William Randall Reading and Writing Our Lives

William L. (Bill) Randall is Professor Emeritus of Gerontology at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He earned degrees from Harvard University (AB), Princeton Theological Seminary (ThM), and the University of Toronto (MDiv, EdD). He is a member of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, where he pursued doctoral studies in the mid-70s and where he will be a Visiting Fellow in the Lent term of 2024. ​Bill has helped to pioneer a unique approach to the study of aging known as Narrative Gerontology. Author or co-author of over 70 publications, including 10 books, he has given keynote speeches, scholarly presentations, and interactive workshops for professionals, researchers, practitioners, and the general public in Canada, the US, the UK, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, The Czech Republic, Spain and Greece.

I would like to start by building some essential understanding of your work in gerontology and then shift to a discussion of storytelling and creativity.

You were a minister for 11 years with the United Church of Canada, serving parishes in Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Ontario. What attracted you to this career?

I was following in my father's footsteps. He was a minister in rural New Brunswick, so I knew that line of work first-hand. As an undergrad at Harvard, I had some powerful religious experiences and decided to study theology, first at Emmanuel College (a seminary connected to the University of Toronto) and then for a year at Cambridge University. There I started on a PhD dealing with autobiography and religion. I was well on my way toward an academic career when I concluded that, topic-wise, I had bitten off more than I could possibly chew at the tender age of 26.After returning to North America and doing a further year at Princeton Theological Seminary, I realized that I needed to get out of the ivory tower and serve people directly. 

How did your work as a minister lead to Gerontology?

After completing my studies, I soon found myself on a five-point rural parish in the big sky country of southwestern Saskatchewan. Much of this work involved visiting people in their homes and listening to their stories. It was very engaging for me and, I like to think, helpful to them.

After three years in the west, I moved back to New Brunswick to take up a position in a large city church. I continued developing discussion groups with members of the congregation and found them especially helpful for older adults trying to make sense of the aging process.

Why did you return to an academic life?

Much as I enjoyed many aspects of the ministry, I realized that this career left very little time for me. Even though I didn't have a simple or clear-cut direction, I knew I needed to get back into the academy. Through a series of synchronicities that still astound me whenever I recall them, I found myself in another doctoral program, this time at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto, initially focusing on adult education.

It seems that creativity became a major interest as a result.

Yes. In studying the philosophy of education (the department I soon switched into), I realized that creativity, self-development, learning, and time were the four main topics that I wanted to try and weave together. Partly as a result of my work as a minister and the discussion groups I had led, I was fascinated by the ways people go about understanding the events of their lives, how they go about composing a life, to use Mary Catherine Bateson’s lovely phrase. In telling our stories to ourselves and others, we simultaneously act as the author, narrator, main character, editor, and reader. Drawing on my earlier studies in narrative theology, as well as the emerging field of narrative psychology, I developed this perspective as a dissertation and then as a book, called The Stories We Are: An Essay on Self-Creation. Publishing it set me on the path I’ve been pursuing ever since.

So self-creation has been at the heart of you work for a long time. Can you elaborate on its significance and implications?

There are both simple and complex answers to this question. Starting simply, as humans we naturally seek to make meaning of our lives and our surroundings. We don't just want to know what happened; we want to know why it happened. And our main means of making meaning is through telling stories.

Things get more complex when we begin to consider the literary and psychological implications of storytelling. Autobiographical memory is especially elusive. One autobiography scholar writes that “there are many stories of Self to tell, and many selves to tell them.” Which self is the narrator of a given event we’re involved in, and to what degree is he or she reliable? What is being emphasized and what is being left out from the story? What stories do we tell regularly  (our “signature stories”) and what stories are more hidden, perhaps from ourselves as well as from others?  

It becomes richer still when we consider the extent to which we are telling and living our stories simultaneously, always from within.  In other words, we can't just stand back and admire a finished narrative from the outside, because it is continually unfolding. And it is us. This is part of the paradox of what I think of as the “novelty” of our lives, the complex, multi-layered, ever-changing narrative tableau--or novel-- that we are living at the same time as we are composing it! 

From this perspective, it seems that life stories are not something we have but rather something we continually create.

Yes. And even the narratives we create are rarely straightforward. We create and share different stories for different situations and for different audiences. We embody multiple narratives simultaneously, through our understanding of our past, our actions in the present, and our plans for the future. I've become especially interested in the narrative complexity that’s entailed when we actively grow old rather than simply get old.

Your work with Gary Kenyon seems essential, both to your work at St Thomas University and to the continuing evolution of your thinking.

Yes. As founder of STU's Gerontology programme, Gary invited me to campus for one semester in 1995 as a visiting chair. Gradually, that position evolved into a full-time academic career in a particularly supportive institution. We have also co-authored many articles and books and, together with a growing community of narrative researchers worldwide (“narrative gerontologists,” you might say), we’ve explored the aging process from the inside as opposed to the outside.

In your book titled In Our Stories Lies Our Strength, you note that aging is intrinsically spiritual. Can you elaborate? 

I like what Thomas Moore writes in his book, Care of the Soul:  “Growing old,” he says, “is one of the ways the soul nudges itself into attention to the spiritual aspects of life.” I like that word “nudges." Aging doesn’t force us so much as it invites us to become more down to earth, more far-sighted, more comfortable with ambiguity, more open to death, and in general more inward-looking. Aging nudges us to wrestle with questions of meaning, with the big questions of why we are here, where have we come from, and where are we going. 

You also describe "biographical aging" as a process that is as complicated and significant as the biological aging we typically discuss. Again, please elaborate.

Biological aging (on which gerontology seems to dwell disproportionately) focuses on our gradual decline physically, as well as on the various social and structural challenges which that decline brings for the healthcare system in particular and for society at large. As a result, aging can be seen, overall, as a problem to confront rather than an opportunity to embrace.

The concept of biographical aging, by contrast, gets us thinking of life as story, as journey, and potentially as adventure: an adventure of learning, discovery, and growth. And along the way, through increasing self-awareness and ongoing self-creation, we can attain a measure of wisdom that’s unique to our lived history, wisdom that then, hopefully, can be shared with others and thereby enrich their lives as well.

In my interviews so far, I have noticed four recurrent themes. I wonder to what extent they are applicable to your work. Can we discuss them one by one?

Sure.

First, it seems that questions are at the heart of creativity. Rather than passively accepting the status quo, the most creative people seem to ask, "what if" and "what next?"

There are several ways to view this. Basically, I’m obsessed with Metaphor, in particular, what’s been called the “narrative root metaphor.” What do we mean when we say that each life is a story? In what sense is “a life” like (and not like) “a story?" These are the kinds of questions I’ve been thinking about ever since writing The Stories We Are, and I’m haunted by them still. I'm especially driven by wonderment. I wonder why people behave as they do and what other paths they could have traveled.

I especially value "slow questions," questions that are broad and complex, questions that require reflection and encourage deep thinking. As we age. Each of us seems to develop a collection of such questions. They’re part of the cache of “ordinary wisdom,” as Gary Kenyon and I call it, that each of us accumulates across the lifespan.

Second, in New Brunswick, a sense of community is very important to many creative people.

Certainly, there are many writer's groups and other organizations that help encourage connections among creative people. But I am also impressed by the sense of community on a more individual scale. I do a lot of my writing in a local coffee shop, immersed in this little world and away from my computer and my meetings. This sort of “narrative environment,” as I would call it, inspired me to write a book entitled The Narrative Complexity of Everyday Life: Tales from the Coffee Shop.

I'm also impressed by the sense of community that each of us can create simply by being attentive to our network of family and friends. My ninety-nine-year-old mother has over one hundred people that she contacts regularly by telephone and to whom she provides emotional support. Community develops naturally when we are truly interested in our stories and in the stories of others.

Third, so many people are inspired by nature, often quite directly.

In addition to inspiring experiences that we might have in nature, we might view the mind– and with it, memory too - more as a compost heap and less as a computer. As with everything in nature, thoughts rise up out of our experiences, may develop into actions and ideas, and then may fall back into the soil of our soul, if you like, as compost for the next thought.

Finally, for the most creative people, the world is alive. Every object and situation seems to be imbued with meaning and possibility.

Surely, life (and aging too) can't simply be a death march! I find myself driven by a “radical amazement," to use Abraham Heschel’s lovely phrase, at the complexity and possibility in just about everything, and every situation, I encounter. I think this is true of many (and maybe all) creative people.

Are there any characteristics of creativity that you would like to add to my existing list?

For me, creativity is fueled by crossing borders rather than parking oneself at the center of a discipline. Stories themselves are inherently interdisciplinary. When describing a movie to a friend, we might say it is about war, love, despair, courage--and all of these things intertwine. They can't really be teased apart; a shift in one creates a shift in all of the others. For me, exploring life and therefore the study of aging requires reading extensively in psychology, literary theory, philosophy, history, linguistics, and more.

This is certainly evident in the works cited in your books! How have you translated your ideas about biographical aging into action?

At least six times over the past decade, my colleague, Beth McKim, and I have offered a one-day workshop titled Reading and Writing Our Lives. In it, thirty or forty elders tackle and then discuss various exercises that are aimed at taking them deeper into the world of their own unique stories. Much of the participants “storywork” is stimulated by a series of quotes that we project on the screen. I recall one from the African-American author, Alex Haley, who said that "Every time an old person dies, it is like a library burns down." The combination of writing and talking, or sharing, is pivotal in events like this. A comment by memoirist Patricia Hampl also seems apt: "It is important to tell our stories, but it is as important to listen to what our stories tell us."

This view seems to suggest that every life is meaningful, not just the lives of the most accomplished or famous people.

Yes. I love a chapter that my friend and colleague, Daphne Noonan, wrote for one of the books Gary and I edited. Titled Ripple Effect, it describes a wonderful type of narrative care. Every month, the life stories of one or two residents of a large nursing home are publicly presented at an event called “Celebrating Our Stories.”  Leading up to it, the residents are interviewed by a staff member or family member, sometimes a student or volunteer, and a fifteen-to-twenty-minute video is then created that combines their favorite music, photographs from various periods of their lives, and snippets from the interviews themselves. For one afternoon, those residents become King or Queen For The Day.

Even if they’re incapacitated now, everyone can see that they lived full, rich lives, full of stories and therefore, wisdom. Typically, there isn't a dry eye in the house. I know because I’ve attended a good many of them myself!

This also helps the staff members in attendance to realize that each resident is so much more than just a set of medical problems lying in a bed. The whole process is helpful not just to the residents, but to their family members, to the administrators of the facility, and indeed to the community at large. It’s a great way to create a positive atmosphere in the community and help the Institution offer a more “home-like” environment.

Any final comments on stories?

WR: We humans imagine, tell, believe, question and even argue over stories about our lives and the lives of others. Think of the damage false conspiracy theories can cause or the benefit of an inspiring tale of generosity or survival. Stories about our counties, our world, and our cosmos drive the values that result in political action--or inaction. Personally, politically, economically and culturally, the stories we create are at the heart of our lives as humans.