William Lowell Randall is the author of The Stories We Are: An Essay on Self-Creation, Second Edition. In The Stories We Are, William Lowell Randall explores the links between literature and life and speculates on the range of storytelling styles through which people compose their lives.
What inspired you to write this book?
In the late 1980s, I was a doctoral student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and I needed a dissertation topic that would fuel me through the months ahead, that would wake me up in the middle of the night and say, “write me.” I had just done a decade as a minister with the United Church of Canada, during which time – no surprise! – I listened to lots of people’s stories. So I knew instinctively that something quite transformative can happen when we feel our story is being listened to by a fellow human being. Thus, I found myself beginning to wonder: what exactly does such telling-and-listening entail; more importantly, what does “our story” itself even mean, and how does it link to our “identity” or our “self”?
In divinity school in the mid-1970s, I had been fascinated with something called “narrative theology”, a core insight of which is that, whatever else it might involve, religious belief concerns our relationship with a certain “master narrative” to which we (implicitly) subscribe and within which seek to live our lives. As well, early on at OISE I had become intrigued with the concept of creativity, specifically self-creativity – i.e., the idea that developing a self is essentially an aesthetic process, as per the title of Catherine Bateson’s lovely book Composing A Life. And since I was enrolled at the time in the Department of Adult Education, I related this idea of self-creativity to that of “lifelong learning”. One day, then, it hit me. By connecting these three core concepts – self, creativity, and learning – I could reconnect with my earlier interests in narrative theology and perhaps develop a project that would unpack the implications of that familiar metaphor, “the story of my life”. As such, my guiding question became: In what ways do we create ourselves through the stories which, in memory and imagination, we weave (and continually re-weave) about our lives? To the thesis that resulted from my musings, and on which this book is based, I gave the title: The Stories We Are: An Essay on Self-Creation.
What do you wish other people knew about your area of research?
Things are improving all the time, of course, with the emergence all over the place of life-writing groups and reminiscence groups, this sort of thing, but my wish is still that people would appreciate just how important the basic activities of storytelling and (especially) storylistening are to the maintenance of positive mental health; just how important, in other words, is the practice of what can be called “narrative care” in our everyday encounters with each other.
In a close, “co-authoring” relationship, if you will, one with a long-standing friend, for example, we have the wonderful feeling that the person knows our story “inside and out”. Naturally, they will only have their own particular version of that story, which will hardly be the same as the one we have of it ourselves. And they will inevitably “storyotype” us to some degree. But all in all, we feel not just familiar with them but safe somehow as well. When they listen to us, they do not interrupt us continually to talk about themselves. Instead, they attend to what we’re saying in a deep and caring manner, and doing so invariably helps us open up – helps us counteract what I speak of now as “narrative foreclosure”. We feel freer, that is, to try on alternative interpretations of events and issues in our lives that, for whatever reasons, we find painful or puzzling. And of course it’s not just in the context of friendships that such story-listening (such narrative care) occurs; it happens in therapy as well, in marriages (ideally, at least), in support groups of various sorts and it can happen in a learning environment as well – a life-writing group would be a good example – as we press past the superficial chit-chat and settle down to sharing with one another our deeper thoughts and feelings.
Do you have to travel much concerning the research/writing of your book?
No, I didn’t. Nor do I have to travel to write the books I’ve written since. Yet though I don’t have to, I often get to. In other words, publishing The Stories We Are has opened up so many opportunities for me to “see the world” – making presentations at conferences, or giving workshops or keynote speeches, not just in Canada and the US, but also Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the UK – I’ve been really fortunate!
What are your current / future projects?
As a narrative gerontologist, I continue to be interested in this idea of “narrative foreclosure” – in what psychologist Mark Freeman describes as “the premature conviction that our life story has effectively ended,” that though our life itself continues on, no new chapters or themes or events of any consequence are deemed apt to open up. The story of our life is, for all intents and purposes, concluded. Since, for several obvious reasons (retirement, disability, bereavement, etc.), a sense of foreclosure can afflict many of us as we advance in age, I’m also interested in finding ways to help people keep their stories open. If you will, I’m interested in helping them keep on truly growing old and not just – passively – getting old; for which, I feel, some form of “narrative care” is essential.
Along such lines, one project I’m involved with, along with my colleagues here at St. Thomas University in our Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative, is exploring the links between “resilience” and the degree of narrative openness and narrative complexity that is reflected in the sorts of stories older people tell about their lives – our hypothesis being that the more we have what I call “a good strong story” (of ourselves and our world), then the more resilient we will be before the challenges of later life and the more positive will be our mental and emotional health.
Another project I’m eager to get working on in the coming months is one that has been brewing for some time, in fact. I want to try and articulate – in another book, quite possibly – what I’m currently referring to as “a narrative theology of aging”. This is a project which would bring together the three broad strands of thinking that have been woven into my life for going on 40 years – namely, narrative, theology (broadly defined), and aging, which is in many ways an implicitly, or at least potentially, “spiritual” process, and that process can be encouraged still more, I believe, by engaging in the kind of soulful “storywork” that The Stories We Are implies and that a more recent book I’ve written, with my colleague Beth McKim, more explicitly spells out. It’s called Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old (Oxford UP, 2008).
What do you read for pleasure? What are you currently reading?
When I’m not reading for my teaching or for some writing project I’m working on, then I’ll read just about anything for pleasure. I love biography and autobiography – not surprisingly, for these concern people’s stories; and I enjoy wading through books written for the layperson on some of the edge-of-the-edge ideas in biology, cosmology, and physics (fields in which I have absolutely no formal training, I might add) – the books by astronomer, Paul Davies, being a case in point. His volume, God and The New Physics, plus just about everything else he’s written since, have been important works for me in terms of keeping my own story open – the bigger story, as it were, of the universe as a whole. On that point, I also appreciate a fair bit of science fiction, including the four-volume Rama series by Arthur C. Clarke, which I’m currently finishing up. What a big story that is!
What is your favourite book?
One of my all-time favourites is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by American author, Annie Dillard.
If you weren’t working in academia, what would you be doing instead?
Good question – for which, I’m afraid, I have no answer. Hmmmm …
