The Daily Narrative

On-line with Kate Measham

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Storytelling is perhaps the most common way people make sense of their experiences, claim identities and share who we think we are with others. So much of our daily life consists of telling our stories and listening to and reading the stories of others.

This class is about telling the story of your everyday life, visually.

You can explore what stories your family tells, how you tell them, and how storytelling creates family identities. “My granny had Pond’s face cream on her dressing table and she used to smother her face in it morning and night”, This said to a child as I hold a jar of face cream. It doesn’t have to be about face cream!

So often we are creatures of habit and we forget where the habits came from. Do men shave their faces the way their fathers taught them? If so there could be a link back to their grandfather and beyond. In my family there are endless rules about how to play cards, probably originating from the pond cream grandmother. And how to tie shoelaces (people tie them differently!) (from my father). How do you lay the table, do you always sit in the same chair, do you always have a hanky in your pocket?

These things are overlooked as ordinary but are part of the history of the individual.

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In this class you will look at the everyday experience of waking up, travelling through your day and going to bed. It can be about a special day, an ordinary day, a lockdown day, the perfect day or a remembered day. You can treat this as a type of diary, or a shared narrative.

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