International Storytelling Festival

8 March 2019

When I applied for the Edinburgh Award, I knew I wanted to improve my resilience, creative process, and enterprising behaviors. At the same time, I was also interested in attending the Scottish Storytelling Center’s International Storytelling Festival due to my professional interest in storytelling from a marketing perspective. However, it wasn’t until my coaching session with Rona Doig that I was able to connect this action with the goals I outlined for the Edinburgh Award and my own professional development.

With this in mind, I applied for funding through Santander to attend various workshops and sessions of the Storytelling Festival. This funding, and my subsequent participation in the Festival, allowed me to work towards my goals of better understanding and refining my creative process and developing enterprising behaviors that allow me to be more innovative and more creative at work.

This funding allowed me to register for several key sessions that have given me the creative space I need to engage with the storytelling process that I would not have otherwise been able to attend. Specifically, I participated in the following workshops: Transforming Voice, Telling Wonder Tales, and Kindness Becomes You. Furthermore, I was able to attend events where I could watch the workshop facilitators use the techniques, they taught us in real time, and I was able to attend networking sessions and other interactive storytelling experiences, like the Samhuinn Fire Festival on Calton Hill and an international storytelling experience at The Waverly Bar. Throughout the course of the Festival, I heard stories hailing from Gaelic, Breton, Welsh, Celtic, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, and Middle Eastern cultures, and I was able to recognise the many different mediums used to both share and engage in storytelling, including narratives, songs, instruments, poetry, physical artifacts, and more.

This festival allowed me the opportunity to reflect on my own storytelling process as it relates to marketing, and challenged me to think of storytelling from different perspectives. I think two of the main things I took away from the experience are the importance of having a clear vision of the story before I begin telling it, while also allowing the story to have enough agency to tell itself—at least to tell itself to me, before I can tell it to others. Both of those learning outcomes required an almost meditative-like state for me to clear my mind and allow the story enough agency in order to determine how exactly it should be told. This, in turn, reinforced the importance of my goal of resilience; only when I dedicate myself to having time to decompress from my day to day tasks can I have the creative space I need to effectively engage in the storytelling and creative process.

This festival also reinforced how stories are more than text on page (or webpage); they are experiential spaces that craft a narrative for people to engage with as they choose to. In some cases, they can even be a series of individual stories that can stand alone, but together weave into a larger narrative that means more than the sum of its parts. As a marketer, this is critical to how I tell stories. Each interaction or engagement with a consumer or audience segment is a form of non-linear storytelling. The interaction should be strong enough to stand alone, but every subsequent experience, whether online, in print, or in a physical space, should work together to create a narrative that is simultaneously on brand, drives an action, and tells a story that is greater than the sum of any individual part.

Kasey Varner