Storytelling Starters ~ Memory Work 1
Saturday, January 7th, 2012
What better time for thinking about memory than the start of a new year. And thinking about memory is what I plan to do in this blog over the next few weeks. I want to write about it in a descriptive way, paying account to how different kinds of remembering interconnect with each other. I hope you might respond with points from your own experience. Maybe they’ll tally with mine, maybe not.
Getting ready
As National Storytelling Week comes closer at the end of this month (details at http://www.sfs.org.uk/nsw), there’ll be people all over the UK engaged in work on remembering stories. Some may be nervously planning to tell a story for the very first time. Others will be old hands at both remembering and telling. Yet, though well-practised in the techniques, they too will be engaged in memory work – perhaps preparing a new story for one or other of the week’s events or maybe ‘re-remembering’, namely revisiting a story that they already know in preparation for retelling.
Some of my most fascinating chats about how memory works have been with a concert-pianist friend of mine who used to be my piano teacher. He has dozens of large-scale pieces of music literally at his finger-tips. If he was so disposed, he could sit down and play any or all of them straight off. Poor me, in contrast, I’m daunted at the prospect of memorising even one single page of music. How on earth do pianists do it? (more…)