In the blog The Mythology of Humanity, “jessaslade” recently mused about the purpose of storytelling and listed: To achieve immortality, of deeds and for the storyteller To explain otherwise senseless phenomena To entertain/educate To moralize/terrify To beta test new versions of reality To exorcise* the imagination To land a movie … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: August 2008
The End of a Story … and a Beginning
In 1991, my mother came to visit my family in Tallahassee. The first words out of her mouth were, “Elly had her baby!” An outside observer might have thought she was talking about a mutual family friend or a relative. But she was talking about Elly Patterson, protagonist and centerpiece … Continue reading
Identifying Your “Only-ness” as a Job-Seeker
Rebecca Ruby wrote recently about the importance to nonprofit organizations of differentiating themselves, finding their “only-ness” (I think uniqueness is a better term). As often happens, I couldn’t help adapting Ruby’s formula for job-seekers (sorry it’s a little blurry; it didn’t reduce as well as I would have liked): Then … Continue reading
And One More “About” Story I Really Like
I’ve been writing recently about telling organizational stories in “About Us” pages, but, of course, “About Me” pages, seen most often in blogs, serve a similar purpose and come off best when told in story form (which I realize this blog’s “About Kathy Hansen” really doesn’t. Must fix that). In … Continue reading
Weekly Wordle
Here’s this week’s A Storied Career word/tag cloud from Wordle.net:
Scholar Says Black America Needs a New Narrative
The cover article of the current issue of American Scholar, published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, carries the headline “The End of the Black American Narrative,” with this subhead: A new century calls for new stories grounded in the present, leaving behind the painful history of slavery and its … Continue reading
How’s This for a Narrative Device?
No sooner had blogger “Nien” written these words: … social media is all about the person and telling the their story. I think it’d be a trip either adapt a novel that’s told through Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Flicker, blogs and whatever or write an entirely new novel using the same … Continue reading
A Family Mystery Story
My mother’s side of my family has long been tantalized by the mystery of what became of my great-grandfather, Walter Scott Fenimore, who disappeared after leaving for work in Beverly, NJ, without a trace in September of 1913, leaving my great-grandmother, Katharine Hathaway Fenimore, after whom I am named, and … Continue reading
About Us, About You, and Storytelling Beyond Integrity
The other day, I blogged about storytelling on About Us pages. Following on that discussion, Jim Randall of The Raconteur, describes a process he takes clients though to “create enterprise through stories.” He writes: To be successful we need to connect with, inform and engage those we serve and those … Continue reading
Svend-Erik Engh’s Tell a Story
Danish story practitioner Svend-Erik Engh, who will be featured in a Q&A interview in A Storied Career this fall, has written a fine little 145-page book, Tell a Story: Be Heard, Be Understood, Create Interaction, that is both written and designed in a reader-friendly manner. The book is full of … Continue reading