Stories of Change

I attended a deeply thought-provoking conference yesterday (October 1).

The 2009 Maytree Leadership Conference was what I call a 'Big Idea' conference.

Thanks to Helen Walsh, President of Diaspora Dialogues, I was invited to participate in the conference.

The theme for this year’s conference was Telling Stories; Creating Change.

John Cruikshank, publisher of Toronto Star, set the tone for the conference with a radical idea.

He said it was time to shake the foundations of the notion that the free market model is the most rational economic model there is, or can ever be.

According to Cruikshank, that was the story of the past.

He suggested that there is a definite role for good governance (not big government) to regulate the economy so that the young, the old, and the poor are not left behind.

According to Cruikshank, this is the story of the future.

It’s an idea that will set in motion changes and create social upheavals across the world; especially in the developing world. (See interview)

I participated in a workshop on pitching story ideas to the media. Jennifer Lewington of The Globe and Mail and Julia Howell, communications consultant, conducted it with alacrity and verve.

Nelofer Pazira, author, filmmaker and journalist narrated her own story in the session on Adversity and Courage: Journeys to Canada Storytelling in Practice.

A story that had the audience spellbound. Listening to her it was hard to imagine that she spoke just five words of English in 1990 when she immigrated to New Brunswick from Afghanistan.

She addressed many dilemmas that immigrants face while settling in Canada. Pazira underlined my conviction that integration is easier, faster and less painful if the newcomer consciously adopts Canadian values.

The evening ended with certificates being awarded to refugee students.

Here is an extract from the booklet Making their Mark Canada’s Young Refugees that tells Ahmed’s story – a story that is shared by hundreds of thousands refugee children.

It’s a fictionalised but accurate account written by Peter Showler, Director of the Refugee Forum at the University of Ottawa.

Somalia:

“Ahmed remained in the camp for nine years. His father did not return and his mother was unhappy. At first he was not able to go to school. There was not enough food. He was always hungry and there was work to do. He helped his mother carry water and collect firewood. He had to go very far to collect wood. His sister used to go with him until the men attacked her and left him beaten. He still carried a dark mark over his left eye that would never go away. His mother sold some of her jewellery to buy a large knife that she said would protect them from the men who came at night. When his mother got sick, he took the knife and kept it under his blanket. The nights were very cold and he often woke up shivering, feeling the knife and he would listen for the men but they did not come. He was fourteen and sure that he would use the knife. His sister was always sad after the attack. People said that she was unclean and she died after the floods that came in the spring and made people sick.”

I read this on my way back home.

I have no right even to think (let alone complain) that I'm being discriminated in my new homeland.

Experiment in reading

Geoff Pevere, the book columnist for Toronto Star, has written about an amazing experiment that I'd like to share with everyone I know. 

Writing in Saturday Star's entertainment section Short stories reveal that less really can be more, he says, "In the best short fiction, style and vision commingle in a way that is unique to the form. This is also one of its most acute pleasures. A couple of years ago, I went on a trip accompanied by three volumes: The Complete Short Stories on Ernest Hemingway, Selected Stories by Alice Munro and The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. I kept them in rotation, reading one story by each author before picking up the next book. The effect, as a reader, was remarkable. Not only was I able to appreciate the quality of the stories on their own -- and you couldn't ask for three more variously amazing writers -- I was stunned by the consistency of tone I encountered when the rotation would bring me back to the world of a particular writer. And that's the point: it was a world. Or three, really: Munro's a place of quiet, localized desperation; Hemingway's a stark frontier for the testing of existential mettle; Nabokov's a glided hall of distorted delusion and stained grandeur.

"This is the very thing: While each tale lived and breathed and haunted as a distinct entity on its own, it also took on an altogether richer life when considered in the context of other stories by the same author. This was the vitality provided by the overriding authority of the author's voice."

Reading & Gaming

Anyone with a child who is a young adult (11-17 age groups) knows that reading is not a priority. Not for the parent and definitely not for the child. Reading is something that s/he does occasionally, and almost always on the computer.

Reading a book is such a rarity. Recently, when my son finished the Island trilogy by the Canadian author Gordon Korman it was a cause of a minor celebration for us. 

Looking at the reading habits of the younger generation I'm completely convinced that books may not survive for long. Of course, reading will last longer. Books won't. They don't need to.

Books were a technological innovation that emerged from Johann Gutenberg's printing press of 1439. As a technological innovation, books have outlasted almost all technological innovation of that era. 

Books changed lives, and were a precursor to mass popularity of the written word. In a sense, books democratized knowledge, and enabled common people to access ideas hitherto reserved only for the privileged sections of the society. 

That popularity eventually led to mass media of the 20th century. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man by Marshall McLuhan is a brilliant exposition on the printing press's enormous overall impact. It is the book that first spoke of the global village. 

The globalization process and the advancement of technology (at a pace that outstrips advancement in science) brought about more democratization of the media. 

The internet has provided access to information and knowledge from across the world and blogs have made it possible for common people to express their views inexpensively through blogs. 

Undoubtedly, we are in the middle of a revolution that will change the way we consume and produce media. 

And books will die. Unlamented, perhaps.

It is in this context that I read the report published by Toronto Star's Ideas section last Saturday (December 20, 2008) that a California-based gaming company -- Electronic Arts -- is developing Dante Alighieri's epic Italian poem The Divine Comedy as a video game for kids called Dante's Inferno. The report Abandon hope, all ye who game here makes for interesting reading. But more than anything else, it sort of reconfirms my belief that books will have to mutate into other (more accessible) variants to survive. 

Video games are perhaps the best mutation for books. Books as video games will make them accessible to kids. The purists will disagree...nobody really cares for them. 

We’ll revisit the subject soon.