Kate Chadbourne

“Storytelling offers a range of expressive possibilities that are simply not available in straight narrative discourse,” says Preceptor in Expository Writing Kate Chadbourne. Though Chadbourne’s affiliation with Harvard is primarily that of an Expos teacher, her work extends into numerous other fields. She is a teacher of modern Irish, a poet, a folklorist, a musician who plays the piano, the flute, and the harp, and, most of all, a storyteller­—a medium in which all of her other interests and talents come to fruition.

Born in Saco, Maine to a nurse and a fisherman, Chadbourne always loved music and storytelling. She laughs, remembering, “I was given piano lessons from the age of five, and I was always mad about stories. Funny how the thing you love when you are little are the things that reassert themselves when you grow up.” Through time and experience, her interests focused on Irish music and storytelling in particular. She recalls when she realized how important Irish stories would be to her: “I was studying abroad in Cork, in Ireland, my junior year of college, and this woman took me to a ceili. She told me I had to bring a song or a story. I went and was enchanted.”

After completing her dissertation in Celtic languages and literatures, Chadbourne looked to teach a course on Irish fairy lore for the Expository Writing program. Expos asked her instead to teach a much broader course on storytelling more generally. Rather than upsetting her plans, this request led Chadbourne to approach the medium differently, and opened up scholarly and creative worlds to her. She considers her ever-changing relationship to academia and the arts, saying, “I used to wonder, am I a scholar or an artist? Now, I don’t worry so much.”

Chadbourne’s art is a combination of narrative, music, and poetry; she weaves together these different media in unique ways, looking to many traditions for her inspiration. She has a remarkable knack for incorporating things that might be obstacles into her artistic repertoire. When on a postdoctoral fellowship in Derry, she had no way to make music, except her voice and a plastic flute. She learned to use the flute, and pursued Sean-nós, a traditional form of Irish singing. As she says, “I try to follow all my stars, my intellectual star, my artistic star, and hope those stars converge into one.”

While embracing the magic of what she studies and creates, Chadbourne is also an educator and a scholar. In discussing her work with students, she says, “In the classroom, we look at so many aspects of meaning and choice in expression—ways of constructing meaning through stories, deliberate and otherwise.” Regarding the function of studying stories, she states, “Stories have tremendous relevance to how we understand social constructions, gender relationships, power, history.” She sees stories as cultural artifacts, as worthy of study and as richly significant as other texts.

In the end, Chadbourne’s charisma and warmth are only outshone by the unique power of her approach to her work. As she goes on, studying stories, she describes her work as if she is “…drawing a map. I keep filling in more places—here is another metaphor for how people are meant to live in the world, or what people are meant to be doing. Not moral lessons, but guideposts to compassion, council, mockery, admiration, humanity.”