Sunday in the Park (Shanghai)

A front blew through last night, heavy rain and high winds, yielding blue skies, bright sun, cool breezes, and fallen autumn leaves. Zhongshan Park in Shanghai is like any city park in Manhattan or Chicago. At the entrance, vendors spread their wares along the pavement, selling kites, whirligigs, bubble blowers and other good toys for a park outing. Within, meandering paths lead over little bridges, along greenswards, through shady groves of bamboo, oak, and even a small stand of redwoods. Park benches are scattered along circular plazas where couples practices ballroom dancing or small groups move in silent Tai Chi meditation. There is a small lake with boat rentals and a little amusement park with spinning swings and a carousel. Families are out today, loving their children (and their smart phones) and contentedly enjoying the sun and each others' company. These are middle-class, urban families, comfortably arrayed and equipped with strollers and back packs. Their children are gifted with balloons and toys, running about in windbreakers and sport shoes. This is China's baby boom. The grandparents easily remember a the great privation and distress of the Cultural Revolution, barely 40 years ago (1966-76) during which our baby boom was protesting the Vietnam War. This new urban China baby boom, like ours, emerges from hardships to bask in new material comfort. A rising middle class is enjoying luxuries unimaginable a short time ago. If patterns repeat themselves, this baby boom will soon develop the perennial distrust of the Establishment. Already the cities are up against a discovery of pollution similar to that which ignited America's environmental movements. The saturation of materialism may likewise lead to a similar questioning of values and ideology, fueled by increasing higher education and international influences. Maybe. It remains to be seen.

Today, however, I feel the warmth of the sun, the peace of the pastoral setting, the beauty of families, and the sense, however fleeting, that all is well. I am especially missing my son, Jordan, who would fit in with all the other children, and whose company would make this day complete. Monday is his 6th birthday and I cannot wait to hug him up close.

Meanwhile, I am happy to begin another week of work tomorrow, and grateful that I will be spending next Sunday at home.

Great Expectorations

I am in China for my second tour of International Schools with the new company, Pana Wakke. The director, Sonia Zivkovic, does a grand job of organizing and integrating my work with the schools and the experience is very rewarding. Because the International Schools serve a population of foreign nationals living and working in China, my tour is limited to the denser urban areas: Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Shouzou, and so on.

The world of the schools is set apart from the life of the city. By and large, the cities are sleepless and busy: pile drivers and construction cranes assault the rising sky line; dense, erratic traffic scurries in, out, and across all lanes; horns bleat, phones blare, and people shout. Yet amidst all the cacophony of the urgency in urban China, one sound grates across them all: the sound of throats clearing. It is a harsh, raspy sound followed by a brief pause and then the splat of spit upon grass, trash, or pavement. The open-air effusion of phlegm erupts suddenly from the crowd and never fails to startle and sicken me. A less loud, but equally common companion to these throaty expectorations is the hiss and spray of open-air nose blowing. Clearly this is one practice where the lines of culture are sharply drawn. I feel a drip, take a tissue, blow, and throw away the refuse. But the man across from me shows that you can skip the tissue (and save trees?) by merely clearing your nostrils onto the nearest bin, bush, or byway.

The rising pollution index in China is famous, and it may be this that engenders the people's nose and throat distress. Whatever the cause, there is something here that can neither be swallowed nor coughed up. The People, it seems, are choking. Or, perhaps, they getting ready to speak.

Magic Picture Story Boards

Over the years I have created ways for using a simple paper folding toy to explore storytelling, tallying, and storyboards. The "magic picture" toy is created by folding a square of paper in on itself to create multiple folds that can hide and reveal part or all of a square. 

As a picture toy, these are used to change a simple picture such as making a facial expression turn from a frown to a smile. For storytelling they can be used to recount a story. I use them in the classroom, to help students find their way through a story and to divide a story into richer details:

Throughout history storytellers have used pictures to illustrate their stories.

Bankelsanger literally means "bench singer." These German storytellers would use a small bench as a stage from which to direct listeners to their story boards.

Similarly the art of Kamishibai in Japan is based on telling stories to images.



The modern use of storyboards in film-making is a direct descendant of these traditions. Storyboarding was first used as a cost effective way to pre-edit animated films by Walt Disney.

Wayfinding on The Mountain

I just received this letter from a woman who attended my programs at The Mountain Retreat and Learning Center in Highlands, NC, last week.

It is sometimes difficult to explain what I do to people and why I think storytelling matters. I call my business A Telling Experience, and my catch-phrase is "finding ourselves together telling stories." That has multiple meanings for me, but most important is the wayfinding we do when we converse and share stories. Every now and then someone gets it and articulates the experience in a lovely way.

Janese's letter validates the role storytelling plays in our Mountain programming.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Janese Nix <janese.nix@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 4:12 PM
Subject: Thank you
To: david@david-novak.com

David,

I was fortunate enough to meet you and experience your art last week at the Mountain Center.  I am aware of many of the ways listening and sharing stories can transform and am grateful for the reminder and opportunity to think again about the power of stories.  But I also want to express gratitude to you for sharing your "aliveness."  When you tell stories you are sharing and passing along the stories themselves but you are also inviting attention.  It's like seeing the first rays of the rising sun and noticing that beauty.  In that moment there is no distraction, no mind chatter or worries, simply life.  When you are story telling, you become the wind moving through the trees, and invite your audience to be captivated, to attend fully.  You energize your audience by awakening their attention.  A gift I'm glad to have received. 

Listening to you talk afterward, I felt like you are a wayfinder, someone who inspires cultural change through your authenticity and by being deeply connected with your inner voice.  Another gift, thank you.

Janese Nix  

My Mother The Car

Last night I was invited to join the storytellers at Listen To This! a storytelling series here in Asheville produced and hosted by local actor and improv comedian, Tom Chalmers. The format is popular these days: people are invited to tell true, 10 minute stories related to the evening theme. Last night the theme was :
"You Never Forget Your First Car" - autobiographical anecdotes of inaugural automobiles
At first I thought: what can I say? I've never been a car jock, couldn't tell you the size of the engine or its attributes, and don't generally consider the car an expression of my prowess as a man. In short, I am not a guy. I never was into popular "guy things" like sports, cars, and sports cars. I was not like my brother, who, when he got his first car, promptly replaced the muffler with a glass pack so he could make loud farting noises as he drove around town. My relationship to cars was different. My first car was an extension of my favorite subject in school: the window.
In 1965, United Artists Television produced what was arguably the worst t.v. comedy in history: "My Mother The Car." It starred Jerry Van Dyke (Dick's younger brother) as a man whose deceased mother is reincarnated as a 1928 Porter Touring car. She speaks to him via the car radio (an anachronism justified by poetic license) and was voiced by Ann Southern. I was 10 years old at the time and I loved the show. Because my mother was the car. She drove us everywhere all the time. I spent more time in her company as her passenger than in any other way. My mother was a science teacher at a new experimental school called Nova High School, in the town of Davie, at what was at the time the edge of Broward County, FL . Davie was a frontier town characterized by orange groves, horse ranches, and flood control canals. It was the edge of the Everglades, the last town west on Hwy 84, the 2 lane highway that cut across southern Florida along what was called "alligator alley."
Our home, however, was in Ft. Lauderdale, in the northeast section of Broward County, an hour's drive from school. My mother, being a school teacher, was required to be at school early and stay late. So most days, we spent hours driving there and back again, often falling asleep in the car and returning home after dark.
I think my mother's favorite subject in school was also the window. For she took every opportunity to lead her class out of doors to study and collect samples from the field and retention pond.She told me "if you want to be a scientist, you don't need to know anything." I thought: great, I'll be a scientist. "But," she would say, "you must always wonder about everything. For", she said "the end of science is knowing, but the beginning is wonder."
In 1969, mom got a new Dodge Dart (white with a blue interior, I can tell you that much.) In 1972, that car was mine. It was a wonderful moving window and showed me the world.
I was a theatre student and most of my childhood was spent in rehearsal (there's a metaphor!) Shortly after acquiring my independence with the acquisition of my driver's license and the Dodge Dart, I was busy designing and hanging lights for a production of Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth" at the community college across from our high school. Our director had given me the keys to the lecture hall/theatre so I could spend all the time I needed working on the light plot. It was well past midnight, when I crawled down from the ceiling scaffolds, and locked up the theatre. The night was moist and noisy with the sleigh-bell sound of crickets in the high grass. My Dart sat alone in the center of a vast asphalt lot. I got in and headed for the highway. As I drove along alligator alley, no street lights, no shop signs, only my headlights cutting through the darkness, my body began to relax into its accustomed drowsiness, unaware that it was no longer merely the passenger. The radio played a lulling song, "Nights in white satin..." My mind struggled to call my body to attention, when I was startled by the sudden appearance of starlight scattered across the highway. I slowed, and then stopped, and stared at hundreds of shiny, beady, eyes reflected in the headlights. A herd of land crabs was crossing the highway. They were about the size of dinner plates, and were moving sidelong while facing me, holding up their claws in a ready stance in case we came to blows. Hundreds of these crabs had pushed up from the muck and were making a mating migration, as they had done seasonally for millennia.
I was enchanted. I began to wonder through the window about the mystery of life all around me, about the landscape and the earth, about water and air. As they passed and I began again to accelerate, I wondered how water condenses to the pull of gravity, forming oceans, but expands into the atmosphere above. I marveled that, in a sense, I was driving along an ocean floor, with crabs scuttling across. For the ocean extends from the depths to the troposphere and out into space.
The next thing I knew, I was parked in our home driveway, the radio singing "Morning has broken..." having no memory of how I got there.
I realized, my mother was the car. Or, rather, the car had mothered me home safely. Something in me had taken charge while my childish self was staring out the window. Something that took on the parent's role. For my first car was an extension of the womb; it birthed me into a larger world. As I sat there in the driveway, I crossed a threshold into adulthood, as part of me that was a child slept in the passenger seat, while a new self arose, ready to take the wheel.

Mind the Gap!

Just heard a great story on NPR's Morning Edition about why certain songs make us want to dance.

Anatomy of a Dance Hit

The conclusion is that songs with moderate rhythmic complexity and syncopation, inspire us to "fill in" the rhythmic gaps. So we jiggle, tap, clap, and...dance!

The same is true in storytelling. A classic "involvement strategy" for storytellers is to develop a rhythmic under current that grows in complexity and leaves gaps for the listener to fill in, resulting in spontaneous participation. The linguistic strategy of ellipsis (...) likewise inspires the listener to fill in the gap.  You can hear this at play in the cumulative pattern story of The Little Ant:

Electric

I recently had a wonderful experience as Emcee and Presenter at The Electric Universe Conference (EU2014) in Albuquerque, NM. This was a gathering of passionate and dedicated physicists, geologists, climatologists, mythologists, and others, all exploring the a big "What IF?"  What IF... electricity plays a major role in the physics of the cosmos? What IF the sun is more like a light bulb than a fire-ball? What IF the mythic cosmologies of our earliest ancestors were reporting actual experiences of extraordinary events? What IF we were to re-examine and re-think our own understanding of ancient history? What IF we are all part of a vast integral electric circuit called 'universe'? What IF?

My mother died just before Easter and I have been pondering her legacy in my life. She had been a high school science teacher. She told me that if I wanted to be a scientist, I did not need to know anything. But, she said, I must wonder about everything. "The end of science is Knowing, the beginning is Wonder."

So at an early point in my life, I set out to be a scientist. I became a storyteller. I discovered that story and science begin in the same place: Wonder.

Here is a storyteller's perspective I contributed to the conversation: