Lipman suggest that in planning a storytelling program---we focus story choices along a "most important thing" connector---that all the stories should be related to this "most important thing" theme.
Further---he suggests---and this makes me nervous---that we should have several story selections for each slot---and that the story we choose should be related to the audience (as it appears that day). Has anyone in our class actually done this? How did it feel?
Joy
Hey Joy, I just finished writing a novel in response and blogger deleted it. So I'll post a mini version of the response and hope that it works out. Aimee and I (and company) had to do a program for Basic Storytelling and we tried to do this, sticking to one MIT, though we often had to "beat it to fit and paint it to match" to get our tiny repository of stories to follow a common theme. All things considered, it worked out pretty well. I don't agree that you have to have multiple back up stories for each story slot, doing so would require a repertoire of some fifty stories just for one program. I think that having a few back-up stories for the whole program in case you think, after telling a few, that one would work better than another for the audience and you can swap it out. But I think that stories are far more broadly interesting than that. I doubt that you have to so greatly change your program from one audience to another. I also think that stories are malleable enough that if there is a portion of a story that you think would be totally unpalatable to an audience, that you could change your telling slightly without having to switch out your story, much like how Bil Lepp talked about changing his on the fly. Bottom Line: a story is not a rigid bullet that, if bent, will destroy the gun when fired, but stories are broad and malleable . But if you've got a repository of hundreds of stories you're keen to tell without a moment's notice, then use Lipman's technique.
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