Book Recommendation: The Call of Stories
This spring, I attended the annual Infant Mental Health of Maine conference to hear the keynote speaker, Vivian Gussin Paley, whose dedication to storytelling with kindergarten and preschool children has made her a legend as well as a MacArthur award recipient.
Paley’s many books sold rapidly at this conference, but I also found on the sales table, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination by Robert Coles, which was published just over twenty years ago. Anyone who is a fan, as I am, of the reading and discussion programs of the Maine Humanities Council would enjoy this testimony to the power and pleasure of ideas in books to transform lives. Coles depicts how his psychiatric practice was transformed when he was a resident in training at Harvard and a supervisor makes a plea for “more stories, less theory.” He began to visit regularly with William Carlos Williams and became influenced by his view of stories, “yours, mine‑it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.”
Coles also shares what he learns from his wife, a high school English teacher with strong conviction about literature’s central role in our lives. Describing teachers as the “intermediary” in helping students take stories deeply into their understanding of their own lives, Coles recounts his family’s move to Atlanta in the midst of school desegregation, when they tried to engage high school students in discussion about their experience of this challenging time. It isn’t until they started talking about a student’s reading assignment of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that the conversation became deeply reflective and revelatory. Part memoir, part persuasive argument, Coles takes us along a reader’s path strewn with treasured classics— title by title, author by author — from Catcher in the Rye, to Middlemarch, to the stories of John Cheever and Tillie Olsen—telling his story of the power that lies within a good book to connect us, through conversation, to our deeper selves and to deeper relationship with others.
Recommended by Denise Pendleton
July 27th, 2010 at 11:52 pm
For many years I used Robert Coles’ book to inspire students from minority backgrounds as they struggled with insecurities in college. I liked to teach students in their very first semester in college. Using Coles and others I would get students to write their own stories–without concern about spelling or grammar. I was seeking fluency with written expression. I then helped them see the positive qualities they brought, and the inspirational lives of their parents and grandparents. As they came to a deeper understanding of their strengths they sought to correct their grammar and spelling, and outstanding students emerged. Stories are very powerful and all people have unique tales to share with others. Robert Coles was a pioneer who lifted up many others. I will always be grateful to him. KEEP ON KEEPING ON.
July 28th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Thank you for your wonderful story. Yes, fostering a basic fluency in conveying stories through writing is the perfect first step to a wider writing ability. It sounds as if you gave your first year students a powerful gift each year. And I’m delighted to know that Coles’ book was such a great help.