How do you establish trust from a distance, with correspondents whose expressions and reactions you can’t vouch for? Perhaps you have to create an epistolary place, a shared space of correspondence in which both correspondents feel at home.

The basic techniques for this can be blunt and simplistic. Sign-offs, for example, are surprisingly crude. When someone wishes you “all the best”, they are making a generic, replicated statement of affection, which is in itself essentially meaningless – but its removal would be significant. Similarly, if you routinely sign off your personal e-mails with two kisses, a reduction to a solitary “x” would seem hostile. By negotiating such clumsy conventions, correspondents construct a mutually acceptable structure, albeit a basic one, in which to interact.

The eighteenth-century letters that I read in the course of my own PhD research are often dull, dry, stiff and formal. The vast majority are matter-of-fact business exchanges which succumb to all the unimaginative conventions of eighteenth-century letter writing. The correspondence archives of Enlightenment Edinburgh bookseller John Bell, for example, are dominated by business invoices, and the details of orders and deliveries. A long day in the archive can be considerably enlivened, then, by the discovery of some creative or literary flair, or even the faintest trace of a story: for example, a hastily scribbled note from a Robert Trotter Esquire of George Square, requesting that two “new comedies” be delivered to him at home as “a cure for the heart ache”.  From a mere scrap such as this, especially on a particularly boring day, the imagination can run wild.

The breakdown of Bell’s relationship with the London bookseller John Murray, a man with whom he corresponded almost entirely through letters, is also fascinating to trace from its warm and intimate peak to its frosty denouement. In 1774, Murray becomes exasperated with his counterpart’s absent-mindedness, and he adopts an occasionally passive-aggressive tone. He wishes Bell well on a new publication, adding: “perhaps you would have done as well had you confined yourself to one London publisher – any of the three would have done.” He signs off this letter with a particularly naked plea for Bell to “Command any services here & believe me to remain, Dear Sir, your affectionate, humble servant”. Two months later he uses the unprecedented sign-off “very sincerely yours”; but shortly afterwards, their relationship has clearly soured, and any meagre correspondence between them takes the form of generic, impersonal business invoices. The epistolary structure remained essentially the same, but the tone became hollow and cold.  

It is the subtlety of letters – their hints and traces of intimacy and emotion – that can make them so powerful; and I am struck by the power of epistolary dialogue to drive a story. And it is not a dialogue like any other. It is a less immediately reciprocal form of communication. Unlike the listener in a face-to-face conversation, readers cannot use their physical responses to encourage or discourage their correspondents. Nor can they interject or contribute to the conversation at will; they are bound by the structure of the message that the writer intended.

Nevertheless, letters resemble “real life” interaction in the sense that they generally have to adhere to certain mundane formalities before the more intimate exchanges can occur. A show called Letters Home, part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, explores this idea beautifully. Unlike site-specific theatre company Grid Iron’s previous work, which made the settings of their performance a distinctive feature of the drama, Letters Home uses empty spaces and non-specific locations to transport the audience to this imagined epistolary place, where dialogue flows freely and the facts of geography and physical distance are secondary to the stories of love, longing, and loss. The epistolary form allows for the primacy of language, in all its agile glory.

In Letters Home, stage directions are few, and perhaps the most effective part is when the audience listens, blindfolded, to disembodied voices, the dialogue alone driving the story. In the drama, each correspondent waits patiently for their turn, as layer upon layer of intimacy is added, each correspondent responding to the boldness of the other in revealing their feelings, and revealing hints and traces of a wider story along the way.

The weaker parts of the drama, though, are spoiled by attempts to counteract the supposed limitations of epistolary dialogue. Ham-fisted stage decoration and absurd over-acting are particularly distracting in one of the four segments, a clumsy attempt to obviate the criticism of a straight dialogical drama as “dull”, a symptom of the director’s lack of trust in the audience’s imagination. But, more pertinently, the whole suffers from the unnatural insertion of context and background. Sections when the characters on stage are addressing not each other but the watching audience, making sure that we understand the context of the scene, are jarring.

Of course, letters are “limited” in some crude sense. Unadorned and contextless in the archive, their meaning can be unclear. Performed theatrically on stage, they offer only a partial picture of a wider story. But while the insight they offer isn’t complete, it is rich, deep, and extremely valuable. Letters act as a powerful imaginative spur, an inspiration to explore the epistolary place that distant correspondents have created, and to construct a story from its fragments.

Phil Dodds | @PA_Dodds

Some reflections on the storytelling process

I don't exactly have what you would call a job description. I was thrilled to see that my name badge for At Home in Scotland's opening conference read 'Storyteller and Folklorist'. As I have faffed about, piecing together bits of work, the three main threads of storytelling, oral history, and reminiscence, have emerged. They're all about the unseen exchange of thoughts and ideas between human minds. They're all, when it comes down to it, just fancy names for conversation. I often feel uncomfortable with the idea of these things being somehow special, something you need to study, rather than something you just do. These activities are formalisations of what used to be the only way to exchange information - that is, through speaking and listening to one another. Storytelling, in particular, is a troubling activity to define - where's the line between traditional storytelling and stand-up comedy and spoken-word performance and chatting to your neighbour at the bus stop? Of course, there is no line except that drawn by our personal tastes, and one person's eye-opening raconteur is another person's insufferable show off.

For me, the most important thing defining traditional storytelling is the utter lack of a fourth wall. Although the audience (hopefully) aren't interrupting you in the midst of your narrative, you are in conversation with them. Their thoughts and reflections and reactions to your words are the only reason to do this. I once read a piece of advice to beginner storytellers saying you should practice in front of a mirror. No. Tell your story to a cat or a pot plant if you can't find or face a human audience yet, but tell it to something living. Because it's about the story, and the listeners. Recently I told a story on a stage, at Mareel in Shetland, and was immensely thrown by the lighting – it was set up so you couldn’t see the audience’s faces from the stage. I felt like I was speaking into a void, trying to feel my way by the laughter and silences.

Where to find your stories is another question with a thousand answers, all of them wrong to somebody. Does it dilute the tradition, to have taken your words from a page into the air? Or take them from – heaven forbid – such a vulgar thing as the internet? I can't help being prouder of the stories I learnt from hearing them, even though I know that's a bit silly. Songs and tales come on and off the page easily. The singer declaiming ballads from a cheap chapbook on a street corner, the Penny Dreadfuls spawning and reinforcing urban legends, the viral online hoax. All stories, all worth the telling. And all stories transform with each telling. It depends on your audience, your mood, the place. Allowing yourself to let go, to go with the story, is incredibly freeing – once you get over the sense of being in freefall. As a counterpoint to the mirror suggestion, some genuinely good advice: know the story, not the words of the story.

Scotland's traditional storytelling scene is in the midst of what you could call a revival. The dedicated Storytelling Centre, on the Royal Mile, has become one of Edinburgh's favourite venues. As well as young and not-so-young upstarts, we're lucky to enjoy the company of a number of tradition bearers, people for whom this seems to be simultaneously a lifetime's worth of painstaking dedicated artistry and as straightforward as breathing. In recognition of the time and effort it takes, the Centre operates the Scottish Storytelling Directory – having your name on this is proof you’ve put the time in, not just to learn stories but to deal with a range of audiences and their reactions – and as far as I know, it’s the only one in the world. I’m currently at the apprentice stage.

There are more questions – about the dangers of professionalising tradition (important to remember, on this point, that even ‘back in the day’ it took work – tradition bearers are not accidentally channelling the amorphous carrying stream which surrounds them, they are actively shaping and re-creating their stories with each telling), who ‘owns’ a traditional story, and how far you can change it before you’ve broken it – than can be addressed here. All I can say is, sometimes it’s better not to overthink things. Go and hear some stories, then tell some stories. It's good for you, and not necessarily bad for your career. I hear the Prime Minister of Greenland is a storyteller.

But why would you listen to me? I make things up all the time.

Erin Catriona Farley | @aliasmacalias

“Your ethnicity: mixed”, the man at the desk states confidently. Tania nods, but wonders which box she would have ticked herself. Her father’s ancestors were African and her mother’s ancestors were Indian. But she usually thinks of herself as Surinamese. What does that actually mean, to be Surinamese? Tania ponders over this question while the man continues ticking boxes that supposedly confirm Tania’s identities. Am I Surinamese because I live in Suriname? Half of the Surinamese population lives in the Netherlands. Is it about my passport? There are Surinamese with Dutch passports (rarely the other way around: a colonial legacy of inequality?) Is it about where I am at home, where I belong? Or perhaps it is about how others identify me? Ticking boxes may inform others about who they think I am, where they think my home is, or where they think I belong. But is that how I see myself? The man has finished his administrative duties. Tania leaves the building, greeted by the scorching hot subtropical sun and hungry mosquitoes – that’s my Suriname, my home. Perhaps self-identification is about the spaces we call home?

My friend Tania’s mixed African-Indian heritage coupled with her Surinamese self-identification stems from the colonial history of the transatlantic slave trade and mass migration to plantation work in the Caribbean and wider Americas. Across the Atlantic in Europe and Africa, mass movement of people has perhaps been more gradual, but questions of ethnicity and national belonging have also been complicated and open to dispute if not outright war – as the experiences of people in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s and at present the Ukraine painfully show.

Closer to ‘home’, Scotland has been concerned with self-determination for centuries. Scotland’s history remains important in the hearts of many Scots, and national recognition is particularly urgent now in light of the upcoming referendum. Regardless of the result in September, everyone living in Scotland is at the moment confronted with their self-identification. Are we Scottish? Are we British? European? Does it matter that some of us are foreign nationals, and that most of us are probably ethnically mixed in some way or another? As a Dutch national with a Scottish husband, a daughter born in Suriname and a son in Edinburgh, these are large questions.

Battles for and against independence are never fought over economic issues alone. They are also about a sense of home, of where we belong, the places and people we identify with. And about what and whom we do not want to be identified with. 

To me, a sense of home is imbued with the stories we connect to. Stories that give us a feeling of being there, of being part of it all. Stories of heroic historical as well as contemporary figures. Stories of people, of landscapes, objects and places. Stories give meaning to things that might be inexplicable otherwise. Stories offer an option of relatedness and shared understanding. A personal story can grow into a communal feeling of belonging when other people are able to transfer this story to their own personal context. Stories, thus conceived, shape to a large extent who we are.

As Dr. Williams so rightly pointed out during his storytelling workshops, stories belong to those who listen to them. Perhaps some of you will listen to Tania’s story, and make her questions ours. Are we ever challenged to question who we are, until we are seen as or reminded of being different?


Iris Marchand (Academia.edu)