On Collaborative Storytelling 

In 2022, Adverse Camber approached ICPAC, a climate centre for 11 countries in East Africa, to partner on a British Council funded R&D project, exploring the very questions posed as starting points for ILX Session 3. We’re an independent company based in Derbyshire, producing storytelling tours, projects with young people and providing training and sector support in England and Wales.   

Most oral storytellers we work with are more than on board with the idea that the stories we tell should positively contribute to benefitting our planet. In this project, we wanted to look deeper, asking how storytelling might best serve the communities who are least responsible for climate crisis, where the effects are becoming ever more intense.   

ICPAC climate adaptation expert Linda Ogallo had referenced oral traditions and indigenous knowledge systems as radically underutilised across the African continent, in part because people see traditional knowledge as illegitimate and irrelevant in the drive towards modernisation. In the UK, storytelling can be viewed similarly. We are keen to widen understanding of its potential. 

Our project was challenging, bringing different practices, contexts and ambitions together – and we experienced significant obstacles. But in reflecting on our discussions and actions, including a field trip to Northern Kenya, podcasts and online workshops, we learned a huge amount. 

• There are stories we need to hear –  

We learned about pastoralist communities at the Northern Kenya/Uganda border who have been adapting creatively to climate change for over 50 years at Lokiriama Peace Accord festival, where performance helps to forge solidarity and solutions to evolving climate, migration and conflict issues. 

In the borderlands with South Sudan, traditional “rainmakers” have accurate, locally specific ways of reading nature to predict rains, in places where communities have no access to other forecasting support.  

• There are very real obstacles to hearing such stories – 

The traditional rainmakers were keen to share their knowledge with us, and scientists. Colonial borders prevented physical access. We flew journalist-researcher Joseph Ngor Deng to the capital to share his knowledge, but even then, reception was patchy. What we learned influenced the whole of the rest of the project, but we regretted that the rainmakers’ voices themselves simply couldn’t be directly heard. 

• How we construct stories matters –  

We could have framed our findings as stories of scarcity and conflict, or as stories of creative adaptation, overcoming historical and political obstacles.  

Our storytellers experimented with different constructs and outputs; similar material, different creative processes and desired outcomes. ICPAC edited their gathered material into a film for policy makers. We created two podcasts, one a braided story incorporating a Yoruba West African folktale as a guiding metaphor for holding paradox, working beyond what we think is possible, the other, sharing communities’ voices verbatim, inviting listeners to construct their own meanings.  

In an online workshop, we reflected on the range of potential storyteller roles, as: 

witnesses, validating people’s stories 

pollinators, sharing solutions between people and cultures 

imagination practitioners, positing alternative futures, fostering hope  

conveners, holding spaces through which knowledge, experience and solutions can be shared 

artful activists, finding language and metaphors for concepts which are hard to grasp 

Oral storytellers have the flexibility to mix and match these roles, responsive in the moment. One of ICPAC’s meteorologists reflected that having storytellers involved in the field trip had enabled him to hear communities’ voices differently.  

• We can make meaning, together, differently – new social imaginaries 

Social activists have identified the kinds of climate stories that make people feel moved to act positively together.  Social imagination goes further, making visible the ‘imaginary’ frameworks through which we perceive what is possible and what has value.  

Professor Dani Celermajer has shared research with us about communities in India and South East Australia, actively working beyond currently dominant imaginaries.  She describes collective storying, and a dynamic, cumulative two-way flow between practice and stories: “as we tell stories with communities about what they are doing, these stories illuminate for them the transformative nature of their actions, nurturing that very transformation.” (8.2.24)  Her research highlights the benefits of imagining more symbiotic relationships between humans and nature, more just, collective relationships between humans and different conceptions of how humans relate to time. These stories can inspire others to imagine and live differently.  

Perhaps it’s here, in the intersection between life as it’s lived, imagined and storied, where there’s such valuable work for literature professionals and writers to do.  Thinking and acting deeply, with others, asking who, how, why, and how helpful we are being, are questions we welcome, and need to keep asking.  

Storying Our Futures was co-led by UK storyteller-academic-activists Cath Heinemeyer (York St John University) and Hannah McDowall (Canopy) with ICPAC’s Linda Ogallo (climate adaptation expert), Callistus Wachana (meteorologist) and storytellers John Mukeni Namai (Nairobi) and Mara Menzies (Kilifi), produced by Adverse Camber.  

Naomi Wilds

Naomi Wilds is a producer and live literature specialist who founded Adverse Camber, one of the UK’s leading storytelling organisations, based in Derbyshire, working locally, nationally and internationally, especially in England and Wales.  Adverse Camber produces and commissions new storytelling performances and tours, provides sector support and develops co-creative socially engaged storytelling projects with young people and partners.   From 2018 to 2023, she has also been Artistic Director of Beyond the Border, Wales’ international storytelling festival, developing projects such as the Mycelium Storytelling Hub and Anti-Racism Storytelling Pathway, with national partners, artists and producers, and programming a biennial in-person international storytelling festival, as well as online activities. 

Her specialities include developing creative teams, commissioning, artist development, partnership work, cross-artform practice, fundraising, programming, team building, evaluation and research. In 2020, she was one of 25 fellows selected for the inaugural Derby Museums National Arts Strategies Creative and Cultural Fellowship programme, supporting cultural entrepreneurs working to drive transformative change in their communities through arts and culture. 

www.adversecamber.org 

The International Literature Exchange is a partnership project by National Centre for Writing and British Council, supported by Arts Council England.