Can Storytelling Heal a “National Divorce” Between Neighbors?

PerSisters, front row L-R: Mary Phillips, Leigh Fairey, Julie Botsford, Geradine Simkins, Maggie Sprattmoran, Darby Trapp. Back row: Elly O’Neill, Anne-Marie Oomen, Anna Taylor, Margo Kehe, Mindy Binsfeld, Mimi Wheeler, Sue Flerlage.

By Berry Kendall

Sun contributor

Some 226 years ago Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.”

Today, a group of Leelanau County neighbors is now testing whether that idea still holds true: that disagreeing with someone on fundamental issues doesn’t have to mean losing them. The results have come to fruition in a local storytelling campaign titled Community Conversations: Exploring What Matters to Our Neighbors. The initiative examines the values and life experiences of 17 residents of the Grand Traverse Region through personal narratives. Those conversations have evolved into an exhibit of photography portraits paired with each storyteller’s words.

The exhibit seeks to help neighbors connect more meaningfully and capture what unites people across a diverse community. It launches in September with exhibits in the Traverse Area District Library, the Glen Lake Community Library and various pop-up exhibits in the Grand Traverse region. Award-winning photographer Susan Tusa and graphic designer Anna Taylor both donated their work to the initiative. “It’s an important project that I believe in,” said Tusa.

Geradine Simkins has lived in Leelanau County for nearly 50 years, long enough to watch the ground shift and buckle beneath old friendships. She’s spent a lifetime organizing activists but lately, she says, she’s been unsettled by how far apart Americans have willfully drifted from one another due to differences in politics, religion, class and education.

“It feels kind of like a national divorce,” Simkins said. “Our diminishing trust and empathy toward one another make many of us feel like we can no longer coexist.”

She’s not convinced either political party is actually meeting people’s needs. But she had a hunch: that beneath the noise, she and her neighbors want a lot of the same things. So, she took that hunch to Leelanau Indivisible, the nonpartisan citizen-led organization she’s part of, and proposed a storytelling campaign which became Community Conversations. A local workgroup called the PerSisters picked up the idea and started running with it last November.

But the PerSisters didn’t just pluck whomever was willing to talk. They built out a deliberately wide-ranging list of 17 interviewees, ages 17 to 78, spanning genders, political leanings, faiths, and income levels, cultures and heritages.

Why stories and not surveys? Simkins points to the research: storytelling is thought to stretch back 30,000 to 40,000 years, old enough that some scientists consider it baked into human survival itself. “We are addicted to stories,” she said, “and we remember them twenty times better than facts. Even when our bodies go to sleep, our minds dream all night, telling ourselves stories.”

Before anyone picked up a recording device, the interviewers went through training from a consultant at Braver Angels to help them notice their own blind spots and assumptions. Interviewers were also trained in a unique research method called Appreciative Inquiry.

A former USAID leadership trainer, Phyllis Craun-Selka of Lake Ann learned the approach at Case Western Reserve University, and what drew her to it, she said, is that it is strengths-based and steers a conversation away from what’s broken and toward what is hopeful and possible.

“It helps me see what is possible more than what’s wrong,” Craun-Selka said. She told the team of PerSisters interviewers something that’s stuck with the project ever since: “At the end of the day, it’s how we listen to our neighbors that will make sustainable change and heal our democracy.”

Maggie Sprattmoran of Empire, an educator and mental health specialist, headed up the subgroup of interviewers. As a therapist, she knows how to sit beside people and create an inviting presence. “I often used silence as a way to let the interviewees hear their own thoughts,” she said.

Sprattmoran shared that she didn’t experience any reticence from her interview subjects. “We asked people ahead of time if they wanted to do this,” she said. “And we were very transparent that it would be on exhibit, it would really be a part of a movement to both get out the vote, encourage active citizenry and to invite people to consider all the different points of view that are represented by the people that live among us.”

She expounded on Appreciative Inquiry as a research method designed both to collect data and also to spark transformation in the interviewee, the interviewer and anyone who later reads the findings.

“I have to say that as the interviewer I was changed by people,” Sprattmoran said. “I was so moved by the things they said, it changed my perspective on some things, I watched them have their own ‘aha moments’ that were quite stunning and beautiful. I hope that our exhibitgoers have a small slice of what we had the incredible privilege to experience.”

Given how different those 17 people are on paper, you might expect 17 different answers. Instead, the same handful of themes kept surfacing: liberty and justice, democracy, individual rights, checks and balances, basic respect for one another. Two things rose above the rest: a longing to belong to a community that looks out for everybody, and a fierce love for this particular corner of the world: its lakes, land and way of life.

Tom Peterson is a 78-year-old disabled veteran who lives on Glen Lake and took part in the project. He shares that during war time, “Whenever I was in a dangerous situation, I could stop for a moment, shift gears and visualize sitting on the dock in Glen Lake, and things would come back into focus for me.”

Eva Petoskey, an elder and elected leader with the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, offered something closer to a warning. “Without the earth, without the water, we’re nothing,” she said. “Without this planet, we’re nothing.” She believes reconnecting with the land, and learning to truly listen, could help the region “reimagine ourselves,” a shift, she says, that has to happen inside people as much as around them.

Not every story was hopeful, and the project didn’t gloss over that. Jodi Garcia, 52, a single mother working two jobs, spoke about the cost of getting sick in America. “I don’t think people should have to go bankrupt because of medical bills,” she said, “and I don’t think people should have to die because they can’t afford their insulin, and have to choose medication over food.”

One planned participant had to withdraw entirely, worried that speaking honestly, with their face and story on public display, could cost them their job.

Another, Martha Garcia, is a young immigrant who left her home country to escape political violence. She brought a different kind of urgency to the same theme. “My family is now in this country because we lost democracy in my country,” she said. “That’s why I know that democracy is really important. I lived that. I know what I am talking about.”

Simkins hopes the exhibit lands right around election season for a reason. “It is our hope that when we vote in the midterm elections, we consider the stories of our neighbors and we remember what matters to them,” she said. “And when we vote, I hope we will consider what is good for everyone in the whole community, not just our individual needs and desires.”

Sprattmoran echoed the same sentiments. “In terms of a change in thinking, my hope is that when we are facing community decisions or decisions that even impact our immediate neighbors, those who’ve been to the exhibit and paid attention are a little more aware of how their decision may impact their neighbors, our neighbors, one another,” she said. “In fact, one of our interviewees, Empire Village President Dan Davis, said, ‘Above everything else, you should be voting for what’s good for the village. If you just vote for what you want, you’re not doing your job’.”

An irrefutable commonality was observed by Sprattmoran in both the interviews she conducted as well as the narratives she read.

“I was astonished at no matter what: right leaning, left leaning, age, gender, citizenry—whatever variables there were in the folks I interviewed—there was such a consistent theme of we need to listen more, we need to live in community more than we are currently,” Sprattmoran said. “Everybody longed for a less divisive, a less polarized and a more communicative, less judgmental, more curious way of being together. And if this exhibit and this project moves the needle toward that then it will be work well done.”

The Opening Gala runs Sept. 4, from 5-8 p.m., at Cedar North at J2 Farm in Cedar. The exhibit will also be on display at the Traverse Area District Library, Sept. 1–29; the Glen Lake Community Library, Sept. 2 through Nov. 3; and at various pop-up locations around the Grand Traverse region throughout September and October. The full schedule and details can be found at: LeelanauIndivisible.com/conversations.