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 deal

(*Is that really “exorcise,” or it it “exercise?”)

It would be easy to add many items to this list, but my tendency is to go the opposite way and reduce the purposes of storytelling to just three:

• Storytelling for change
• Storytelling for identity construction
• Storytelling for sensemaking and learning

I argue that it is possible to fit any kind of storytelling into one of these three categories. Coming soon is an essay in which I defend these as the definitive storytelling categories.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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 of the newspaper comic strip For Better or For Worse. So familiar and so much a part of our lives had the Patterson family become — not only to our family but to families all over the world — that it seemed just as natural to join in celebrating the birth of April Patterson as it did to mourn the death of the Patterson’s family dog, Farley, at a different point in the strip’s history.

Today the daily storyline of the Patterson family comes to end as Canadian cartoonist and creator of For Better of For Worse, Lynn Johnston, begins a new phase. I believe she had planned to retire altogether and the strip would run in repeats much like the late Charles Schulz’s Peanuts Classics. But Johnston instead decided to start from the beginning, re-telling the story of the Patterson family using her original, more simple drawing style (as she explains here, the current style had become too complex and required additional illustrators). She wanted to simplify. Here’s another article that explains what Johnston is doing.

As I sit here writing this, I feel tears welling up. I will truly miss the ongoing story, finding out what happens in the lives of the Pattersons. [Update: Johnston generously filled this need to know “what happens next” in her Sunday strip on Aug. 31, 2008.] On the other hand, I don’t think I started reading the strip until the two older children, Michael and Elizabeth, were preteens, so I’m looking forward to learning more of the backstory.

I also want to thank Lynn Johnston for all the years of pleasure and peak emotional moments this compelling, engrossing, warm, family story has brought me and my family. I grew up on serialized comic strips — Brenda Starr, Winnie Winkle, Gasoline Alley, Rex Morgan, MD, Mary Worth — another early indication that stories are everything to me. Not many of them are still around, or at least they are not widely syndicated, and I miss them.

It is truly amazing how much of a touching, involving story can be conveyed in four panels in a daily newspaper. Thank you, Patterson Family, and thank you, Lynn.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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 (in a Venn diagram she credits to Jim Collins of BBMG), Ruby says, think about how these three circles intersect. I’ve again adapted the diagram for the job-seeker:

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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 the meantime, the About Me page of the blog an undone calm made me smile. The author is ACloudman, and I think the A stands for Anne.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Here’s this week’s A Storied Career word/tag cloud from Wordle.net:

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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 consequences

(Not surprisingly, Barack Obama is pictured on the cover and on the Web page carrying the article, and it thus seems appropriate to publish this entry on the day Obama accepts the nomination of his party for President of the United States).

Here is how author Charles Johnson, the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professor for Excellence in English at the University of Washington, Seattle, characterizes the current black American narrative:

It is a very old narrative, one we all know quite well, and it is a tool we use, consciously or unconsciously, to interpret or to make sense of everything that has happened to black people in this country since the arrival of the first 20 Africans at the Jamestown colony in 1619. A good story always has a meaning (and sometimes layers of meaning); it also has an epistemological mission: namely, to show us something. It is an effort to make the best sense we can of the human experience, and I believe that we base our lives, actions, and judgments as often on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (even when they are less than empirically sound or verifiable) as we do on the severe rigor of reason. This unique black American narrative, which emphasizes the experience of victimization, is quietly in the background of every conversation we have about black people, even when it is not fully articulated or expressed. It is our starting point, our agreed-upon premise, our most important presupposition for dialogues about black America.

Johnson begins his argument by analyzing just what a story is, asking:

• How do we shape one?
• How many different forms can it take?
• What do stories tell us about our world?
• What details are necessary, and which ones are unimportant for telling it well?
• Does the story work, technically?
• And, if so, then, what does it say?

These are the questions he tells his students they must ask of a story, adding that a story must offer “a conflict that is clearly presented, one that we care about, a dilemma or disequilibrium for the protagonist that we, as readers, emotionally identify with.”

Does the black American story meet the criteria? Yes, Johnson says, it “beautifully embodies all these narrative virtues.”

Johnson builds his argument by summarizing the horrors of slavery and subsequent oppression. He calls the Civil Rights Movement “the most important and transformative domestic event in American history” after the Civil War. In sum, “The conflict of this story is first slavery, then segregation and legal disenfranchisement. The meaning of the story is group victimization, and every black person is the story’s protagonist.”

Johnson invokes the words of W.E.B. DuBois and the success of today’s prominent African-Americans (such as Obama and Oprah) to “challenge, culturally and politically, an old group narrative that fails at the beginning of this new century to capture even a fraction of our rich diversity and heterogeneity.” He critiques Louis Farrakhan and discusses a scholarly debacle in which a 19th Century black woman writer turned out to be white, “a cautionary tale for scholars and an example of how our theories, our explanatory models, and the stories we tell ourselves can blind us to the obvious, leading us to see in matters of race only what we want to see based on our desires and political agendas.”

I am vastly oversimplifying here and drastically summarizing when I’m longing to paste the whole article into this space. Bottom line: It’s an important article not only for what it says about Black Americans but for what its says about story and narrative.

And what narrative should replace the existing one? Johnson writes:

In the 21st century, we need new and better stories, new concepts, and new vocabularies and grammar based not on the past but on the dangerous, exciting, and unexplored present, with the understanding that each is, at best, a provisional reading of reality, a single phenomenological profile that one day is likely to be revised, if not completely overturned. These will be narratives that do not claim to be absolute truth, but instead more humbly present themselves as a very tentative thesis that must be tested every day in the depths of our own experience and by all the reliable evidence we have available, as limited as that might be. … These will be narratives of individuals, not groups. And is this not exactly what Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of when he hoped a day would come when men and women were judged not by the color of their skin, but instead by their individual deeds and actions, and the content of their character?

Certainly Obama’s acceptance tonight of the presidential nomination (on the 45th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech) is a triumph of the individual.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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 devices…

… than the above appeared on the Chicago Tribune’s headcandy, A Modern Day Romance (using Facebook’s News Feed feature as a narrative device).

Of course, about 5 billion commenters jumped on the headcandy poster to point out that the Facebook News Feed is in reverse chrono order — with the most recent items appearing first, but it was a cool idea.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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 her four children. My grandfather, H. Haines Fenimore, being the only male offspring, was left to support the family.

Speculation about Walter Scott Fenimore’s disappearance has suggested he was an alcoholic and that perhaps he ran off to Alaska, maybe to prospect for gold.

My mother’s family has always known little of the circumstances of my great-grandfather’s disappearance until recently when my sister Robin began to do some digging and found the newspaper clipping shown here (his middle initial was mistakenly reported as “F.”) that relates that $500 in bail money also disappeared with my great-grandfather. I had never known he has a justice of the peace, similar to a judge of today.

A subsequent clipping from the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sept. 24, some two weeks after his disappearance, noted that he had been the “committing magistrate” for the city of Beverly, and “the records of important cases that came before his court are said to be much complicated because of his continued absence.” The clipping mentions a sensational case involving the shooting of a National Guardsman, allegedly by a chauffeur who cited the attentions of the Guardsman to the chauffeur’s wife. It was the Guardsman’s bail money that disappeared with my great-grandfather.

Could his disappearance have been related to that case or another case before him as a judge? Perhaps the story will continue to be unraveled.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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 who contribute to our success. Engage them in developing ideas and initiatives, building relationships and facilitating our progress.

An organization’s story, Randall contends, consists of:

• Who you are
• What you do
• How you do it
• What you want to be
• Your value proposition
• Your commitment

I would suggest that all the same points can apply to the job-seeker. Going through the bullets above and articulating your response to each will serve you well as a job candidate, especially in preparation for interviewing.

Randall goes on to explain that to become engaged in your enterprise, people want to know:

• Why where we are today is not acceptable
• Why were we are going is more promising
• How are we going to get there
• You know who they are
• You know what they care
• You care about them

Again, these points can be adapted to the job-seeker to a great extent. In researching an employer before you go into an interview, you can develop responses about taking the organization to a more promising place and how you will get there. You can also demonstrate your understanding of the organization’s constituents — employees and customers.

Randall’s site also contains his “story so far” and a section with “Stories that demonstrate operating beyond integrity,” although it contains only one story at this point.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

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 Svend-Erik’s stories and describes his journey to becoming a storyteller and organizational-storytelling practitioner. It is also loaded with practical advice on how to tell all sorts of stories.

The book can be ordered here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

As the 29th Olympiad comes to a close, I note an interesting trend. With some exceptions, most athletes have been narrating their own stories in the video “packages” on NBC’s telecast. No voiceover narration from an omniscient sportscaster. The athletes who’ve done it seem very camera-savvy and well-spoken.

I find it a refreshing trend. It peels back a layer of mediation and minimizes the maudlin quality that my best friend has always complained about.

Here’s an example, though maybe not the best one (but you can search for others at the same page).

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I get very frustrated when Web sites either have no About Us page or have About Us pages that really reveal nothing. A classic case in point of a tell-nothing About Us page is Twitter’s. Now, I know what Twitter is, what it does. But I’d like the perspective of the folks who run it. How did it start? Where did the idea come from? What it Twitter’s story?

At the blog Buzz Canuck, Sean Moffitt writes:

“Search high and low and if you scan 100 websites, you’d be challenged to find one good story about the company or brand it supports. Even the good ones in my recent search, can hide themselves behind the trivial stuff. A good story should be there smack dab on the front page attracting you like a mosquito to the nightlight.”

The blog of Caterina, co-founder of Flickr (whose About page, by the way, is a fun bulleted list), turned me onto the story of Plum (“Plum is a free online service that lets you collect and share all of the cool, interesting, and important stuff in your digital life. We started Plum because we think that collecting and sharing on the web is really fun and useful — but much too difficult to do.”)

Curiously, the Plum story isn’t on its About Us page but is in its blog (by Hans Peter):

Plum was born because making it easier for people to capture their knowledge and share it with their communities could help make the world a better, more connected place.

For me, a personal story illustrates this. In 1999, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and my siblings and I (at the time living in Anchorage, San Francisco, New York, and Oslo) sought information and insight. We used the web for research and email to share our findings with each other. Our research led us to become informed and armed with questions and even some suggestions as we discussed his condition and care with the doctors and our parents. I firmly believe that the information and knowledge we shared helped both extend my dad’s life and maximize the quality of his last days with us.

Two years later, a good friend emailed me. Her boyfriend’s dad had been diagnosed with the same cancer, and she remembered that we had done tons of research and wondered if I would share it with her. I pulled out my tweezers and went through my old email, but sadly was only able to recover a small amount of the information we had gathered. I would gladly have shared the collected information and resources we had pulled together with anyone who had an interest in the subject. But other than hand-crafting a personal web site to collect the links, the emails, and the additional notes we found and shared with each other, there was no simple way for me to do so. Our cumulative knowledge and information was lost.

The next time someone emails me to ask “do you still have the research you did on this topic?” I want to be able to simply point them to the collected information. One reason I jumped back into the startup world is because with Plum, such collected knowledge and information will be easy to make and keep accessible. We’re still evolving and refining the service, working to make it simpler than ever to collect and share all kinds of knowledge and information that we care about, stumble across, or need. I think this has the power to change the way we use the net, and I hope it will change the world, if even just a little bit.

The blog Geekpreneur has a nice, comprehensive piece on telling your organization’s story on your About us page, stressing that the story should stick in reader’s minds and “leave important messages in the listener’s memory.”

Somewhere in all these pieces about organizations telling their stories, I came across the Squidoo lens Arrowsmith Printing: Entreprenuership in Small Town Iowa in Mid /Century, which tells the wonderful, detailed story — complete with video — of a small family business. The profile of author Margo Arrowsmith provides a glimpse at the mentality that created this fascinating lens:

I was born into a small business, I believe that small business and entrepreneurs are the backbone of America and what has made us great. They are what made us great and will save us in these unsure times, when corporations are outsources to any place where the labor is cheap.

James Chartrand wrote in the article The Savvy Copywriter’s Advantage: Creative Storytelling on Copyblogger:

Entire websites can be stories too. The About Us page is a great place to start. The Home page of any site tells a story too (and if it doesn’t, it probably isn’t doing very well in the conversion department).

Each page leads a reader from one story to another:

• Who these people are.
• How these people can help.
• Why you need these people.
• Why you should buy.

Finally from a post at Jew Point 0 are some good questions for organizations to ask themselves as they attempt to tell their stories in About Us pages or otherwise:

• In what ways does your online presence depict your organization’s story?
• How does it reflect the diversity of your membership and its experiences?
• What are the values, beliefs, and rituals projected in your online narrative?
• How would someone new to your community — a new “reader” — interpret your organization’s story?
• And in what ways can we facilitate connecting these stories to the larger, ever expanding, intricately interwoven community?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Not long ago, I blogged about a community storytelling initiative in Oakland, CA. Commenter Tim Enerata pointed out that lots of place-based, community-based storytelling projects are thriving out there, some of which are listed at The Center for Digital Storytelling’s StoryMapping Stories page.

I’ve also just come across Denver’s Five Two Eight O, described as being “about you, your life, and your neighborhood in the context of Denver’s larger community, its intersecting histories, development, challenges and successes.” Further:

Five Two Eight O draws on personal stories, the arts and dialogue to bring people together to identify and explore what it is to live together in this city, this neighborhood, this time- as ourselves, with our own experiences, among these particular people.

You’re probably curious as to what Five Two Eight O stands for:

Five Two Eight O stands for: five events (one in Berkeley-Regis; one in Lowry; one in the Santa Fe Arts District and one in the Five Points area). The fifth and final event is a culminating evening of art and performance created and developed from the four preceding neighborhood events - a two-act celebration of Denver’s community and communities. Eight stories will be presented in that final evening — stories told and heard this summer, when Five Two Eight O comes to your neighborhood. Dialogue circles (O) will be an integral part of every event.

The stories of some of the folks behind this project can be accessed from its site and are quite fascinating.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Here’s this week’s A Storied Career word/tag cloud from Wordle.net, produced during Tropical Storm Fay after four straight days of rain:

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Experience Corps, an award-winning national program, engages people over 55 in meeting their communities’ greatest challenges. Today, in 21 cities across the country, 2,000 Experience Corps members tutor and mentor elementary school students, help teachers in the classroom, and lead after-school enrichment activities. Independent research shows that Experience Corps boosts student academic performance, helps schools and youth-serving organizations become more successful, and enhances the well-being of the older adults in the process.

The Experience Corps site provides the opportunity for Experience Corps members, educators, and families to share their stories about the program. Here’s a sample:

I had a child in my class who had very low self confidence. He listened when he heard me say, “Now you’re cooking,” to children who were doing very well. When the other children heard this they paid more attention to how they did their work. When we test on math and reading and grade their paper they will say to me “Ms. G, am I cooking?” It just warms my heart to know that a little word such as cooking is making a difference in our children’s education Now this child is cooking, too!

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The folks at ethos 3 Communications specialize in using stories in presentations, as evidenced by their blog, Presentation Revolution: Revolutionizing Presentations Through Storytelling.

They also offer a nifty 22-page book, StoryBored: How to Improve Your Presentations Through Storytelling, as a free download. The booklet has a fun layout/design and lots of great ideas. Here’s what the ethos 3 folks say about it:

Check out the Ethos3 eBook on how to improve your presentations with storytelling. It will take your presentation to the next level. It has all the tips, tricks, and hacks you need to succeed with your next presentation.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Willy Franzen blogs about entry-level jobs at One Day, One Job in a folksy, story-like way, often providing access to the employer’s own story, such as through video. From the blog’s About page:

Every day we take a look at one employer and the jobs that they are offering for recent college graduates. We scour both online and offline media for information on jobs that you may never think to look for. Too much job seeker attention goes to the top handful of companies that hire at the entry level. We want to open your eyes to the thousands of opportunities available to you, one day at a time.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I have long been intrigued with authors who use story to write books in innovative ways (I almost said “novel” ways). I’m interested in business novels, business fables, like Steve Denning’s Squirrel, Inc. and Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese?, and some of the others that appear on the sidebar of this blog.

A new entry is Edge! A Leadership Story.

Here’s what the book’s Web site says about its creation:

In May of 2006, Bea Fields approached Corey Blake with an idea. She was recognized as a pioneer in her industry, but she needed a vehicle to really shake people up and challenge them to set higher standards for themselves, their businesses and their lives. She also knew that the way to achieve her goal was to use a story approach that would engage and entertain her readers as much as it would educate them. With a longstanding background in storytelling and developing exceptional content, Corey brought aboard Eva Silva Travers, an accomplished writer, and the three worked over the course of two years to bring you Edge! A Leadership Story.

One of the co-authors, Corey Blake, gives a quick plot summary in the clip below:

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In addition to the upcoming Q&As planned for A Storied Career, I’m researching the idea of doing blog carnivals.

Please e-mail me if you might be interested in participating.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

From a terrific list of 250 Things To Improve Your Presentations at Siam English come several items related to storytelling:

• Tell a story, make a point.
• Tell another story, make another point.
• Create a story bank. Each time something interesting happens — big or small — write it down. You never know where you can use it.
• Quoting someone you know gives you the opportunity to tell a story about how the quote came about. Twice the fun for your audience!
• A powerful story has four elements — it makes you think, makes you feel, makes you laugh and most importantly, it delivers a message that can change your life.
• What’s one story that only YOU can tell? Spend time creating that signature story.
• Tell half a story and the proceed with your main message. Make sure your message ties in well with that story and don’t forget to tell the rest of your story at the end of your speech. You won’t want to leave your audience high and dry, will you?
• Tell them enough to whet their appetite but do not reveal the big secret yet. Here’s one you can try: Tell them a story of how a man from the streets became rich and famous overnight without giving them the specifics.
• Smile. Smile when you are walking up to the stage. Smile when you make a mistake. Smile when your audience laughs at your story.
• One story per point. The story doesn’t have to be long. Just make sure it underscores your point.
• Variety keeps your audience on their toes. Find different ways to deliver your content. It could be a story, a videoclip, a demonstration, a pair share, an activity, a guest share, quotes, numbers, graphs, visuals, and the list goes on.
• Stories are only an asset to your speech if you bring your audience into your story through a “U”-centric question. For example, “Have YOU ever stepped on a scale and were forced to face reality?” And then you proceed with your story.
• The above is much better than telling your audience blatantly that you have a story to tell. Also avoid: “Oh, and this remind me of a story…” Equally lame.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Colette Ellis of InStep Consulting for Nonprofit Central and Craig’s List Foundation recorded the 18-minute podcast, Once Upon a Time: Create Stories to Engage Your Supporters. It provides tips for nonprofit leaders to create engaging stories that will motivate potential supporters and volunteers (including a model for writing the story). While it is geared toward public-sector organizations, other business leaders may also benefit from the ideas and suggestions.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

This week’s Wordle.net word/tag cloud based on A Storied Career.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Both Two Men Talking and the related site narativ are rather spare Web sites into which one must do a bit of digging to see what they’re all about.

A press release on Two Men Talking explains the origins:

Murray Nossel and Paul Browde met in 1974 in Johannesburg when they were 12-year-old rival schoolmates and were challenged by a teacher to tell each other a story. Decades later, they met by chance in a New York street and the story has continued, but has become the tale of their own experiences and individual and shared lives. Murray is now an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and Paul a psychiatrist, and their conversation is frank, unsentimental and without boundaries. Within a broadly chronological framework, TWO MEN TALKING examines their shared experiences growing up white, Jewish, gay and privileged under the apartheid regime. Over the many years of performing this show, this unscripted piece has dealt with difficult issues including harassment, homophobia, racism and AIDS, each of which has deeply touched the lives of the two men. Each performance is absolutely unique as the way they tell the story changes in a continually transforming and developing piece. The combination of theatre and real life and has inspired audience members to tell stories of their own, and to better value their own relationships.

Murray apparently now leads story workshops and seminars with special guest Paul under the name narativ, described this way on the narativ site:

Discover your Life Story as a source of creative expression. Clearly and confidently communicate who you are + what you do. In an amazingly short time you will learn how to master your own storytelling ability and be taught how to use that skill to succeed in any part of your life, including business and socially.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

It has been awhile (March) since Part 2 of this series. The convergence of social media and storytelling is hugely fascinating to me, but something prevents me from blogging more about it. Maybe I just want to do it justice.

Although myriad examples of storytelling in social media can be found out there, Heekya is the first one I’ve seen that blatantly states its connection to storytelling. It calls itself a social storytelling platform and claims it will “change the way you create, share, and discover stories.”

Heekya wants to be known as the Wikipedia for stories.

Kristen Nicole of Mashable writes of Heekya:

Currently in private beta, a new service called Heekya is joining this larger development trend [the trend of approaching social media’s potential] with a story creation tool that doesn’t require direct social interaction but taps into the web community as a whole for the rendering of a given project, which can be created and recreated over and over again, by any number of users. In the video below, Heekya gives the example of a friend’s wedding, which is documented by the bride and groom and filled with photos, text and videos.

For the collaborative bit, guests from the wedding can take the Heekya story created by the bride and groom, and add their anecdotes, images, and videos as well. From this stance, a story can be recreated from several different vantage points, and distributed through multiple channels as a custom narrative by each person. Heekya seems rather simple to use, and its import and sharing capabilities will be key to its success—the easier it is for any given editor to pull from their existing content from across the Web, the more accessible Heekya becomes to a very wide range of users.

Over at threeminds, Marta Strickland asks: “Will ‘Social Storytelling’ Hit The Mainstream? She compares Heekya with previous attempts at collaborative storytelling, Penguin Books’ We Tell Stories project and The L Word’s partnership with FanLib to sponsor a contest in which fans submitted scenes. Strickland suggests Heekya may become a more compelling example of exploring storytelling as it relates to the social web.

Here’s a video about Heekya (OK, if the video doesn’t work, go to the source):
Heekya: Wikipedia for Stories from DavidAdewumi on Vimeo.

Nipping at the heels of the Heekya debut is word that Roxio is launching an online storytelling platform.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Malcolm Gladwell’s next book apparently will be about the challenge of hiring in the modern world. Amazon lists his next book as Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t, which doesn’t sound exactly like the topic he talked about at the recent New Yorker Stories from the Near Future Conference. Kotke.org reports that the topic is “the future of the workplace with subtopics of education and genius,” which sounds a bit more like what Gladwell talked about at the New Yorker conference. In any case, the book comes out in November, as Gladwell affirms in the video.

You can see and hear his story-rich New Yorker presentation here or download the conference free from iTunes.

He uses sports-recruiting analogies to illustrate what he calls “the mismatch problem,” the use of poor, non-predictive, hard, outdated, simplistic, objective criteria and tests to supposedly hire the right people. Only subjective on-the-job evaluation of performance actually works — largely because the demands of the workplace have so dramatically changed. We want certainty in hiring, so we uses these objective measures — but they don’t work, Gladwell asserts.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

My friend Steve Rothberg of CollegeRecruiter.com calls this the “best recruiting video.” He says: “After watching this video, the only candidates who aren’t more likely to want to work for Whirlpool are those without souls.”

What he doesn’t say is why.

Because it tells a story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’m not a huge sports fan — I like a little college football and Major League Baseball — but I’ve always been a bit of an Olympics junkie.

I have come to realize that it’s largely the stories that attract me. When ABC used to cover the Olympics, they come up with the “Up close and personal” tagline for the stories they told about the athletes. My best friend denounces these stories as maudlin, but they are my favorite part.

Yes, there will always be stories that the media will overhype and over-dramatize, but many others are authentically heart-tugging, creating peak emotional experiences.

China itself promises to provide a remarkable story for the current Olympics. The spectacular opening ceremony told the story of China’s history and culture, so unknown to most of us in the West. The NBC commentators noted the cinematic quality of the ceremony. (I note that they must have used the word “story” at least two dozen times).

I know I will long remember the spectacle of athlete Li Ning “flying” up to the top of the stadium and appearing to lope along its upper rim as he prepared to light the cauldron.

Let the games … and the stories … begin.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I came across the utterly charming and uplifting site Tera’s Wish, subtitled “a free informational resource about Creativity.”

The Tera’s Wish web site, the site says, “is about exploring the energy within each of us that fulfills and makes us most happy.”

There are a heck of lot tools on this site for exploring that energy.

The story of site founder Tera Leigh is inspiring in itself.

She offers many articles in her articles section.

For those into journaling, lifestory writing, blogging, and storytelling, the most resource-rich section is “The Workshop,” offering material on journaling prompts, illustrated journaling, starting a creative mentoring group, idea catcher, visual goal journals, goal journaling, life map collages, shine time journaling, writing your life story, and many more topics.

Tera also lists creativity-related websites and her own books and products.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Through this posting by Jonah Lehrer in the blog The Frontal Cortex, I learned of a wonderful commencement address (superb content, well delivered) given by Robert Krulwich at the 2008 Cal Tech graduation ceremony. (The address is in RealPlayer format and doesn’t actually occur until about 9 minutes and 15 seconds into the video; the early part is preamble and an intro by a member of Cal Tech’s board of trustees). Krulwich, correspondent for NPR’s Science Desk, reports on the intersections of science and technology with culture, politics and religion. The thrust of his Cal Tech address is that scientists need to tell their stories:

Because talking about science, telling science stories to regular folks like me and your parents, is not a trivial thing. Scientists need to tell stories to non-scientists because science stories have to compete with other stories about how the universe works and how it came to be….and some of those other stories, bible stories, movie stories, myths, can be very beautiful and very compelling. But to protect science and scientists - and this is not a gentle competition — you’ve got to get in there and tell yours.

Krulwich talks at length about Turkey, where good storytelling has popularized creationism. If scientists (and graduates from technical universities) use effective words, pictures, and metaphors in telling the stories of what they’re doing., Krulwich asserts, people won’t be as willing to accept the other stories (like creationism). Science stories won’t always win the day, he says, but the stories need to be told so there will at least be a tug-of-war between those stories and the others. Krulwich also notes that scientific experiments are in essence stories that may or may not be true — so scientists test these stories to discover the truth.

The address and Lehrer’s blog entry reminded me of another blog entry, this one about string-theorist and distinguished theoretical physicist Peter Freund, who writes stories about the way historical events affect scientists. The blog, Book Publishing News by BookCatcher.com, notes that Freund “packed his book, A Passion for Discovery, with stories about important 20th-century physicists and mathematicians.” (In his Exquisite Corpse online journal, Andrei Codrescu says the book comprises “a wonderful series of anecdotes about great physicists.”)

The blog entry goes on:

After he began writing A Passion for Discovery, Freund noticed certain narrative parallels between science and literature. “There are really three narrative flows in physics,” Freund said. “One is at the level of the individual paper.” He added most papers in physics are short stories, in which concepts, rather than human characters, undergo adventures. “In the end, they emerge changed, occasionally with new concepts being introduced and promises that we will return to them, which is like what they call a sequel or a spin-off in Hollywood.” The second narrative encompasses science as a whole. “Each time a really good paper is written, the older papers automatically all get rewritten,” Freund said. Undergraduates today can perform certain calculations in one line that in Sir Isaac Newton’s day would have required two pages. That’s because they know the mathematical descendants of Newton’s original work. The third narrative of science is the human story. Freund emphasizes this narrative in his book, “but it is always entwined with these other two stories of a given paper or of the subject as a whole,” he said.

Returning to the Lehrer blog posting, a commenter suggested that Krulwich’s speech reminded him of Lehrer’s own book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, about which reviewer Joseph LeDoux of New York University writes:

Taking a group of artists — a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists — Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain’s malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language — a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. It’s the ultimate tale of art trumping science. More broadly, Lehrer shows that there’s a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and art knows this better than science does. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.

The reviewer’s words, “Lehrer shows that there’s a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and art knows this better than science does” suggest that stories foster this understanding better than does measurement.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

This week’s Wordle.net word/tag cloud based on A Storied Career.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Marci Alboher, who authors the Shifting Careers blog for the New York Times has been running a series in which she "glean[s] useful career skills from attending more arts and cultural events."

Giving a shout-out to A Storied Career as evidence that it's "well established that being a good storyteller is a useful skill in careers," Alboher attended a "Talking Stick" show and discusses "techniques they use to tell good stories."

Check them out here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In a review on the Minnesota Artists (MNartists.org), art critic Ann Klefstad reflects on the “victorious return of story to art, a triumph evidenced by the narrative-rich work of the four McKnight Fellows on view at the MCAD Gallery” (which runs for just a few more days, though Aug. 10).

Klefstad asserts that “stories really haven’t been respectable in art around here lately—let’s say, from the mid-1980s until sometime last year, when everyone simultaneously got sick of ambition-made-visible as an art strategy.”

When she says “around here,” I wonder if Klefstad means Minnesota. Have stories been respectable in art elsewhere, but not that state?

As an appreciator of art, I always enjoy looking for the story in it, whether the artist intended it or not. Here are some snippets of Klefstad’s review:

[Stacey] Davidson [first picture on left] makes dolls, sculpts these characters, and then paints pictures of them. And the artwork is this second-order product, the painting. The process feels like the double level of making you find in the nouveau roman and in the air outside of the book itself — the making both by author and by reader that such a book demands. You become conscious of the intervention of the fabulist, but the fictions she paints are more credible than many real lives, maybe in part because you, the viewer, are actually collaborating with her to make the story.

In [Andrea] Carlson’s world [2nd from left], the everyday reality we experience most of the time is charged with the breathing life of spirit, which maybe you could think of as “meaning” if meaning were alive.

[Amy] DiGennaro has a huge resonator for her images [3rd from left] — and that’s the way story works. It always plays out before the crowded hall of all the other stories that people have told. And the more of them you know, the more every molecule of the one you’re hearing is electrified and, yes, illuminated.

[Megan] Vossler’s recent work is more difficult to take in. All of Our Moments Are Stolen [far right] is an attempt to tell a story that the storyteller has not mastered — hasn’t lived. The need to fake it, to gloss over the crucial unknown detail, to resort to generic gestures of abjection — is clear in this array of human beings grubbing around in a cul-de-sac of broken wood and crumbled rocks.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The August issue of O magazine offers "O's Memoir Feast," eight "riveting true stories" introduced with these words:

Tell me a story. Tell me your story. ... Okay, talk to me, tell me who you really are. This is what we feel when we sit down to read a memoir. We have a craving for connection, an urge to share a confidence. We want an insider's glimpse of someone else's life. ... some contemporary memoirists such as Kathryn Harrison, Geoffrey Wolff, and Augusten Burroughs have bared startling family secrets, but a memoir can as often be a story carved from a quiet, ordinary life: a personal history reconstructed from memory and infused with meaning...

1. Write two pages of something you can't deny.
2. Write two pages of what got left behind.
3. Write two pages of something you wrote or did that you no longer understand.
4. Write two pages of apologizing for something you didn't do.
5. Write two pages about a physical characteristic you are proud to have inherited or passed on.
6. Write two pages of what you had to have.
7. Write two pages of humiliating exposure.
8. Write two pages about a time when you felt compassion unexpectedly.
9. Write two pages of what you have too much of.
10. Write two pages of when you knew you were in trouble.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Daryn Kagan’s online community features a daily Web cast of stories that “Show the World What is Possible.” The idea behind these stories is inspiration and triumph of the human spirit. Of course, all the stories are archived on the site and can be browsed under these categories: Animals, Artists, Business, Celebrities, For Charity, Heroism, Kids, Love, Over 60, Overcoming Obstacles, Sports, and World Events.

A former CNN anchor, Kagan devised a way to upload a quality video daily to her site without spending a dime, as she explains in this video.

Kagan is always looking for people to tell their stories of what’s possible, and she has written a book, What’s Possible: 50 True Stories of People Who Dared To Dream They Could Make a Difference. And who better to tell about the book than Kagan herself in another video.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Our Stories™ is a new project that encourages people to interview friends and loved ones, and to share these oral histories with others. Founding partners include UNICEF, One Laptop per Child, and Google. The idea is to create, share, and grow a global collection of personal stories collected through recorded audio interviews.

The project’s founders plan to gather stories from around the world because:

we believe that everyone will discover joy and inspiration in these many and varied voices, words, and lives.

Currently visitors can’t upload their own stories directly to the Our Stories site, but the plan is to have systems in place in the future to allow all people to upload their own audio interviews to share.

Visitors can listen to the current collection of stories on the Find a Story page.

What I like — since I love collecting story prompts — is the interview guides (these seem actually to be from StoryCorps) for “capturing the stories and lives of those around you.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I previously wrote about the “locative storytelling” project of a team of Northwestern University graduate students to study the intersection of journalism and emerging location-based technologies.

The team has concluded its project and presented its findings, which they summed up here in 12 points and have made available as a downloadable PDF.

I still don’t totally grok “LoJo” as Locative Journalism is nicknamed, but a couple of highlights resonated with me:

… locative stories delivered to portable devices has taught us that this kind of storytelling, at its best, can be extremely compelling… We live in an era of user-generated content and participation. Young adults, in particular, are used to sites that allow comments, rating or reviews, and sharing. Sites such as Yelp and YouTube have been distinguished and made popular by these qualities. Social networking sites such as Facebook have applications that allow for easier sharing of news stories and other content. … We are accustomed to using linear interfaces, such as alphabetized directories and timelines, to organize and access information. But our experiences in the real, physical and non-digitized world are usually not linear. They’re spatial, dynamic and intuitive.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Not long ago, USA Today ran a feature on memoirs about obsessions — such as the wife who vowed to have sex with her husband nightly for a year (somehow this one doesn’t seem all that obsessive to me), the couple that likes to vacation at sites related to atomic weaponry, the sportswriter, who, like George Plimpton, tried to play in the NFL, the guy who spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary, another who read the Encyclopedia Britannica and then spent a year “living Biblically.”

Also known, according to USA Today, as extreme writing, narrative nonfiction, immersion journalism, experiential journalism, radical self-improvement, these books make an appearance on my sidebar, though mostly in the form of anthologies, such as Dealing with Divas, about serving as a personal assistant to celebrities, and Who ARE You People?, about folks with just the type of obsessions the USA Today article describes.

It does seem like a pretty sweet concept for a book — find something wacky to do for some period of time and then write about about it.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

This week’s Wordle.net word/tag cloud based on A Storied Career.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.