When you're ready, here's part 3.Part 3: The call of the cowbell
With my son's cancer vanquished, I again turned my attention to Greenfire: What next?
I leafed through notes from dozens of programs I'd presented at conferences and meetings. These kinds of sessions were my marketing bread-and-butter. Not only did they provide my audiences with practical information they could use immediately, they gave us a chance to get acquainted.
And they were fun--people had a great time and learned a lot. Evaluations practically vibrated with excitement: So inspiring! Best session of the conference! Empowering! Life-changing! Even better were the notes I received long after, notes telling me how they'd used what they learned, how they'd overcome a major roadblock to achieve something they never believed possible.
I attributed the glowing reviews to my presentation style--or maybe my value system. I'd been in too many conference sessions where the presenters droned through the text of their latest research paper or mumbled their way through the canned graphics and text heavy slides of a PowerPoint presentation--with the lights down low, guaranteeing that the most ardent student would zone out by slide three.
My presentations were interactive from the beginning. Maybe it's residual ADHD, maybe it's some other innate internal restlessness, maybe it's my own experience as a learner and especially as a writer, but I wanted people to have the chance to try new things, to have the space and time to experiment and explore. I try to provide just enough information, followed by a suggestion of something to try--and then we're off and running, inventing and sharing in the safe space of like-minded souls.
About half of my presentations were on marketing, half on creativity, with a smattering on writing. I knew I didn't want to do marketing workshops any more. I didn't think I wanted to teach just creativity, either, despite my fascination with it. Creativity, it seemed to me, was a fundamental human trait that supported our endeavors, but it was the
application of creativity--to story-making, in particular--that was important.
This wasn't a shift in how I view the creative process of, for example, visual arts versus writing, but a shift toward what I live and breathe, often without conscious awareness: the drive, the desire to create stories that make a difference--no matter how you define "story," no matter how you define "difference" or to whom the difference happens.
With that philosophy and a belief in the power of learning-by-doing, I created more short workshop-style programs. Not long after, in 2004,
Karin Hostetter of Interpret This and I combined forces to create a full-day interpretive writing workshop for
NAI's Region 7. Region 7 is a long skinny strip of geography with scattered towns. Our members had been asking for comprehensive training in writing, and no one had the time or budget to travel to Denver. So instead of trying to gather everyone in one place for a regional conference, we decided to take the conference, in the form of a writing workshop, on the road.
That's where the cowbell comes in.
There's a writing exercise called "object writing" that's been around in assorted variations for a long time. A lot of interpretive training programs, including NAI's certification workshops for trainers and guides, use a version of it to teach the concepts of tangibles, intangibles, and universals used in interpretive theme development. I use it partly for that, but also for showing how objects carry story (you can read about that
here). Karin and I agreed that for our writing workshop, we wanted an object that was distinctive, durable, and easy to carry.
We picked a cowbell.
Or rather, Karin picked a cowbell. Turns out, her dad collected cowbells, all the way from teeny tiny ones to massive bells reminiscent of temple bells that use a swinging log as a clapper.
Karin had great memories and lots of stories about growing up with cowbells. The only thing I knew about cowbells was that they clanged, plus a faint recollection that they were involved in a Saturday Night Live sketch with Christopher Walken.
Sometimes, when you know practically nothing, you discover the best stories.
I own two cowbells now, one smallish, one medium-sized. The medium-sized one is the size I think of when someone says "cowbell." They carry the stories of the adventure I had finding them (did you know that cowbells used as musical instruments don't have clappers?). They carry the stories I found as I researched the history of cowbells (the first case presented in the first court of record in Western New York dealt with the theft of a cowbell), the manufacturing methods (ancient China), their use in popular culture (including the Saturday Night Live sketch). They carry my favorite story, the one that still gives me goosebumps, that I tell every time I teach, which is about people escaping Nazi Germany by walking across the Alps, cowbells hanging from their necks, because a cowbell dangling from a walking person's neck clangs exactly the same way as a cowbell dangling from a cow's neck, and the soldiers were hunting people, not chasing cows.
When I first clanged the cowbell in a workshop, I winced at how loud it was. It sounded much louder, much more intrusive, than it had back home, in the safety of my spare room office. The workshop participants looked a little alarmed. There was some self-conscious laughter. I wondered if the cowbells were a bad idea.
But we survived, and I discovered that the shock of the bell's clang served another purpose: it fractured the polite wait-til-someone-else-goes-first reluctance. It cracked open memories of being called to supper and struggling in school and waking to Reveille. It crashed through comfort zones and clattered into a miracle of stories.