The objects on the storytelling table

Text: an original contemporary event-account-style practice extract.

Three objects waited in the centre of each table: a bus ticket, a wooden spoon and a postcard with no message on it. They looked too ordinary to deserve such careful placing. Beside them, cards offered beginnings rather than instructions: ‘A journey I remember’, ‘A meal that mattered’ and ‘Something I kept’. The organiser explained that people could use a prompt, choose another subject or simply listen.

At my table, a man immediately folded his arms and said that he had no story. Nobody tried to persuade him otherwise. The first two speakers talked about a childhood kitchen and a postcard sent from the coast. During the pause that followed, the man picked up the bus ticket. He turned it over twice before describing the evening a missed bus had led him to walk home with his father. By the end, his hands were moving across the table as if the road still ran between them.

The ticket had not supplied his memory, and the organiser could not have known which object, if any, would matter to whom. That uncertainty seems important. The preparation did not demand a particular result; it made several kinds of participation possible. What had first appeared to be a display of unremarkable things became a set of quiet invitations, including the invitation to say nothing at all.

In this extract, the writer tries to create appreciation for thoughtful preparation.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.