The Tale Exchange: telling stories around corners to craft a commons

Here Cath Heinemeyer reflects on her work on The Tale Exchange (2018), one phase of Things As They Are, a research enquiry into the potential of story to create an intersubjective space or ‘commons’ which might enable more illuminating dialogue between young people and the adults in their lives about the challenges to young people’s mental health. The exchange took the form of a series of multi-artform storytelling workshops with four groups of young people experiencing mental health issues. All four groups initially worked separately and in different artforms, but with the same Siberian folktale - one rich in Freirian ‘generative themes’ (as explored by Arizpe et al 2014). They then exchanged their work and made a second round of creative responses, enabling inter-group dialogue ‘around corners’ about the story’s resonances with the participants’ own experience. The project culminated in a shared workshop and story exchange on neutral ground, crystallising what the combined group saw in the story – their multivocal, shared retelling of it for the current moment.