Story Sharing dinner

Friday, April 3rd, 5:30-7:30pm

Seguinland Institute’s third annual Story Sharing Dinner is a community gathering where storytelling, good food, and connection come together. Georgetowners and Seguinland students reflect on the meaning of community through shared stories and conversation. Hosted by our Spring Semester students as part of their course on “Community Building in the 21st Century,” the evening features a delicious student-prepared meal, potluck dessert, formal storytelling performances, and informal story exchanges around the dinner table.

For each dinner, we hope to welcome as many members of the Georgetown community as space allows. If you’re involved in community building in any way—through work or volunteering—we would love for you to join us. Please let us know if you’re interested in attending, and we’ll be in touch soon.

EXPRESS INTEREST

How does art affect our transformation? Art, it seems, opens up transitional, ritual, or utopian spaces that enable us to reconcile inward imperatives and outward constraints, thereby making our lives more manageable and meaningful. Art allows us to strike a balance between being actors and being acted upon. Art is the symbolic labor whereby human beings make themselves, both individually and socially, out of the environmental, biographical, and physical materials that affect them: a process that connects art with gestation, storytelling, and dreaming and illuminates the elementary forms of life. 

– M.D. Jackson, The Work of Art

Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance. The most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling and generally in artistic transposition of individual experiences. But we do not need the form of the artist to witness this transfiguration. Each time we talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they never could have had before. 

–Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition