Performance Storytelling--Dispatches from the Other Kingdom

This past weekend I was at the National Storytelling Network annual conference in Covington,Ky. As part of a troupe including Joseph Sobol and Kenneth Tedford, I was honored to perform in Dispatches from the Other Kingdom featuring cancer stories taken directly from interviews with three people.  Joseph told his father's story, Kenny told his own, and I told a cancer patient's story.

Each time we perform this piece, the result is amazing, as people are stirred, and reminded of their own brushes with this dreaded disease.  It seems no one in today's world can escape cancer's tentacles, and everyone has either experienced it personally or knows someone who has.  Cathy touched me deeply when I interviewed her. I was still in the master's in storytelling program at East Tennessee State University, and working as the graduate assistant with a grant in conjunction with the Quillen School of Medicine, when we met. She had lost so many family members that to hear it was beyond staggering. On top of that, she lost her husband in an accident and then she got cancer.

Interviewing 28 people with cancer in various stages including hospice-care was a step beyond my experience in community relations at Big Bend Hospice in Tallahassee, Florida. I should have known when I left there that those stories I heard would follow me.  When the call came to interview these people and then share their stories, I was ready.

My reason for sharing this is to remind all of us to listen without judgment. People undergoing horrible life experiences may need only to share, and to feel human understanding in return.