will have in our lives, right now, or in the near future.
If you are someone trying to sell a story, as a writer, filmmaker, dramatist, you as often as not ask yourself: “What stories compel me and where might I find a profoundly dramatic story?” You want a subject filled with high consequence, compelling characters, exciting challenges, plot twists, and an ending that provokes insight. So you go looking for the equivalent of the trapped miner story in Chile, or some other miraculous event with people facing tragedy and escaping at the last moment.
We see versions of these “trapped miner” stories every night via entertainment and news. In my observations of countless storytellers, I have found that people have learned to equate the idea of a good story with high drama. If they have not had major drama in their lives, then they have no story. Frankly, even if their lives were filled with loss and setback, inside their stories it seemed more mundane than dramatic.
In the practice of community work and storytelling, we are talking about a story that emerges from a small audience, within a safe environment, that is as close to private as family, as close to personal as diary. This is an essentially private medium. A media document may find a broader public forum, but the purpose of the artifact may simply help you to process your dreams and aspirations. It may be public, but
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
31.Bevel Gauge
32.Bottom-Board
36.Frame, with Cross-Section of Top-Bar
38.Division-Board
of Quinby Hive
58.Everett's Extractor
59.Comb Basket for Extractor
68.Block for Fastening Foundation
70.Wax Extractor
72.Heddon Crate
76.American Wistaria
77.Chinese Wistaria
80.White or Dutch Clover
INTRODUCTION.
WHO MAY KEEP BEES.
SPECIALISTS.
Any person who is cautious, observing, and prompt to do whatever the needs of his business require, with no thought of delay, may make apiculture a specialty, with almost certain prospects of success. He must also be willing to work with Spartan energy during the busy season, and must persist, though sore discouragement, and even dire misfortune, essay to thwart his plans and rob him of his coveted gains. As in all other vocations, such are the men who succeed in apiculture. I make no mention of capital to begin with, or territory on which to locate; for men of true metal—men whose energy of mind and body bespeak success in advance—will solve these questions long before their experience and knowledge warrant their assuming the charge of large apiaries.
AMATEURS.
Apiculture, as an avocation, may be safely recommended to those of any business or profession, who possess the above named qualities, and control a little space for their bees, a few rods from street and neighbor, or a flat roof whereupon hives may securely rest (C. F. Muth, of Cincinnati, keeps his bees very successfully on the top of his store, in the very heart of a large city), and who are able to devote a little time, when required, to care for their bees. The amount of time will of course vary with the number of colonies kept, but with proper management this time may be granted at any period of the day or week, and thus not interfere with the regular business. Thus residents of country, village, or city, male or female, who may
wish to be associated with and study natural objects, and add to their income and pleasure, will find here, an ever-waiting opportunity. To the ladies, shut out from fresh air and sunshine, till pallor and languor point sadly to departing health, and vigor, and to men the nature of whose business precludes air and exercise, apiculture cannot be too highly recommended as an avocation.
WHO ARE SPECIALLY INTERDICTED.
There are a few people, whose systems seem to be specially susceptible to the poison intruded with the bee's sting. Sometimes such persons, if even stung on the foot, will be so thoroughly poisoned that their eyes will swell so they cannot see, and will suffer with fever for days, and, very rarely, individuals are so sensitive to this poison that a bee-sting proves fatal. I hardly need say, that such people should never keep bees. Many persons, among whom were the noted Kleine and Gunther, are at first very susceptible to the poison, but spurred on by their enthusiasm, they persist, and soon become so inoculated that they experience no serious injury from the stings. It is a well-recognized fact, that each successive sting is less powerful to work harm. Every bee-keeper is almost sure to receive an occasional sting, though with the experienced these are very rare, and the occasion neither of fear nor anxiety.
INDUCEMENTS TO BEE-KEEPING.
RECREATION.
Among the attractive features of apiculture, I mention the pleasure which it offers its votaries. There is a fascination about the apiary which is indescribable. Nature is always presenting the most pleasurable surprises to those on the alert to receive them. And among the insect hosts, especially bees, the instincts and habits are so inexplicable and marvelous, that the student of this department of nature never ceases to meet with exhibitions that move him, no less
with wonder than with admiration. Thus, bee-keeping affords most wholesome recreation, especially to any who love to look in upon the book of nature, and study the marvelous pages she is ever waiting to present. To such, the very fascination of their pursuit is of itself a rich reward for the time and labor expended. I doubt if there is any other class of manual laborers who engage in their business, and dwell upon it, with the same fondness as do bee-keepers. Indeed, to meet a scientific bee-keeper is to meet an enthusiast. A thorough study of the wonderful economy of the hive must, from its very nature, go hand-in-hand with delight and admiration. I once asked an extensive apiarist, who was also a farmer, why he kept bees. The answer was characteristic: "Even if I could not make a good deal the most money with my bees, I should still keep them for the real pleasure they bring me." But yesterday I asked the same question of Prof. Daniels, President of the Grand Rapids schools, whose official duties are very severe. Said he: "For the restful pleasure which I receive in their management." I am very sure, that were there no other inducement than that of pleasure, I should be slow to part with these models of industry, whose marvelous instincts and wondrous life-habits are ever ministering to my delight and astonishment.
A year ago, I received a visit from my old friend and College classmate, O. Clute, of Keokuk, Iowa. Of course I took him to see our apiary, and as we looked at the bees and their handiwork, just as the nectar from golden-rod and asters was flooding the honey-cells; he became enraptured, took my little "Manual of the Apiary" home with him, and at once subscribed for the old American Bee Journal He very soon purchased several colonies of bees, and has found so much of pleasure and recreation in the duties imposed by his new charge, that he has written me several times, expressing gratitude that I had led him into such a work of love and pleasure.
PROFITS.
The profits, too, of apiculture, urge its adoption as a pursuit. When we consider the comparatively small amount of capital invested, the relatively small amount of labor and expense attending
its operations, we are surprised at the abundant reward that is sure to wait upon its intelligent practice. I do not wish to be understood here as claiming that labor—yes, real hard, back-aching labor—is not required in the apiary. The specialist, with his hundred or more colonies, will have, at certain seasons, right hard and vigorous work. Yet this will be both pleasant and Healthful, and will go hand-in-hand with thought, so that brain and muscle will work together. Yet this time of hard, physical labor will only continue for five or six months, and for the balance of the year the apiarist has or may have comparative leisure. Nor do I think that all will succeed. The fickle, careless, indolent, heedless man, will as surely fail in apiculture, as in any other calling. But I repeat, in the light of many years of experience, where accurate weight, measure, and counting of change has given no heed to conjecture, that there is no manual labor pursuit, where the returns are so large, when compared with the labor and expense.
An intelligent apiarist may invest in bees any spring in Michigan, with the absolute certainty of more than doubling his investment the first season; while a net gain of 400 per cent, brings no surprise to the experienced apiarists of our State. This of course applies only to a limited number of colonies. Nor is Michigan superior to other States as a location for the apiarist. During the past season, the poorest I ever knew, our fifteen colonies of bees in the College apiary, have netted us over $200. In 1876, each colony gave a net return of $24.04, while in 1875, our bees gave a profit, above all expense, of over 400 per cent, of their entire value in the spring. Mr Fisk Bangs, who graduated at our College one year since, purchased last spring seven colonies of bees. The proceeds of these seven colonies have more than paid all expenses, including first cost of bees, in honey sold, while there are now sixteen colonies, as clear gain, if we do not count the labor, and we hardly need do so, as it has in no wise interfered with the regular duties of the owner. Several farmers of our State who possess good apiaries and good improved farms, have told me that their apiaries were more profitable than all the remainder of their farms. Who will doubt the profits of apiculture in the face of friend Doolittle's experience? He has realized $6,000, in five years, simply from the honey taken from fifty
colonies. This $6,000 is in excess of all expenses except his own time. Add to this the increase of stocks, and then remember that one man can easily care for 100 colonies, and we have a graphic picture of apiarian profits. Bee-keeping made Adam Grimm a wealthy man. It brought to Capt. Hetherington over $10,000 as the cash receipts of a single year's honey-crop. It enabled Mr. Harbison, so it is reported, to ship from his own apiary, eleven car-loads of comb-honey as the product of a single season. What greater recommendation has any pursuit? Opportunity for money-making, even with hardships and privations, is attractive and seldom disregarded; such opportunity with labor that brings, in itself, constant delight, is surely worthy of attention.
EXCELLENCE AS AN AMATEUR PURSUIT.
Again, there is no business, and I speak from experience, that serves so well as an avocation. It offers additional funds to the poorly paid, out-door air to the clerk and office-hand, healthful exercise to the person of sedentary habits, and superb recreation to the student or professional man, and especially to him whose life-work is of that dull, hum-drum, routine order that seems to rob life of all zest. The labor, too, required in keeping bees, can, with a little thought and management, be so planned, if but few colonies are kept, as not to infringe upon the time demanded by the regular occupation. Indeed, I have never been more heartily thanked, than by such parsons as named above, and that, too, because I called them to consider— which usually means to adopt—the pleasing duties of the apiary.
ADAPTATION TO WOMEN.
Apiculture may also bring succor to those whom society has not been over-ready to favor—our women. Widowed mothers, dependent girls, the weak and the feeble, all may find a blessing in the easy, pleasant, and profitable labors of the apiary. Of course, women who lack vigor and health, can care for but very few colonies,
and must have sufficient strength to bend over and lift the smallsized frames of comb when loaded with honey, and to carry empty hives. With the proper thought and management, full colonies need never be lifted, nor work done in the hot sunshine. Yet right here let me add, and emphasize the truth, that only those who will let energetic thought and skillful plan, and above all promptitude and persistence, make up for physical weakness, should enlist as apiarists. Usually a stronger body, and improved health, the results of pure air, sunshine, and exercise, will make each successive day's labor more easy, and will permit a corresponding growth in the size of the apiary for each successive season. One of the most noted apiarists, not only in America but in the world, sought in bee-keeping her lost health, and found not only health, but reputation and influence. Some of the most successful apiarists in our country are women. Of these, many were led to adopt the pursuit because of waning health, grasping at this as the last and successful weapon with which to vanquish the grim monster. Said "Cyula Linswik"— whose excellent and beautifully written articles have so often charmed the readers of the bee publications, and who has had five years of successful experience as an apiarist—in a paper read before our Michigan Convention of March, 1877: "I would gladly purchase exemption from in-door work, on washing-day, by two days' labor among the bees, and I find two hours' labor at the ironing-table more fatiguing than two hours of the severest toil the apiary can exact. * * * I repeat, that apiculture offers to many women not only pleasure but profit. * * * Though the care of a few colonies means only recreation, the woman who experiments in bee-keeping somewhat extensively, will find that it means, at some seasons, genuine hard work. * * * There is risk in the business, I would not have you ignore this fact, but an experience of five years has led me to believe that the risk is less than is generally supposed." Mrs. L. B. Baker, of Lansing, Michigan, who has kept bees very successfully for four years, read an admirable paper before the same Convention, in which she said: "But I can say, having tried both," (keeping boardinghouse and apiculture,) "I give bee-keeping the preference, as more profitable, healthful, independent and enjoyable. * * * I find the labors of the apiary more endurable than working over a cook-stove in-
doors, and more pleasant and conducive to health. * * * I believe that many of our delicate and invalid ladies would find renewed vigor of body and mind in the labors and recreations of the apiary. * * * By beginning in the early spring, when the weather was cool and the work light, I became gradually accustomed to out-door labor, and by mid-summer found myself as well able to endure the heat of the sun as my husband, who has been accustomed to it all his life. Previously, to attend an open-air picnic was to return with a headache. * * * My own experience in the apiary has been a source of interest and enjoyment far exceeding my anticipations." Although Mrs. Baker commenced with but two colonies of bees, her net profits the first season were over $100; the second year but a few cents less than $300; and the third year about $250. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating;" so, too, such words as given above, show that apiculture offers special inducements to our sisters to become either amateur or professional apiarists.
IMPROVES THE MIND AND THE OBSERVATION.
Successful apiculture demands close and accurate observation, and hard, continuous thought and study, and this, too, in the wondrous realm of nature. In all this, the apiarist receives manifold and substantial advantages. In the cultivation of the habit of observation, a person becomes constantly more able, useful and susceptible to pleasure, results which also follow as surely on the habit of thought and study. It is hardly conceivable that the wideawake apiarist, who is so frequently busy with his wonder-working comrades of the hive, can ever be lonely, or feel time hanging heavily on his hands. The mind is occupied, and there is no chance for ennui. The whole tendency, too, of such thought and study, where nature is the subject, is to refine the taste, elevate the desires, and ennoble manhood. Once get our youth, with their susceptible natures, engaged in such wholesome study, and we shall have less reason to fear the vicious tendencies of the street, or the luring vices and damning influences of the saloon. Thus apiculture spreads an intellectual feast, that even the old philosophers would have coveted;
furnishes the rarest food for the observing faculties, and, best of all, by keeping its votaries face to face with the matchless creations of the All Father, must draw them toward Him "who went about doing good," and in "whom there was no guile."
YIELDS DELICIOUS FOOD.
A last inducement to apiculture, certainly not unworthy of mention, is the offerings it brings to our tables. Health, yea, our very lives, demand that we should eat sweets. It is a truth that our sugars, and especially our commercial syrups, are so adulterated as to be often poisonous. The apiary, in lieu of these, gives us one of the most delicious and wholesome of sweets, which has received merited praise, as food fit for the gods, from the most ancient time till the present day. To ever have within reach the beautiful, immaculate comb, or the equally grateful nectar, right from the extractor, is certainly a blessing of no mean order. We may thus supply our families and friends with a most necessary and desirable food element, and this with no cloud of fear from vile, poisonous adulterations.
WHAT SUCCESSFUL BEE-KEEPING REQUIRES.
MENTAL EFFORT.
No one should commence this business who is not willing to read, think and study. To be sure, the ignorant and unthinking may stumble on success for a time, but sooner or later, failure will set her seal upon their efforts. Those of our apiarists who have studied the hardest, observed the closest, and thought the deepest, have even passed the late terrible winters with but slight loss.
Of course the novice will ask. How and what shall I study?
Nothing will take the place of real experience. Commence with a few colonies, even one or two is best, and make the bees your companions at every possible opportunity. Note every change, whether of the bees, their development, or work, and then by earnest thought strive to divine the cause.
LEARN FROM OTHERS.
Great good will also come from visiting other apiarists. Note their methods and apiarian apparatus. Strive by conversation to gain new and valuable ideas, and gratefully adopt whatever is found, by comparison, to be an improvement upon your own past system and practice.
AID FROM CONVENTIONS.
Attend conventions whenever distance and means render this possible. Here you will not only be made better by social intercourse with those whose occupation and study make them sympathetic and congenial, but you will find a real conservatory of scientific truths, valuable hints, and improved instruments and methods. And the apt attention—rendered possible by your own experience—which you will give to essays, discussions and private conversations, will so enrich your mind, that you will return to your home encouraged, and able to do better work, and to achieve higher success. I have attended nearly all the meetings of the Michigan Convention, and never yet when I was not well paid for all trouble and expense by the many, often very valuable, suggestions which I received. These I would carry home, and test as commanded by the Apostle: "Prove all things and hold fast that which is good."
Every apiarist, too, should take and read at least one of the three excellent bee publications that are issued in our country. It has been suggested that Francis Huber's blindness was an advantage to him, as he thus had the assistance of two pairs of eyes, his wife's and servant's, instead of one. So, too, of the apiarist who reads the bee publications. He has the aid of the eyes, and the brains, too, of hundreds of intelligent and observing bee-keepers. Who is it that squanders his money on worse than useless patents and fixtures? He who "cannot afford" to take a bee-journal.
It would be invidious and uncalled for to recommend any one of these valuable papers to the exclusion of the others. Each has its peculiar excellences, and all who can, may well secure all of them to aid and direct their ways.
AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL.
This, the oldest bee publication, is not only peculiar for its age, but for the ability with which it has been managed, with scarce any exception, even from its first appearance. Samuel Wagner, its founder and long its editor, had few superiors in breadth of culture, strength of judgment, and practical and historic knowledge of apiculture. With what pleasure we remember the elegant, really classic, diction of the editorials, the dignified bearing, and freedom from asperities which marked the old American Bee Journal as it made its monthly visits fresh from the editorial supervision of Mr. Samuel Wagner. Some one has said that there is something in the very atmosphere of a scholarly gentleman, that impresses all who approach him. I have often thought, as memory reverted to the old American Bee Journal, or as I have re-read the numbers which bear the impress of Mr. Wagner's superior learning, that, though the man is gone, the stamp of his noble character and classical culture is still on these pages, aiding, instructing, elevating, all who are so fortunate as to possess the early volumes of this periodical. I am also happy to state that the American Bee Journal is again in good hands, and that its old prestige is fully restored. Mr. Newman is an
experienced editor, a man of excellent judgment and admirable balance, a man who demonstrates his dislike of criminations and recriminations by avoiding them; who has no special inventions or pet theories to push, and is thus almost sure to be disinterested and unbiased in the advice he offers who lends his aid and favor to our Conventions, which do so much to spread apiarian knowledge. And when I add, that he brings to his editorial aid the most able, experienced and educated apiarists of the world, I surely have spoken high but just praise, of the American Bee Journal, whose enviable reputation extends even to distant lands. It is edited by Thomas G. Newman, at Chicago. Price, $2.00 a year.
GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE.
This periodical makes up for its brief history of only five years, by the vigor and energy which has characterized it from the first. Its editor is an active apiarist, who is constantly experimenting; a terse, able writer, and brimming-full of good nature and enthusiasm. I am free to say, that in practical apiculture I am more indebted to Mr. Root than to any other one person, except Rev. L. L. Langstroth. I also think that, with few exceptions, he has done more for the recent advancement of practical apiculture than any other person in our country. Yet I have often regretted that Mr. Root is so inimical to conventions, and that he often so stoutly praises that with which he has had so brief an experience, and must consequently know so little. This trait makes it imperative that the apiarist read discriminately, and then decide for himself. In case of an innovation, wait for Mr. Root's continued approval, else prove its value before general adoption. This sprightly little journal is edited by A. I. Root, Medina, Ohio. Price, $1.00 a year
I have read this periodical less, and, of course know less of it than of the others. It is well edited, and certainly has many very able contributors. Both Mr. King and Mr. Root deal largely in their own wares, and, of course, give space to their advertisement, yet, in all my dealings with them, and I have dealt largely with Mr. Root, I have ever found them prompt and reliable. The Magazine is edited by A. J. King, New York. Price, $1.50 a year.
BOOKS FOR THE APIARIST.
Having read very many of the books treating of apiculture, both American and foreign, I can freely recommend such a course to others. Each book has peculiar excellences, and each one may be read with interest and profit.
LANGSTROTH ON THE HONEY BEE.
Of course, this treatise will ever remain a classic in bee-literature. I cannot over-estimate the benefits which I have received from the study of its pages. It was a high, but deserved encomium, which J. Hunter, of England, in his "Manual of Bee-Keeping," paid to this work: "It is unquestionably the best bee-book in the English language."
The style of this work is so admirable, the subject matter so replete with interest, and the entire book so entertaining, that it is a desirable addition to any library, and no thoughtful, studious apiarist can well be without it. It is especially happy in detailing the methods of experimentation, and in showing with what caution the true scientist establishes principles or deduces conclusions. The work is wonderfully free from errors, and had the science and practice of apiculture remained stationary, there would have been little need of another work; but as some of the most important improvements in apiculture are not mentioned, the book alone would be a very unsatisfactory guide to the apiarist of to-day. Price, $2.00.
QUINBY'S MYSTERIES OF BEE-KEEPING.
This is a plain, sensible treatise, written by one of America's most successful bee-keepers. It proceeds, I think, on a wrong basis in supposing that those who read bee-books will use the old box-hives, especially as the author is constantly inferring that other hives are better. It contains many valuable truths, and when first written was a valuable auxiliary to the bee-keeper I understand that the work has been revised by Mr. L. C. Root. Price, $1.50.
KING'S TEXT-BOOK.
This is a compilation of the above works, and has recently been revised, so that it is abreast of the times. It is to be regretted that the publisher did not take more pains with his work, as the typography is very poor. The price is $1.00.
A B C OF BEE-CULTURE.
This work was issued in numbers, but is now complete. It is arranged in the convenient form of our cyclopædias, is printed in fine style, on beautiful paper, and is to be well illustrated. I need hardly say that the style is pleasing and vigorous. The subject matter will, of course, be fresh, embodying the most recent discoveries and inventions pertaining to bee-keeping. That it may be kept abreast of apiarian progress, the type is to be kept in position, so that each new discovery may be added as soon as made. The price is $1.00.
FOREIGN WORKS.
Bevan, revised by Munn, is exceedingly interesting, and shows by its able historical chapters, admirable scientific disquisitions, and
frequent quotations and references to practical and scientific writers on bees and bee-keeping, both ancient and modern, that the writers were men of extensive reading and great scientific ability. The book is of no practical value to us, but to the student it will be read with great interest. Next to Langstroth, I value this work most highly of any in my library that treat of bees and bee-keeping, if I may except back volumes of the bee-publications.
"The Apiary, or Bees, Bee-Hives and Bee Culture," by Alfred Neighbour, London, is a fresh, sprightly little work, and as the third edition has just appeared, is, of course, up with the times. The book is in nice dress, concise, and very readable, and I am glad to commend it.
A less interesting work, though by no means without merit, is the "Manual of Bee-Keeping," by John Hunter, London. This is also recent. I think these works would be received with little favor among American apiarists. They are exponents of English apiculture, which in method would seem clumsy to Americans. In fact, I think I may say that in implements and perhaps I may add methods, the English, French, Germans and Italians, are behind our American apiarists, and hence their text-books and journals compare illy with ours. I believe the many intelligent foreign apiarists who have come to this country and are now honored members of our own fraternity, will sustain this position. Foreign scientists are ahead of American, but we glean and utilize their facts and discoveries as soon as made known. Salicylic acid is discovered by a German to be a remedy for foul brood, yet ten times as many American as foreign apiarists know of this and practice by the knowledge. In practical fields, on the other hand, as also in skill and delicacy of invention, we are, I think, in advance. So our apiarists have little need to go abroad for either books or papers.
PROMPTITUDE.
Another absolute requirement of successful bee-keeping, is prompt attention to all its varied duties. Neglect is the rock on which
many bee-keepers, especially farmers, find too often that they have wrecked their success. I have no doubt that more colonies die from starvation, than from all the bee maladies known to the bee-keeper. And why is this? Neglect is the apicide. I feel sure that the loss each season by absconding colonies is almost incalculable, and whom must we blame? Neglect. The loss every summer by enforced idleness of queen and workers, just because room is denied them, is very great. Who is the guilty party? Plainly, neglect. In these and in a hundred other ways, indifference to the needs of the bees, which require but a few moments, greatly lessen the profits of apiculture. If we would be successful, promptitude must be our motto. Each colony of bees requires but very little care and attention. Our every interest demands that this be not denied, nor even granted grudgingly. The very fact that this attention is slight, renders it more liable to be neglected; but this neglect always involves loss—often disaster.
ENTHUSIASM.
Enthusiasm, or an ardent love of its duties is very desirable, if not an absolute requisite, to successful apiculture. To be sure, this is a quality whose growth, with even slight opportunity, is almost sure. It only demands perseverance. The beginner, without either experience or knowledge, may meet with discouragements— unquestionably will. Swarms will be lost, colonies will fail to winter, the young apiarist will become nervous, which fact will be noted by the bees with great disfavor, and if opportunity permits, will meet reproof more sharp than pleasant. Yet, with , all these difficulties quickly vanish. Every contingency will be foreseen and provided against, and the myriad of little workers will become as manageable and may be fondled as safely as a pet dog or cat, and the apiarist will minister to their needs with the same fearlessness and self-possession that he does to his gentlest cow or favorite horse. Persistence in the face of all those discouragements which are so sure to confront inexperience, will surely triumph. In-sooth, he who appreciates the beautiful and marvelous, will soon grow to love
his companions of the hive, and the labor attendant upon their care and management. Nor will this love abate till it has kindled into enthusiasm.
True, there may be successful apiarists who are impelled by no warmth of feeling, whose superior intelligence, system and promptitude, stand in lieu of and make amends for absence of enthusiasm. Yet I believe such are rare, and certainly they work at great disadvantage.
