Contents

1) A HUGE OPPORTUNITY FOR STORYTELLERS

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

• Subscribe to the Storytelling Games Newsletter (free)

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!

• Subscribe to the Storytelling Games Newsletter (free)

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

Contents

1) A LONG-NIGHT’S STORY: “KEEPING HOPE ALIVE”

2) A WINTER BLESSING FOR STORYTELLERS

1) A LONG-NIGHT’S STORY: “KEEPING HOPE ALIVE”

Here’s a story for the times when the darkness can seem unassailable. (And a blessing based on the story.)

Keeping Hope Alive

The great Jewish mystic known as the Baal Shem Tov had discovered four great holy secrets. In order to keep hope alive in the world, he went to a sacred place in the forest, built an ancient, special fire, said a holy prayer, and spoke the long-forgotten true pronunciation of the most holy name of God.

He built an ancient, special fire...

It was enough. Hope stayed alive for the next generation.

The Baal Shem Tov’s successor, though, did not know the true pronunciation of the most holy name of God. But, when the time came, he went to the place in the forest, built the fire, and spoke the prayer. It was enough. Hope stayed alive for the next generation.

In the next generation, the successor to the successor only knew enough to go to the sacred place in the forest and build the ancient fire. But it was enough; hope stayed alive.

In the following generation, the next successor could only go to the place in the forest and pray that this last, single secret would be enough. It was! Hope stayed alive.

But in the next generation, the final secret was lost. So the successor in this generation sat in his own armchair and told the story.

Just telling the story was enough. Hope stayed alive in the next generation – and the next and the next, as long as the story is told.

2) A WINTER BLESSING FOR STORYTELLERS

May you be blessed with stories of hope.

And may you be blessed to tell the stories – even in the winter darkness – that keep hope alive for those around you.

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.

Starting in the 1870s, lumber companies clear-cut the easily accessible white pine stands in the area. Destructive tree harvesting continued until the 1960s, when the forest was so weakened that it had lost much of its ability to regenerate. The rugged land was unsuited for agriculture, so some of the beautiful lake shores were sold to developers, leaving 70,000 acres of dubious commercial value.

Peter Schleifenbaum listens to a question

Sound like a familiar eco-tragedy? Here’s where the story takes a surprising turn.

In 1963, a German businessman bought the abused forest land. Over the next years, he was forced to sell off more lakefront to pay taxes on the property. But in 1987, his son, Peter Schleifenbaum, graduated with a doctorate in forestry – and moved from Germany to Haliburton Forest to try to save the forest.

Support the work that supports the forest?

How do you get enough income to manage a forest that has been stripped of nearly all saleable trees? How do you raise money to care for a natural environment without harming the environment in the process?

Schleifenbaum took this problem as his life’s work. His first attempts were fairly conventional: make the forest available for recreation, including fishing, hunting, and snowmobiling.

Pam and Doug on the canopy walkway

But what would make Haliburton Forest stand out? What could make an experience there unlike any other, and therefore valuable enough to command the kind of admission prices that would be needed to finance 70,000 acres of forest restoration?

One of his projects was the world’s longest canopy walkway through a remote stand of old-growth white pine. Another was a meditative tour below the surface of a mountain lake – in a one-of-a-kind tourist submarine. Still another was a 15-acre Wolf Park, containing a resident, non-tame pack of timber wolves, and a Wolf Center featuring a one-way-mirror viewing-room from which to observe the wolves.

Wolf seen from the viewing room into the Wolf Park

Still other projects are an astronomical observatory (at the right times of the year, the Northern Lights are visible there), ElderHostels, mountain bike trails, and sled-dogging.

Peter has also forged relationships with forest researchers at the University of Toronto. At this point, Haliburton Forest is eagerly sought after as a research site, because so much baseline data has already been gathered there.

The Problem of the Sawmill

One of the problems any forest faces is that lumber is sold to sawmills. Sawmills, in turn, demand the highest grade, healthy trees, which are actually essential to the forest. So Peter built his own sawmill, optimized for processing low-grade trees – which are the trees that the forest needs removed.

One of the normally unsaleable trees is eastern hemlock, in spite of its resistance to decay and insects. To create a market for those trees, Peter began Eco-Log Building Concepts, using eastern hemlock logs that are felled only when they come due for harvesting and are skidded by horse to avoid truck-damage to the forest.

In this way, Peter says, the forest no longer works for the sawmill; the sawmill works for the forest.

What Storytellers Can Learn from Haliburton Forest

As storytellers, we have problems similar to Peter Schleifenbaum’s:

• How can we make enough money to support our art?
• How can we “monetize” our art without harming it?
• How can we make our storytelling stand out in a forest of storytellers?
• How can we survive when the book and record publishers, the concert promoters, and all the rest have their own agendas?

From Peter’s story, therefore, we can learn lessons to help us support our art and our selves:

1. Take an active approach to solving the problem of earning a living, no matter how unfair or hopeless your situation seems at first.

2. Apply as much creativity to earning a living as you do to your art – and continue to apply it for decades. Search continuously for new ways to use your assets/skills.

Looking down from the canopy platform

3. Try things that no one else is doing; learn from others, but be willing to go beyond them.

4. Create multiple streams of income. Don’t rely exclusively on any one market, product, or approach.

5. Accept that failures are a part of the process. (Peter’s submarine has been in dry-dock for two years, due to disputes with local regulators. I heard some people complain that a submarine was a crazy idea, but Peter seems to understand that, in order to find lots of things that work, you need to try some that don’t pan out.)

6. If you are not well served by those who earn money from your efforts (like the sawmill owners), create alternatives that work for you.

7. Learn enough about business to succeed, but always work in service to your passion.

What about you? What lessons do you draw from Peter’s story? What ideas does it give you about your storytelling work?

Of all the books written on storytelling so far (4,469 hits on Amazon.com), 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!

Why Is This Good News?

Since storytelling was rediscovered in the 1970′s, the world has seen storytelling as something quaint and harmless. For decades, you and I have tried to correct that view by asserting that storytelling is timely and powerful. Sometimes it felt as though we were whispering into a hurricane.

But now that an author took the time to research and write an entire book against storytelling, our years of work must have had an effect.

Well, Not Exactly Storytelling

If you’re a performer, don’t worry; Salmon isn’t aiming at you. Rather, he is concerned about applied storytelling: storytelling that is used to persuade, sell, or educate. In particular, he rails against the use of stories and storytelling in business and politics – in seven chapters with titles like these:

• The New “Fiction Economy” (about manipulating workers emotionally so they can, in turn, fool customers)
• Turning Politics Into a Story (about the role of narrative in recent presidential politics in the U.S.)
• Telling War Stories (about video-game-like, immersive military training) and
• The Propaganda Empire (Karl Rove, Fox News, the internet and more.)

Salmon sees all these trends as combining to form a frightening replacement of a reality-based world with a series of “shared fictions” (p.67).

His claim is that storytelling puts emotions ahead of rational thought, elevates entertaining fiction over hard reality, and replaces political skill with “fictional competence.”

Blaming the Hammer?

Like all tools, storytelling can be used for good or bad, to illuminate the nature of reality or to conceal it.

Salmon, to be sure, puts his finger on some disturbing uses of storytelling. But he focuses blame on the tool, not on those using it or even on those of us who allow ourselves to be manipulated.

Too Simple a Story

I would have loved a good book about the dangers of mis-applied storytelling. But this isn’t it.

Salmon writes like a muck-raking journalist. He is good at assembling many examples of storytelling-as-deception and assembling them into an alarming montage. But he has clearly spent more time compiling examples than constructing a penetrating analysis of them – or suggesting a reasonable corrective for society.

To make matters worse, his writing is frequently lacking in the logic that he glorifies. He often uses examples that don’t support his conclusions. He uses emotional language in an apparent attempt to prejudice the reader against his targets. (For example, people in favor of storytelling are usually called “gurus,” whereas those critical of it are “researchers.”)

He doesn’t appear to have noticed that the emphasis during the Industrial Age on “discipline” and “rational argument” has failed to make us either disciplined or rational – never mind relaxed or peaceful. Most importantly, he doesn’t seem to notice that storytelling’s increased presence is in part a reaction to the suppression of important aspects of the human experience.

Altogether, his implied story has more in common with tabloid journalism than with reasoned analysis: “We are being manipulated by unseen forces that are taking over the world. Be afraid!”

Our First Critic. Hooray!

If Salmons’s book were well-argued and well-interpreted, it might be a valuable addition to the literature about storytelling.

As it is, it’s a source of references to story and storytelling in contemporary culture. (Did you know that one of President George W. Bush’s speeches used the word ‘story’ 10 times?) That’s the best recommendation I can give it.

We deserve better critics. I hope that the coming years produce them.

But for now, let’s celebrate: we are powerful enough to be on a critic’s radar. At last, storytelling has come of age!

Two centuries later, in 1820, Daniel Webster, the U.S. orator and stateman (a great storyteller!) spoke at a gathering where five grains of corn were placed on each plate, as a remembrance.

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

Share Your Wealth of Stories

I trust that you have enough to eat today. But no matter how bare your larder, you have a feast of stories to share. If you are fortunate enough to have friends and family to share them with, then you are truly wealthy!

Please ask others for their experiences today, both of hardship and of gratitude; please listen well. And then take a turn to share your own.

If you wish, you could place five kernels of corn on each plate, and ask each person present at your meal today to remember five losses or worries, and five moments for which they are grateful. I promise this will draw you all closer.

A Scarcity of Stories?

What keeps people from telling their stories? Here are the top three items mentioned on my subscribers’ survey results:

• Lack of confidence.
• Fear of not holding listeners’ attention.
• Don’t know how to learn a story (for the uninitiated, this often takes the form “I don’t know how to memorize a story.”)

Over the years, I have constructed audio lessons, supplemented by exercises and more, to help storytellers at all levels tell stories with a minimum of effort and a maximum of effectiveness.

These include:

1. The Beginning Storytelling Toolkit (a beginner’s guide to learning to command attention through storytelling)
2. The Storytelling Workshop in a Box (all the key information for intermediate and advanced tellers)
3. The Image Riding Toolkit (how to create vivid stories by connecting with your mind’s ability to think in images)

My Thanksgiving Gift

For the first time this year, you can get all three of the in-depth collections listed above, in the most convenient possible form: pre-installed on a new iPod.

I call an iPod with story instruction installed on it a Story-Pod.

I sell the Story-Pod all year round. But for Thanksgiving, I offer a discount, and add $301 worth of gifts.

The gifts go only to the first 12 to order.

Please check them out:

http://www.story-pod.com

And let me know how your Thanksgiving stories go, by adding a comment on this article, below.