A Narrative Community

This progressive resource brings the innovative power of narrative medicine to the forefront of community public health care. Chapters describe community involvement across a continuum of control, from health consultants describing problems and suggesting solutions to health committees designing programs and evaluating results. Narrative strategies to this end, including authentic dialogue and community mapping, are examined in the context of public health and fleshed out with examples of different levels of participation by community members. From the respectful collaboration modeled here, the principles of community public health care can potentially expand beyond the immediate community into other social domains on a greater scale. Included in the coverage: · Narratives, local knowledge, and world entry. · Community and narratives. · What is dialogue? · Storylines, causes, and locus of interventions. · Community mapping tells a story. · The politics of storytelling. Narrative Medicine and Community-Based Health Care and Planning gives health psychologists, sociologists, social workers, and public health administrators realistic practical insights for tapping into the unique resources communities and clients have to offer. This is the next step in the evolution of public health, toward large-scale improvements in care delivery, access to and relevance of services, and patient and community outcomes.

An intertextual examination of the storytelling of Israeli backpackers that analyzes their unique patterns of communication to create a thorough picture of this “narrative community.”

Narratives of Community draws together essays that examine short story sequences by women through the lenses of Sandra Zagarell’s theoretical essay, “Narrative of Community.” Reading texts from countries around the world, the collection’s twenty-two contributors expand scholarship on the genre as they employ diverse theoretical models to consider how female identity is negotiated in community or the roles of women in domestic, social and literary community. Grouped into four sections based on these examinations, the essays demonstrate how Zagarell’s theory can provide a point of reference for multiple approaches to women’s writing as they read the semiotic systems of community. While “narrative of community” provides an organizing principle behind this collection, these essays offer critical approaches grounded in a wide variety of disciplines. Zagarell contributes the collection’s concluding essay, in which she provides a series of reflections on literary and cultural representations of community, on generic categorizations of community, and on regionalism and narrative of community as she returns to theoretical ground she first broke almost twenty years ago. Overall, these essays bring their contributors and readers into a community engaged with a narrative genre that inspires and affords a rich and growing tradition of scholarship. With Narratives of Community, editor Roxanne Harde offers a wealth of critical essays on a wide variety of women's linked series of short stories, essays that can be seen overall to explore the genre as a kind of meeting house of fictional form and meaning for an inclusive sororal community. The book itself joins a growing critical community of monographs and essay collections that have been critically documenting the rise of the modern genre of the story cycle to a place second only to the novel. But more than simply joining this critical venture, Narratives of Community makes a major contribution to studies in the short story, feminist theory, women's studies, and genre theory. Its introduction and essays should prove of enduring interest to scholars and critics in these fields, as well as continue highly useful in the undergraduate and graduate classrooms. — Gerald Lynch, Professor of English, University of Ottawa The introduction, by Prof. Harde, and the 20 essays in the book dialogue with Sandra Zagarell’s proposed paradigm “narratives of community”, which other scholars have called “short story cycles” or “story sequences”. Zagarell’s proposal organically blends a generic model with a thematic concern to explain how women writing community often turn to a particular narrative style that itself supports the literary creation of that community. Harde and the volume contributors appropriate this brilliant and engaging proposal in the context of other crucial discussions of the genre—notably Forest Ingram’s germinal study, J. Gerald Kennedy’s work, and those by Robert Luscher, Maggie Dunn and Anne Morris, James Nagel, Gerald Lynch and (I’m honored to note), my own study on Asian American short story cycles—to expand the range of the critical discussion on the form. The quality and diversity of the essays remind us that there is still much work that can be done in the area of genre studies. The volume emphasizes an important caveat to one vital misconception: that although writers like James Joyce or Sherwood Anderson are thought to be the precursors or, even, “inventors” of the form, women’s sequences, by Sara Orne Jewett and Elizabeth Gaskell, among others, actually predate the work of the male writers. This fact suggests that the development of the form as a genre that attends to specific perspectives or creative formulations of and by women needs to be considered in depth. The temporal scope of the volume is therefore a vital contribution to scholarship on the form, as is the diversity of the writers analyzed. Indeed, the examination of narratives by writers from different countries and that focus on characters from different time periods, racial, religious, or ethnic communities, and social class impels a multilayered reading of the texts that inevitably promotes a nuanced understanding of the project of each of the writers, a project that connects issues of individuality and community in varied and often surprising ways. The essays thus critically explore the notion of community in its myriad associations with the individual and as a crucial site not only for women’s action upon the world but also for her creative endeavors. The essays in the volume revisit familiar texts—Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Welty’s The Golden Apples, Munro’s The Lives of Girls and Women, among others—but offer new perspectives on the way form interacts with issues of women’s communities and women creating community in these works. Significantly, it also offers readings on texts that have not been analyzed in detail from this perspective—Gaskell’s Cranford or Woolf’s A Haunted House, for example—thus contributing to a continuing conversation about the ways women write. The juxtaposition of the familiar and the new expand the paradigms of current criticism not only on the story cycle but also on women’s writing in general. —Rocio Davis, Professor of Literature, University of Navarre "Roxanne Harde’s forthcoming volume, Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences, provides an abundant collection of varied responses to Sandra Zagarell’s longstanding call for further in-depth exploration of the genre that Zagarell christened “the narrative of community” in her 1988 essay linking non-novelistic narrative form with representations of female experience. As Harde observes, such narratives of community overlap significantly with the growing canon of unified but discontinuous collections of autonomous stories that critics have variously labeled as the short story cycle/ sequence/ composite . . . The essays in her collection examine a rich variety of such works by women, extending the scholarship in this area. . . Harde’s ample collection of essays presents a concerted and diverse exploration of the implications of the short story sequence form as a representation of women’s lives as part of and in conflict with membership in a community. . . . Overall, Harde’s volume is a welcome addition to current scholarship on the short story sequence, bringing in a variety of new voices and perspectives to the community of scholars who have engaged in the exploration of this paradoxical, evolving, and increasingly popular genre." — Dr. Luscher

"Working with Stories" is a textbook for people who want to use participatory narrative inquiry (PNI) in their communities and organizations. PNI methods help people discover insights, catch emerging trends, make decisions, generate ideas, resolve conflicts, and connect people. Participatory narrative inquiry draws on theory and practice in narrative inquiry, participatory action research, oral history, mixed-methods research, participatory theatre, narrative therapy, sensemaking, complexity theory, and decision support. Its focus is on the exploration of values, beliefs, feelings, and perspectives through collaborative sensemaking with stories of lived experience. Contents Introduction Fundamentals of Story Work What Is a Story? What Are Stories For? How Do Stories Work? Stories in Communities and Organizations A Guide to Participatory Narrative Inquiry Introducing Participatory Narrative Inquiry Project Planning Story Collection Group Exercises for Story Collection Narrative Catalysis Narrative Sensemaking Group Exercises for Narrative Sensemaking Narrative Intervention Narrative Return Appendices Example Models and Templates for Group Exercises Further Reading: Your PNI Bookshelf Bibliography Acknowledgements and Biography Glossary Index Reader praise "I wanted to say thanks for making Working with Stories available. It's an amazing piece of work, so simple (not the ideas, but the presentation) and unintimidating." "["Working With Stories"] is very thorough and helpful to me in exploring ways that I might capture the narrative of a project I am involved in." "Your detailed description of [the sensemaking] process is so useful and helpful. It makes seasoned facilitators like me yearn to try out the ideas." "Over the past few months I have been reading, reflecting, and feasting on your experiences working with stories. I am really excited to have found "Working With Stories" because it seems like a rich set of options for our needs." "Your terminology and explanation of participatory narrative inquiry have helped me greatly in understanding what I want from my practice and what I might be capable of achieving in social change." "I have been returning to Working With Stories time and again over the past six months to help support a community project, and my printed copy is underlined, noted and dog-eared."

The Tales that Bind presents a narrative approach to facing the challenges of working as a practitioner in social work, education, medicine, or the church in small towns, remote hamlets, and other rural settings.

Political communities are defined, and often contested, through stories. Scholars have long recognized that two foundational sets of stories � narratives of contact and narratives of arrival � helped to define settler societies. Storied Communities disrupts the assumption that Indigenous and immigrant identities fall into two separate streams of analysis. The authors juxtapose narratives of contact and narratives of arrival as they explore key themes such as narrative form, the nature of storytelling in the political realm, and the institutional and theoretical implications of foundation narratives. By doing so, they open up new ways to imagine, sustain, and transform political communities.

This book introduces a range of hopeful methodologies to respond to individuals, groups and communities who are experiencing hardship. These approaches are deliberately easy to engage with and can be used with children, young people and adults. The methodologies described include: Collective narrative documents, Enabling contributions through exchanging messages and convening definitional ceremonies, The Tree of Life: responding to vulnerable children, The Team of Life: giving young people a sporting chance, Checklists of social and psychological resistance, Collective narrative timelines, Maps of history, and Songs of sustenance. To illustrate these approaches, stories are shared from Australia, Southern Africa, Israel, Ireland, USA, Palestine, Rwanda and elsewhere. This book also breaks new ground in considering how responding to trauma also involves responding to social issues. How can our work contribute not only to 'healing' but also to 'social movement'? As we work with the stories of people's lives can we contribute to the remaking of folk culture? And is it possible to move beyond the dichotomy of individualism/collectivism? Collective narrative practices are now being engaged with in many different parts of the world. This book invites the reader to engage with these approaches in their own ways.

The Narrative Forms of Southern Community contains close readings of five narratives - Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn, Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia, William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee, and William Faulkner's Light in August - that attempt to mediate or negotiate the social tensions inherent in the stratified world they represent."--BOOK JACKET.