Contents

1) A HUGE OPPORTUNITY FOR STORYTELLERS

2) MY HOLIDAY GIFT TO YOU: A NEW, FREE NEWSLETTER

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1) A HUGE OPPORTUNITY FOR STORYTELLERS

We face a significant opportunity

In the U.S. public schools, 48 states have now adopted the “Common Core State Standards” for what students should learn.

This is an enormous development for teachers of children in kindergarten through high school.

The near-universal adoption of these standards is so new that teachers are scrambling to adapt their teaching to them. Even some of the largest textbook publishers have not yet provided full sets of materials.

As a result, these standards represent, I believe, a significant opportunity for storytellers.

“Standards? Storytellers Don’t Do Standards!”

For those of us who, like Einstein, cherish imagination above knowledge, trends toward standardized curriculum don’t necessarily sound inviting.

We are reminded of the French school administrator of years past who famously bragged, we are told, that he could look at his watch and know what every student in France was studying at that moment.

Where is there room in such a system, we might say, for individual learning styles? Individual interests? Divergent thinking?

Where is there room for education as an exciting adventure? For the thrill of discovery? For any form of enjoyment at all?

Not As Bad As I Feared…

Once I looked at these standards, though (and talked to the forward-looking educator/storyteller Lynne Burns about them), I saw them in a more hopeful light.

First, the creators of these standards have given some thought to what skills they think high school graduates need, to succeed in college and their careers. Indeed, each grade-level standard refers to a long-term “College and Career Readiness” standard.

This means that, unlike some other systems, the work at each grade level builds in a meaningful way on the work at previous levels – and helps prepare the student for the next levels.

Second, these standards don’t seem to lend themselves to over-reliance on uncomprehending memorization.

The vast majority, in fact, seem to focus on thinking skills. They are dominated by words and phrases like “analyze,” “compare and contrast,” “explain the relationships between…,” etc.

But Wait: There’s Another Problem

If the good news is that these standards seem to challenge students to do more than memorize, that merely highlights an ongoing problem: from the students’ point of view, why would they want to exert the effort? What will motivate them to rise to the challenge?

Imagine a student who is faced with a task like this, for example:

Determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how they are supported by key details.

I readily imagine the student thinking, “What does that have to do with my life? Why would I care about that?”

The more a curriculum requires mental exertion (learning to analyze requires more effort than simple memorization, for example), the more important it becomes to answer the students’ questions about “Why?”

This is a huge potential problem inherent in all standards-driven education: the student might be treated like a thinking machine, expected to perform tasks that seem unconnected to the student’s universal human motivations, such as:

• What do I want to accomplish? How can I accomplish it?
• Who is on this journey with me? How do we fit into each others’ lives?

In other words, these standards don’t, by themselves, make curriculum meaningful to the student.

Stories and Connection

Who could help humanize such a curriculum?

Needed: connection, meaning, involvement

Such helpers would need to be experts in:

• Connecting to human motivations;
• Putting problems in understandable contexts; and
• Engaging people both intellectually and emotionally.

Sound familiar?

If anyone knows about connecting to human motivations and emotions, it’s storytellers. After all, such meaning-building is the essence of what stories do.

Re-wording E.M. Forster’s famous dictum, I would say:

“’The king died and then the queen died’” is a series of unconnected events. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a story.”

In other words, a story differs from a recital of facts in that a story creates causal connections between the facts. A story is really the most basic way of giving meaning to events, of interpreting people’s motivations and personalities.

Such interpretation is essential both to story and to human life.

Specialists in Meaning

Whenever you need to create personal involvement in an otherwise impersonal context, the premier discipline to call upon is storytelling.

Said another way, the missing element in the Common Core State Standards is EXACTLY what storytellers have, since time beyond memory, always known how to provide.

We specialize in helping people create meaning and become involved.

Like a shovel-store in a gold rush, we have what people need

How Often Does This Happen?

Two factors are therefore converging. First, teachers are desperate for help in this time of change.

Second, storytellers have the exact skills that educators need.

We are like a long-established shovel store that just happens to be near a new gold rush. Suddenly, everybody needs what we offer!

A convergence like that comes once in a long, long while.

So How Do We Help?

I see three principal ways that storytellers can help well-meaning teachers carry out a Core Standards based curriculum, so that students become engaged. We can do, or assist teachers in doing, the following:

1. Perform stories;
2. Help students learn, create, and tell their own stories;
3. Teach storytelling games.

In a future article, I’ll talk about the contributions that each of these methods can make.

In the meantime, read on for a new, free resource for the least familiar of the three: Story Games.

2) MY HOLIDAY GIFT TO YOU: A NEW, FREE NEWSLETTER

Storytelling is a part of every human culture; so are games.

Storytelling games can help teach subjects, enjoyably

So it’s natural that people in many cultures have created games that involve stories.

For me, a storytelling game is any game that involves:

• Telling a story;
• Telling part of a story; or
• Using a skill that’s used in storytelling.

It turns out that people have created such games, for entertainment purposes, for generations.

Many such games help the beginning storyteller develop a particular storytelling skill. Other games focus on particular kinds of content that are of interest to teachers – and that apply to educational standards.

For example, there are storytelling games that require the use of words or phrases that can have two or more meanings. In such games, the spotlight of attention is easily and entertainingly focused on homonyms and metaphors.

To learn more about storytelling games every month, just subscribe – at no charge – to my new, free Storytelling Games newsletter.

In the newsletter, you’ll get games, variations on games, hints on teaching games, and suggestions of Common Core Standards that particular games help develop.

In time, I’ll have a website devoted to storytelling games. For now, you can subscribe by double-clicking this link:

http://www.storydynamics.com/games.newsletter

Questions or problems? Please use my contact form: http://www.storydynamics.com/contact

This newsletter is a gift from me to the storytelling (and education) communities. Happy Holidays! Enjoy!

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Storytelling helps us know what it means to be human...

Storytelling is important, in all times and all places. Storytelling, like all art, helps us know what it’s like to be human, including:

- What we have been in the past;
- What we are like now;
- What we are capable of becoming in the future.

Art does this in myriad ways, from van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers to great novels about imagined worlds. The art of storytelling does this through both informal and formal exchanges, from folktales told around a campfire, to personal experiences shared in a diner, to concert storytelling performances on large stages.

The Experience Factor

Is it any secret that the pace of our society is accellerating? And that the more we work and the more we consume, the less satisfied we are on the deepest levels?

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy not having to worry about the basics like food and shelter. I also love the fine things in life. I like my tools, including computers; I am very glad they exist.

Yet I also believe in the wise words of the Jewish compendium of writings known as the Talmud:

“Who is weathly? The one who is happy with his portion.”

In a society based largely on consumption, status, and the profit-motive, artists help shine a light on the quality of human experience.

Art Is Dangerous

Any government dependent on deception or injustice fears art...

Because all honest art helps us know who we are as humans, art is important to societies.

Without accurate knowledge of human experience, human nature and human potential, no society can make intelligent decisions about how to use its resources.

At the same time, any government or system dependent on deception or injustice fears the truth about humanity and our experiences – and therefore fears art.

If you don’t believe this, consider how often a new dictator moves immediately to control art. Consider why Franco’s forces killed the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca even before their full military victory in Spain, or why songwriter Victor Jara was assasinated – and the masters of his recordings burned – soon after a military junta overthrew the elected Chilean president in 1973.

Controlling Art in a Free Society

In our society, we control art not with guns or a Soviet-style bureaucracy, but, in part, with the star system. The star system elevates a few artists to “star” and even “super star” status. Because there is a limited supply of such stars, it’s possible to profit from them by creating a monopoly.

A recording company, for example, can control the supply and distribution of the star musician’s work. And, because the star is now dependent on the company, the company can also partly control the star.

Incidentally, the extravagant promotion of a relatively few artists’ work, in itself, often discourages other artists. (“If you had talent, you’d be rich.”) Still others are kept from seeking their own truth by their desire to “make it big” (that is, by pursuing fame rather than the truth of their own vision).

This is not to disparage the work of famous artists. Often they are magnificent writers, singers, painters, etc. Yet there are many non-star artists whose work is also worthy of being more widely shared, but is filtered out by a system that requires mass popularity for mass profits.

Such filtering affects all artists, but some artforms, including in-person storytelling, are particularly ill-suited to mass consumption. The for-profit organizations that dominate our society are indifferent to such artforms. As a result, performance storytelling operates only along the fringes of society, where resources are in shorter supply.

Sadly, all this works to encourage artists to compete against each other, fighting over the crumbs available to us as non-stars. Our natural gratitude for each other (as companions on the path of art) can be replaced by carping and jealousy. This further distracts us from our true possibilities—and our importance to each other and to society.

Signs of Hope

A new appreciation for people telling their own stories...

In spite of the difficulties currently faced by artists in general and storytellers in particular, I am excited by hopeful developments in recent years. We see, for example, a new appreciation of people telling their own stories, as evidenced in the U.S. by the rise of The Moth, of story slams, and of organized story-collection projects like StoryCorps.

The internet is another source of hope. To be sure, live, two-way storytelling is not yet taking place in significant amounts on the internet. But the strangle-hold of mass publishers over the availability of art is being weakened. It is increasingly easy to create and post audio recordings, videos, books, photographs and more – and it is increasingly easy for others to access and pay for such art.

Further, artists can now easily connect with each other via the web. We can share our work with each other. We can share our experiences, even when separated by oceans.

We can also share how-to information about our artforms, information that would never have found its way into the more limited pre-internet channels of books, broadcast, and recordings.

Thankful for Being A Storyteller Now

In other words, it’s a good time to be a storyteller. No matter how isolated we are locally, if we have access to an internet connection we have a world community at our fingertips. And we have access to information about our art.

In this case, information is power. It gives us the power to be inspired by each other to create our unique styles, to understand the inner workings of our art, and to share what we have learned widely and easily.

It’s a great time to be a storyteller, not because rivers of money are flowing to us or because we are prominent in society, but because it’s a great time to become the storyteller you are capable of being – and therefore to help nudge society ever closer to what it, too, is capable of becoming.

For all this opportunity, I give thanks – and a promise to re-dedicate my efforts.

Contents

1) WHAT KEEPS A STORYTELLER GOING?

2) SUBSCRIBER SPECIAL: NEW COURSE ON LEARNING YOUR GIFTS

• Read more or request an application

1) WHAT KEEPS A STORYTELLER GOING?

In many ways, we performing storytellers don’t live easy lives.

We get up early, pack the car, and drive to our audiences...

We spend years developing our skills and our repertory. We figure out how to find audiences. Most of us spend countless hours on the phone arranging performances and negotiating what we’ll tell.

Then we get up early (or stay up late), pack the car, drive to our audiences (or to an airport), and deal with the sound systems, the noisy auditoriums, the sometimes poorly planned events. And then we repeat the process again and again.

Oh, and did I mention that the pay is often low?

So, why do we do all that? What’s in it for us?

Riding the Racehorse

I remember my first time to perform as a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN.

The audience had been listening to stories for two days straight. Their response was immediate and strong!

On Friday and Saturday, I told in short sets: 12 to 30 minutes at a time.

Then came 1pm on Sunday: my solo hour. My listeners were primed and ready. They had been listening to stories for two days straight.

I began my first story and felt awe. The audience’s response was immediate and strong! As the performance went on, I adjusted happily to their amazing responsiveness. It was like spending an hour horseback riding, in perfect unity with a powerful, sensitive thoroughbred in its prime. Wow!

Last in Line

After my set (and the applause) was over, a line of people formed, waiting to thank me individually for the particular ways in which I had touched them.

After 30 years, I remember one person in that line.

He was the last in line. He was perhaps 30, slight of build, wearing a worn, long-sleeve denim shirt. He looked to me like he came from the rural South.

When nearly everyone else had left the tent, he stood about 5 feet from me, as though he were too shy to come nearer. I took one step closer to him and looked in his eyes. They were wide open and moist.

I waited. At last he said, “Things have been kind of hard.” He sounded choked up.

I nodded and waited again.

He said, “Those were some stories I needed to hear.” He began to cry.

I stepped forward, put my arms around him, and held him gently for a few minutes.

Then he stepped back, locked eyes with me for a second or two, smiled, and turned and left.

The Gift

I never saw him again or learned what he had found in my stories that day.

But I didn’t need to. I had received from him a precious gift, perhaps the most precious a teller can receive.

He let me know that I had given him what he most needed that day, that my stories had touched him in the exact way he had needed to be touched – that, in their mysterious way, the stories had spoken through me a message perhaps unknown to me.

The Reason?

Isn’t that what keeps so many of us at storytelling? Sure, most of us love the applause, the attention, the chance to hold sway. But those things aren’t the deepest motivators.

My deepest motivation became visible that day in Tennessee, in that one man’s face: storytelling gives me a chance to give people something they need. It gives me the feeling of offering just the right thing, of being the right person at the right time.

That feeling doesn’t depend on all my listeners being generous enough to tell me what it was like for them. In fact, the more often I feel it happening, the more I learn to sense it – to know that, even when no one thanks me for it, someone in the crowd has received a unique gift.

That’s what keeps me coming back. That’s what keeps me going as a storyteller.

What about you? I welcome your reasons at http://www.storydynamics.com/current.

2) SUBSCRIBER SPECIAL: NEW COURSE ON LEARNING YOUR GIFTS

Over the years, I learned that I can give people just what they need by performing – but also by other ways.

I discovered the joy of teaching about storytelling, of helping people find the “missing second leg” in their communication, the leg that propels the heart and the imagination, not just the intellect.

I also learned the joy of coaching, of helping other tellers to overcome obstacles they face in their storytelling, helping them move closer to being the unique tellers that only they can become.

Help Others Learn to Help Others?

They I began to think: If meeting people’s unique needs is my prime motivation, and if I can learn multiple ways to meet people’s needs, then could I maybe help other tellers get that same satisfaction, using their unique gifts in new ways, too?

I tried multiple approaches, from “mastermind groups” to four-month, online courses with 20 people.

But last year, I pioneered a new approach: a telephone plus web course with only 6 people. The small number meant that, in the 6 sessions of the course, I could schedule two coaching sessions for EACH participant (one of them for a full hour) as well as two meaty lessons.

Better yet, the group of 6 would gain from hearing each other be coached to make such significant progress. They would become a mini-community of people learning to use their storytelling skills to meet customers’ needs in unique ways.

Course Starting in October

I am offering such a phone/web course again this fall. Its six sessions will begin the first week of October and be over by the Thanksgiving holiday.

Learn to use your gifts in new ways - without leaving home

It may happen, of course, that not every participant gets the coaching they need in the first 6 sessions. If that happens, we’ll schedule additional meetings in January. I promise to give enough coaching (in the class or privately) that each of you in the course will:

1. Discover a group (a market) who is hungry for what you have to offer;
2. Create the title and outline of a digital product that will attract just the people in that group.

(If you want further help in actually creating the digital product from your outline and offering it to members of your new market, additional optional courses will follow in the winter and spring. In fact, with one of the additional courses, I will offer free websites optimized to help you reach your market.)

Save By Just Asking for an Application

To make this $795 course more affordable to you – and to encourage you to sign up early – I’m offering an Early Bird Special discount.

All you need to do to lock in your discount is to request a simple, 5-question application. Just click the large button toward the end of this web page:

http://IrresistibleOfferCourse.com

You may want to read the page, even if you’re not interested in the course at this time. It contains useful information about how to “get off the storytelling treadmill” by adding to your storytelling income.

• Read more or request an application

What are your winter stories?

I wonder: Are different kinds of stories required for this phase of our yearly cycle? After all, many Native American cultures have stories that can only be told during the time of the snows.

In the summer and spring, of course, we see life budding out around us. We like stories then that speak of action and growth.

What about the dark days of the year? In the dominant U.S. culture, we act as though nothing happens in winter. Of course, a perennial world – including crocuses, daffodils, lilies and much else – is growing and thriving beneath the surface.

To treat this time of quiet stillness as nothingness is to overlook half the cycle of life.

What Do We Need?

In the winter we need time to come into ourselves, to go down below the surface, to nourish the roots of our being. We need to tend to it, strengthen it, and establish our deep connections to it – so that when the spring comes, we will be ready for the blooming-forth phase of the cycle.

Yes, we can comfort and console ourselves with stories during the long nights and the short days. But beyond that, let’s be thoughtful: what stories do we each need, to nourish our roots? To ground us in the cool but timeless parts of being human?

As you approach the longest night of the year, try to notice: what stories are you hungry for?

Where Will You Find Those Stories?

We’re unlikely to find our root stories in the popular-culture mills that provide most TV and movie stories.

Instead, we’ll have to turn to books, to recordings, but most of all to each other and to our communities of storytellers. And even there, we may need persistence to uncover what we seek.

My wish to you during this solstice season is that you find the stories that nurture your roots. Perhaps the stories you need are dark, or perhaps they are filled with light. Perhaps they are painful or perhaps hopeful.

By letting these stories do their work in you, you will be honoring that part of your life that our society tends to skip over.

Table 1: Summary of the Seven Differences

Stories Concepts
1. Mode of Listening Creation Evaluation
2. Essence Unique event:
• one moment,
• one character,
• one place,
• one action Abstract commonalities:
what many events (etc.) have in common
3. Causes & Effects The specific
which may lead to the general The general
which may evoke the particular
4. Owner of Meaning The Listener The Speaker
5. Precision of Meaning Diverse
(wider range) Shared
(narrower range)
6. Scope of Meaning Contextual Literal (“Textual”)
7. Emotional Responses Empathic Reactive

Lesson 5: Go Where There’s Less Traffic

About six months after I moved to Oklahoma, I had occasion to return to a major East Coast city. I rented a car and, for the first time in all those months, had to navigate intense traffic.

After driving just a few minutes, I noticed how tense I felt. I noticed how alert I had to be, how aware of people on all sides, and how much effort it took to figure out where these winding streets actually went.

I realized that I had not felt this feeling in my body for six months.

I thought to myself. “I never want to feel this again on a daily basis!” I realized that being in less-crowded places actually improves my quality of life.

What’s the lesson for storytellers? Well, it’s tempting to look at popular storytellers and to decide to do what they do. But those venues are already crowded. Those styles of telling are already spoken for. That’s where the traffic is.

In other words, the decision to imitate others – in style or in marketing – takes me away from the wide open spaces.

The good news is that there are many, many people who have never heard of storytelling; they represent vast new audiences. There are also an infinite number of ways to tell stories, some of which are going to be natural and easy for me. So I always have the opportunity to be a storyteller in a rewarding, “low traffic” market.

Lesson 6: Don’t Believe the Appearance of Sameness

When I first moved to Oklahoma, my wife Pam was the pastor of a small church in Tulsa. Naturally, I went to the church every week and spent time at church outings with the 50 people who went there regularly. They were more Mid-Western and elderly than the folks I’d mostly been with in Boston, but I perceived them as a sweet, “plain vanilla” group of people.

One day, Pam came home with a story that the chair of the church board had told her about his father, who in the 1940′s had been a promising young baseball player.

In the story Pam told me, the board chair’s father had been offered a position on one of the Boston Red Sox farm teams. Naturally, he planned to accept this incredible opportunity for a poor boy from Oklahoma.

Soon after the letter from the Red Sox, though, he got a form letter from the government saying, “Uncle Sam needs you – to be a soldier.”

Reading the letter, his mother said, “We Indians are warrior people. When our people need us, we must go.”

And so this man’s father enlisted in the army instead of the Red Sox.

And hearing the story, I said to Pam, “He’s Native American?”

And she said, “Yes, he’s Choctaw.” Seeing the stunned look on my face, she said, “You know his wife, right? She’s Chickasaw. And you know the other elders….” She named them each, then listed their tribes: “Cherokee, Sac and Fox, Osage….”

I thought about all those people that had appeared so “plain vanilla” to me. I realized that, just a little below the surface, they had a deep connection to a very different culture.

I had been mislead by their conformity to the standard way that we’re expected to dress, speak and act in the contemporary U.S. I had assumed that they had several generations of assimilation behind them, not just one.

I had known, of course, that Oklahoma had been Indian Territory until its statehood. I knew that many tribes had been given reservations here after being forcibly and even violently removed from other parts of the country.

Yet I still assumed that these life-long Oklahomans were culturally much more homogeneous than they were. I had been fooled by the appearance of sameness that our society demands of people.

As a storyteller, it’s tempting to assume that “sameness” goes below the surface. In fact, different people have strongly different backgrounds and individual characteristics. They have different paces and experiences. They have different sensory modes in which they are likely to imagine. They have different interests.

All in all, they all have different needs that can be met by storytelling. This is another reason for me as a storyteller NOT to try to fit into an existing mold. Instead, I can notice my individual strengths. Only then can I offer these strengths to the people who need them; in other words, only then can I market what I truly have to offer.

And only then can people who are hungry for my strengths have a way to meet their needs through my work.

Lesson 7: Communicate Through Stories

The first widely distributed motion picture in the United States to be written, directed, and co-produced entirely by Native Americans was called “Smoke Signals.” (http://www.storydynamics.com/smoke)

There’s a scene in Smoke Signals in which a young, athletic man asks whether he should let his nerdy would-be companion come with him on an important journey.

He asks his mother while she is in her kitchen making fry bread, that fried-dough staple.

Instead of answering him, she begins talking about her fry bread and what parts of the recipe she learned from her own mother, from her mother-in-law and from her grandmother. She describes how large numbers of people have been involved in helping her know when her recipe needed to be a little less sweet or a little more cooked. When she finishes with this monologue about her history with fry bread, her son says, “So you think I should let him come with me.”

His mother says, “Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. But if you do go, please come back.”

As this scene demonstrates, there is a tradition in Native American cultures of using stories as a way of imparting advice, knowledge and point of view – without overtly stating an opinion. Many people raised in Oklahoma (even those who do not have native heritage) come to expect that, if you tell a them a story in conversation, you intend it to carry a personal message.

It’s an odd thing that I, as a storyteller, need to be reminded to tell stories, but I’ve been on the boards of storytelling organizations that, during crisis-level discussions, forgot the power of storytelling – especially when tempers heat up and the stakes are high.

Further, when coaching storytellers on their publicity, I often find them using the bullet-point, glossy brochure copy that is so prevalent everywhere else in the world – instead of telling stories about their work.

Oklahoma has reminded me that, when we need to persuade or inform, we can do so respectfully and powerfully by using story.

We can use story this way in our storytelling organizations, in our life at home, in our work – and in our marketing, to help potential listeners get an imagined experience of what it would be like to be the beneficiary of our storytelling.

Keeping the Lessons, Even as I Return East

These seven lessons have changed my telling and my way of presenting myself as a storyteller to the world. I am eager to return to my beloved Massachusetts and to establish yet another new life there – a life that will be enriched by my Oklahoma experiences.

I hope you, too, can find your “inner Oklahoma” and let it guide you in becoming ever more the storyteller that you alone are capable of becoming.

One Day, They Arrest You…

Can you imagine being unjustly accused of murder? At first, you might not be too worried, sure that the truth will set you free. If you’re poor, you might not care whether the court appoints you a good lawyer, because you know you were home with your friends at the time of the murder.

Surely this is a big mistake, and will be over quickly, right?

That’s what Gary Drinkard thought. But then his own half-sister, facing charges in an unrelated robbery, made a plea deal: she’d testify against Gary in exchange for dismissal of all charges against her. Her common-law husband, also implicated in the robbery, joined her in fingering Gary.

Then Gary’s lawyers failed to even interview the people Gary was with at the time of the murder. They failed to call to the stand the physicians who would have testified that Gary’s back injury made it impossible for him to have committed the murder. Worse, the police themselves bruised Gary and then exhibited his bruises as proof that Gary had fought with the murder victim.

Before he knew it, Gary was on death row, awaiting execution.

Gary Was One of the Lucky Ones

Naturally, Gary appealed. For years, the verdict against him was upheld.

Then, fortunately for Gary, some excellent volunteer lawyers joined his case. They won an appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court. He was granted a new trial on the basis of prosecutorial misconduct. He won his case. After 6 years in prison, he was released.

The Story Isn’t Over…

There are 130 people in the U.S. who, like Gary, were released after being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. (Others weren’t so lucky. Their exonerating evidence came to light only after they were executed.)

You might think, “Well, once you’re released, the story is over. You get back to your life.”

For many of those 130, you’d be wrong. Their years in prison not only disrupted their lives, they disrupted their faith in society. Many are so angry that they have turned to drink or drugs. Others have lost all that mattered to them before their wrongful conviction. The life they might “get back to” no longer exists; or they can no longer live it.

But Gary isn’t one of those. Gary has channelled his outrage into a cause. And his chief weapon in this fight is his story.

Helping Them Tell Their Stories

Last weekend, I travelled to Philadelphia to coach Gary and seven others like him on telling their stories. Even though they have all done public speaking (through the organization Witness to Innocence, http://www.witnesstoinnocence.org) I gave them the key tools I give any beginning (or advanced) storytellers: tools for imagining, remembering, organizing and adapting their stories.

Like others I have worked with, these eight exonerees took well to what I taught. A little suspicious at first (after what happened to them, they’re suspicious of everyone!) they left feeling empowered to make their stories fit their cause, their purposes, and each unique audience.

A Brotherhood of Heroes

But for me, this group was unlike any other. As I see it, these men are truly heroes. They have travelled past the boundaries of ordinary life, conquered a dragon of injustice, and returned to offer us the elixir of their truth.

This group was founded to bring their stories to the world. But it has also functioned to bring the exonerees to each other. And they are desperate to know each other.

Can you imagine? You’ve experienced a waking, multi-year nightmare. Wouldn’t you be thirsty to meet others who had experienced something similar? These men have gained solace and strength from being brought together.

To me, these men are heroes in another way: they are fiercely protective of each other. They have formed a brotherhood of death row exonerees, a brotherhood of witnesses to injustice. A brotherhood of storytellers.

The Power Made Visible

I felt honored to be allowed to enter their circle for a weekend. As I left, I could tell they were excited about applying what I had taught them, in order to tell their stories even more effectively.

Even more, I had experienced the power of storytelling, yet again. I saw how it helped these men individually. I also saw how it helped them form a brotherhood and maintain their focus in the wake of their suffering. And I heard how it was changing society.

Their strength seemed to infect me. I felt even more determined to share the transformative power of well-told stories.

How about you? Are there stories that you have lived, witnessed, or heard, that the world needs to hear?

Like these witnesses to innocence, are you willing to put yourself out there, so that your stories can strengthen others?

And are there others like you to join with, so that, through your stories, you can help each other become ever more determined and bold?

2) DO YOU WANT TO LEARN WHAT I TAUGHT THEM?

If you’re interested in the basic storytelling principles, tools, and exercises I taught last weekend (see the article above), they are contained in the Beginning Storytelling Toolkit.

And the Beginning Storytelling Toolkit is now available, for the first time, in hard-copy form: eight CDs plus a notebook of handouts and transcriptions.

Read the details at http://www.storydynamics.com/begin

Yours in storytelling,

Doug