Telling Stories

Courtney Yusuf

Courtney is part of the team that bring you Today In Focus at The Guardian. He also produces The Wine-Dark Sea for Noods Radio, a sonic cruise around the Mediterranean where each episode explores a different musical genre and the world from which it came. Courtney is someone who thinks deeply about place - and what it means to really take a listener somewhere. We wanted to get to the bottom of how you can help the listener arrive at the authentic truth of a place. While, Courtney says, there is no real authentic truth, we can work to understand a story (and a place) by speaking to different people who share an authentic investment in it and by listening closely to the details they pick-up on. You can listen to the episode here.

RESOURCES

Courtney’s Top Picks:

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing

Our Top Picks:

The Today in Focus episode with Mohamedou Ould Salahi

TAKEAWAYS

We should all be given the tools to understand the ways stories can be used to achieve different ends.

Be critical of the stories you hear. Give people the chance to be critical of you.

We can only develop our worldview by constantly testing our theories and seeing whether our values standup.

CHALLENGES

Please send us your challenges to tellingstoriespod@gmail.com so that we can feature them on the site!

Courtney challenges you to make a story inspired by John Berger’s Way of Seeing (https://bit.ly/3xPSa1b) —-> to tell a story that explores/interrogates/reflects upon the act of telling stories itself. Good luck!