Origin

The Story Shepherds project was born of a Fairy Fort, or Lios, on the Dingle Peninsula My lifelong friend and colleague, Tara Ross, and I parked our rental car, paid a Euro to the young person in the little cabin, and received our plastic containers of sheep food and map. We walked along into a grassy space, holding our printed map. We were looking for the “Fairy Fort” because neither of us had ever walked to one. I don’t know what we were expecting. We looked around us. We noticed the raised earth all around. Together we said, “We are in the Fairy Fort.” In our modern minds, we had not adjusted for the passage of thousands of years. We were looking for something built, constructed, made. We were looking for what’s familiar or at least what was shown on the page. In so many ways, our eyes and minds had to adjust for culture, for time, for surprise. In other words, we had to adjust to story. Not as Story is thought of in many contexts–as performance, as fundraising, as advertising, as education. While these are all well and good, there is this other level where story is something we can miss if we are looking for a big production. Story that is close to the earth. Story that is earth.

Moving among the Neolithic is part of any sojourn in Ireland. There are Standing Stones, Ring Forts, and ruins of castles whose kitchens fell into the sea. There is a 5000 year old portal tomb, Poulnabrone, on millions-years-old ocean floor. You see the counterparts to spaces too often overwritten in the United States. Seeing these reminds us of how much has been covered by “progress” and how even this word, Progress, is a mask for genocide. These spaces, wherever seen, invite us to question what no longer stands in ourselves, what ancestors covered and what contemporaries still strive to destroy. Also, they invite us to feel some ancient part of us step forward in the form of awe, in the form of peace, in the form of peculiar familiarity.

This would not be our story. I traveled to Ireland with my best friend since middle school, Dr. Tara Ross, PhD (though that wasn’t her name in middle school). Tara is a historian and learning experience designer. While designing a course in higher education in refugee camps, she and her partner at Centreity, a company that provides outstanding learning experience design, Cindy, focused on Northern Ireland.

Peace requires tending. Shepherding. In a place that has been ravaged by violence, hate, and wounding, it needs to be built–and built and built and built using story to humanize those we would call “enemy.” On our trip, Tara introduced me to her friends who had shared their stories with her on her last visit to the North. We found deep resonance between their work and the work I engage in Narrative Healthcare courses at Lenoir-Rhyne University and in Creative Writing classes. Healing with words. The ancient work of words.

The resonances were so deep, I knew I had found the new form for Asheville Wordfest, a gathering of Story Shepherds from around the world, whose worlds story has healed and held together even as those worlds have fallen apart.

Northern Ireland is now 25 years into a Peace Accord that quieted the Troubles in 1998. Peace as we know is not something that we just snap our fingers and see. It requires our stories to build it. Story by story that says “No” to not being fully human anymore. Story by story, we assert our shared humanity, our places to belong. Story by story, we gather.

The term “story shepherd” has emerged softly and gently in our ongoing conversations, reflecting how tenderly story stirs, how quietly we listen. The Northern Irish Story Shepherds will join more story shepherds this Fall, September 29-October 1 in Black Mountain. We will be planning other locations, too, so let me know if you’d like to book.

In the meantime, peace.

Sincerely,

Laura Hope-Gill