Stories and narrative are so embedded in our day-to-day lives, from how we consume current affairs and escape into fictional worlds created for stage, screen or print, to how we understand our collective past. In response to 2022 being Scotland's Year Of Stories, StAnza poetry festival prepares to hold a magnifying glass over storytelling and the very essence of narrative in this year's programme titled Stories Like Starting Points...

Under the new direction of author and poet Lucy Burnett, StAnza festivals will act as an intervention in poetry; an opportunity to explore structure and form and better understand poetry's role within the wider world. The Stories Like Starting Points... programme will provide the opportunity to discuss (and contest) the role of narrative in poetic storytelling from a variety of local and international perspectives.

Ahead of the festival (running Monday 7–Sunday 13 March), we asked six participating poets from across Scotland, Ireland, Ukraine, Syria and Latin America for their initial reflections on the power of stories and narrative in relation to the events of the past few years.

What is the role of narrative in your poetry?

Daniel Sluman: I write pretty much exclusively from my own experience… In that regard, I am constructing narratives in my work, and hopefully that makes the things I'm talking about in terms of love, disability and isolation, easier for the reader to feel.

Lyuba Yakimchuk: Narrative creates the text`s inner world which can work and play like a metaverse. Since I have been writing for screen and stage, my poetry has become polylogical, [meaning] there are [several] voices or different points of view.

Nouri Jarah: My own poetry knits together a unified vision of the Mediterranean's mythologies. This is a view inclusive of the epics, legends and religious texts that we receive from Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Arabic and speaks to events both historical and imagined. On one level, I see these as cultural texts that guide our common, kindred humanity. On another, my Arabic poetry expresses the temperament of one who belongs to the Mediterranean and feels its pull, yet is distantly exiled from its shores by the tyrannical, military dictatorship that has ruled my country, Syria, for a half-century with regional and international support... Legends and folktales, and the theatrical masks of tragedy and comedy, are not simply ancient metaphors used to express something about the modern condition. These legends are a current, authentic and metaphoric presence.

Alycia Pirmohamed: I've noticed my work is often responding to the work of others, and so the narrative is perhaps layered rather than linear. This kind of narrative plays an important part in my poetry, because the associations created by placing my poems side by side, or by placing them next to their influences, will (I hope!) narrate how I have experienced womanhood, spirituality, the natural world, personal/ancestral histories, friendships, and so on.

What makes storytelling such a powerful tool?

Annemarie Ní Churreáin: Stories and poetry can give us a space to bear witness, to challenge ourselves and others, to engage in a dialogue about the realities of trauma.

Daniel Sluman: I think storytelling is how we make sense of most things in this world. As soon as we place something within a larger narrative, we can humanise and make it relatable... It's probably the simplest and most effective way we have of changing people's minds and furthering their understanding.

Andrés N Ordorica: I am drawn to storytelling as a means of archiving my experiences of migration around the world, while also contending with heavy ideas of what it means to belong. Stories... can be a bridge for people who are working through who they are and searching for where they are most welcomed.

Nouri Jarah: Poetry [specifically] grasps at, and makes contact with, eternal and absolute truths. This is because it plumbs the great depths of the human condition…It gives us a new language that translates our feelings and emotions, and our obsessions, ones that cannot be expressed in the normalcy of prose.

What role do you think stories have played in dealing with the events of the last few years?

Andrés N Ordorica: I use stories to respond to the specific moments I am living through. That is where story and I come together and so for me storytelling will always be a means of dealing with life events in a very personal way. Poetry is profound for its ability to process grief, work through anger, and unearth joy, and as these past few years have shown us, surviving has been about riding the waves of ever-changing emotions.

Daniel Sluman: Without learning about people's stories directly from them we wouldn't be as aware as we are of things like how easily the medical establishment pushes do-not-resuscitate orders onto chronically ill people, and how difficult it is to get consistent care workers for many vulnerable people in this country… The Covid-19 pandemic has really opened up the realities around the experience of disabled and chronically ill people for wider society to see.

Alycia Pirmohamed: I think stories and storytelling play an important part in witnessing, in documenting history, and articulating counter-narratives to what we might see in mainstream media. But while storytelling as a mode of dealing with, recuperating, or documenting these last few years is crucial, and I appreciate and love storytelling for that power, I am also concerned that limited capacities, lack of access, and barriers in relation to mental health will have contributed to neglected voices, and stories that will be missing from our archive that should be there.

How can we contest existing narratives, and why should we tell new stories?

Lyuba Yakimchuk: New strong narratives [can lead] to life-changing things… For centuries, Ukrainians have told each other the story of being victims…because of Soviet propaganda, Ukrainians believe that the heroes are dead people, which is very dangerous...
The Russian political narration of history is usually just a story – fiction that is based on disinformation. I think that new Ukrainian stories are changing this narrative now. If we don't tell stories for ourselves, our enemies tell them for us.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin: I'm not certain that we can tell any new stories, but we can challenge ourselves to rethink the versions of the stories we have been told. I'm always interested in hidden or obscured narratives, and in reclaiming the female perspective and experience. In my exploration of the legacies of Irish child 'care' institutions (including Mother and Baby homes, industrial schools and orphanages, for example), I wanted first of all to contest the silence in my own family about intergenerational trauma. What happens when we name a harm? What happens when we remove the stigma or shame? My experience with storytelling and poetry is that it can be a transformative experience.

Andrés N Ordorica: I think the only way to fight back against damaging, harmful narratives is to start challenging publishers and festivals to be more inventive with who is being given the opportunity to tell stories. Until the gatekeeping establishment changes their ways, one of the most radical things we can do as individuals is challenge ourselves individually to hear and read from those storytellers who might not necessarily share our same lived experience. If so, we will be all the richer for it, and stand to gain so much in terms of a deeper understanding of these universal life experiences of love, loss, and resilience now told from a plethora of new perspectives.

StAnza Poetry Festival will run from Monday 7–Sunday 13 March in St Andrews. Visit stanzapoetry.org to find out more.