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Beauty as it
Becomes a Clue

Once you get used to finding them (which happens with the heart, not the mind), you will find that you are able to echo them back to the speaker in a way that will help them to build upon them. This technique will be particularly important when you are struggling with stories that feel too furious or whiny or boastful.) 


One Herstory facilitator in training asked: “But how can I trust myself to know a moment of beauty?” This is a case in which whatever comes to you will help guide the writer. 


Ask yourself hard questions about beauty and vulnerability. Did the storyteller pass over those moments so quickly that you had to hold your breath in order to catch them? Try to imagine what would happen if the teller allowed those moments to elongate.   


As you move into working with writers who will be shy about showing the more beautiful parts of themselves, this work will allow you to detect them more easily, so that you will be able to play them back.  


Try not to let your preferences in terms of content distract you from looking at narrative successes and failures. Practice doing this work when you're dealing with content that isn’t intrinsically interesting to you. 

This website was launched as part of "Writing Beyond the Prison: Reimagining the Carceral Ecosystem with Incarcerated Authors," a public humanities collaboration with the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook and the United Black Families Scholarship Foundation, supported by a Sustaining Public Engagement Grant awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It has enjoyed funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Humanities New York with support from the Mellon Foundation, Flagstar Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts.

We invite you to explore new ways of listening for narrative shape, to prepare you for moving from engaging groups from oral imaging to writing opening moments and scenes.

Herstory Writers Network

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Phone: 631-676-7395

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Email: contactus@herstorywriters.org

The artwork on these pages is from the Paintings for Justice series, created by Gwynne Duncan for Herstory

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