Story Work: Field Notes on Self-Discovery and Reclaiming Your Narrative

A guide to understanding the stories we tell ourselves and the actions needed to reclaim power over our narrative.

We absorb the world around us through stories. It's how we make sense of our surroundings, our communities, and ourselves. There's often truth and validity in these stories. But the stories we tell ourselves are not an end-all, be-all. Instead, they're all part of a larger, ongoing, unfinished narrative--one that we must continually refresh, expand, and contemplate to stay soft and open-hearted.

Here's the thing: we can choose to keep these stories open to possibility and imagination--or we can choose to keep them closed. That's where Story Work comes in. Through essays and prompting questions, GG Renee Hill invites readers to breathe new life into the stories we carry. She leads by example, by penning the raw material of her own life: an upbringing raised by a mother with schizophrenia, and a lifetime of internal and external forces trying to minimize that impact. It was a long, old, heavy story Hill silently carried with her--the powerless girl who lost her voice in the wreckage of her mother's condition -- until she turned to writing and began to change the meaning she'd assigned to her experiences. And she doesn't stop there. Hill invites readers to the transformative practice of creative self-discovery through storytelling -- treating our life experiences as creative material that we have the power to shape. For the person searching, Story Work is the answer that enables us to live with an open-hearted curiosity--one that both fuels and grounds us.