Story Dynamics – Stories

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for students in US public schools emphasize thinking skills. But they lack something essential that storytellers can help provide. We are in the enviable position of knowing things that teachers are desperate to learn!

This makes storytellers like pickaxe-sellers in a gold rush. We have meaning-related tools that teachers desparately need.

Much of what is hard for us as storytellers and artists stems from how important—and dangerous—arts can be.

For all the difficulties, we live in 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.

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

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

Could it be something about the mysterious ways that stories pass through us, conveying meanings of which we may be unaware?

A brief story about keeping hope alive, and a winter blessing for storytellers.

We are moving day by day toward the longest night of the year (in the Northern hemisphere.)

I wonder: Are different kinds of stories required for this phase of our yearly cycle? As you approach the longest night of the year, what stories are you hungry for? And where can we find such stories?

The true comeback story of an abused forest in Ontario yields lessons for storytellers. What Peter Schleifenbaum has figured out about managing a forest ecologically teaches us 7 lessons about taking charge of our own futures.

Of all the books written about storytelling, can you think of a single one that opposes storytelling?

But now we have Christian Salmon’s “Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind,” published in March, 2010.

Salmon doesn’t just hate storytelling. He thinks storytelling is dangerous and disruptive to modern civilization.

That’s the best news I’ve heard in our decades of trying to spread the word about storytelling. Our movement is finally big enough to be someone’s target.

Here at my home near Boston, we just had our first major snowstorm. The nights are long now and the days are cold.

Given how dark and cold it feels, it’s easy to ignore the solstice, which occurred without fanfare yesterday at 5:45 pm. Nothing flashy happened. It was dark before 5:45; it was dark afterward. And, after all, the solstice happens every year.

But the solstice can be a reminder that events go in cycles, undulating like waves. And story can be a powerful reminder…

Imagining is the most important storytelling skill. If you cannot imagine a story, then you have nothing to communicate.

The words of a story are much less important: they are just a medium through which you stimulate others to imagine. In this sense, words are like a fireplace: the container that shapes the fire and makes it efficient, not the fuel that burns.

But, in another sense, imagining is the act that puts you in contact with the unknown…

Two years after their first Thanksgiving feast, the Pilgrims faced starvation, living for a time on a ration of five kernels of grain a day.

Gratitude is sweeter when we remember times of scarcity. And scarcity is sweeter when we season it with gratitude for what we do have.

Stories are, themselves, a form of wealth. And telling our stories – both of scarcity and especially of gratitude – is a form of wealth no one can take from us.