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Chapter Two:
The Ear in the Heart: The Art of Storycatching
This material is edited from a much longer chapter with hopes it will intrigue you to discover the fullness of the book, Storycatcher, Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story, by Christina Baldwin. Each chapter is carried by a tale about people, family, or community, intertwined with philosophical and practical instruction about the nature of story, how it works and how we can practice it in our lives. The Storycatcher reading group guidelines show the list of questions that appears at the end of each chapter.
 Dusk, and the room glows only in candlelight for no one has wanted to move toward the lamps. Though twilight sits at our shoulders, we do not want to disturb the delicate attentiveness that hangs suspended between us. There is a palpable sense of compassion and respect in the room. Eyes glisten with tears and laughter. This is story space. This is what happens when people set aside everything else and listen to each other with such quality of attention that speaking and listening become like meditation. Our whole way of being with one another subtly shifts: we become the ear in the heart.
I can tell you a hundred stories:
How a parent and child had trouble understanding each other until they went camping and sat around the fire...
How a couple set aside one hour a month to sit in a quiet place and read to each other from their journals...
How a team of people assigned to a difficult task decided to write their strategic plan as a mythic story and then to fulfill their roles as heroes and helpers to each other...
How soldiers of two armies sat down and admitted the pain of fighting a particular war. 
I can tell you these stories, and I will. Come listen. Come read. Lean into this space ready to receive and to give the gift of story. There are two modalities of storycatching explored in this book: oral tradition and personal writing. In the modern world, both speaking and writing are vital components in reclaiming and preserving story.
...Both oral and written tradition is experiencing a renaissance in the modern world. Though we are under incredible pressure to fill our time with chores and distractions, to just keep moving in the race of our days, and to fall exhausted into bed, story remains our companion. People keep claiming the value of personal stories...Story is loose in the world and the people of the world are communicating as never before.
In 1974, recently returned from living abroad and trying to find my way into the next phase of post college work, I went to the University of Minnesota community education program to see if anybody there taught journal writing. I quietly admitted my writing habit and since I did not seem able or interested in giving it up, I wondered if they had anybody on staff who could teach me how to do it better. The registrar looked me over and asked me a few questions. "Journalism?"  "No. Journal writing. Like a diary, only I'm not disciplined enough to do it every day..."
"Well, how long have you been doing it?"
"About twelve years."
"Twelve years! Why don't you teach the course...?" And so my career began. I made up a course title, outlined a curriculum, and waited to see who would show up. Twelve people came: ten young women poets, one young man poet, and an antiquarian book dealer who collected first edition diaries and journals, and had kept a diary himself every day since he was thirteen. We sat in a circle with our blank books and loose-leaf pages on our laps. I made up things as we went, and they all contributed to my thinking and understanding of how this might go. We felt as though we were breaking ground: admitting the importance of this private writing, writing in quiet communion, then sharing thoughts we'd never spoken aloud. The whole idea of studying journal writing, seeing it as an art form and a life skill was portentous; we knew this intuitively, but we couldn't see the shape and scope of what was coming. It was winter, a time of long darkness in Minnesota. I remember us bundling up, leaving the attic of the little bookstore where we met, journals tucked in gloved hands, following our breath to the tomblike cold of waiting cars. We scuttled off into the night like conspirators: same time next week. Same group.
In 1977, my first book, One to One: Self-Understanding through Journal Writing, came out of these classes. I cannot imagine my life without writing. Writing has changed everything about how I live, though it's hard to say exactly how because I have no comparison self who doesn't write. The reason I spend thousands of lifetime hours creating something 99 percent of which no one else is likely to ever read is that writing itself is the gift. Writing organizes the mind, and the actions that lead from the mind. Over time, the decisions and choices we make in the rush of the moment are informed by the self-knowledge our story gives us. We learn that if we have practiced articulating our story, if we have honored the path to this moment by writing it down, the choices we make are congruent with who we say we are. This is one of the primary promises of story: it was true in oral form, and remains even more true in written form. For in writing we live life twice: once in the experience, and again in recording and reflecting upon our experience.
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Tell Me This Story: Your Opportunity to
Share Your Story
Learning to listen with the ear in the heart enhances our ability to become a Storycatcher. By making agreements about sharing conversation and the responsibility for listening, we help to hold the story space. Recognizing the need for deliberate conversation in place of speaking merely to hear the sound of one's voice increases the power of story for all participants. And writing takes the power of story onto the page, where we can practice the narrative of our lives, looking for what has heart and meaning.
When did you claim the right to speak or write your own life?
Let's start there.
Tell me that story.
Click here to answer this question with a story from your own life >>
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