Story Insider: "Dreaming is free" with Kirsty de Garis.
Read now | "Given that narrative and story is one of the dominant strands of our world, it felt important for me to dive into that."
In this edition of The Storymakers Institute, I sit down with storyteller and producer Kirsty de Garis. Kirsty is a journalist, editor and curator, and is Head of Publishing at Small Giants Academy and former Editor of Dumbo Feather magazine. In this convo, we talk about about dreaming, storymaking and the advice I’d give to my former self.
Kirsty: Dreaming is free. If you could change one element of the system as it is now, what would you change?
Joel: The value of storytelling, the value of a story and storymaking and its impact.
Kirsty: Tell me about that.
Joel: I guess the enquiry that I have set up through The Storymakers Institute for myself and for everyone who listens to the show, is about the role of story as a storymaker and our role and our impact on the world. And the way in which story and the world both reflect and impact each other. Given that narrative and story is one of the dominant strands of our world, it feels to me that conversations around how story is made and how story is projected, and the narratives that then unfold from it, and the influences of that…it felt important for me to dive into that. So that’s what the The Storymakers Institute is about - featuring thought leaders, journalists and storymakers.
Storymaking for me is a very active process, and it involves a level of focus on process rather than outcome. For me, storymaking is vastly different to storytelling in the sense that storytelling feels like the end result, whereas storymaking encompasses all of the process of that creation. Which influences the outcome ultimately. So the way in which you make a story affects the outcome of it. Whether you’re creating a documentary, a theatre show, a book. There’s a process that sits behind the storytelling, which is clearly going to have a great level of impact on what people experience at the end of the day.
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