- Image by dickuhne via Flickr
As students progress at the Family Foundation School, we ask them to sponsor other students in the way most Twelve Step programs use sponsors. We call them “junior sponsors,” because each student is assigned a staff member as a senior sponsor. Those not familiar with Twelve Step programs can think of this as mentorship.
As junior sponsors, our students learn to listen to others and withhold judgment. As sponsees, they learn to share their feelings and to admit to fears they would not admit to themselves. They learned to look for resentment in their story and in those of others.
They’ve learned that constructing a self is hard work—as is novel writing. Our graduation speeches are often about the struggles the student has experienced here. Our students have discovered emotion and work—essential to telling a good story.
In addition to these analytic techniques, the program gives its story tellers a pattern–what it was like—how we changed—what it is like now. Many literary critics of the twentieth century have tried to define the number and types of patterns in stories. While various critics disagree on the exact number, most concur that there are a limited number of patterns (plots) and that writers more often hold our interest through character and setting.
The AA pattern seems to me to be a number of things—first it is a pattern of hope. Recovery is possible. Second it strikes me as a romantic plot—in the classic versus romantic sense—not as a love story. This pattern assumes that people are always changing, always growing. Persons who have been in AA awhile and spoken at a number of meetings know that they rewrite the story in each telling, because they have changed since they told it last. As Goethe says, “man is always becoming, never is.” And third this pattern is a basic American plot often seen in melodrama and comedy. A struggle is successful and people are stronger because of it.
Finely any useful theory of story telling must include ideas about audience. The AA story has a specified audience those who came to a meeting seeking help. So our graduation speeches are not for the students’ families, or even for themselves. They are for the students who are remaining at the school and who are in the midst of the struggle. They see their friends successfully telling themselves and acquire hope that too can do this. That is why it takes three days to graduate our class.
(Read more of Sid’s work at Old Before Wise.)
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