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.”
