This week NPR presented a two-part piece on “Our Storied Lives.” The text of the story (part 1 and part 2), written by Jon Hamilton, engagingly juxtaposes a preview of an upcoming book by Antonio Damasio with the story of a storyteller trying to make it in Los Angeles after many delays in reaching for his dreams.

The Damasio book, Self Comes to Mind, Hamilton writes, is about “how our sense of story influences our lives.” Hamilton characterizes the views of Damasio, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California: “… although we may not be aware of it, each of us thinks of our life as if it were a story in the making. … [W]e use stories to gain a perspective on our own lives.”

The way Hamilton structured the piece inspired me to juxtapose my life/story with Damasio’s research about story. Not because I think my story is fascinating but because I think this kind of analysis is useful for anyone, especially anyone interested in how story influences our lives. Here are some of Damasio’s findings (in italics) and my responses.

… we frequently model our own life stories on a story we’ve seen on stage or at the movies.

I don’t think so in my case. My favorite movies are achingly romantic, and I definitely wanted romance in my life, but I don’t believe I modeled my life after any one fictional story. Possibly the biggest pop-culture influence of my youth was comic strips. Perhaps I did model my story a bit after the life of Brenda Starr, the beautiful reporter whose story was filled with romance, intrigue, and adventure. But she was a working gal, and more specifically, a writer. That’s what I wanted to be.

My parents’ stories, however, influenced me more than those of pop culture. I decided early on to be a writer, in large part because my father was a writer. But I had a parallel ambition: I was rather obsessed with being a mother. Also the idea of being pregnant. As a child, I voraciously and precociously read reams of material about pregnancy and parenting, writing the story in my head of what a wonderful mother I would be. In 1964 (I think), the Ladies Home Journal ran a story about the Fischer quintuplets of Aberdeen, SD. This was back before fertility drugs, so quints were very rare; in fact, the Fischers were the first American quints to survive. I cannot tell you how many times I read that article.

My mothering fantasies were fed by my perception that my mother was a perfect mom completely dedicated to mothering. It wasn’t until I had children of my own that I learned my mother was not living the story she wanted; one day, she loudly and emphatically exclaimed that she had never wanted children. She had played the role of devoted mother to the hilt because she considered it her job, and she always gave 100 percent to her jobs. But the story she really wanted probably involved horses and being outdoors in nature. The saddest part is that I turned out much the same way. I believed my story would be one of fulfilling and nurturing motherhood but was shocked to discover — as much as I adore my children and do not in any way regret having them — that I was much more fulfilled by the Brenda Starr side of my life than by the Fischer quints side.

Setbacks aren’t unique to humans, but … our response to them probably is. We see them as changing the plot line of the life story we thought we were writing, and we cope by coming up with a new narrative.

The biggest setback in my life, the one that shaped my story for many years, was discovering — at the last possible moment — that my father had used my college money to start a PR firm specializing in petroleum companies — during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Needless to say, that venture was doomed to failure. I had been accepted at three great colleges, including Boston University, my dream school. But my dad told me there was no money to send me. I had grown up never having one shred of doubt that I would go to college. I had earned good grades so I would be accepted at a good school. My parents’ expectation for me was that I would go to college. If I had known they wouldn’t be able to finance my education, I would have approached going to college differently. And that’s what I ended up doing. I rewrote the narrative so that I alone was responsible for my education. I worked for a year after high school to save money, apply to cheaper state schools, and line up loans, grants, and scholarships. But my college self-sufficiency plan derailed after just over a year at a state university. I dropped out for reasons I didn’t understand then, but that I now recognize as depression. I’m sure my money struggles played a role, but they were not the entire cause. And I had to rewrite my story again. During the next 18 years, I worked my way up through a series of retail and clerical jobs, always looking for a chance to go back to school. I made a couple of false starts but managed to sabotage myself. I finally finished my undergrad degree at age 39. My setback story is not unlike that of Shaun Parker, the protagonist of Hamilton’s story on NPR. He, too, postponed his goal for nearly 20 years. Both of our stories turned out the way we hoped. But I know I can’t help wondering whether my story would have contained more success and prosperity if I had finished college at a more traditional age.

Humans never stop looking ahead to something better. … Because we know our own life is a story, we are able to look ahead to the part we haven’t lived yet and start writing those chapters.

Today, my next-chapter story is influenced by my mother, but in the opposite way from the way it shaped the story of my younger years. Hers is the story I don’t want. I love my mother dearly, but I do not want to be the lonely, bitter, pessimistic bigot she is. She has given to everyone else at the expense of living her own story. As selfish as I sometimes feel, I can’t be like that.

I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time. Life is very, very good. But, yes, I still have chapters to write, including literal ones. I have at least a couple more books in me, including a novel. I would love my story to include teaching again. I want to pursue creative avenues like crafts projects. And perhaps play a small role in guiding my children to fulfilling stories for their lives.

Humans have a unique awareness that our lives are stories that begin when we’re born and end when we die. And because we know we’re going to die, … we are not satisfied with merely surviving day to day. We want our personal story to mean something.

I want to be remembered. Many aspects of my story have pointed to the meaning I have sought, this desire to be a memory. It’s why I’ve written books, though none (yet) timeless enough to be propel my memory for very long after my death. I have left many artifacts — writing and more — all over the Internet in the hope of leaving a bit of a legacy. I was a teacher. Some of my students from 15 years ago remember me, and I hope some will after I’m gone.

How has your life been influenced by awareness that you are living your story?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Gabriella Evelina Britth, who offers expertise in concepts, design, and storytelling, has declared in her Twitter profile that she plans to produce “50 tweets in 5 days. A Storytelling Experiment where I will share myself n [sic] my resume. Manifesto: Honest. Ironic. Sarcastic.” (I’m not sure if that’s meant to be “in my resume,” “and my resume,” or something else.) She started tweeting two days ago.

Britth had posted nearly two dozen tweets at the time of this writing. Most are creative ways of showing glimpses of her story, her lifestream, if you will. The first tweet, for example, is on PinintheMap and shows where in Stockholm, Sweden, Britth was born. In other tweets, she links to her LinkedIn profile, samples of her work, pictures of schools she’s attended and companies at which she’s worked, a video of a song she likes to sing while in the car, snapshots, a flowchart of how she likes to work (pictured), the Facebook profile of fictional Hollywood agent Ari Gold, a Lady Gaga video with art direction Britth admires, a blog she admires, a Survey Monkey quiz about herself, a Google street-view map of where she lives now, and a clip from Pineapple Express, the movie she considers the funniest ever.

The tweeted story/resume is clever and whimsical, and it does provide a good glimpse of Britth’s story. I’m not sure it work for employment (at least not in the U.S.) because it contains a few mildly risque elements.

I’d love to see job-seekers adopt some of Britth’s ideas for artifacts to link to as they seek to tell their stories. But tweeting the story doesn’t do much for me. I’d like to see some of these elements integrated into some other form of online resume.

[Thanks to Gregg Morris for alerting me to this tweeted resume.]

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A few weeks ago, Gregg Morris shared with me a Twitter recruiting video. The blogger who initially posted it, Michael Batistich, had called it a “great piece of storytelling… [that] makes me want to work there.”

Maybe I’m getting more discriminating about my definition of storytelling, but this video didn’t quite reach the level of storytelling for me. It’s more about symbols and metaphors. In the video, various functional teams use costumes and props to depict what they do. We can see that the Twitter employees all look young, diverse, and casual. They look like they’re having a good time. But I’d call this video “proto-storytelling,” rather than storytelling.

As Marguerite Granat said (I quoted here recently here), “It’s not the best employer that attracts the most candidates; it’s the one who knows how to tell a story through its employment brand.”

Twitter gets that. Even if the story is more of a proto-story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I recently recapped the “business novels” I’ve covered here on A Storied Career and then received an e-mail from Omar Adams with a link to 50 All-Time Best Business Novels.

I thus realized that perhaps I need to more specifically define the kind of business novel I’ve written about here. I write about novels that employ a story, parable, or fable to convey business principles or lessons. Of course, there are plenty of novels in business settings, but most aren’t explicitly trying to teach a lesson. On the list Omar shared with me, “my” kind of business novel is called “Business ‘Parable’ Novels, written by well-known business experts and consultants, aim to illustrate principles of success.” Interestingly, not one of the titles in this category has appeared in my previous entries about business novels.

Other list categories include Tales From The 18th and 19th Century; Novels With Philosophical Perspective; Stories of Personal Crisis, Disillusionment, and Sometimes Redemption; Business Novels With A Touch of Romance; and Business Novels With Mystery and Suspense. All worthy categories and examples of storytelling, but perhaps not applied storytelling.

Here are the parable-type novels from the list Omar shared:

The Goal Written in a how-to, piecemeal style wrapped in narrative fiction, Eliyahu Goldratt’s novel is able to delineate his philosophy through the story of a man who tries to build his marriage and business.

It’s Not Luck This is the sequel to Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal. Alex Rojo, the main character, must figure out the most profitable way to sell his companies while trying to manage his personal life.

Getting Naked Patrick Lencioni tells the story of fictitious consultant Jack Bauer. He learns to use the “naked service”model for his business, which changes his life forever.

Critical Chain Eliyahu Goldratt continues his series of business novels, building on the Theory of Constraints. This novel again questions the theories of conventional management.

Necessary but not Sufficient This is another novel by Eliyahu Goldratt about the Theory of Constraints. It discusses many of the pressures and challenges of high-tech companies.

The Deadline Consultant Tom DeMarco uses creativity with deep insight to deliver this story commenting on the principles that affect software development. Mr. Tompkins, the main character, divides his company into eighteen teams and force them to compete with each other and a deadline.

Selling the Wheel Business novel bestseller Jeff Cox uses a narrative approach to give advice on how to best sell a company to customers. Told from the point of view of Max, this story tells how four different types of business men help him reach success.

The Small Business Billionaire Frank Mills is struggling with his restaurant when a robbery takes place. Fortunately, a young millionaire comes along to give him advice.

The Cure The widget company Essential is on the verge of losing clients because of incompatibility between its employees. Will the three main players join forces just in time?

Under the Gun Jack Griffin is a young entrepreneur satiated with the sudden success of his company. However, will the same things that brought about his success bring consequences later down the line?

The Time Seller This hilarious quick read talks about selling time in a bottle.

Miller’s Bolt Jim Manion is a good worker, but he doesn’t seem to be appreciated by his co-workers. Fortunately, Peter is willing to help save his career.

Jack’s Notebook Jack Huber’s daydreams about starting his own business as a professional photographer. Unfortunately, he’s not too experienced–until a mentor comes along.

The Venture Michael DiGabriel’s video production group has been downsized. They decide to build their own production company while learning a lot on the way.

The Squeeze This novel tells about the struggle of a small family-owned Midwest manufacturer. Fortunately, he learns about sustainability.

Meanwhile, I came across yet another one, The Ginger Bread Man, “the story of a young man who leaves a faceless job in a cubicle to pursue the personal craft of baking. He faces several everyday challenges that help him follow his heart and grow into a life he truly enjoys. At its root the book is about learning who you are and finding joy in a career that suits your skills and personality. … The Ginger Bread Man is about our quest to live up to that creativity in our daily lives. … The book also contains several discussion questions suitable for book clubs and classroom use.” (The several typos in the book’s Web page, corrected here, concern me a bit about the book.)

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Thought it would be nice to have a daily lit quote as an entry:

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Here’s a little widget with the tweets of all the story folks I follow on Twitter on my @AStoriedCareer account. It’s supposed to have a shell and a nice header. Who knows why it doesn’t.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I recently read of someone’s passion for writing, and it gave me pause. Writing is integral to my existence, but do I have a passion for it? When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a writer. I have wanted to be a writer since third grade, when I wrote a story that was published in the school paper. The fact that my father was a writer was a key influence. Since I moved out of the retail and clerical realm, virtually all my jobs have had writing as a key element. I’ve written eight books and countless articles. But do I have a passion for writing?

I would have to say that my relationship with writing goes beyond passion. It’s simply part of my identity, part of who I am, something that is in my DNA. I often say writing is like breathing for me; it’s just something I have to do.

And that brings me to time management. Ever since our big move to Washington state, I’ve had a barometer of how “busy” I am. It’s an e-mail list I belong to that contains queries by reporters. Expert sources can publicize and promote their expertise by responding to appropriate queries. I receive e-mails three times a day from this list. Since we left Florida, I have deleted every one of these e-mails without reading it.

As I wrote about here, I’ve also often felt too busy to give this blog my best effort. I could rationalize by saying I come nowhere near making a living from this blog; the money I earn from the advertising it carries amounts to pocket change. Yet, if I truly had my druthers, I would spend the bulk of my days researching material for and writing for this blog.

My best friend is an expert at time management, and her favorite rule on this subject is “Do what you love. Don’t do what you hate.” What could comprise better time management than spending our time doing what we’re passionate about and avoiding what doesn’t make us happy?

Still, living in a rural woodland is pretty labor-intensive. My husband does a lot more work here than I do simply because he has skills I don’t have. But I have plenty of regular chores, as well as house-finishing activities that are within my skillset. The beauty of nature here also beckons, saying, “Come outside. Enjoy the beauty. Go for a bike ride or hike.”

In the end though, applied storytelling is my passion. Writing about it goes beyond passion. I must constantly strive to balance the have-tos of my life with the activities that stoke my passions. Today, I rededicate myself to doing what I love.

What’s your passion, and do you spend as much time on it as you want to?

PS: NPR recently ran a story on why writers write.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Every time I come across someone’s suggested story formula, I ask myself whether the structure could be applied in job-search stories. Most of the time, they can, and I’ve written about many of them.

Here’s another one posed by Marc Stoiber on MediaPost, along with my italicized comments on how each step could apply to a story told in, say, a job interview:

Foreboding — a vague sense that something isn’t right: You begin to sense a problem in your workplace that needs attention.

Triggering event — a moment that causes us to act: The problem comes to a head, and you decide to take action.

Epiphany — the curtains draw back and we see clearly: You figure out the best action to take.

Reconciliation — we act to bring reality in line with our vision: You take action to solve the problem.

Transformation — we grow based on the experience: You improve your workplace and develop yourself as a a valuable contributor.

Return and responsibility — we bring our new wisdom to daily life: You apply what you learned as a result of solving this problem to your everyday work life.

Meanwhile, on Glassdoor.com in an article called The Myth Of Transferable Skills, Liz Ryan complains about job-seekers who submit meaningless lists of their “transferable skills” in job-search communications (resumes, cover letters, applications, and more). “People are not actually ambulatory sets of disembodied, abstract skills,” Ryan writes. “Describing ourselves as packages of skills is about the worst way imaginable to get a hiring manager excited about us.”

Ryan protests that hiring managers have no reason to trust job-seekers when they say they have certain transferable skills. A hiring manager’s concept of a given skill could be very different from that of the candidate claiming to possess that skill. The hiring manager has no way of know how a claimed skill will manifest itself in diverse situations. Lists of skills a cliched. “Everyone claims the same ten, done-to-death skills (Communication, Negotiation, Teamwork, Organizational, Writing, Leadership, Technical, Administrative, Customer Service and Process Improvement),” she writes. “We won’t make our mark sounding like every other skill-toting job seeker in the pack.” Perhaps worst of all, lists of transferable skills lack context.

The solution to all these issues, of course, is to tell stories that put transferable skills in context and describe how the job-seeker deployed them. “We need powerful stories to convey our power, battle-tested and concrete, to the person who’s reading our resume,” Ryan says. Further:

Stories, in contrast to skills listings, are loaded with context. We’ll tell the reader about that business dragon we slew (a cost overrun in Production, or a drop-off in attendance at our teleseminars) with plenty of detail about the situation we faced as we brought that dragon down. That’s when our job-search pitch has power! … Trumpeting our fabulousness sans context, proof or relevance is a waste of time. Use your stories, instead, to make it clear how you’ve made a difference for your employers in the past.

I talk about transferable-skills stories and give examples in my book, Tell Me About Yourself, starting here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

OK, I will admit I’m posting this entry in part because the article it references features my wonderful daughter (pictured).

My colleague Barbara Safani compiled this article about the trials and tribulations of being part of an airline flight crew after the incident in which JetBlue flight attendant Stephen Slater decided he’d had enough abuse from passengers and quit his job by sliding down the emergency-exit slide (around the same time as the hoax-but-still-a-good-story video in which the young woman supposedly quit her job via whiteboard).

The stories in Barb’s article illustrate how the frustrations of airline work could provoke a crew member into drastic actions like Slater’s.

My daughter’s situation is a little different because she doesn’t work for an airline but for a private plane owner. I still crack up over her story of “babysitting” expensive caviar for her former boss.

A related posting is this one from Gawker with readers’ most spectacular “I quit” stories.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Fiction is not atop my interests here on A Storied Career, but today, I’m dipping into two fiction-based story projects that have implications for storytelling outside fiction. Both of these are also mashups of fiction and social media.

Erik Hare has launched a fiction project called Mythnology, which he explains here. Here are some excerpts:

Many kinds of truth are best explored through fiction. … Mythnology is set up to be a novel written in blog form. … Each chapter, after the first three, is available only by subscription. I hope to develop a community of subscribers commenting and asking questions which help guide this process through to its completion. This should be a lot of fun as the process of writing a novel (really a novella) becomes a kind of performance art, as the ancient art of storytelling has long been. … The title Mythnology is a combination of Technology and Mythology. One is based on a system of faith where the other has a core of truth in it. … I happen to believe that myths, or stories that illuminate a grain of truth at the core of them, are the strongest connections between people. If a strong society is all about connections between people and people or people and ideas, our faith in technology is certainly going to test us in ways we probably do not understand very well yet. The ancient art of storytelling, or the crafting of myths, is how we usually fill the gaps.

Role Pages is “a fictional, in-character, role-playing social network where you can be anyone that you can imagine.” Here’s how the site works:

Our members include vampires, werewolves, demons, psychics, aliens, and elves. Sign up for an account, and tell the story of your own unique character by uploading pictures, videos, and written accounts of their adventures. You can also role play with our eclectic members, and participate in the creation of elaborate multi-player interactive stories.

Exploring fictional approaches can be an effective way to work through our storied realities.

This blog’s comment function has been temporarily disabled. If you’d like to comment while I’m working to restore it, please e-mail me.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I know that I have extolled the webinar-presenting prowess of Terrence Gargiulo on several occasions, but I really can’t express often enough how well he puts on a webinar.

That goes double when he teams up with Shawn Callahan of Australia’s Anecdote consulting firm. The two had presented an excellent webinar about a year ago, so I was eager to “attend” their most recent production, It’s a Marathon Not Magic: Deliberate Practice Approach to Developing Business Storytelling Skills.

I’ve talked before about what makes Terrence’s webinars so special, and this one last week enables me to add to the list:

• Terrence is wonderful about welcoming folks and chatting with them as they enter the webinar. Shawn noted that Terrence is “the master of saying g’day to everyone.”
• He (and his co-presenters) always stick strictly to the planned schedule, never failing to end on time — but this time, Terrence and Shawn invited folks to stick around if they wanted to continue the conversation.
• And “conversation” is key because Terrence and Shawn ran this webinar as more of a give-and-take discussion instead of a purely didactic presentation. They also involved participants in a couple of polls during the session. In one, a third of webinar participants felt it was not hard to notice stories in events and other aspects of everyday life. Asked how often they use a book or movie story to illustrate a point, participant responses were pretty evenly distributed among possible answers.

The webinar offered a number of valuable suggestions — not just by the presenters, but also by participants — for enhancing storytelling skills. Here are some of them (and of course, you can see all of them in the video of the webinar, embedded below):

• Noting that Ben Franklin rewrote his essays and then wrote them again in verse, the presenters suggested practice, repetition, and soliciting feedback are excellent ways to polish storytelling skills.
• Starting a story with a “relevance statement” (Why would you want to hear this story?) is an effective technique.
• Find a story in a book or on the Web. Work out its point and pinpoint the aspects of the story that make it work.
• Try telling the story of a book or movie in varying lengths of time.
• Jot down stories or notes about stories as you encounter them in real life. Participants suggested the applications Evernote and Whrrl as excellent tools for this kind of note-taking. (I wrote about Whrrl, a “storytelling application for the web and mobile that lets people share and remember their real-world stories as they happen,” here. I’ve gotten the sense from at least one tweeter that the app has changed since I originally wrote about it.) Writing stories down, of course, is more for clarifying them in your mind than for memorizing.
• Terrence offers a “circle” technique (best absorbed by viewing the webinar video), which prompted a participant to suggest mind-mapping as a good way to work out stories.
• Practice techniques are also listed here.
• A fabulous resource for finding appropriate stories in Anecdote’s StoryFinder.
• Care and intention, the presenters noted, make your story believable. You can open the doorway to your story by posing a question to the audience.

Meanwhile, Steve Denning has posted a related 3-minute video about how anyone can tell a story in business. “If we all do it, we can learn to do it better,” he says, echoing Shawn’s and Terrence’s theme. (The audio is a little hard to pick up in the video.)

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

When I was preparing to enter high school, my father told me I had to take Latin. I was not enthusiastic about the idea. I wanted to take French. My father and I compromised. I would take two years of Latin.

My Latin teacher, as it turned out, was fresh out of college and in his first year of teaching. He was only nine years older than I was (even now in his 60s, he still has a boyish look, as you can see in the photo at right).

And he was a fabulous teacher. Energetic, interesting, and passionate about his subject matter, he brought the allegedly dead language vibrantly to life. I immersed myself in studying Latin with Mr. Rhody, a.k.a. “Magister,” the Latin word for teacher. I was a good student in most of my subjects, but I worked especially hard in Latin and earned excellent grades. As you may have guessed by now, my compromise with my dad proved unnecessary because I eagerly took four years of Latin (I did also take French, but that experience was far less memorable). I enhanced my immersion in ancient Roman culture through involvement in Latin Club and two spring-break trips to Italy. At the end of the four years, I won the Latin Prize, an accomplishment I have always valued more than most (even though I kind of thought my cousin Vicki deserved it more than I did; she earned straight A’s for all four years of Latin, where I had gotten a B in the first grading period because I had mono).

Even after the years of high school, college, and graduate school, David Rhody remains — by far — my favorite teacher and one of my greatest influences.

Not that many students take Latin today, and many schools don’t even offer it. (I would have invoked the same requirement for my two children that my father did for me, but Latin was not offered at their highschool.) That’s a shame. As my Magister taught me, 60 percent of the English language comes from Latin. Mr. Rhody assigned us to keep “derivative notebooks” to catalog the English words derived from Latin. My four years of Latin were an enormous boon to my vocabulary and my life as a writer. A knowledge of Latin helps a person figure out the meaning not only of unfamiliar English words, but also words in any of the Romance languages.

But I digress … I have kept in touch with Mr. Rhody over the (too many) years since high school, and last year, we became friends on Facebook. He has been retired for several years now, but I like to think his legacy lives on just as vibrantly in the classroom (jokingly referred to as the “Latin wing” of our high school) since his successor is one of his students.

A few weeks ago, I received a Facebook friend request from Larry Smith, co-founder of SMITH Magazine, which I’ve written about many times in this space. Larry had noticed we had a mutual friend — David Rhody. Turns out Larry had had the Magister experience 15 years after I had.

It’s fascinating to speculate about whether anything about our mutual high-school or Latin experience led us both to storytelling. In fact, Larry told me Latin class did influence him, noting that he couldn’t remember where his passport was but could vividly remember Hannibal crossing the Alps on elephants. For me, The Aeneid mesmerized me with its storytelling by the poet Vergil.

I have a good chance to learn more about Larry’s Latin-storytelling connection as he has agreed to participate in a Q&A soon.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Earlier this year, Ning, the site that allowed anyone to create a social network at no cost, announced that it was ending its free service. Administrators (known as Network Creators) of roughly 300,000 Ning networks were faced with either paying for their networks or moving them to different platforms. (See details here.)

I belong to several Ning groups and have just begun to receive notices from administrators announcing their plans to deal with this transition.

John Caddell, Network Creator of The Mistake Bank, announced he was shutting the site down.

Shawn Callahan, Network Creator of Worldwide Story Work, asked members to contribute to the cost of the network. I have not yet learned if member response has reached the levels Shawn hopes for. UPDATE: Shawn writes: “… we had a very good response from members donating more than enough money to keep the site going. We have 500+ members, so it only needs a small percentage to help out to keep the whole thing going. Very similar to the amount of conversation you get in a community of practice. It would be interesting to see if the people who donate are also the people who speak.”

Kevin Cordi of The Storybox Project, told members he was considering either seeking grant funding or would find another platform for the network.

It’s unfortunate that Ning’s business model (primarily supported by Google ads) eventually put the company in such straits that these kinds of choices have become necessary. I always felt Ning was an excellent resource for those seeking to start their own online networks.

I hope we don’t lose more storytelling networks as a result of the transition.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Not that I get a huge number of comments anyway, but just wanted to let regular readers know this blog underwent a huge spam attack on Aug. 22, so I disabled the comment function.

Trying to get it back but having difficulty. If you are champing at the bit to comment, thanks for your patience.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I have to admit, at this time of heated debate over religious freedom, that my knowledge of Islam is virtually nonexistent. Although I unconditionally support religious freedom, I admit to feeling slightly uneasy about Muslims.

Knowledge is, of course, the way to eradicate uneasiness and fear.

In a highly thoughtful essay, The Power of Storytelling: Creating a New Future for American Muslims, Wajahat Ali talks about the exalted position of storytelling and storytellers in early Muslim culture. Throughout history, of course, stories have “inform[ed] and influence[d] a cultural citizenry of its values and identity.”

But in the US today, stories of Islam and Muslims have devolved into “daily stories of vile stereotyping, fear-mongering, and hysteria,” prompting Ali to predict, “If these stories persist with such simplistic, one-dimensional caricatures and formulaic narratives, then the predictable third act can only end in tragedy.”

The answer, Ali suggests, is “finally telling our own stories in our own voices and using art and storytelling as a means of healing and education.”

The second half of Ali’s essay offers a number of resources in which Muslims are telling their stories. Writes Ali:

These stories will ultimately influence the greater American narrative reminding fellow citizens that no group is a cultural monolith worthy of being painted with only black and white colors, and that even Islam is capable of benefitting America with its unique spiritual and cultural gifts.

I, for one, would like to make an effort to learn more about Islam through its stories and those of its followers.

Ali’s piece is superb. I recommend it.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.