Nail fungus infection is not a choice of yours.

I'm sorry! I was cleaning out the spam this morning and came across that gem of a title. I just had to use it.

What I mean by it is: here is a report on book writing progress. The book's content is between eighty and ninety percent done (hard to say exactly). The more I write the more I like it, but it is not yet done. Five of my closest colleague-friends, those who may see what I have written before anyone may see what I have written, have received "early-early" review copies of the incomplete book. All others on the reviewer list (and I thank each and every one of them for their patience) will receive the "early" version for review as soon as anybody may see it.

However I will show you the high-level table of contents, in case you have any feedback on the book's structure, and so you can see that I am still writing it. Color key:

• new writing in red
• writing from the blog (cleaned up and improved) in blue, blue for blog
• writing from the original book (cleaned up and improved) in green, green for growth
• parts yet to be finished in shocking purple

The contents:

Part One: Introduction and Evaluation

Chapter 1: Introduction

What this book is for

Why I wrote this book

This book and you

Notes on the book

Chapter 2: Why Work with Stories?

Why work with stories?

Why work with stories?

Why work with stories?

Summary

Resources

Activities

[Summary/Resources/Activities repeat in each chapter, some done some not]

Part Two: Fundamentals of Story Work

Chapter 3: What Is a Story?

The ant and the dove

Definitions of story, stories of definition

A working definition

Chapter 4: What Are Stories For?

Stories are maps of experience

Stories are sounding devices

Stories are elements of play

Stories are packages of meaning

Chapter 5: How Do Stories Work?

Stories in society

Stories in conversation

Stories in use

Stories in stories

Stories in personalities

Part Three: A Guide to Participatory Narrative Inquiry

Chapter 6: Introducing Participatory Narrative Inquiry

PNI definitions

PNI phases

PNI principles

Chapter 7: Project Planning

Mini-collection

Mini-sensemaking

Mini-return

Knowing your storytellers

Knowing your topic

Considering privacy

Chapter 8: Story Collection

Methods of story collection

Asking people to tell stories

Diverse questions for diverse motivations

How many stories to collect

Asking questions about stories

Facilitating group story sessions

Story collection exercises

Chapter 9: Narrative Catalysis

Chapter 10: Narrative Sensemaking

Chapter 11: Narrative Intervention

Chapter 12: Narrative Return

Part Four: Advanced Topics in PNI

Chapter 13: Advanced Introduction to PNI

PNI justified

PNI in context

PNI opportunities

PNI dangers

Chapter 14: Becoming a PNI Practitioner

The essential skills of a PNI practitioner

Breadth and depth in story work

Evaluations of story work

Chapter 15: Advanced Topics in Project Planning

Habits of story planning

Planning projects with the story uses triangle

Planning projects with stories in personalities

Transparency in PNI projects

Resolving tensions between needs

Practical ethics in story work

Chapter 16: Advanced Topics in Story Collection

Habits of story collection

Story collecting venues and story personalities

How not to ask too many questions about stories

When you can't ask questions about stories

Transcribing storytelling

What to expect when you're expecting stories

The story fundamentals questions expanded

Chapter 17: Advanced topics in Narrative Catalysis

Chapter 18: Advanced Topics in Narrative Sensemaking

Chapter 19: Advanced Topics in Narrative Intervention

Chapter 20: Advanced topics in Narrative Return

Part Five: PNI Stories

Chapter 21: PNI Stories from Other Lands

Collecting stories in a poor urban community (Jonathan Carter)

Helping a community market listen to its customers (John Caddell)

Evaluating effectiveness helping youth in foster care (Stephen Shimshock)

Using a specific narrative process to face conflictual situations (Stephane Dangel)

Chapter 22: PNI Stories from My Journey

Incorporating narrative into e-learning

Probing a wound gently

Holding up a mirror

We said, they said

Too much and too little

Contradicting ourselves

Shooting the messenger

The near miss

Discovering the obvious

10-15 more of these stories left to clean up

Appendices

Acknowledgements and biography

Glossary

Index

You could look at this and say, "What? You have so much left to do! All those shocking purple parts!" But of course the introduction, planning and story collection parts would be the longest. The other parts will be much shorter and faster to write, so I do see a sort of light at the end of the tunnel. I am working on the catalysis section now, writing by PNI phase, sorting into basic and advanced as I go.

The "PNI stories" should end up at between 20 and 25 when I'm finished: this will be a sort of (highly anonymized/fictionalized) "folk tale collection" of stories about things I've learned from projects I've done: not "case studies" or "best practices" but more like a trial and error parade. The format is the same as in the previous case studies, but there are just lots of them now. I have notes on all of these stories but about half remain to be cleaned up. Sort of like a nail fungus infection, which is no choice of mine or yours, just something that remains to be dealt with.

Why I am I telling you this? Because the blog was hungry; to let you know I'm still writing; because I wouldn't mind some feedback on the organization of the material; because winter is coming; because I found such an excellent spam title.

PLA articles; Recruitment drive

Volume 63 of the journal Participatory Learning and Action has come out, and I am author or co-author in three of its articles. Click here, then on "Download PDF (free)" to read it. The volume is titled "How wide are the ripples? From local participation to international organisational learning" and its description is as follows.

Do you work with or in an international or northern office of an international non-governmental organisation (INGO)? Do you facilitate participatory processes at the grassroots? Have you ever wondered how wide an impact the process might have?

When a pebble is thrown in the water it creates ripples. But just as the ripples fade as they lose momentum, the strong local impact of good quality participatory grassroots processes also weakens as it gets further away from the original context. Yet the insight and analysis, evidence and stories generated and documented during participatory processes are just the kinds of information which are needed to inform good development policy and planning.

This issue shares reflections and experiences of bringing grassroots knowledge and information from participatory processes to bear at international level. It examines the possibilities and challenges involved – as well as strategies for strengthening practice. It aims to inspire other empowered activists working with INGOs to be a conscious and active part of change: to bring about more accountable, equitable and participatory development.

The articles I contributed to are as follows:

1. "Bridges to understanding and action: using stories to negotiate meaning across community boundaries" by Cynthia Kurtz and Stephen Shimshock,  page 63
2. "Telling stories: who makes sense of participatory communication?" by Hannah Beardon, Jasber Singh, Rose McCausland, Cynthia Kurtz and Clodagh Miskelly, page 77
3. "Working with your community's stories" by Cynthia Kurtz, page 167

All of the articles in this journal are worth reading. They contain many inspirational stories and ideas for application in participatory work.

Meet me in the room of requirement 

I expect to deliver early copies of the greatly expanded third edition of Working with Stories by the end of this month to an eager army of skimmers/readers for essential feedback, to be incorporated as I finish the formatting. If you want to join the WWS army, send me an email and I will put you on the list to receive the manuscript.

Hints of things to come

How is the book coming? I have nearly finished reviewing hundreds of books and papers and typing in must-have quotes from them, all so I can remove the unpleasant "sorry there are so few references here" bit I had in the book before. I have been having a wonderful time re-reading lots of things I first encountered a decade ago and finding parts I never noticed before and so on, but all good things must come to an end. This means that nothing remains now but to finish all the parts of the book not quite finished and pull it all together. Which will still take a while. But it is happening.

However I wanted to show you this nice little bit of coalescence: some new diagrams on the stages of a PNI (participatory narrative inquiry) project, which came popping out of somewhere onto paper the other day. I put a full description of this on the PNI page.

If you study this diagram you may find something exciting about it. (Well, I found something exciting about it.) The parts of the process inside the triangle are all emergent, unordered processes -- things that rely heavily on the meshwork of many connections and perspectives coming together. The parts outside the triangle feature stronger components of hierarchy, structure, order. So in a sense this shows how PNI brings together organization and self-organization into a dynamic interplay for the purpose of supporting collective narrative sensemaking. (If this makes no sense to you, read about the confluence framework. That may help ... or it may just make things worse.)

Feedback/encouragement accepted with wild enthusiasm.

Meet the NarraCat

I finally got around to releasing NarraCat. It is a set of scripts for narrative catalysis I've been using and building for the past few years. You will find a page on NarraCat on the right side of the blog under "useful things."

I don't expect more than a handful of people to be very interested in using NarraCat. It's not a polished package, that's for sure. It has a face only a programmer could love, and you have to treat it like a baby to get it to do what you want. But I've come to respect and depend on it, so I think at least a few other people might like to use it too. If you want to work with stories and have the time and patience, or know somebody who is willing to have the time and patience for you, you might find NarraCat useful. If you do use it, let me know.

Why release NarraCat now? For one, we just put out some source code for our ancient-history projects PlantStudio and StoryHarp (due to that one more request that tipped it over into doing something about it), and that got me thinking about open source. Also, I'm starting to think about writing the catalysis part of the book, and it's hard to describe catalysis without referring to the tool I know best (even though I intend to describe things you can do without software as well). Write what you know, they say, so I will.

By the way, if and when Rakontu ever grows large enough and strong enough, it will probably swallow up NarraCat; but that may take a while, and besides there may be reasons to use NarraCat by itself even then. So for now I'll let it wander and see if it finds interesting places to go.

Rakontu on WWSW Wednesday

I will be talking about Rakontu on the Worldwide Story Work Ning group on Wednesday the 13th of July, 2011.

In preparation for that, I thought about what I'd like to say about Rakontu, and that turned into an "elevator pitch" presentation that starts out like this (excerpted):

Click here to see the rest of the pitch.