A Challenge

          The outer world, shared by listeners, is observable. It is a tangible set of movements, participants and patterns. It is a shared place; its qualities and patterns are matters of agreement amongst listeners. But, not all of it is "visible." Such aspects as expectation and value are as intangible as each participant's inner life. Again, we also have many ways of understanding and referring to the outer world. We call it our environment, landscape, exterior world, culture or social life.
Members of a group experience a discrepancy between themselves and their community's social expectations. A story explores and explains the difference of "self" felt by listeners living within a bigger world shaped by other people and places. Personal understandings of social norms challenge a strongly felt inner life. A story often functions to bridge that discrepancy. There is a kind of tension tugged tight by a sense of incongruity of self--ones felt identity--within the group. This is especially true of personal stories and stories centered by character development. The story serves to explain difference or stretch acceptance. When Bruner identifies a story he describes its chief characteristic as a "unique way of managing departures from the canonical." He continues to describe storytelling as "find(ing) an intentional state that mitigates or at least makes comprehensible a deviation from a canonical cultural pattern." (1990:49-50; italics his). This is an important social function of stories:
          It is necessary, because with its (the story's) aid I am unable to understand myself situationally, that is, to understand myself as placed among objects which are totally different from me; I cannot therefore name myself as different from the world--that is, I cannot give an account of the irresistible sense of self-identification. (Kolakowski 1972:17)
Similarly, as Wertsch (1992) argues, a story is the teller and listener's means to "organize and supply with sense his or her ordinary life" (1992: xvi). Stories explain and justify the difference.
           In these ways a story engagement is very busy. The listener-reader crosses, reconfigures and finds connections between two places, inner and outer lives. While constructing the story world, listeners reconstruct personal and social identities. The story is a working laboratory in which participants "experiment with estimations, evaluations and judgments of approval and condemnation" (Ricoeur, 1992: 116). A story bridge is a place of safety where reader-listeners are free from constraints that might be imposed by either end: particulars of the self or of the shared world. It connects two shores. As the Dauenhauers (1990), working with Tlinkit oral narratives for several decades, noted, a story is "a gaff hook reaching out over a distance and becoming one with another person who is hooked" (1990: ix(8)).
          While Linda read about Roger wondering at the havoc wrought by a wish, and about Roger's anguish over his identity, we used the story space to puzzle over our own lives and about our lives as they connect with the group; our lives on two shores. This aspect of a story, connecting and carrying personal learning into and out of the group, is at the heart of reading response approaches with stories. Works for classroom teachers as developed by Atwell (1998) and Rosenblatt (1995) demonstrate rich interactions possible when traffic between inner and shared outer lives is facilitated in stories. These acknowledge the tension felt in uses of story to teach reading and writing. Two important teaching goals are woven together: print literacy teaching and a commitment to provide social, personal life learning opportunities. This approach also guides participants into deeper, more complex engagements with literature. The responses, however, are shaped and directed by written engagements; evaluation and interaction are guided by the page. This is necessary and perhaps the very best fusion of interests.
          But, in this paper, I draw awareness to the effects of stories outside of print text. Where is the space for story engagement freed of print interest? Participants in a story are absorbed with traffic on a bridge, connecting experiences that meet from two directions. Those participants do not pay attention to the page.