Education I Writing I Story Development
Playing With Sto ries
By Kevin Cordi
NEW from a master of
story development
Countless storytellers and writers only work on their
stories while writing them down. This is a manual that
explains why play is essential to story development and
how to first use playful techniques as we work along the
design of story based work.
“Storytelling is the great tree of civilization. Kevin Cordi has
climbed all the branches of that tree. He is perfect for this book.
I can’t wait to hold it in my hands.”
—Jay O’Callahan, Storyteller, Coach, Author, and
occasional NPR Commentator
“Kevin Cordi, a master in the field of story development, is
famous for his work in improving storytelling in education and
for encouraging youth troupes. I travelled half way across the
globe to hear his stories and seek his wisdom, all of which
exceeded expectation."
2014 Release
Hardcover $29.50
ISBN 978-1-62491-049-4
Trade Paperback $19.50
ISBN 978-1-62491-037-1
156 Pages @ 6” x 9”
Ebook $14.50
eISBN
—Terrie Howey, Storyteller and Educator, England
“
In Playing With Stories, every fifth word Kevin Cordi said got
me laughing in ways I wasn't expecting, and got me thinking
about my story from a new perspective."
—Tony Toledo, storyteller and former chair of the
League for the Advancement of New England Storytelling
Advertising in School Library Journal,
Library Journal, Booklist, and
Storytelling Magazine
According to the National Storytelling Network,
Dr. Kevin Cordi has made it his personal crusade to
share the rich value of story making and storytelling.
For over 27 years, he has told stories in more than
40 states, and in England, Japan, Scotland, Canada,
and Qatar. Now he is Assistant Professor at Ohio
Dominican University and he also serves as a CoDirector for the Columbus Area Writing Project at
OSU.
PHOTO BY MATTHEW HELLER.
To Order: 800-621-2736
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All major distributors
About the Author:
According to the National Storytelling Network, Dr. Kevin Cordi has made it his personal crusade to share the
rich value of story making and storytelling. For over 27 years, he has told in over 40 states, England, Japan,
Scotland, Canada and most recently, Qatar. He has presented and told stories for over
a million adults, children and young adults. He is a leading advocate for youth storytelling. He has fostered this
cause by serving among other roles, as the Executive Director for the National Youth
Storytelling Olympics, now National Youth Storytelling Showcase. He created Voices Across the World Youth
Storytelling Project where he registered over 83 youth storytelling groups in the United States, Japan, and Canada.
He authored with storyteller Judy Sima, the award-winning text Raising Voices:
creating youth storytelling groups and troupes. For 11 years he coached, he would call mediated, the awardwinning youth storytelling group Voices of Illusion.
Dr. Cordi believes that when it comes to education, one must turn to story. He holds a MA from the University of
Akron with work at East Tennessee State University in “Using storytelling as a primary means of teaching.” He
taught in three high schools in Ohio and California. He served, according to the
National Storytelling Network, as “the first full time high school storytelling teacher in the country.” He advanced
his knowledge of story curriculum and furthered his work in play by securing a Ph.D. in “Storytelling and Story
making” examining the juxtaposition of dramatic play and narrative building
at The Ohio State University. He now extends this work as he works with businesses, corporations, and
academics. He demonstrates how to use play to find a concerted way to share the story of the company,
organization, and/or university. www.permission2play.com
Today you can find Dr. Cordi teaching among other courses Applied Storytelling and Uncovering fairytales,
folktales, and ghost stories as a full time Assistant Professor at The Ohio Dominican University and he also serves
as a Co-Director for the Columbus Area Writing Project at OSU. He believes his real learning occurred at the lap
of his mother and father who raised him on stories of West Virginia. He believes that storytelling can change how
a person learns and for over 27 years has been playing and
refining how this can be done.
You can find Dr. Kevin Cordi at www.kevincordi.com
“Together we make a difference with stories.”
Q&A
Why Play?
It is not easy to value play. There are too many people telling us we need to work and stop playing. I
contend that play is actually the best work that we can do as creative artists. Remember when you were in
recess and you were given space and time to play with your classmates. In no time you could become
Spiderman swinging webs across the buildings, build an imaginary sandcastle where the invading armies
could not enter or create a world that is only shared among your friends. This same type of play acne is
used in shaping making, and telling stories.
After all, at recess you were crafting narratives. Although you were probably not conscious that this was
crafting narratives, this is what we did. We created story and story choices as part of our play. It almost
became a reflex action.
As we grow older, others work hard to limit or devalue our play. For many they contained and constrained
their lives to become the work that others demand and not what they need to create to make significance to
their lives and their work of being creative.
Creating is something that needs to happy on a routine basis. It is as important as breathing. We gasp
when we don’t do it. We feel empty and unresolved, especially when searching for direction in our stories.
Play allows us to examine our writing, teaching, and practices so that we can reflect on its design and shape
our understanding from playful choices. In over 28 years as a creative educator, storyteller, university
professor and even husband, play has been my guide that I have used to understand these practices.
Do you give yourself space for play?
Do we provide ourselves permission to play? (see www.permission2play.com ) Do we wrestle with our
words or do we simply write them down? Is our story crafting simply a matter of sitting in an isolated desk
and writing? Although this practice can be fruitful, did you know there other ways to play with story ideas?
The answer quite simply is yes. Many other techniques including talking ideas out loud by using oral
exercises can invite more play with your creative work. Play can be established by finding a partner that
not only deeply listens to your story, but also uses these same exercises to dig deeper into what you are
trying to grasp in the story. We need to always remember the story is connected to live experience, the
teller and the listener. Whether we are writing for an audience we don’t’ see, we are writing for live
listeners.
This is why play in real time helps writers and all forms of story crafters create for real audiences. They
often need to wrestle with story ideas before writing them down.
What is an imaginative thinker?
In order to imagine, we must first become imaginative thinkers dedicating just as much time if not more on
the “how” and “why” that the “what” in the story. With some guiding principles, pedagogy of practice will
be established that allows you to imagine as you create your story. In your imaginative work resides the
place that unlike life, you can rewind an idea, explore something that is not real or possible, and revisit and
re-imagine and most of all re-experience an event, idea, or suggestion. In play, we can dance with our
words and watch the endless possibilities that arise from the dance.
What is Word Dancing?
When it comes to language, we need to let the word dance. In play I become a better writer because I don’t
merely write the words, I invite the words to live within other forms and dance before they meet the page.
In play, I can draw what I say. I can use drama to move the words and make better sense of the choices I
make. In play I can invite others to listen and recall my choices made during play. In play, not only do the
words dance, but also I do.
Word dancing exercise can be used at all levels. One does not have to be a visual artist to draw ideas but
they need to practice drawing as much as they write. One does not have to be a dramatist to find the
dramatic scenes is a story. In this work I share how the novice to the experienced story crafter can dance
and dance well with their words.
What is story crafting?
This craft we know as story can be explored in the same way a potter shapes clay. Starting with an idea is
like the raw clay, but for story crafters, which consists of anyone who work with developing stories, their
clay is the narrative (or narratives). The form or shape of the narrative is not always understood but with
play, many directions can be pursued to help the narrative (s) take shape. However, like the potter shapes
an idea many times, a story crafter uses many tools to mold a story. The story crafters need to play with the
shapes before a final product is created.
What is Deep Listening?
Deep listening is when everything goes away except the story and the connection between teller and
listener. Remember those times when a teacher, a family member began talking and everything
disappeared. You weighed in each word. This can be established at a good poetry reading, Story Slam, or
simply telling of the day. However, as the teller of stories there are ways to establish deeper listening
invitations. However, this is only one side of deep listening. There is also the type of coach (I refer to as
mediator) or listener that invites personal and connected response. This is the beginning point of
reflection.
What is story mediation and how is it different than traditional “story coaching?”
Collaborative play is serious work. According to Vygotsky (1978), when students play together,
they learn more. When students engage in problem based play, “a child (or adult) is always above
his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than
himself” (p. 102). However, dramatic play is different from childhood play. In dramatic play, the
students need mediators. In this case, “story mediators” (Cordi, 2009). The story mediator works
exploring topics or subjects worth “storying.” Storying is what I call playing with a story’s
directions. The story mediator works to connect ideas and explore individual story crafters
interest in the collective story. Story mediators remember that every story has many sides,
turning, twisting, and flipping through possibilities, creating movement and increasing what
Heathcote (1984) calls “dramatic tension.” As Heathcote suggests, tension must always be present
in drama. The goal, of the story mediator, is not to speed up the work, but instead to move the
unresolved, not to complete the drama but to allow the drama to progress. In the hands of a skilled
story mediator, the story does not have to end; one can always produce other results from the
story work.
How important is tension to story crafting? As Jerome Bruner states, “tension is the engine of
narrative.” This is best illustrated with an example in my work with teenagers from the Cleveland
School for the Arts, students played with many narratives, exploring how the Titanic sank.
However, instead of simply reporting the news, I used play to heighten the tension, asking
students to become engineers, reporting to the press how the Titanic sank. I furthered the tension
by adding details, noting, for example, that the press was looking for blame. Students, as engineers,
were invested in the dramatic tension of the story that we enacted together. So instead of
brainstorming on paper in isolation, we mediated story choices as a class. Story mediators, then,
must grant permission to make mistakes, practice a teaching pedagogy known as teacher in role,
and employ ensemble storytelling/learning.
What is Ensemble Storytelling?
Ensemble storytelling/learning does not require a performance stage or experience as a
storyteller.
Ensemble storytelling lifts the words of the text in a dramatic way so they can be communicated
and evaluated in a classroom or community. The power of the story goes beyond plot sequence.
When learners work in a co-creative environment, they begin to relate to, empathize with, and
question the tale they have created, asking why they are telling it and to whom. The learning is a
shared experience based on inquiry, not on recall.
When working with a small group of story crafters later in the day, we took on the assignment of
creating the story of a murder investigation. The activity began, and I provided a few leading
sentences. One by one, story crafters came forward to continue the story. When I sensed them
losing inspiration and creativity, I changed the dynamic and brought life into the story by taking
on a character and making the story come to life.
How important is improvisation in storytelling?
Borrowing from the work of improvisational actors, such as The Second City, we follow, as often as
we can, the “just say yes to all ideas” philosophy. When acting as story mediator, I often agree to
writers and storyteller’s outrageous or unrealistic choices, but I try to trouble them, to reveal the
complexity in these situations and force them to grapple with it. I do not deny the crafter but use
what they offer to complicate the tension in the drama. However, modeling this is important if we
expect the story crafters to follow. First, it helps if they see you play.
I am not a storyteller, why should I look at Playing with Stories?
As an English teacher, I was used to reading fiction; however, when we used process drama to
make and experience fiction. I had come to graduate school prepared to learn about acting and
constructing plays, but this class was different. Drama was used as a powerful way for students to
learn and not perform. For instance, instead of working with a preexisting plot, plot was treated as
a byproduct of the drama. Collins’ ideas came out of O’Neill and Lambert’s (1984) text, Drama
Structures. Drama structures are episodes based upon a theme, but the how and why of these
episodes is not spelled out. “What happens next” depends on what is built within the dramatic
structure. Ensemble storytelling works to find these structures.
As story crafters, we frequently examine what happens in stories, asking people to recount the
events of the plot. But my experience with ensemble storyteller made me aware of something
else—a question: What if something else happened? For instance, I recently worked with
elementary students and the classic Three Little Pigs folktale. Instead of retelling the story, we
examined the story’s dramatic structure and approached it as a homicide and crime scene. In no
time at all, students were searching as forensics investigators to find out how the pigs had died.
Students quickly took on roles, asking, “What did the suspect look like?” “Where did this
bloodstain come from?” “What is this piece of chinny chin?” We even drew a chalk outline of the
dead pig to develop our understanding. Instead of letting the story’s plot direct our inquiry, we
improvised; Heathcote (1984) notes,
Improvisation ... means “discovering by trial, error, and testing; using available materials with
respect for their nature, and being guided by the appreciation of their potential.” The end product
of improvisation is the experience of it (p. 45).