On March 30 I will be offering a workshop at Sharing the Fire, the annual New England Storytelling Conference, which is one of the great events of the storytelling year.  The workshop will cover the use of historical primary sources in storytelling.   Below is a somewhat expanded version of a blurb which I wrote for the conference outreach efforts.  

For full information about Sharing the Fire see https://www.nestorytelling.org/  This year it will be held in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

 Last Veterans’ day our church’s congregation was invited to bring in mementos of our own or family members ‘military service, to display during coffee hour.   I brought in several items, including the telegram which my father’s parents received when he was wounded in 1944. 

I was chatting with a fellow parishioner when our friend Helen approached, looking distressed.  Helen is kind, caring, a wonderful mother to two young daughters, and a quiet part of the salt of the earth.  

“Is that really how your grandparents found out?”  She asked.  I allowed that it was. 

“That’s awful! Helen exclaimed.  “”Seriously wounded!”  They didn’t say what happened!”  

I knew what she meant.  The telegram, in its entirety reads as follows: 

REGRET TO INFORM YOU YOUR SON WAS SERIOUSLY WOUNDED IN ACTION 22 AUGUST IN FRANCE.  UNTIL NEW ADDRESS IS RECEIVED ADDRESS MAIL FOR HIM QUOTE: FIRST LT. ANTON A. PRITCHARD S.N. (HOSPITALIZED) CENTRAL POSTAL DIRECTORY A.P.O. 640 C/O POSTMASTER, NEW YORK, NEW YORK.  UNQUOTE.  YOU WILL BE ADVISED AS REPORTS OF CONDITION ARE RECEIVED.

                                                                                                J.A. ULIO

                                                                                                ADJUTANT GENERAL

(“S.N.” means serial number, “A.P.O. means Army Post Office. )

The telegram is laconic, almost totally devoid of feeling, and leaves out what the recipient would most want to know.  Yet in its clumsy way it opens up a window into a very human reality.  Helen and I talked about it a bit – imagining the confusion of parents receiving such a message, and noting the problems of large organizations producing masses of standardized documents which cannot take much account of the feelings of those who receive them. 

Helen is not a history buff, but this telegram grabbed her.  A close look at a tiny incident in one of history’s enormous disasters enabled her to imagine what it must have been like – and it became a human story rather than a textbook abstraction.

That is what primary sources do.   They help us reconstruct what it might be like to be someone else, in different circumstances and with different perspectives.  Reading a textbook is like flying over a landscape at thirty thousand feet – you can see a lot of things, but none very closely.  A primary source can bring you into the streets, the homes, the woods, and the people who inhabit them.  And once you get to know those people a bit, you may begin to see what’s so interesting in the landscape around them.  We will explore this at Sharing the Fire 2019, in a workshop entitled “Can these Bones Live?: Creating Stories from History’s Primary Sources”.  Hope to see some of you there.