The Thomas Wolfe Center’s Initiative for Storytelling, Healing, and Cultural Renewal

Grounded in a decade of scholarship in Medicine, Culture, and Literature, Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative’s will launch the Initiative for Storytelling, Healing, and Cultural Renewal this autumn with The Story Shepherds followed by a course entitled Nature and Spirituality in the Gaelic World as part of the Native Well-Springs academic program. The Initiative seeks to draw people of Gaelic and Celtic ancestry into Cultural Reclamation and Generational Healing.

The Initiative presents courses for academic grounding as well as community engagement to strengthen our shared ancestral roots in Storytelling Culture. Alongside music, art, and poetry, Storytelling unifies us across ethnicities, offering a path to confict resolution and restorative justice. No one is left out of this immense story we are all living inside of. We can tap into our shared ancestral memory and reclaim this part of us, the kind part, the part that feels emotion, the part that grieves and loves, the part that is bound by covenant with all humanity, the part that listens even in disagreement and responds with respect.

The Storytelling, Healing, and Culture Renewal Initiative will:

— Support the transdisciplinary storytelling movement by grounding it in indigeneity through classes and community events.

–Develop a culture of telling stories to dispel psychic pain, to heal conflict, to sustain community coherence, and to restore a sense of belonging to those who feel something great has been lost.

–Provide learning opportunities for discovering indigenous cultures and their traditions of storytelling.

–Incorporate Gaelic and Celtic history, traditions, and language into the conversation surrounding indigeneity so people of these lineages can begin to heal from collective wounds.

The Mission of this project is to support our communities develop storytelling practices for personal and cultural healing, as we are urged to do by Asheville’s own “favorite son,” Thomas Wolfe.

“But it is not only at these outward forms that we must look to find the evidence of a nation’s hurt. We must look as well at the heart of guilt that beats in each of us, for there the cause lies. We must look, and with our own eyes see, the central core of defeat and shame and failure which we have wrought in the lives of even the least of these, our brothers. And why must we look? Because we must probe to the bottom of our collective wound. As men, as Americans, we can no longer cringe away and lie. Are we not all warmed by the same sun, frozen by the same cold, shone on by the same lights of time and terror here in America? Yes, and if we do not look and see it, we shall all be damned together.” 

― Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again 1938.

This is not blame. This is not shame. It is Story. It can be told. As our shepherds demonstrate through their friendship, Story heals with witness—to look, to see. During the Story Shepherd Residency and Retreat, the shepherds will lead and teach individuals and organizations how.

We invite organizations to contact Laura.HopeGill@LR.Edu to book workshops onsite or at Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Asheville campus. We wish to connect with as many future shepherds as we can.