I’ve highlighted Jonathan Harris’ technologically mind-blowing storytelling projects and platforms in this space before. Just learned of one I hadn’t checked out before, Universe. Here, you type in a word or phrase and see it depicted using the “metaphor of an interactive night sky.”

Your word or phrase is depicted in terms of nine “Stages,” titled: Stars, Shapes, Secrets, Stories, Statements, Snapshots, Superstars, Settings, and Time. In Harris’ words: “Stars presents a cryptic star field; Shapes causes constellation outlines to emerge; Secrets extracts the most salient single words and presents them to scale; Stories extracts the sagas and events; Statements extracts the things people said; Snapshots extracts images; Superstars extracts the people, places, companies, teams, and organizations; Time shows how the universe has evolved over hours, days, months, and years.”

In the illustration shown below right, I used the term “American Idol.” This piece is from the “Shapes stage,” though the shapes are pretty difficult to see here.

Harris explains the concept behind the project in his artist’s statement:

If we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? … Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone’s path through Universe is different, just as everyone’s path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife [the Daylife Platform, an, “intelligent content services platform” that “collects content from thousands of high-quality online sources, deeply analyzes and parses it, and creates a trove of data.”]

Whereas news is often presented as a series of unrelated static events, Universe strives to show the broader narrative that contains those events. The only way to begin to see the mythic nature of today’s world is to surface its connections, patterns, and themes. When this happens, we begin to see common threads — myths, really — twisting through the stream of information.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Flickr has a cool group project in which group members each day take a self portrait, tag it with “365days,” and submit it.

Below a small selection from a member with the screen name “everythingsjustjake.”

I love this idea. What a fantastic way to tell the story of a year and be able to look back at each photo and remember what you were experiencing and feeling on that day.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Along with publishing this week’s word cloud/tag cloud from Wordle based on A STORIED CAREER, I offer a reminder that Phase II of my Q&A series will commence Monday with a Q&A with Michael Margolis of Thirsty-Fish.

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Four interesting story-related finds that have come across my computer screen in the past few days:

Rooftop Confessions: I’ve blogged about sites where folks can tell their personal stories, including sites like Alpha Women, which logs rather racy confessions. But this is the first site I’ve seen in which confessions are recorded in both text and video. Here are some words on what the site is all about:

Rooftop Confessions are literally public confessions of private experiences…all of which are delivered from rooftops across the country. … User-driven and fully interactive, let Rooftop Confessions be your cyber-diary for the Web 2.0 world.

The folks behind the site use words like “embarrassing,” “lewd,” and “sordid” to describe the confessions. Users get to “Forgive” or “Condemn” each confession. I particularly enjoyed the founders’ description of themselves (these points seem to capture the spirit of the confessions sought):

We’re the guy down the hall who stole your Playboy subscriptions throughout most of 2007.
We’re the girl who had a spring-break fling with your fiancée while you were home with the flu.
We’re the pizza delivery guy who’s had a major crush on you for the past 3 years.
We’re the old lady who keyed your car just for the hell of it.
We’re the younger brother who read your diary when you went off to college.
We’re the waitress who served you tap water even though you ordered Evian.
We’re the neighborhood kids who put bags of flaming feces on your porch last Halloween.
We’re the young co-ed who used sex to get out of a speeding ticket.
We’re the friend who shamelessly slipped meat into your vegetarian burrito.
We’re the sister who accidentally killed and secretly replaced your goldfish while house-sitting for you last week.
We’re the guy who lied about being Jewish just to get into your pants.
We’re the coworker who sabotaged your project in order to get a promotion

One Million Monkeys Typing: As you can probably guess, this site is inspired by the “infinite monkey theorem,” which states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type or create a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of Shakespeare. It works like this, according to the site’s founders:

This site attempts not only to harness the literary power of one million “monkeys” typing but also to generate some truly wonderful texts and social networks. It is part Exquisite Corpse, part Choose Your Own Adventure, and it works by having multiple authors work on the same stories with each adding their own segments. Each segment (or snippet) will have the opportunity for 3 offshoots — those that are ranked highly will gain offshoots of their own, and those that are ranked poorly will wither and die.

30 Unusual Innovations in Storytelling from TrendHunter Magazine. A few of these I knew about and have even blogged about, but most were new to me. You can see them either as a slideshow or photo gallery. The innovations range from t-shirts and other fashion to street art to virtual mixed-media scrapbooks. Or how about a story tattooed in words across the bodies of 2,095 strangers? Or a video that depicts a completely different storyline when played in reverse vs. forward?

Storytron: This is a complex interactive storytelling tool that I don’t totally grasp, involving Storytronics, software called The Storyteller, SWAT (the Storyworld Authoring Tool), Diekto (a simplified form of English used by the Storyteller), Sappho (the scripting language the author uses to create a storyworld), and Storyengine, the brain of the Storyteller. See? Complex.

And here’s what Storytron is not and is not similar to: interactive fiction/choose your own adventure, videogames or massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), The Sims, Second Life, or literature. What it is: “A sophisticated new technology that employs computer-generated actors in a social learning environment.” Apparently it can also be used for corporate e-learning, in which “Storytronic e-worlds are peopled by savvy, computer-generated Actors who teach your employees the hard lessons in a safe, simulated setting—so they don’t learn them on your customers.” The corporate slide show gave me my best understanding of Storytron, which is good because my hatred of games will probably preclude further exploration.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’m pleased that my little survey widget on my sidebar has gleaned a few responses — and not as much spam as I’d feared.

I asked: What do you think will be the next significant development in applied storytelling?

Here are readers’ responses:

I imagine something that draws on creativity…the use of cartooning and visualising stories is of interest.

Continued advancement & adoption of immersive storytelling in simulation games & virtual worlds like World of Warcraft & SecondLife.

Person-to-person charity sites (e.g. Kiva, GlobalGiving) will reach the tipping point of mainstream philanthropy because recipient stories (told via multimedia) will increase the emotional connection of the transaction.

I would take issue with the word applied. All storytelling is applied. I don’t think good storytelling changes. All that changes is the methodology that is used to communicate the story. So today we have the web that allows us to reach people with our story that are not within our immediate circle of family and friends. Just as the printing press changed how story was distributed. The web changes how story is distributed. But neither technology changed story. Story adapts to the medium outwardly, but at its core remains the same. So when the next technological advance arrives, story will hop on for the ride.

Interesting observation about virtual worlds. Seems like last year, Second Life got tons of buzz (the way Twitter does this year), but now I barely hear about it. Just read a piece about newspapers setting up bureaus in Second Life but now expressing disappointment in the low number of users and advertisers.

Tim, I think your observation is astute as I am increasingly seeing nonprofits use storytelling.

Harley, I believe it was Michael Margolis who inspired me to use the term “applied storytelling.” I don’t disagree that “all storytelling is applied.” But I use the term “applied” to distinguish the forms of storytelling that most interest me from performance storytelling, which interests me, but not as much as other forms do. I have learned through Annette Simmons that the performance-storytelling roots of “applied” storytelling are exceedingly important because performance storytellers have so much to teach the rest of us about how to tell a good story. I really like your final line, “So when the next technological advance arrives, story will hop on for the ride.”

I’m posting my next question on the widget — about defining “story.”

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Here’s a collection of recent story-related finds — all free, I’m pretty sure:

• The Science of Presentations
  Nice slideshow with audio about creating preserntations that cater to the way people actually learn; hence, stories are effective in presentations. Audio wasn’t great for me, but that could be my computer.
• Story-Selling in Business by Tom Nies
  Attractive PDF booklet by Tom Nies on the importance of storytelling in business, especially in the current economic climate.

• Storytelling & Social Media series
  5-part webinar series, Social Media and Storytelling, sponsored by TechSoup Global and NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Network), that teaches the building blocks of the social web, then the specifics on podcasting, video creation, and creating social media buzz, and finishing with ROI to determine what your strategy is worth. The series ended last week, but slides and recordings are available for free download.
• Podcast: Telling Your Idea Story
  Free podcast about creating a story that will attract others to your killer idea. Outline of podcast here.
• Storytelling and Narrative for Business Podcast #3
  Frequent commenter to A Storied Career, Sean Buvala, responds to a listener’s email asking about the use of jokes, anecdotes, and stories and discusses the differences among each of these items
• Storytelling and Narrative for Business Podcast #2
  Sean Buvala, on using even an old, familiar story in your business presentations.
• Storytelling and Narrative for Business Podcast #1
  Sean Buvala on how every business and every person in the business needs the power of storytelling.
• Episode 3 (in an 8-part series) of the Perry Marshall Podcast about copywriting.
  Marshall discusses, among other things, how storytelling helps make for better copy. This podcast is a bit too off-the-cuff for my tastes (and it’s a dialog with an unidentified woman; maybe she is identified in the earlier parts of the podcast series). The discussion of storytelling begins 8 minutes into this 18-minute podcast.
• One-hour Interview on Socially Speaking (via BlogTalkRadio) with David Spark on Storytelling in Social Media.
  David Spark, owner of a consulting and production company that helps organizations become leading voices in their industries through storytelling, discusses how online and social media have changed our concept of storytelling, as well as tips and tricks you can use. I did not find this broadcast to be very much about storytelling; it’s more about how social-media content is more important than distribution. Judge for yourself by listening below. (I had embedded the broadcast, but it took too long to load and was too hard to turn off.)

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Just read a fascinating and resonant (to me anyway) article by Frank A. Mills in the online Urban Paradoxes magazine (reprinted from the blog Flaneur). (Beware that some of the links in the article are a bit funky).

In the article, “Quantum Storytelling: The New Way of Thinking,” Mills asserts that “old linear, left-brained thinking” (which “reduces new products, new technology, and new solutions, to just another version of the same old thing”) needs to yield to “a new model of right-brained thinking — Creative and conceptual.” (much like Dan Pink’s proclamation that we are in the Conceptual Age).

For me, the most striking line in Mills’ article is this one:

Whatever you call it, the “new economy” is at its core, a storytelling economy.

That statement is a preface to this:

This is not storytelling in the same linear fashion we use today … The new storytelling model is web-weaving, histological storytelling. In truth, there is nothing new about it; it is a return to a form of storytelling lost to the Enlightenment and its subsequent 1 + 1=2 objective logic. Over the years we have come to believe that the only way to think logically is the linear way. If Quantum Theory has taught anything, it is that there are logic constructs other than linear.

As you can guess from the article’s title and the foregoing, Mills then compares storytelling with Quantum Theory. Here’s a snippet of that comparison:

Each and every story contains, contains other stories, each opening up, if we but see and hear, potential and possibilities for even more stories, stories hereto unknown. In classic Newtonian logic, the observer is always a neutral and objective external agent. In quantum logic, the observer is always involved in the process of observing, and will in spite of efforts to the contrary always influence the eventual outcome. I just stated this linearly, but what we must grasp is that the eventual outcome is not fixed, not even singular, but rather has the potential to be one or more of many possibilities, perhaps even hereto unobserved. Every story has a backstory, middle, and end. In quantum storytelling, it is the middle, not the backstory nor the end that is important.

(I’m not sure Mills really explains why the middle is most important). He goes on to discuss how our brains think in “wholes,” not parts; thus, “The natural result of the mind processing the ‘whole story,’ i.e., the quantum story.” Mills ends with this powerful call to action:

Let us tell the stories that need to be told, and in the telling and the conversations, discover brand new, hereto unrealized solutions. Quantum storytelling is our last hope for a better future.

[Image credit: From The Daily Galaxy, http://www.dailygalaxy.com/myweblog/parallelworldsmultiversequantum_physics/, depicting quantum theory]

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I have no commentary about the following, no questions, no critique. I just like these words about story and storytelling from novelist Laini Taylor:

Isn’t “story” a beautiful word? I think it likely that some day I will get it tattooed somewhere on my body. I like the idea of it on my wrist, like a bracelet. I’ve been thinking a lot about stories the past few days, not writing them, or reading them, which is where my mind usually goes when I think of stories, but telling them. Out loud. How magical! I come from a post-storytelling culture; my great-grandfather, as I understand it, was a storyteller, but he died when I was a toddler, and his stories — tall tales from a genuine cowboy — weren’t really handed down. It’s a shame.

I want campfires and ululating gypsies, guitar strummings and throat clearing and the jangle of a tambourine being tossed aside. A camel lazily listening from beyond the circle of the firelight as someone says, “Once upon a time,” or “Maybe there was and maybe there wasn’t,” or otherwise opens some gateway into the world of stories. I want to lean back on my elbows on my magic carpet — which maybe is hovering softly a few inches off the ground, to keep off the sand fleas — and listen. Better yet, I want to be able to tell stories.

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Pipl is a well-regarded “people search engine” that helps folks find other folks.

A section of Pipl that collects stories asks users to “Tell us your story and explain why is it really important for you to reunite with the person you’re looking for.” Definitely an interesting idea, and the collected stories linked from the left side of the site are fascinating — but they don’t seem to explain the importance for the storytellers to reunite with the person they’re looking for. Instead, they are more like testimonials for Pipl and how the site has helped bring reunions about.

But they’re still fascinating stories — of finding a mother after four years, learning that a best friend had died, finding an ex-boyfriend who had the storyteller’s college diploma in his possession, reconnecting with a brother lost for seven years.

Just as an aside, although Pipl searches the “deep Web,” I’m not sure how effective it is since no “advanced search” feature is in evidence. If you’re searching for someone with a common name, you can’t enter a middle name, for example, or a birth year.

If I were to tell a story about how satisfying a reunion can be, I’d tell about finding my childhood best friend, Claudia, whom I haven’t seen in about 45 years but am now in touch with. Over the last year or so, I’ve had some social-media-powered wonderful reunions with old friends, former students, and others — all more or less through Facebook. If I were to tell a story about the importance of finding someone, I’d tell about my high-school boyfriend. Not because I have any great need to reconnect with him, but because he so mysteriously disappeared just a few years after graduation. His parents have never been able to find him, and I’d love them to have some peace if they’re still living. Oh, what the heck, I’ll throw his name out there — William Scott Carson (he went by “Scott”), last seen in the Santa Barbara area in the mid-70s.

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Periodically, I like to gather together interesting examples of visual storytelling I’ve come across and try to find connections among them — or just examine some of the fascinating ways artists are telling visual stories.

• Philip Bishop, art critic for the Orlando Sentinel, notes that narrative painting is out of fashion in today’s world. He observed that a return to narrative painting has often been heralded but has not come to fruition. A rare exception is the work of Michael Ananian that Bishop reviewed for a show (“Narrative Tactics”) that has since closed but that can be seen on the artist’s Web site. The main narrative series featured in the exhibition was “Two Voices,” which I decided not to show here because its nudity might offend some readers. Instead, image No. 1 in the montage below is from the series “Counterpart,” the story of which you can read here.
• I was intrigued by the existence of the Museum of Biblical Art because it’s hard to imagine any biblical art that is not narrative. A recent example (from a show also closed) was the work of Marc Chagall, in which the artist “sought to integrate various traditions of Jewish Hassidism, eastern Orthodoxy and western Catholicism into dramatically rich and personally significant expressions of biblical narratives,” according the New York Council for the Humanities. Chagall’s Samson Destroys the Temple is image No. 2 in the montage.
• The work of artist IceKubi came to my attention when a blogger blogged about it last fall. For me, this work, an example of which is image No. 3, falls into the category of good fodder for story prompts. The artist says she is inspired by fairytales and stories told by her Polish grandmother. But viewers may prefer to see what stories IceKubi’s images evoke for them — rather than trying to guess at which stories inspired each work.
• The blogger behind The Photophiles (I can’t detect the blogger’s name) admires a couple of photo essays in which “the juxtaposition of detail shots and broad shots of scenes will shock the viewer’s eye and draw them into the story.” They are American Trucker (image No. 9) by Tim Gruber and Havana (image No. 4) by Orlando Barria.
• Most of the visual-storytelling examples here tell their stories without words. Caravan (image No. 5) is a photo essay accompanied by words. The photos are wonderful. I can’t discern the name of the artist, but this work and others appear on the site Mechanised. “Caravan” is a British-commonwealth term (I’ve seen it in Australia and New Zealand) for what we Americans would call an RV or travel trailer. I think the words are needed in this case. The story is quite magical, and I’m not sure it could be told with the photos alone. It’s fascinating to imagine the backstory of how the caravan came to be abandoned in the woods.
• Photographer Jodi Getz proclaims that “storytelling, in both words and images is a wonderful way to combine the gifts I was given.” She illustrates that theme with a series about the concept “Your love, as seen through your child’s eyes.” The image I chose to represent the theme, No. 6, is not the best photo in the series (in my opinion) but is the one that best executes the theme.
• Mark Neilsen exhibited three three-dimensional and autobiographical works at a gallery called In a Flash. The show was called “Flash Art Mob Don’t Blink” and apparently based on the concept of the “flash mob,” which Wikipedia defines as “a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse.” I’m not sure the “flash mob” idea comes across (perhaps you had to be there), but the autobiography does in Suspension of Disbelief (image No. 7) and the other two pieces from the show.
• Neil Crowley of MakeLoveReal.net does some of the most amazing slideshow work I’ve ever seen. The slideshow love story of Sara and Jeremy (image No. 8) seems almost like stop-motion animation and is accompanied by music and voiceover narration by the happy couple.
• The Web site Visual Telling of Stories is an inelegant yet fascinating site from Dr. Chris Mullen that describes itself as “a lyrical encyclopedia of visual propositions” that is “dedicated to the study of the visial narrative.” Click on a letter, and you’re taken to a list of topics/terms about which storytelling images are available (click on the box to the left of each term). A good Web designer could make this info-rich site really powerful.
• Mike Doyle, in a blog entry both in his own blog and the Huffington Post, laments the “lack of appropriate storytelling to give the average museumgoer a true impression of the wonderfulness of the objects on view.” He’s particularly referring to a late-2008 visit to the Art Institute of Chicago and its “ongoing lack of useful, plain-English explanations on text walls and wall cards [that] unnecessarily leaves average visitors scratching their heads — or hurrying through gallery after gallery with the puzzling feeling that they should be getting more out of their Art Institute visit than they unfortunately are.” Though he feels the Art Institute’s lack of context for its exhibits is especially egregious, he finds the problem all over Chicago. The exception is a non-art museum, the Chicago History Museum. I know from my brief time as a gallery assistant and my many art-history courses that this lack of context is pervasive throughout art exhibitions, but it doesn’t bother me the way it does Doyle. The average art patron is often dying to ask the artist — what does this piece mean? what was in your head when you created it? what inspired it? what are you trying to say? what’s the story behind this piece? But I’ve found that artist’s statements are notoriously stingy with that information. (The kind of meaty artist’s statement that Michael Ananian, for example, puts forth is unusual in my experience.) I think the underlying philosophy is that art is in the eye of the beholder, and every viewer should interpret each piece as he or she deems fit. As far as I can tell (and this may be a vast oversimplification), all art-history scholarship is based on trying to interpret the artist’s intent. Each beholder creates his or her own context. Still, I wouldn’t object to what Doyle cries out for: “…wall texts giving visitors a capsule history of the works on view, the relationships between the artists, and the role the works and the schools that contain them played in the history of art? Or at least a brochure or handout?”
• “Neil” of Heartwood Studios delineates in the company’s Visuual blog purposes or uses of visual storytelling: (1) capturing “events [that] take place at a pace [that] is too fast (or too slow) for the human eye, (2) depicting images in which the location or perspective is inaccessible to the typical viewer (such as inside a working jet engine or underground), (3) showing events that are too small (or too large) for us to perceive, (4) presenting views that would risk the safety of viewers trying to experience them, (5) illustrating experiences that can’t yet be seen because they’re in the future (Neil explains that when the Dallas Cowboys built their new stadium, they wanted to win the rights to a SuperBowl before the stadium existed. Heartwood created digital animation of their new stadium), (6) making an abstract concept concrete, (7) explaining concepts, especially when a language barrier exists, and (8) guiding a viewer’s focus. That’s what Neoscape did for for William and Mary’s Mason School of Business. They, in Neil’s words, “created a 3D animation … that allows users to see related elements — classrooms, offices, etc … because the animation guides the viewer through color-highlighting.” The animation appears below.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

World Storytelling Day is a month from today — March 20. Although the day is a “global celebration of the art of oral storytelling,” I’d like to come up with some interactive way to celebrate here on A Storied Career.

World Storytelling Day is celebrated every year on the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, the first day of autumn equinox in the southern. On World Storytelling Day, as many people as possible tell and listen to stories in as many languages and at as many places as possible, during the same day and night. Participants tell each other about their events in order to share stories and inspiration, to learn from each other and create international contacts.

I welcome any ideas for how this blog and its readers can celebrate together.

Meanwhile, here’s this week’s word cloud/tag cloud from Wordle.net based on A Storied Career.

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On another site, I saw praise for this site headlined “Is the library transforming your life?”

The site collects and publishes stories of all the marvelous benefits of libraries — saving people money, building community, creating a safe haven for youth, and more.

Collecting these stories seems to be a defense against budget cuts. A powerful and poignant video on the site tells the story of Sean — how a librarian trusted him to take a book home and come back the next day and bring the ID needed to get a library card and how he went on to get a community-college education and a good job. There’s a neat Wizard-of-Oz moment in the video in which black and white becomes color just at the moment the narrator-librarian talks about how “alive” libraries are. (Sorry, couldn’t find any coding to embed the video here).

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Assisted by Sharon Lippincott’s and Jerry Waxler’s Lifewriters Forum Yahoo group, I’ve become increasingly interested in memoir-writing as a form of identity-constructing storytelling.

Here are some interesting bits I’ve come across on the topic:

• You don’t have to have had great drama in your life or a rags-to-riches story to write a good memoir. So says memoirist Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle) in a Reader’s Digest article by Joe Kita.
• Writing a memoir can be therapeutic and cathartic, Walls says. “Even if the book hadn’t sold a single copy, it would still have been worth it.” Kita adds that writing a memoir helps the writer “make some sense out of his or her existence, to find some meaning in the world.” (You don’t even have to publish your story, Kita notes.)

• In the same issue of Reader’s Digest, you’ll find five excerpts from memoirs, and Maureen Mackey suggests 10 Great Memoirs to Read.
• One of the books on memoir-writing that I’ve seen discussed quite favorably is Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Memoir Writing by Lisa Dale Norton. A blogger (and memoir author) on Amazon, Theo Pauline Nestor, interviewed Norton, and spotlighted her thesis that “memoir writing is a means for transformation, not only of oneself but of the world.” Here’s how that process works, in Norton’s words:

  When we write memoir we craft a story of our past from disparate pieces. One could argue that all experience is random. To make a story from this random experience we must apply structure. By applying structure we create form and meaning. As we create meaning about our past, we have the opportunity to re-envision what we believe those past events meant. In so doing we open up the possibility of living a new way in the future. (If you see the past differently, the future that rises from it will consequently have to be different, too.)

  When we claim new meaning around our past and offer that story as a written narrative for others to read, they are given an opportunity to rethink and rewrite their lives. This process of transforming oneself and then passing on the transformation is a radical act of change. The more people who do it, the more apt change on a large scale will take place. This is an organic, subtle and powerful way to influence the world.

  Norton suggests that would-be memoirists consider the first 15 years practice, as well as read and analyze texts.
• Judy H. Wright offers a PDF download entitled “Reasons for Recording Your Life Story,” of which some of my favorites of the 24 listed include:

  When we record something, we remember more.

  A life examined and recorded is twice precious, first the experience itself and then the memories it evokes when we read about it later.

  There is an inner need in each of us to be remembered. To reflect and to see that our lives had value.

  It is the ultimate journey of self-discovery, even if no one else ever reads it.

  Wright ends the list with this telling tidbit: “A recent survey taken of a group of elderly people indicated that their major life regrets were in not contributing and sharing more feelings, thoughts and emotions with family, friends and community.”


• Tips for getting started on a memoir include choosing a favorite object or photograph as a jumping-off point for the memoir, as well as speaking your story into a recording device if the idea of writing it daunts you. These ideas come from personal historian Dan Curtis (though I couldn’t find them on his site) by way of the blog Legacy Smile.
• Back around New Year’s, I cited Gena Haskett, who blogged about 2008 as having been the Year of Personal Narratives. That blog posting is also notable for several striking examples of ” personal narratives … that not only could touch your heart but cause you to think beyond the surface of the story.” Check them out.
• If you like the idea of a memoir but feel too overwhelmed or intimidated to write yours, consider hiring a personal historian to assist. The Web site of the Association of Personal Historians offers a great list of Frequently Asked Questions about Personal History to help folks make decisions about committing to a personal history. I’ll feature a Q&A interview with association member Sarah White in early April.
• A ton of sites focus on memoir-writing, lifewriting, and similar pursuits. An intriguing site about learning from the past experiences of others (while connecting with them) is the Legacy Project. Here’s the site’s focus:

The Legacy Project is about creating your life, connecting with others, and changing the world. A multigenerational education project, it offers free online activities and guides, books, essay contests, workshops, exhibits, community programs, and more.

This is a “big picture” education project for children and adults that draws on scientific research. The Legacy Project’s three banner programs reflect the three ways we make a difference and evolve our legacy. LifeDreams explores individual potential and creating your life. Across Generations explores our connections with others and encourages closer relationships between generations. Our World explores the world around us and our role in it, looking at how each of us can change the world to deal with challenges like the environment.

• Another admirable memoir-related project is Timeslips, “a creative storytelling method, originally designed to be used with people with dementia and their caregivers.” Says the site:

TimeSlips is a group process that opens storytelling to people with cognitive challenges by replacing the pressure to remember with the encouragement to imagine.

[TimeSlips] stories capture the hopes, dreams, regrets, fears, humor, and desires of people with memory loss, and help them connect with staff, family, and friends.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve been writing about sharing stories as a way of understanding and coping with the current economic crisis.

Ann Banks understands the value of stories during these tough time. In an article in Newsweek, Banks notes that she was raised on Depression stories. “Hearing them again and again,” she writes, “I became fascinated by the role that stories play during hard times — the way they seem to strengthen people, offering a bulwark against loneliness and feelings of personal failure.”

Her fascination led Banks to do something remarkable. In a dusty Library of Congress storage room, she spent a year sifting through 150,000 pages containing “thousands of interviews with ordinary Americans telling of how they survived the Great Depression.”

Banks explains:

The stories were collected in the late 1930s by the Federal Writers’ Project, a unit of the Works Progress Administration that employed out-of-work writers. But before the intended series of anthologies could be published, the Writers’ Project was Red-baited out of existence. The oral histories — of tobacco farmers, smugglers, midwives, jazz musicians, oil roustabouts and others — ended up crammed in rickety filing cabinets in a remote storage room in the library stacks.

She goes on to discuss how she fell in love with many of these stories.

Banks collected the stories and published them in the book First-Person America.

And she is convinced that we should be doing the same kind of storytelling in the current climate: “Listening to each other’s stories may grant us a sense of common purpose that money can’t buy.”

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve added a mechanism to conduct 1-question surveys on my sidebar, just underneath the advertising.

Here’s what it looks like (but this illustration isn’t functional; it’s just so you know what the survey looks like).

Periodically, as I get a critical mass of responses, I’ll publish them. If I don’t many responses, I’ll figure I probably didn’t ask a very thought-provoking question.

First question asks what you think the next significant development will be in applied storytelling. I’ve received one response so far.

The survey form isn’t spam-proof, so it may not stay, but we’ll see how it goes. Hope you’ll consider responding, and feel free also to suggest questions. What would you like to know about storytelling?

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Nick Warren, of the blog Restless Voices (“Very short stories. Daily.”) is running a Twitter-based contest — stories written in 140 characters (amusing that you can interpret his invitation — “Fancy writing a 140-character story?” — as a story with 140 characters, as in people.). Here’s the skinny:

Fancy writing a 140-character story? If enough people are game I’m going to set up the simple competition below. Let me know if you are in, or tell your creative friends.

Here’s how I reckon it will work:

Confidential story submissions to @nickwarren via Twitter DM. Deadline: 6pm, Thurs 19th Feb.

All stories posted to public Story140 web page, by midnight. Page published and voting begins.

Votes to @nickwarren via Twitter DM. One vote per Twitterer. Deadline. 6pm, Friday 20th February.

Results published by Midnight, Friday 20th February.

All times are GMT. And no, I won’t be submitting a story for obvious reasons.

The stories will be posted uncredited to avoid obvious bias, and we’ll rely on the honour of storytellers to promote the vote without giving away which contribution is theirs. Once the results are in we’ll credit which of the stories and name the top three.

It’s just an excuse for five minutes of utterly non-commercial creativity, and to see what the community can do. I reckon we need a minimum of ten people to make it interesting, but more is better

.

The winner gets to bask in the warmth and admiration of fellow Twitterers.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Twitter and how I changed my “Twitter behavior” overnight. In the time since that entry, I’ve gone from following just one person on Twitter to following 200+ today.

At the time of that entry, I tried to explain my Twitter behavior in terms of an assessment, the FIRO-B (Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation — Behavior), that I took at least 10 years ago. It was a pretty convoluted explanation; yet it made a certain kind of sense.

Based on some great information from commenter Eric Bolden, I now think I may have been onto something. I’m now speculating that personality assessments may be possible based on the way people interact with social media. I can imagine a whole new research area opening up if it hasn’t already.

First, let’s make the storytelling connection: Anyone who is involved in any kind of social media — or even anyone who simply has a personal Web site — is engaging in constructing his or her identity online. Thus, they are constructing and telling their stories. One’s online identity may not be exactly the same as one’s face-to-face identity or the identity one constructs when writing for print publication; we construct our identities in various media and venues, and while these identities share core elements, they likely vary from medium to medium. If I may quote from a Q&A interview with Michael Margolis that I have not yet published, in the Internet age, “one’s identity is ever morphing and adaptable to the presiding context.”

For example, I put out a lot of information about myself publicly in the online world. I am neither particularly private in my online life nor terribly cautious about sharing information about myself. I share myself in this blog, a personal Web site, a social-media resume, profiles on numerous social-media venues, several online portfolios — and the list goes one. I am far less forthcoming in my offline life.

Now, let’s get back to the FIRO-B and Eric Bolden. My FIRO-B results* reveal certain aspects of my personality that I don’t especially admire but that are probably pretty accurate. They reveal that I am a “loner” but that I cherish a small, close-knit group of friends. That revelation, I believe, aligns with my social-media behavior. I have at least 100 connections on each of the three major social-media venues I use the most — Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Of those, I most cherish the dear friends and family members that I’ve reconnected with. I’m also developed relatively close connections with some folks I’ve never met. If you offered me an opportunity to meet face-to-face with my close-knit group of connections and reconnections, I’d welcome it but feel considerable anxiety. Through online social media, I can interact with these dear ones in my preferred “loner” style.

The preceding behavior is covered by the “Inclusion” dimension of the FIRO-B. Another dimension is Control, where my results indicate that I avoid self-initiated decisions. Guilty as charged. My husband can tell you that I consistently demand that he make the decisions about, for example, when and where we’ll go on our daily bike ride and which Netflix movie we’ll watch in the evening. This aspect of my personality — my story — I’m convinced, explains both my past and current Twitter behavior. I previously did not follow my followers because I did not want to initiate that decision. I am still in the mode of abdicating the “following” decision because I have set up automatic following through a third-party application. Anytime a new person starts following me, I automatically follow that person without making a conscious decision to do so. I behave similarly with the other social-media venues. It’s not unheard of for me to initiate a new connection, but it’s unusual. Typically, I wait for others to connect to me.

So, it seems to me that researchers could develop a personality assessment based on social-media behavior. Questions to reveal one’s social-media personality might include:

• What is your goal in making connections in social-media venues?
• Which is more important to you — quantity of connections or quality?
• To what extent do you initiate connections with others on social-media venues?
• How often do you interact with your online connections?
• To what extent do you accept new connections with people you know?
• To what extent do you accept new connections with strangers?

What other personality-revealing questions can you think of?

As a side note, I have found the criticisms of my Twitter ways interesting. Some have suggested that I will alienate my existing followers by automatically following each new follower. My response: Do my followers really check that closely on how I obtained my follow-ees? I’m also not completely indiscriminate; I’ve unfollowed couple of people whose values severely conflicted with mine or who seemed overly fixated on selling me something. The idea of sending the same “tweet” or status report to multiple social-media venues also has offended some folks. They contend that each social-media audience is different, and messages should be tailored to each audience. I agree only to a certain extent. I feel as though my tweets to Twitter and Facebook are almost always interchangeable. However, if I want to tweet an item that is purely “professional,” I use ping.fm to send it out to a larger group of social-media venues, including LinkedIn, because most of the tweets I send to Twitter and Facebook are not appropriate for my LinkedIn audience.

* Bolden informed me that results from the FIRO-B do not reflect an inborn type and can change. Thus, my results might be different now from the last time I took the assessment. A Christian-based assessment, the Arno Profile System or APS, is based on the FIRO-B and is intended to show one’s inborn temperament. I’d like to take the FIRO-B again and also try the APS (though Bolden says the assessments are exactly the same but are administered differently). Also, based on my FIRO-B results, Bolden guessed my Myers-Briggs type with 75 percent accuracy (He guessed INFJ; it’s actually INFP).

Finally, it’s appropriate to be writing about online social-identity construction today because this is my 16th anniversary of the day I first went on the Internet.

If you’re interested in learning more about the FIRO-B, you can download a PowerPoint presentation here and see a 9-minute video here. I have not seen clear evidence that one can take the FIRO-B online, but it’s probably available.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Stumbled across this article on a free content site (content4reprint.com). I’m a little wary of the author, Melani Ward (pictured below), as she seems almost “anti-story.” In her Changing Your Story Blog, she calls herself a “storybuster.” To her, that means breaking through stories that keep people (especially women entrepreneurs) stuck. It’s not so different from my “change your story, change your life” philosophy. I present her guest article in the interest of offering diverse viewpoints:

Storytelling that Ruins Relationships: What Stories Are You Telling About Other People?

By Melani Ward

I love stories. I love reading them, listening to them, talking about them and creating them. But, for a long time, I used to use the stories I told about OTHER people to make me feel better. Crazy huh? Well it’s true. I was what I now call the quintessential “I’ve Got YOUR Story Straight” Storyteller. Now I don’t necessarily want to go telling a story about you right now but I would bet that you have first hand knowledge of this storyteller.

This is the person who has your whole life figured out. She will tell you what you should do, how you should feel and what everything you say, think and feel means. You may hear something like this from this storyteller, “If you would just do ___, you would be so much happier.”

These storytellers usually mean well, in fact I rarely meet any who don’t, it’s just that they have a hard time keeping their ideas to themselves and what they define as help more often than not comes across as patronizing and quite irritating actually. The truth is most of the time these people want to help you or “fix” your situation because if they do, it makes them feel better.

If you are the “I’ve Got You Story Straight” storyteller, you probably have some pretty good ideas about what the people in your life should be doing differently in order to be happier, healthier, fitter, or more likeable, right?

Well, here’s the deal — what you think doesn’t matter.

And to steal a phrase from one of my friends and a totally cool chick Marie Forleo, “nobody made you manager of the world.” It’s none of your business how someone else thinks, feels, or acts.

Let me give you a quick example. I had a friend many years ago who I loved very much but I was not the best at showing it. You see as far as I was concerned she made all of the wrong decisions when it came to men.

(As if I had it all figured out myself, right?) She would say she wanted one thing and then do something that made getting the thing she said she wanted virtually impossible. It drove me nutty and I used to have a whole bunch of advice I was more than happy to dole out, even when she never asked.

The story I was telling about her was that she was not happy or that she could be happy if she just chose a different path. But who was I to say if she was happy or not?

This person is the way she is because of the people who raised her, her environment and her experiences. And she can only be exactly as she is just as I can only be exactly as I am. It not only wasn’t fair of me to expect her to behave, think or feel differently, it also wasn’t fair of me to put that kind of energy on her. I was putting her somewhere (in unhappy land) that she didn’t deserve to be.

One of the challenges for me was that people would come to me a lot and ask me for my thoughts or opinions so I got used to it and decided that since they wanted it than everyone else must have wanted it too. Not true.

But, I truly learned to stop telling stories when I moved away from home. I love my dad very much but we did not have the world’s best relationship when I was growing up. It wasn’t that we ever fought or didn’t get along. It was just that I had such a hard time understanding him that it made it difficult to get close. However, when I moved away, the space gave me the freedom to let go of the stories I was telling about him. I realized that I was trying to do the impossible — understand what it was like to be him and therefore understand how he acted. But, I was never going to understand.

I’d never understand what it was like to go to work as a young kid to help support my family. I’d never understand what it was like to have to pay for everything in my life including college and graduate school. I’d never understand what it was like to have parents who did not support me and encourage me every minute of my life. And I most certainly could not understand what it was like to watch my 8-year-old daughter fight for her life every day for two and a half years.

But that was the whole trick — I wasn’t supposed to understand. I was just supposed to have compassion and let him BE. Once I did that, our relationship blossomed. In letting go, I created an opportunity for what really mattered to flow in, which has been a gift for both of us.

The real lesson here is that it’s never our business to tell stories about anyone else. So, the next time your mom starts lamenting her worries or your best friend starts complaining about her current loser boyfriend/husband or your brother complains about his lame job, just listen. Just open your heart and show compassion for wherever they happen to be at that moment. If they want advice, they’ll ask. You’ll be amazed at the results.

Find out what storyteller might be keeping you stuck at Changing Your Story Blog. Melani Ward is a multi-passionate entrepreneur: numerologist, marketer, lifestyle coach, writer, and athlete! She helps women entrepreneurs attract ideal clients and a lot of money doing work they LOVE.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Stephane Dangel has started a social-booking site (also called a “social-content network”) for storytelling, StoryBest, where fans and practitioners of storytelling can build a collection of interesting things we find on the web. Funny, that’s sort of how I think of the purpose of A Storied Career — except that this blog collects only the items that I think are interesting (with an occasional outside suggestion). StoryBest allows everyone to get in on the act.

“That way, we all can learn, share, comment, and even rank whatever we all add to the site,” says the StoryBest description.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve blogged about President Obama’s soliciting stories about his election and healthcare stories but complained that the administration did not seem to offer any mechanism to read the stories that were being sought.

In contrast, on the topic of the economic crisis, barackobama.com is offering stories. States the site: “Tens of thousands of people all across the country have shared their stories of losing jobs, struggling to pay bills, facing foreclosure, and closing family businesses after generations of hard work.”

The stories are presented in a slide-show format with Google maps indicating where each story-writer hails from. Of course, the purpose of sharing these stories is to make the case for the stimulus bill.

At another part of the site, you can share your story.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

This week’s word cloud/tag cloud from Wordle.net based on the content of A Storied Career:

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Eric Winick has a dilemma.

He wants to help people tell their stories orally through his company, Yarn Audioworks.

But he’s having difficulty persuading folks to come forward to record their narratives. “I’m just looking for the best incident-based 10-15 minute stories I can find,” he says.

Winick, a full-time marketing director at an off-Broadway theater in New York City, came to storytelling through the medium of theater. “For many years I fancied myself a writer — first of short stories, and then of plays, which is where I found a niche for almost 20 years,” he explains.

In 2005, after becoming a fan of the kinds of stories he heard on public radio, Winick had the idea to record audio pieces myself. “I blew an entire tax refund one year on audio equipment,” he says. “That was the year I started working on my first audio documentary. My model, obviously, is ‘This American Life,’” he says, although Yarn doesn’t follow a particular theme. “

Three of Winick’s pieces have made it to public radio in the last six months, in places as far-flung as Birmingham, AL, and Urbana, IL, he notes.

Winick wants to expand Yarn by recording more stories — his own and those of others in the NYC metro area (or elsewhere for would-be storytellers with the ability to record a .WAV file). He’d like to get some of these stories on the radio.

After Winick wrote to me, I gave him a few suggestions about his Web site and approach. I told him I think the idea of recording stories is much more intimidating than writing stories. That fear factor may explain his difficulty in getting people to speak their tales.

I now throw this dilemma open to readers: How can Winick coax more folks to record their stories?

In the meantime, Winick has a terrific set of story-prompting questions on his site that are not only good for brainstorming stories to record but for all kinds of other uses:

1. What was the most frightening experience you’ve ever had?
2. What was the funniest experience you’ve ever had?
3. What was the funniest and most harrowing experience you’ve ever had?
4. Who was the most influential person you’ve met? What experience with this person typifies the influence he/she had on you?
5. Have you had an experience in which you accomplished something you did not think was possible?
6. Have had ever triumphed over what you felt at the time were the forces of evil?
7. Have you had an encounter with a celebrity/well-known individual that made an impression on you?
8. Have you ever made a complete fool of yourself in front of others?
9. Have you ever done something you wished you could take back?
10. Have you ever had a near-death experience?
11. What was the most ill you’ve ever been? How did it cause you to reflect on your life?
12. What was the happiest you’ve ever been?
13. What was the most trying experience of your life?
14. Have you ever done something for which you did not apologize, but still wish you could?
15. Have you ever had an experience in a foreign country that taught you a lesson about yourself/your culture?
16. Have you ever been arrested?
17. Have you ever been mistaken for someone else?
18. Have you ever carried out a practical joke that either succeeded or failed?
19. Have you ever had an experience while working that made you think about the nature of your work/vocation/yourself as a worker?
20. Have you ever had to make a life-or-death decision for yourself or someone else?
21. What’s the most impulsive thing you’ve ever done on a date?
22. What’s the most impulsive thing you’ve ever done in the name of love?
23. What’s the most impulsive thing you’ve ever done, period?
24. What was your bravest or most courageous moment?
25. What was the worst injury you’ve ever sustained?
26. Have you ever had to make the choice between doing the right thing and the wrong thing?
27. What was the one moment in high school you’ll never forget, for all the right or wrong reasons?
28. Have you ever been so lost you couldn’t find your way back?
29. Have you ever lost or broken something and then not been able to admit it?

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging has extrapolated information from University of North Carolina journalism-school professor Phil Meyer to determine that the very last newspaper will land on doorsteps in April 2043.

I’ve said in a past entry that I’m OK with the inevitable death of newspapers as long as they don’t predecease me. Given that I plan to live to 100, 2043 isn’t quite going to cut it.

Even now, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reports that for 40 percent of survey respondents, the Internet is their primary news source, for 70 percent, it’s TV news, and for just 35 percent, it’s newspapers (the numbers add up to more than 100 percent because respondents could give multiple answers).

Newspaper journalism is moving inexorably online. “Multimedia” and “interactive” are becoming the watchwords. At the Society for New Design, Tyson Evans blogged about interactive and multimedia highlights of 2008, noting “a spectrum of technologies and storytelling methods” that are indeed worth a look. Tyson cites my grade-school pal Jeff Jarvis, who writes:

The story was all we had before — it’s what would fit onto a newspaper page or into a broadcast show. But a discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public. There’s too much repetition. Too little explanation. The knowledge is not cumulative. Each instance is necessarily shallow. And when more big stories come — as they have lately! — in scarce time and space and with scarce resources, each becomes even shallower. We never catch up, we never get smarter. Articles perpetuate a Ground Hog Day kind of journalism.

Here are a few story-based methods that may not save the venerable print newspaper but may save news-publishing organizations, even as they change their approaches:

• Blogging: The shift to online journalism seems to be helping many newspapers. Some have cut back on — or completely eliminated — print editions in favor of online formats. LATimes.com, the online incarnation of the LA Times, boosted readership 143 percent, primarily through the use of blogs.
• Exceptional multimedia storytelling: Sites like MediaStorm are “usher[ing] in the next generation of multimedia storytelling by publishing social documentary projects incorporating photojournalism, interactivity, animation, audio and video for distribution across multiple media.”
• Interactive databases: I don’t entirely understand interactive databases, but long-time journalist Steve Buttry says he’s used databases for more than a decade. In a report to Newspaper Next (which costs $19.95), Buttry explains how communication companies can use interactive databases to shape a prosperous future. He also cites iowafloodstories as an example of an interactive database. (Elsewhere on the Web, Buttry offers a primer on the most traditional elements of writing a good journalistic story.)
• Liveblogging. Buttry notes the development of liveblogging as a storytelling form. Liveblogging is popular at conferences, and folks have liveblogged events such as the Hudson River plane crash. I made a lame, technology-plagued attempt to liveblog the inauguration of Barack Obama and am not a bit surprised that the New York Times did a much better job of it.
• Visuals. Seeming to acknowledge that 70 percent that gets its news primarily through TV, newspapers are increasingly it their stock-in-trade to tell stories visually. An article by Dane Stickney last fall in the American Journalism Review debated the merits of the “charticle,” “combinations of text, images and graphics that take the place of a full article.” Stickney reported on Josh Awtry, who has the reputation as a “story killer” because of his “steadfast support for the short, graphic-driven alternate story form,” the charticle. Stickney quotes Awtry as defending the practice: “I’m not out to destroy narrative. Just bad narrative.” Apparently my own local newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel is a hotbed of charticle-ism. The Poynter Institute found that “alternative story forms like charticles did a better job of catching readers’ attention than traditional narratives,” Stickney reports. Opponents note that techniques like charticles that cater to readers’ short attention spans tend to become self-fulfilling. We become so accustomed to short, easy-to-digest forms that longer, word-filled narratives become daunting. But, Stickney notes, “readers also want to be told stories in longer, captivating ways, in compelling traditional narratives.”
• Other Alternate Story Forms: Barbara Allen and Kelsea Gurski blog at the Newspaper Association of America about alternate story forms or “alts,” which according to the Chris Courtney, design director of Chicago Tribune’s free news and entertainment tabloid Red Eye, are “scannable, focused, reader-driven, non-narrative piece in which readers consume information in chunks.” These “alts” are said to yield greater information retention than traditional narratives do. (But are they as enjoyable to read?). Courtney includes charticles on a list that also comprises breakout boxes, timelines, Topic 101 (breaking the idea into key facts). how tos, graphic novels, quizzes, catch-ups (to reorient the reader with previous events), and combinations of these “alts.”
• Capitalizing on pattern recognition and the need for coherence. Howard C. Weaver of the McClatchey newspaper company reprinted in a blog a speech he had given to a group of publishers and editors in the late 1990s. Though newspapers have changed drastically and the market has become exponentially more difficult even since then, Weaver’s words still offer hope for the printed newspaper:

  I honestly believe that most of the persistent, misguided talk you hear about the inevitable demise of newspapers is based on one simpleminded fact: that the act of printing words on paper simply seems out-dated. Because these critics and naysayers do not realize that we’re appealing to basic human capacities and meeting basic, primal needs [pattern recognition and the need for coherence], they mistakenly conclude that the service we provide will be easily replaced by some flashier, more beguiling product — any day now.

  But the fact is that while text seems old fashioned, it remains by far the most efficient way to transfer complex information.

  Weaver notes that the printed word has going for it the fact that it’s asynchronous — “you don’t have to listen to the story in the order it’s spoken. It’s also permanent. Good reporting and writing transfers power because you can read n 10 minutes what took the reporter 10 hours to report and write.
The ultimate power of the written word, though, is storytelling, Weaver asserts. Weaver ends by talking about his time at the Anchorage Daily News:

At the Daily News, we wanted to be Alaska’s tribal fire, the place where Alaskans gathered to tell the stories that defined themselves as a people. That same aspiration is alive and engaged at the newspaper today, and it is one in which you all can readily and profitably share. You’re the storytellers, and the power and the magic of a tale well told rests well within your grasp.

Can any medium other than newspapers tell the stories that define a people? What must newspapers do to maintain that role? The debate continues.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In Web and social-media time, it feels like Jennifer Warwick and I have been friends for ages and ages. It’s really been only since 2004, but she’s one of my “oldest” virtual friends, meaning that I have all sorts of warm feelings and admiration for her even though we’ve never met.

One impetus of my admiration is the radical way she has reinvented herself. She was a high-powered, in-demand consultant, blogger, coach, and speaker in fast-paced LA. About three years ago, she moved to Texas and became an actress, singer, director, writer (and other roles that I’m probably inadvertently leaving out), and above all, champion of rural life. Here’s what she said at the time:

After 20-odd years in the hustle and bustle of LA, we moved to a little teeny town of 7,000 just outside Austin to recalibrate our lives and spend more time with each other and doing things we love.

That town is Bastrop, and Jennifer has initiated a story-based project about her adopted little town; thus, writing about her today provides an appropriate followup to yesterday’s entry about Barbara Ganley and community storytelling.

Jennifer’s vision is to collect, preserve, and celebrate Bastrop’s stories.

In a project update, she writes:

… The Bastrop Folklife Project will become a self-sustaining nonprofit organization, significantly contributing to Bastrop’s quality of life and its cultural and heritage tourism efforts. We will provide Bastrop residents of all ages with training in collecting and preserving oral histories as well as in the performing arts, and will entertain thousands of citizens and visitors annually with high-quality live performances, books and recordings, celebrating a history and culture that is uniquely Bastrop.

The Bastrop Folklife Project captures vanished ways of life and specific moments in American history by collecting the folklore, myths, songs and memories passed down over the years by members of our community, and creating illuminating and memorable books, soundtracks, and live performances to keep those stories alive.

It’s exciting to observe this project at its birth. I hope to report on its progress. It’s one thing to note a community-storytelling project; it’s another to see it in its infancy and watch it grow. Watch the development of the project’s Web site, now under construction.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

One of my new heroes is Barbara Ganley, who blogs at (The New) BG Blogging. I find her fascinating because of her work with story in higher education and in community storytelling. She recently left the former to focus on the latter:

Barbara Ganley recently left higher education to set up the nonprofit, Digital Explorations, dedicated to helping rural towns in the United States explore the impact of social media on physical community, through the creation of downtown Centers for Community Digital Exploration.

Her blog is also beautifully illustrated with photos.

Barbara posted a particularly rich blog entry last September, in essence her syllabus for a workshop she co-taught (with Joe Antonioli) at Middlebury College on capturing the stories of a small country town. The entry includes a vast list of storytelling resources.

But in December Barbara lamented that she does not see enough storytelling that does what she believes it should do:

We go on and on about the power of storytelling, its role in human culture, but how are we using the telling, the sharing and the art itself within classrooms and communities? As a classroom teacher and now in my work in rural communities, only rarely do I see sustained, connected use of both stories and storytelling to build healthy bonds and bridges, to synthesize thought and experience, or to imagine a better future. Certainly not in higher ed. Not in community work either. At least not enough.

She cites “a simple storytelling exercise” that has had this positive effect when she’s used it in workshops:

Participants feel closer to one another, trust builds, and differences are honored. People laugh. But it is a tender, fragile trust, one that can easily fade out once the “workshop” or the course ends.

That trust, therefore, needs to be part of a sustained storytelling practice, Barbara writes:

When this storytelling extends, however, through sustained practice, and stories are caught here, commented on, revised, and extended on blogs, on wikis, on sites … where they become threads woven together of a complex story, the moment of person-to-person connection has the potential to deepen, to open up through contact with other stories, and to move others - if the story is told well. Hence the need for practice, for developing a practice where storytelling is used.

She goes on to cite three examples of blogs that represent this kind of sustained practice and “wrap the tendrils of story around whomever happens upon them and takes the time to read.”

My only complaint? I can’t see a way to get in touch with Barbara other than to leave a comment on her blog. I’d love to invite her to do a Q&A.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

As a followup to Friday’s entry about Unemployed Bob who is attempting to collect stories of the jobless through his eponymous blog, I came across the story of Greg Dillon, as told by CNN’s Jennifer Reingold on CNNMoney.com. What makes the story especially interesting is the fact that Dillon is a career counselor. Reingold writes:

The worst thing for Dillon is the sense of powerlessness, even as he knows that others are in the same situation. “It’s a double-edged sword,” he says. “You don’t take it as personal because it’s affecting everyone, but at the same time those other people are also competing against you for jobs.”

If a career counselor, who presumably knows all the right moves, feels powerless, it’s easy to imagine how typical laid-off folks feel.

I was impressed by another out-of-work job-seeker who presumably knows all the right moves, recruiter Craig Campbell. I so often advise the unemployed that they must treat job-seeking like a job unto itself and really put the necessary time and work into it — but few do. Campbell, however, does. He should be the poster child for hard-working job-seeker. An excerpt from a blog entry describing his efforts:

Between online, on the phone and in person, I’m working-and obsessing-over my search about six to seven hours a day. I’ve built a career profile that includes my professional value proposition (the unique value that I offer to employers) and looks more like a marketing one sheet-an easy-to-read page that highlights my expertise-rather than the basic text resume. With the help of a friend I designed a Web profile and blog. I created a ‘call to action’ Outlook signature with links to my resume and Web site so that for every email exchange I have, the recipient can view or forward my profile. I updated my profiles and significantly increased my participation on social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. I’m participating in blogs, chats, and Webinars and providing advice as a recruiting industry expert. I’ve created several competitive comparison case studies to present to the employers that I’m interested in. It outlines what they’re doing versus what their most direct competitors are doing (of course the final part, is how I can help close that gap). I’m also seeking out opportunities to speak on my areas of expertise for a fee or free.

… I think the extra work is necessary considering how competitive the environment continues to get with more layoffs every week. While I don’t have offers yet, after about a month of launching this new effort, I have been to several final round interviews. Each time they have commented on my career profile, online career page as well as my comments and feedback on their blogs or other social media outlets. It doesn’t always result in actual opportunity, but at a minimum they’re letting me know that I’m on their radar.

During the Great Depression, no medium like the Internet existed for the widespread dissemination of stories of the jobless. I believe the unemployed today are fortunate to have stories that help them feel they are not alone — and to offer tips on what is working and not working in the job search in this climate.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Valentine’s Day is a week from today, and the folks at SMITH magazine are serving up another tasty box of chocolates, a.k.a., their third book of six-word memoirs, Six Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak.

Below is
a video
that offers
a tantalizing preview:

Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak from SMITHmag on Vimeo.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A troubling convergence today: The US government announced this morning that 598,000 more jobs were lost in January; for the first time in this crisis, I learned of a friend who was just laid off (not counting a number of my former students who have not found appropriate work since graduating); and I was forwarded an e-mail from “Unemployed Bob” about his blog (also called Unemployed Bob).

In stark contrast to my entry a while back about Barbara Winter, who is “joyfully” (and deliberately) jobless, Bob, formerly a successful marketing executive, says he is “hopelessly and desperately unemployed.” He says he has been “unemployed for nine months, eleven days, and three hours” and expected to land a new job easily after he got his pink slip. He was so confident that he used his severance pay for a six-day trip to Rome. All these months later, his parents think he’s starting a software venture and have no idea how dire his situation is.

Bob has a button on his blog that asks for others to send their unemployment stories. He says, “I’ve started this forum to share my tale with those who are just like me. I want to hear your stories (all printed anonymously) so we can create a healing revolution for brilliant, deserving, and jobless.” He wants to form a sort of “Unemployed Anonymous.”

There is indeed power, or at least comfort, in sharing stories in these difficult times. He believes — and I support his belief — that sharing stories can help to make unemployed folks “a little saner and confident in our everyday routine.” Bob says:

I started this site because I don’t want any of us to feel like we’re the only failures on Earth. Everyday when I sit in front of the computer, I want to read your stories. How are you coping? How did you lose your job? How are you feeling today? How do you stay positive? I need to hear that there are more people like me. Or like you. Like all of us.

Bob is asking for jobless stories to come to him by e-mail. He’s also asking the folks spread the word about his venture.

Bob’s blog is well-written and compelling. I plan to follow it. I hope folks do indeed share their stories with him.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Here’s this week’s word cloud/tag cloud from Wordle.net based on the content of A Storied Career:

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Perhaps it is President Obama’s inauguration, Black History Month, and the fact that February brings us Presidents’ Day that puts me in a patriotic mood and receptive to Americana.

I was thus charmed by a site, America’s Story, from the Library of Congress.

The site was designed especially with young people in mind, but also offers “great stories for people of all ages.” These teasers illustrate the site’s storytelling potential:

Here, you can discover what Abraham Lincoln had in his pockets on the night he was assassinated. (You will be surprised.) Or you can read about other “Amazing Americans” such as Buffalo Bill Cody and his “Wild West” show; the heroism of Harriet Tubman, who helped many slaves escape bondage; the music of jazz great Duke Ellington; or the inventions of Thomas Edison. (You will even be able to see his first motion picture!).

If you think break-dancing is a new invention, then visit “Join America at Play,” where you’ll see a film of an early break-dancer from 1898! Ever hear of a “cloth sandwich”? You’ll know what I’m talking about when you read the stories in this section. And, of course, we have many tales to tell about baseball, America’s pastime — from the “Cyclone” (pitcher Cy Young) to Jackie Robinson, a hero both on and off the field.

“Jump Back in Time” and find the settlers who landed on Plymouth Rock. Or jump to a more recent age and read about be-bop, a type of music invented long before hip-hop. Do you know what happened on the day you were born? You can find out here.

Want to travel across the country? Then click on “Explore the States,” where you’ll find fascinating facts and stories about all the states and Washington, D.C.

And if you’ve ever wondered what the first cartoons looked like, then click on “See, Hear and Sing.” You’ll read about a man who in 1896 figured out how to make inanimate objects move. You know about the guitar, the piano and the trumpet, but how about the oud, the zurna and the marimba? These unusual instruments influenced today’s modern musical instruments.

It’s a fascinating and lively romp through history told with a strong storytelling flavor.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Last fall, my Facebook friend Liz Massey of the blog Write Livelihood interviewed Roger Burks, a pioneer of what he calls “humanitarian storytelling.”

The interview, Roger Burks, his company Pictographers, and Burks’ pioneering work in humanitarian storytelling all impressed me. I had especially not consider the negative and exploitative effect of what he calls “poverty porn,” which he explains in the excerpt below:

For too long now, most of the communications we’ve all seen coming from humanitarian, development and non-governmental organizations have been what I’ve heard described as “poverty porn” — words and images that elicit an emotional response by their sheer shock value. Images like starving, skeletal children covered in flies. Overuse of the word “victim.”

That kind of communication may get results, but at what cost to those portrayed? I believe that kind of exploitation is nothing less than a violation of human rights, especially considering what the impoverished, oppressed and marginalized have already had to endure.

I co-founded Pictographers with the idea of dignity and development through communication. We’re trying to cause a shift toward documentary writing and photography that respects the humanity of those our organizations are serving, while still crafting compelling communications that inspire people to action.

Massey asks a great question about how Burks balances objectivity with the rawness of human emotion to tell a powerful story. Burks’ response, in part:

I think this is the essence of humanitarian storytelling: that balance between being an objective journalist and letting yourself be the conduit through which human emotion is channeled.

Burks’ believes this kind of humanitarian storytelling can be world-changing. I know well from my research that storytelling, done well, can spark action. Burks’ particular brand of storytelling may indeed be the kind that can inspire global transformation:

I’m excited for the chance to, as Pictographers, train journalists who will not only work to change their organizations, but change the world. That sounds lofty, but think about it: humanitarian storytelling gets people to take action. It not only raises awareness, but also gives organizations the resources they need to make a difference.

You can see examples of Burks’ humanitarian stories here.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

As I read a piece by “Jennifer” on “the lost art of storytelling” (which I don’t believe is actually lost), it dawned on me that storytelling is a mainstay of 12-step groups.

I have been sober for 26 years, after 10 years of problem drinking in my 20s, but I bypassed Alcoholics Anonymous because I just didn’t want to do a group thing. I am not unfamiliar with how AA works, however, and have attended a meeting or two with close family members who were 12-steppers. I know that storytelling — about the struggles and triumphs of dealing with addiction — is the heart of a 12-step meeting. I’ve also shared my own alcoholism story in other venues, such as newspaper columns I’ve written.

“Jennifer” made this point about storytelling and 12-step groups by way of discussing the book, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning. She explains that the book:

… talks about the spirituality of shared imperfection through the telling of stories that occurs in AA (and likewise in other 12-step programs, e.g. Al-anon). It is through the telling of stories of hardship and pain, shame and doubt, joy and strength, experience and hope — stories of recovery — that we connect with each other and find a shared spirituality that accepts us all as okay, as imperfect and we learn and grow from our shared imperfections. These very imperfections are what enhances, not only our connection, but our spirituality, our connectedness, so that we are better, stronger as a result. It is not just through our flaws that we grow strong, but in shared imperfections - a sharing that occurs through the telling of our “stories”.

In a review on Amazon, John Moryl of Yeshiva University Library further explains:

The aim of this book is to explain the underlying spiritual — although not necessarily religious — principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. Part 1 presents the emphasis of this spirituality, which is the recognition and especially the acceptance of humans as imperfect beings. Part 2 tells how the founders of AA put spirituality to use. Part 3 discusses the benefits: release, gratitude, humility, tolerance, and forgiveness. On nearly every page, the authors retell stories and provide anecdotes from various sources: ancient Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Greek, and more. One need not have an interest in AA to benefit from this fine introduction to spirituality.

I’m intrigued and will add this book to the huge stack of books I want to read.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Anecdote, the Australian story-based consultancy, offered a neat idea in its latest newsletter — using name badges as story prompts. Suggesting this activity as an icebreaker for folks meeting the first time or that don’t know each other well, Anecdote instructs:

Ask everyone to write something interesting or quirky about themself on a name tag or post-it and wear it as a badge. … Allow 10 min for the group to mingle and hear as many stories they can that reveal the choice of words people have used and in doing so learn something interesting about each other.

Anecdote suggests these as possibilities for the name badges:

• your nickname
• sports you love to play or watch
• the [sports] team you follow (Anecdote suggested football team, which, of course, means soccer in most of the world.)
• your favourite biography
• what’s on the cover of your diary
• a thought-provoking quote
• your personal motto
• the beginning of an interesting story

Anecdote notes that Margaret Moon suggested a variation of this technique as an in-house team-building activity:

Ask people to write [on a post-it] a fact about themselves (a skill or talent) that their team members may or may not know about. Cluster the post-its on a wall. Invite participants to guess who the post-its might represent.

I like these activities a lot because they make the most out name badges (presumably, names are also included along with the tidbits on the badges; imagine how well your memory of each person’s name can be reinforced by looking at the other information on the name badge). These are great ways of integrating networking and storytelling.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Today is an anniversary of sorts. A year ago today, I relaunched this blog (originally launched in May 2005) and made a commitment to blog every single day. I’ve kept my commitment. Purists can uncover one entry (sometime in Aug. 2008) that I placed back into draft status because I wanted to add something to it and still haven’t gotten around to it. But I’m pretty sure that’s the only post-less day in the last year.

I never lack material. I do sometimes lack time because I find blogging very time-consuming. But maintaining this blog is always an immensely satisfying experience.

Thanks for coming along on the journey. I hope you’ll stick around.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.