Conversations: Small Stories; Big Memories

There is a space between a story well told and a life well-lived. That’s the world I grew up in with my mother, the storyteller.?

Our lives evolved as we authored them with enthusiastic curiosity, spawning intertwining stories.?

Constance would invent excursions for us to venture upon. Each was a story of discovery that sparked a combustion of awe, inquiry, and speculation. Every tiny spontaneous exchange helped weave the fabric of our reality, helped define our story, our connection, our relationship.?

These were the biggest memories of my lifetime, made from the smallest of conversations. They live on within me after she’s gone.

Alex Haley shared his family history in his pivotal book “Roots,” inspired in him as a boy on his front porch. He was listening to the conversations of his grandmothers reminiscing about their grandmothers.? How then can I pass on to my daughter this intergenerational conversation of my mother’s history now that she’s passed away? Her story wasn’t an epic hero’s journey, but a loving, casual conversation by a hero. The historical facts of her past were less important than the emotional framework of relationships, the dynamics that connected people, places and things.

It takes only one generation to lose touch and the continuity of the ancestral conversation. I reconnected with mom’s living conversation by looking through the photo albums with her before she died. Our new conversation about the stories of her life began when the old photos in the family albums reconnected her life with her story during memory care. If we didn’t catch, unfold, and reimagine these stories residing between the photos, they would have been lost to the family, especially my daughter.?

Growing up, my daughter lived far from my mother, separated as much by age as distance. I wanted her to connect with my mother’s story as I experienced it, through these casual, woven conversations across a lifetime.?

With all my mother’s writings and today’s advanced language models, could my daughter engage in conversation with her grandmother using her own documented words??

Could a computer-generated conversation with my mom be based upon my daughter’s own unique inquiry, not filtered by her father? If it could, I’d like that—an augmentation, not a replacement. The conversation-story could connect life events across generations that would still be founded and anchored in her writings.

Their conversation would need to be personal, based upon their own curiosity about each other and life.

Bypassing the uncanny valley of image and voice synthesis, it may best be through the written word—new letters. That was a powerful story device in Ken Burns’ documentaries. What will my daughter want to ask? How could my mother’s writings respond and inquire back in satisfactorily rich, nuanced conversations through analytical, generative computing??

It’s unfortunate Constance has passed just as my daughter reaches an age to be curious about the family experiences. She’s just now begun her own family story.?

Later, when looking at the photos and letters of my Mother’s mother, I wondered what were their inner dialogues that might emerge among the disparate artifacts that survived?

Is it just my curiosity, or could there be significant, meaningful perspectives passed on in this exchange of intergenerational, conversational story? All family story tapestries have holes because we only read half the story—the letters received, because the others were mailed away. Photos only show the subjects, not the photographer, not the social dynamics. All those story-records of families can skip whole branches and generations by mistake or intent, twists to a true tale that erases part of the flow forever.?

Those lost stories and forgotten true adventures could be the most valuable asset for any family, or for the country as a whole. They so often represent lives that were ignored, suppressed, or never written because they weren’t important enough at some moment. Instead, the stories taught were those of the privileged class, published historians, or minor and major elected officials using sanitized myths that serve themselves.

How many absent, competing, real narratives are there when a child reads a history book, compared to generations of their grandparents’ stories, if they weren’t prevented from or ashamed of telling them? ?

Imagine what we could all learn about ourselves from the inter-meshed accumulation of all of our grandparents’ experience. We could learn even more about our society with those grandparents’ grandparents’ stories. We could feel the continuity of the past to maybe understand the complexity of our present. So many different lenses that jointly witnessed the same events. History in the service of one point of view is deception, for all the stories it discards.

My daughter’s grandmother’s grandmother came over from Ireland, prospered, then faced disaster raising her grandchild (Constance) in the Great Depression when her husband, my mom’s father died. Just the facts are devastating, but how did their lives swerve? What were they all feeling as they mourned, adapted, went on, …from their own points of view? My mother lost her brother, father, uncle and cousin far too early in life, yet she remained eternally optimistic. Why? Her published writing emerged from her answers to that question.

Relatives from each generation, of different ages and different contexts had unique, valid viewpoints. But this diversity of stories will only bring value and relevance if it reaches the next generation and fires curiosity. You and I can only enable and hope for that curiosity; we can’t know their response until it happens.

Does our society forget about its history so easily because we don’t have time to bother sharing details of our own family story? We usually think of it too late to ask, “What are the thoughts and feelings beyond just names and faces in an antique photo album?”?

More importantly: “Who knows what my daughter will face, what she would want or need to learn from the guidance of her ancestors?”

The book “Story Intelligence,” lists seven powers of story, all of which could be inherited from our ancestors, maybe more valuable than tangible property. But if trapped in a single-track, linear story, they cannot be as richly relevant to unborn generations. Telling our storied history in hindsight becomes simplified by omissions, rationalizations, vagaries of memory, even artistry of the storyteller. The storytelling lineage may not even think to reflect on the curiosity or needs of their future audiences.

Audiences of such conversational stories need to step in, to participate in the authorship for connection. They need to step into the characters’ agency.

Each successful result can be an effortless joy: the audience’s imagination dancing with the author’s expression.

We’ve been exploring Conversational Story Creation to bring communities and ultimately society together by richly overcoming communication barriers. We’ll explore how in the next chapter of the Story Dance.?

Copyright (c)2024 Christopher Stapleton

Thanks to Clark Dodsworth for editorial collaboration.