1. The past is closer than it’s ever been.

The images that Wolfgang Wild finds for his Retronaut project tear time and bring the past roaring back to life. This is original colour photography that messes with our map of time to make it feel unreal, staged somehow. Yet its ultimate effect is the opposite. We connect more directly with the fellow humans within the image. People from fifty, a hundred years ago are suddenly less historical strangers, and instead potential peers.

Daniel Meadows, an archivist and ‘documentarist’, shared other vanished worlds — more recent but no less evocative now they’re gone. He shared audio recordings from the 60s and 70s, when he toured the UK, documenting the ‘ordinary’ lives of ‘ordinary’ people. At one point he showed a family living-room photo, along with a re-staged shot thirty years later.

“Then and now. Or rather,” he said, “then and then, as all photographs are in the past.”

Capturing the present turns it into history. And since we capture far more of the present than we ever did before, history is filling up. The past comes round more quickly, and it’s more self-conscious once it’s there. That was the lesson from artists Thomson and Craighead. Where Meadows captured oral history, they make textual history, re-contextualising the spontaneous and throwaway of geo-fenced tweets on art gallery walls.

History is bigger, shallower, and more retrievable than ever.

2. There are no small stories, just stories that are less frequently told.

Meadows talked about his dislike of ‘big media’, and his work clearly struck a chord, and not just in the room. Phil’s comment to me about his 60s work (“we used to have that gas fire”) was echoed in the responses Meadows had himself captured. The strength of feeling is a nostalgic rush, but also I think the thrill of seeing ourselves and our lives represented.

Born N Bread, a young Peckham collective, echoed this. Their zine is a way of connecting with people like themselves. One of them spoke of seeing the first issue and thinking, I used to wear that lipgloss, I used to wear my hat like that. She wanted in. And who can blame her? Our own stories aren’t always told in the obvious places. When we’re validated in places made just for us it’s incredibly powerful.

Hannah Nicklin had been artist-in-residence on a housing estate for a while. There she met people whose jobs were disappearing, whose lives were changing, and whose stories weren’t being told by a ‘big media’ less interested than it should be in understanding these stories and holding to account the powerful institutions that helped create them. In that climate, the simple act of listening becomes a political act. Jamie Byng was proof, urging us to see Calais to truly understand for ourselves the plight of the refugees. And so was Nicklin herself, who sees her role as “opening up the space for people to tell their stories.”

3. Our identity is whatever we want it to be.

Helen Zaltzman presents a brilliant podcast called The Allusionist, and at The Story she talked about handwriting. She got me thinking: how does something we all learn in the same way at school end up so identifiably individual? She dismissed graphology, but conceded that such a physical act as writing would of course be influenced by our emotional and physiological state. A state, of course, that changes all the time.

Our story of ourselves does that too. When people ask her what she does, Hannah Nicklin has a different answer depending on who has asked her. She might talk about game design to a young man in a pub, her latest work to some theatre types, and a more oblique description to a taxi driver. We’ve all done that.

In the pub later, seeing her talking to a young man, it occurred to us that, as her audience, we shouldn’t assume we had been any different. We were people for whom she would construct a persona, just as she would for anyone else. Just as we all do for anyone else. Did that make her later pivot, when she challenged herself about the genuine value of her work, any less powerful? No. But it did made me think about the theatricality of her talk, and highlighted that we rarely hold only one position on things.

Our personality is fluid. Our identify isn’t fixed. Yet when we’re exposed to someone new we find that hard to imagine, I think.

4. Sometimes you need to ask some really difficult questions

Hannah Nicklin’s challenge to herself was, what’s the point? It was dramatic, disruptive even. A provocation for all of us. What does it mean for stories to be valuable, rather than merely worthy?

Gaia Vince, who has travelled the world for 800 days to better understand the way we live now and the way we may have to live very soon, showed us that perhaps the only real question worth asking is, which of the earth’s resources do we want to prioritise, and why?

Wolfgang Wild took years to answer that killer question — what is my passion? Eventually he could admit that it wasn’t time travel. Rather it was to work out what to do when you accept that time travel isn’t possible.

And James Ball, data journalist at The Guardian, revealed the question his team needed to answer when faced with a leaked story about HSBC and alleged impropriety. Should the focus of the story be the whistle blower, the clients, or the non-doms? Every story needs a protagonist, and in the end it could only be the bank itself.

5. Stories want to change the world, not just reflect it

We played a game at the start of the morning. Ministry Of Stories read out lines of poetry and asked us whether we thought they’d been written by poet laureates or children. I got all but one wrong. That the game is even possible tells us something about the skills we attribute to both poets and children. We want them both to reveal something truthful to us, or help us see the world we think we know with new eyes.

The power of writing and stories to imbue the world with meaning always comes through strongly at The Story. Musa Okwonga, a poet and writer, went further, demanding that writers “write with an open wound,” to write with compassion to address the complexity of the world around us. His best writing, he said, was always “a blend of cold reason and almost volcanic anger.”

That sounds like the kind of focused creativity that really will change the world. And the sort that leaves you full of fuel for another year.