See a photo of Amy Zalman, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

Q&A with Amy Zalman, Question 3:

Q: Why do you feel it’s important “to gain a holistic view of our own stories, those of others, and those that drive public events and perceptions” and to “bridge divergent narratives”?

A: I believe these two abilities are crucial. My thoughts on this come out having watched the experience of the U.S. and later NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Here is an example of divergent narratives: for a long time, we characterized the accidental deaths of Afghan civilians, so called “collateral damage” as regrettable but necessary adjuncts to winning a war. And although Allied forces began after about 2009 to start taking the issue more seriously, issuing public apologies, and compensating families, the fundamental way that civilian deaths were understood never really changed because they were part of the Western understanding of the war. From the Afghan side, although I cannot claim to be inside the cultural contours, I believe that the calculus was different. First of all, Taliban are also Afghans. The line we’d like to draw between Taliban combatants and civilians is not so clear as we might think, from the Afghan vantage. Second, the “collateral” in question were sons and daughters, husbands and wives, children and grandparents — they were not just characters in the story of a war, but members of families and communities, to those who lost them.

If we cannot draw back and take a look from on high at how these different view points are clashing, interacting, and feeding each other, we cannot formulate a strategic response that gets us somewhere new. As for bridging divergent narratives, apologizing to someone for their loss is not the same as seeing the story from their vantage. This kind of empathy is not a humanistic luxury, but a strategic necessity. We failed to heed or even grasp the narrative as Afghans see it, and the accumulated grievance is now unfolding very violently.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Amy Zalman, her bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Amy Zalman, Question 2:

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/ narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

A: My love of words and stories has no beginning; all I know is that some of my favorite childhood memories are of lying under our dining room table and reading books, or reading by flashlights after hours in bed, or riding my bicycle back and forth to the library with a basket full of books. I spent a lot of hours alone; stories kept me company.

My professional engagement with narrative comes out of the war in Iraq. The communications firm I owned then was on a team competing for a military contract to produce info-tainment products for Middle Eastern audiences. It felt somewhat surreal to sit around a DC boardroom table with military intelligence folks coming in and out, Madison Avenue advertisers, defense contractors, and social scientists all trying to come up with soap operas and comic books and roadside billboard ads to dissuade Iraqis from “terrorism.” There was minimal understanding of the Middle East, a poorly understood global media environment, and a lot of money flying around. Together these produced communications ideas that ranged from slightly mad to offensive. Obviously, there was something deeply misguided about how the United States was trying to communicate with foreign publics, but I didn’t know quite how to articulate it. One day, I picked up a book in a local bookstore with an essay by literary theorist J. Hillis Miller [pictured] in it on narrative. In it he said,

A story is a way of doing things with words. It makes something happen in the real world, for example, it can propose modes of selfhood or ways of behaving that are then imitated in the real world. It has been said, along these lines, that we would not know if we were in love if we had not read novels. Seen from this point of view, fictions may be said to have a tremendous importance not as the accurate reflections of a culture, but as the makers of that culture and as the unostentatious but therefore all the more effective policemen of that culture. Fictions keep us in line and tend to make us more like our neighbors.

That was an “a-ha” moment for me. The U.S. government had been saying repeatedly that the United States had to “tell its story better” to the rest of the world, to Muslims in particular. But we did not at an institutional level understand at all that there is no binary “us” and “them” but rather many different stories of world history that actually involve all of us, but assign radically different meaning to history, and that propose different visions of the future.

Miller’s reminder that stories produce social reality gave me a way to think about what is wrong with going around the world “telling our story” as a way of generating a productive international environment. “Telling our story” presumes we have monologic relationship with a passive, blank slate of a world. To produce a future in which everyone feels like a stakeholder requires tapping into others’ existing narratives and finding ways to insert new storylines that shift away from unproductive paths. This seems to be a better route than hitting people over the head with stories about liberty and freedom, as if they had no native vision of this fundamental agenda shared by all modern people, although we express that intention in different idioms.

Shortly after reading Miller’s essay, I completed a paper I called “A Narrative Theory Approach to U.S. Strategic Communications.” I presented it to a military audience, and I have been fascinated since then about the potential for insights from the worlds of poets and artists to inform national security strategy. That potential is insufficiently explored, and as a line of inquiry it lets me live at the intersection of things I love most — language and poetry, international affairs and cultures, and strategy.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

I am beyond intrigued with the niche of storytelling/narrative that Dr. Amy Zalman practices — strategic narrative. Her firm “advance[s] the practice of narrative to solve complex problems among people, cultures and organizations.” I felt it would be helpful to kick off this Q&A with Dr. Zalman’s explanation of strategic narrative. The Q&A will run over the next five days.

Bio: Amy Zalman has worked to support more culturally astute approaches to national security problems for nearly a decade. She currently heads new markets strategy at a private sector government consulting firm, where her research supports new analytic approaches and applications of technology, to address global and transnational challenges.

Her current research develops a framework by which countries and organizations can measure their “soft power” — their ability to use resources, discourses and interactions with others to generate desired outcomes. She recently spoke on the topic at the Heritage Foundation think tank and is working on a book on the topic.

Amy is also an authority on how the U.S. can better understand and engage foreign publics, and regularly provides insight to policymakers and other stakeholder audiences. She has briefed U.S. Congress on “winning hearts and minds” in the context of a battle against violent extremism, and on the future of cultural education in the U.S. military. Other recent audiences include the U.S. Marine Corps Public Affairs Leadership Conference, Ankara based NATO Center of Excellence-Defense Against Terrorism (COE-DAT), the NATO International School of Azerbaijan, the EastWest Institute Worldwide Security Conference, the Office of the Secretary of Defense Highlands Forum, and National Defense University.

She has served on the faculties of New York University, Cornell University and the New School University. She received her Ph.D. in Arabic literature and cultural studies from the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from Cornell. Her publications include poetry, literary translation and scholarly essays, in addition to commentaries in the national security space. She is a proficient Arabic and Hebrew speaker.

Amy can be located through her website, Strategic Narrative, which is dedicated to applications of narrative to solve complex problems, and on LinkedIn.

Q&A with Amy Zalman, Question 1:

Q: What future trends or directions to do foresee for story/storytelling/ narrative? What’s next for the discipline? What future aspirations do you personally have for your own story work? What would you like to do in the story world that you haven’t yet done?

A: There is an emergent strand of international relations research focused on the concept of “strategic narrative.” Lawrence Freedman, a professor at King’s College London, used the term in a 2006 paper called “The Transformation of Strategic Affairs.” For Freedman, “compelling story lines which can explain events convincingly and from which inferences can be drawn” may be increasingly important aspects of military conflict, where combatants may seek to undermine each others narratives, rather than only seeking to eliminate each others’ assets.

Other scholars, including Andreas Antoniades, Alister Miskimmon and Ben O’Loughlin, among others, have extended this work; in 2010 they co-authored a work called “Great Power Politics and Strategic Narratives” that offered an amplified vision of how great powers ply their values in the international system through narrative. Yet, I think there is a great deal more work to be done that would link concepts such as authorship, voice, character, plot, and time to power as it is expressed in the international arena.

I am extremely interested in the practical uses of understanding these intersections better as a route to understanding the symbolic aspects of a successful foreign policy. I’m also pleased I’ll have the chance to meet some of these scholars at this spring’s International Studies Association conference, where I’ll present some early thoughts on the Saudi Arabian response to the Arab Spring. My intention was to outline the Saudi narrative. But what I found when I went looking would be better described as an official effort to prevent domestic or international publics from interpreting events as they were being interpreted in the streets of Tunisia and Egypt as a coherent story. It was anti-narrative.

American leadership is in the global press every day trying to tell our story, listen to others’ stories, connect the American story to that of the rest of the world. We are constantly in storytelling mode! In contrast, Saudi officials speak rarely in the global press, and they said almost nothing last year during the Arab Spring. But Saudi Arabia also has a different founding narrative of itself that is closely identified with Islamic orthodoxy. Does a state whose identity is tied to a universal religion have a different relationship to storytelling than one whose founding myth is one not of transcendent truth, but on being a frontier-seeking, future looking society? Is there a typology of the storytelling state? And if so, how do we trace the effects of that identity in current events?

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Periodically I like to do a roundup of storytelling goodies from the generous world of applied storytelling. Fans, students, and practitioners in this field can build a nice little library of white papers, ebooks, tools, checklists, online videos, and much more without spending a dime. It would be fun to look at every post I’ve ever done on these freebies and discover just what a treasure trove it is.

Here are the goodies I’ve come across recently:

• Sample chapter of Storytelling Pocketbook by Roger Edward Jones: This 16-page, user-friendly excerpt from the larger book of the same name discusses the power of storytelling in business, why we need to tell more stories, where stories beat facts, common objections to storytelling (that’s something that doesn’t get much discussion and is a welcome topic), and an exercise on becoming a story detective.
• A Checklist for Business Leaders on Introducing Organisational Storytelling into Your Organisation from Australia’s onethousandandone consultancy. The one-page downloadable PDF offers important principles for deploying storytelling in an organization.

• Story Juice: How Ideas Spread and Brands Grow, a colorful, reader-friendly, 85-page free ebook by Julie Fuoti and Lisa Johnson of The Grapevine Group. See the foreword; here’s a snippet below:

When brands and businesses add a missing story ingredient the authors have dubbed — Story Juice — it’s transformative. … it has “juice” (excitement, energy, movement and possibility).

• Lifescapes Handbook: A guide for creating a writing program for senior citizens: Tons of ideas, tools, prompts, and resources populate this 95-page downloadable ebook that tells how to start a writing program for elders, including how participants can write memoirs. Includes reproducible handouts.
• The Story Behind The Gift, from Norma Cameron of The Narrative Company, a wonderful three-page handout that guides nonprofit fundraisers in collecting and sharing “legacy stories” so “that those who receive the benefit of the gift will know a little about the donors and why they decided to be so generous to [the] organization.” Read more about The Power of Legacy Stories
• How to Use Powerful Storytelling, a five-video series from Michael Margolis. I don’t usually promote items I haven’t previewed, but I trust Michael. Users who give their names are promised “instant access” to the videos, but first they have to wait for email confirmation. When they click on the link in the email, they are told the videos aren’t ready yet (at least at this writing), but offered a downloadable copy of Michael’s popular Believe Me storytelling manifesto, while I already have. I don’t know how long the videos are, but the topics are “Stand Out from the Crowd,” “Against All Odds,” “The Ultimate Question,” “The Re-Storying the Future,” and “Get It Now.”

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Anna Marie Trester is a sociolinguist who recently made the point in her eponymous blog that as researchers, she and her colleagues bring special skills to crafting resumes and cover letters.

I was pleased to note her support for telling stories in cover letters. Here’s what she said in her post:

We are aware of the power of narrative. Use your cover letter to tell the story of your resume (the goal is not to encapsulate your life story, but tell your reader how to read this one representation of it). We know that in storytelling, we cannot say anything and everything. We must choose. And such choices carry meaning. Just as Schiffrin (1996) tells us “Our transformation of experience into stories, and the way we carry it out, is thus a way to show our interlocutors the salience of particular aspects of our identities” (199). We can only chose some aspects of our professional identities to showcase in a resume and cover letter. The task is to choose the best ones for the job, and showcase them well. One piece of advice that I heard from a career expert which I thought was very useful was to think about your resume as a wish list. Of course you perform many duties as part of your current job, and you have performed many at your past jobs as well. Given that you cannot tell the stories about them all, select the ones that you would most like to do again (careful of course not to misrepresent your duties). When you talk about things that you enjoyed doing, you are more likely to strike the right tone and communicate enthusiasm as well…

I can’t argue with that advice, but I would add to it that the job-seeker should keep in mind choosing a story that is relevant for the employer and vacancy he or she is targeting in the letter. The cover letter is the job-seeker’s best opportunity to customize the application package to the specific opening and employer. He or she should research what’s important to the employer (that information may or may not be evident in the job posting) and choose a story that aligns with that priority.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

During my PhD program, I tried to latch onto the term “organizational entry” to describe, in part, my field of research. Organizational entry is the term used in academia to cover there activities surrounding bringing new employees into an organization. Though the term is much more commonly applied to what happens after employees are hired, it also refers to the actually hiring process. (Job search, recruiting, and hiring don’t get an enormous amount of attention in academic research, though.)

All that is a long-winded intro to my observation that organizational people in the real world don’t, as far as I can tell, use the term “organizational entry;” instead, they use “onboarding.” It’s a perfectly decent term, but I like the descriptiveness of “organizational entry.”

Writing on ERE.net, David Lee yesterday offered 5 Kinds of Stories to Tell During Onboarding. His thesis is that helping new employees develop pride in working for your organization is the most important message you can convey to them. Happily, Lee prescribes stories as the best way to convey that message and suggests five themes:

1. What makes your product or service great.
2. How your product or service has made a difference in the lives or businesses of your customers.
3. The good things your organization does in your local community, or for the world community.
4. Examples of employees performing at elite levels, such as providing over-the-top customer service that blows your customers away.
5. How your organization is run with integrity, respect for its people, and competence.

These, of course, are important story themes for organizations to think about in several contexts, including branding and advertising. As Lee suggests later in the article, you can also use these types of stories to attract talent to your organization.

Lee also details how organizations can find and develop stories for these purposes:

1. Collect stories from employees at all levels, about Moments of Truth that illustrate why they are proud to work in your organization.
2. Collect and catalog these stories in a database. Note what message they communicate, what value they personify, and use these as searchable keywords in your database. That way, you can easily locate what stories communicate the specific message you want to communicate.
3. Start including these stories in your new employee orientation program, but don’t stop there. Include them also on your recruiting site, have your recruiters share them at job fairs, and include them in your hiring interviews.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

In a thoughtful and thought-provoking blog post, Storytelling: Community through… Competition?, Katie Knutson talks about how, even in competitive settings, storytellers generate a strong sense of community.

Knutson recalls that despite the “fiercely competitive” storytelling category in her high-school forensics contests, a sense of community persisted in that category as with no other in the forensics competition:

… the storytellers talked, complimented each other on stories, shared ideas, laughed, and celebrated the successes of our competitors. After all, the better our competition was, the better we had to be.

She raises a question that everyone in the story world might ask: “Was there something special about storytelling that created community among competitors? Was it the act of sharing stories or the people who created the sense of belonging?”

As an adult oral-performance storyteller, Knutson notes that she is still in competition with other storytellers — for gigs, grant money, and more. Yet …

Despite this competition, the community persists. We come together to share our stories, best practices, and skills. We welcome newcomers and encourage others to join us — not because there is so much work that we cannot do it all, but because we have a passion. We get to use our gifts to make a difference, and have a wonderful time doing it.

One thing that has struck me more than just about anything else in the eight years I’ve been in the applied-storytelling realm is that exact same kind of community and mutual support. In theory, many story practitioners are competing for clients, for readers, for buyers, and more. Yet the same spirit of community and mutual support Knutson observes is evident in the applied world. We help each other out, give shootouts and pats on the back, and support each others’ endeavors.

I’d go a step further and cite the incredible spirit of generosity in the story world; storytellers and practitioners are constantly offering freebies — ebooks, white papers, tools, and more — to their constituencies and the general public.

I do think this sense of community and generosity is unique to the story world. I see it in the other major sector I travel in — job search and careers — but to a much lesser extent.

Thus, Knutson’s question is appropriate. Is it the act of sharing stories that creates community?

It just may be. I’ve been revisiting The Spirituality of Imperfection for an upcoming Toastmasters speech. The book, subtitled, “Storytelling and the Search for Meaning,” emphasizes the connectedness people feel when they share stories.

And that’s the key, I think, that we professionals who “compete” in the story world are connected by the stories we share.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

I had two occasions in the last couple of months to see the “About” pages of many Web sites and blogs. In the first, I had a few dozen story practitioners that I wanted to invite to participate in my Q&A series. In the second, I visited many sites and blogs to glean a short description of each so I could list them on my inside pages.

Both activities had maddening elements.

Probably about a third of the “practitioners” provided absolutely no way to contact them. These were mostly bloggers. I do understand that blogging has its roots in anonymity. While most bloggers identify themselves today (Is that a true statement? Any stats on blogger anonymity?), some still have legitimate reasons to hide their identities. They may not want their employers to know about their blogs, for example.

But note that I perceived these bloggers as practitioners in the story world. That means they appeared to be interested in selling their services — so how do they expect to do so if they provide no contact information? Some provided only a first name; a few provided no name at all.

I don’t get it.

The other maddening phenomenon involved sites and blogs (and here I also refer to the businesses or organizations behind the sites) that provided little or no idea of what they are about — their purpose, mission, premise, etc. In at least two cases, I had to turn to third-party sites to get a description of the thrust of the sites I wanted to list. That’s just pathetic, in my opinion. Common situations:

• Absolutely no About page at all and no description on the home page as to what the site is about.
• Descriptions on the About page of people behind the site, but still no hint of what the site is about.
• Long — often nicely written and even storied — descriptions of an overall philosophy, but still no concise statement of what the site is about.
• Worse, a long, boring chronological bio with all of the founder’s credentials, but again no concise statement of what the site is about.
• Site where one could probably figure out what the site is about by using it, but the user must register to do so.
• The user has to watch a video to find out what the site is about. Sorry, I don’t have the patience for that.

Here are the two crazy-making examples from my recent endeavors for which I had to consult third-party sites to get a description:

The much buzzed-about Dear Photograph: Now, it’s not hard to figure out what this site is about by looking at it: Submitters take a snapshot — usually one featuring one or more people and dating from the film-photography era — and hold it up against the original setting so that past and present blend into a new work of art. They also write a brief piece about the work. But would it kill founder Taylor Jones to have an About page? I’d love to see how he sees the site, what his vision for it is, a description of it in his own words.

Small Demons: No About page. You’ll find a fair amount of text on the home page for this tool. But none of it explains how to use the tool, what the purpose is, and why you would want to use it. In fairness, a 1:49 video gets the user a little closer to understanding — but still doesn’t tell us how or why this tool is useful. We could also perhaps figure it out if we registered on the site. Personally, I’d like to know what I’m registering for before I register. Could we not get a simple explanation of a couple of sentences that tells us what Small Demons is good for? Something like these sentences I resorted to from Cool Hunting: “Collects and catalogs the millions of references to real-world and fictional music, movies, people, and objects that are found in literature and provides a place — a Storyverse — where users can draw meaningful connections between stories and everyday life.” I can only wonder at how many more users Small Demons would get if people could figure out what it’s about.

Not long ago, the About page of blogger Len Evans’s blog, “Looking Out from My Little Place was cited as a nice, storied example of an About page (I’m sorry that I forget who pointed it out.)

The story is indeed charming, authentic, and personal, especially when juxtaposed with the link Evans provides at the end of the story: “The Blah, Blah, Blah Bio” (also charmingly, there’s not all that much blah, blah, blah).

Evans’s story isn’t perfect. It’s a tad long. He says what he’s about but isn’t explicit about what the blog’s about. A quick look, however, reveals that his “about” and his blog’s are one and the same: “pastoring youth pastors and youth workers, helping build healthy local youth ministry networks, providing youth ministry training and walking alongside churches with a process so they can discern and discover what a healthy youth ministry means in their context.”

Still, it’s a refreshing About page compared to many.

Karen Dietz included in her Just Story It Scoop.it curation today Sonia Simone’s article on this “About” subject, Are You Making These 7 Mistakes with Your About Page?, which covers many of the same complaints I’ve just ranted about — plus more:

1. You don’t have an About page.
2. I can’t find your name.
3. I don’t know what you look like. (Not a huge complaint for me, but a photo is nice.)
4. The writing is boring.
5. Using video alone.
6. You go on (and on and on).
7. I bet you think your About Page is about you.

The article also generated 113 comments (at this writing), so it’s a great discussion of the issues of About pages.

Why do you think so many Web folks and bloggers fall down in the area of About pages, and what are your pet peeves?

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

I committed myself this month to updating some aspects of this blog, notably the “inside pages” on which I list links related to applied storytelling (Links to Interdisciplinary Storytelling Resources, Links to Organizational Storytelling Resources, Links to Storytelling Platforms, Tools, and Prompts, Links to Blogs that Relate to Storytelling, Links that Relate to Storytelling and Career, and Links about Memoir-Writing, Journaling, and Personal Storytelling).

I was also planning to update “Kat’s Definitive Twitter Story Follow List.” I’m not usually the type to make bold pronouncements, such as “my list of story people to follow on Twitter is definitive,” but I did so a few years ago in a fanciful mood.

I was horrified to discover during my updating process that I had not updated my Twitter-Follow list in almost three years!

I’m guessing that I initiated the list before Twitter enabled users to create lists there. As I considered updating my Twitter-Follow list, I wondered whether it made any sense to simply copy the information that appears on this page of my Twitter profile to a page within this blog. No, of course it doesn’t when I can simply provide a link to the list.

I follow, at this writing, 412 Twitter entities on a list I call Storytelling Practitioners. Despite its name, it’s a pretty all-encompassing list that includes brands and story tools as well as people. Most are in applied storytelling, but a few are traditional oral-performance storytellers.

To be honest, I use Twitter much less than I once did, and I was never a devoted Twitter user. I just never got into it the way some folks do; all the FF-ing, RT-ing, and thanking seemed exhausting and time-consuming.

Twitter is a great way to find out about new content in the applied-storytelling realm, but one must wade through an awful lot of repetition and noise to get to the gems. At one time I had a wonderful desktop app called Twicker. Icons of folks who used the #storytelling hashtag would move across my screen in ticker fashion. It was a great way to keep up, especially when I could see icons of my favorite story peeps. I can’t make Twicker work anymore, and it doesn’t seem to be supported. If I still had Twicker or something like it, I’d be much more into Twitter than I am.

I have other ways of uncovering finds now, and one can be enmeshed in just so many social-media venues. As I’ve said before in this space, I’m a long-time Facebook gal. I’m sure I miss some story goodies by putting so many of my eggs in the Facebook basket, but my experience on Facebook is much more enjoyable than it is on Twitter.

Each to his or her own when it comes to social media. I hope my friends for whom Twitter is a big deal don’t feel neglected and unappreciated when I don’t notice a shoutout from them. I am grateful for the attention, even if I fail to say so.

If you’re new to the story world or just curious about whom I follow in that realm, please do check out my public Twitter Story Practitioners list.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

The final piece of my rollout of recent finds is the largest, my catch-all category of Links to Interdisciplinary Storytelling Resources. This category covers everything that doesn’t fit into the categories of my other inside pages.

Now begins the task not only of actually placing this week’s lists on their respective inside pages, but also doing the same for all the finds I listed last July!

Education-Related Story Resources

• Talk Story Together: Joint family literacy project between the Asian/Pacific American Library Association and the American Indian Library Association.
• Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives: Publicly available archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, audio) that together provide a historical record of the literacy practices and values of contributors, as those practices and values change.

Multimedia Storytelling Resources

• Storytelling Category: Knight Digital Media Center: Recorded webcasts of speakers conducting digital media training sessions; presentations in this section filed under “Storytelling.”

• Story Wheel: Enables users to record a story around Instagram photos.

Online Magazines

• Narrative Nipple: Online literary magazine that focuses on the impact, revelation, celebration, darkness, exasperation, and expressive cravings of all breast-cancer survivors, fighters, and thrivers.

• The Sun: Independent, ad-free monthly magazine that for more than 30 years has used words and photographs to invoke the splendor and heartache of being human. The Sun celebrates life, but not in a way that ignores its complexity. “The personal essays, short stories, interviews, poetry, and photographs that appear in its pages explore the challenges we face and the moments when we rise to meet those challenges.”

Oral Performance and Presentation Storytelling

• Ex Fabula: Regularly connects storytellers with live audiences.
• The Moth on Stitcher: A mobile app that enables listening to podcasts of The Moth (and other programs).
• Rattle Tales: Night of interactive story-telling, run by local writers in Brighton, UK.
• Stories from the Borders of Sleep: Weekly podcast, featuring original stories, fantastic fables and curious tales written and read by Seymour Jacklin.
• Story League: For writers, stand-ups, poets, actors, and others who want to perfect the art and craft of telling true stories onstage.

Social-Change Story Initiatives and Resources

• Benevolent Media: Exploration of storytelling and design for good. Focuses on people, organizations and projects that compel audiences to care about a cause, take action on an issue, or promote a point of view through strategic and inspiring multimedia.
• The Brave Discussion: A community-based project led by a company of sisters who come together to raise awareness for issues that need to be discussed, whose stories need to be changed.
• First-Person Stories (Evelyn & Walter Haas Jr. Fund): First-person stories by people whose voices shed light on the complex and critical issues at the heart of the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund’s work.
• Globalgiving Storytelling Project: Project that collects 1,000 new stories each month from more than 50 towns and cities across Kenya and Uganda and uses Sensemaker(R) to turn these stories into data to inform and encourage organizations to provide solutions to communities’ most pressing needs.
• The Positive Project: Provides a mechanism by which people infected/affected by HIV/AIDS can share their experiences with those who can benefit from hearing them, to use their stories for the greater good.
• Social Enterprise Stories: A space for experiencing and sharing the impact of social enterprise.
• Stategic Narrative: Dr. Amy Zalman’s consultancy to advance the practice of narrative to solve complex problems among people, cultures and organizations.
• The Suicide Project: Website devoted to allowing people to share their stories of desperation and depression… and ultimately of hope. The hope is that by allowing people to share their stories of despair with one another, they can find a reason to live, a reason to survive another minute. Another hour. Another day.

Spiritual and religious Story Resources

• Guideposts: Offers real-life inspiration through true stories of hope, faith, personal growth, and positive thinking.
• Network of Biblical Storytellers: Internaitonal organization whose purpose is to communicate the sacred stories of the biblical tradition.

Story Collections

• 365 Veterans: Two moms on a mission to honor a Veteran a day, every day of the year.
• Army Strong Stories: Program provided by U.S. Army Accessions Command. The site is dedicated to sharing the meaning of Army Strong through a dedicated Soldier blog, and video and written story submissions from Soldiers, family members, friends and supporters.
• A Story Every Day: A new story is posted every day, and the site welcomes submissions.
• Biography.com: Site of the Biography channel.
• Epiphany Channel: Site to accompany the book, Epiphany: True Stories of Sudden Insight to Inspire, Encourage and Transformcompilation, a compilation of interviews with people from all different professions, nationalities, ages, beliefs and walks of life.
• Eyewitness to History: History through the eyes of the people who lived it.
• FMyLife.com: Collection of everyday anecdotes and stories likely to happen to anyone and everyone.
• Handprints on My Heart: A growing community featuring inspirational quotes, uplifting, positive blog posts, and motivational true personal short stories.
• Historical Haunts: A collection of ghost stories based on documented events from across the United States. For each tale, a cinematic adaptation using notable actors emotionally grabs the audience and a short documentary containing interviews with historians, scientists, and scholars help decipher the truth behind the legend.
• The Experience Project: Calls itself “the largest living collection of shared experiences.”
• Makes Me Think: Online community where people share daily life stories that provoke deep thought and inspire positive change.
• Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations: Oral history project exploring Montrealers’ experiences and memories of mass violence and displacement.
• Make the Connection: Stories of Connection: Shared experiences and support for veterans.
• One Woman’s Day: A project from Story Circle Network in which each day features a woman’s story.
• Mapping the Human Story: Explores and curates humanity’s traditions, wisdom and knowledge.
• The Payphone Project: Stories, pictures, phone numbers and news from payphones and public telephony.
• Share a Story: A social initiative to discover powerful personal stories from around the world.
• Stub Story: Stories about ticket stubs.
• Twitter Stories: Stories by Twitter users.
• Web of Stories: Began as an archive of life stories told by some of the great scientists of our time but is now open to people outside the field of science to tell their life stories.
• Your Story Club: Promote traditions of story-telling and story-listening by serving as online story publishing house where people can publish stories.
• Your Story: Audio Stories of Interesting Lives: Podcast and site about the individuals the site founder has met, their lives,. and how they have managed to get to where they are today.

Story Practitioners/Consultancies: Individual Coaching

• Juliet Bruce/Living Story: Writer, creatively oriented counselor, and story coach.
• Keener Inspiration: Patricia Keener is a career coach and training consultant who works with international businesses using training, workshop, and coaching techniques to help her clients develop their career and improve their business effectiveness, integrate successfully into other cultures, and develop their interpersonal skills.
• Seven Story Learning: The consultancy of Andrew Nemiccolo, who helps professionals communicate more effectively through stories.

Story Practitioners/Consultancies: Marketing, Branding

• B2B Storytelling: Consultancy that offers Web content, profiles, and case/customer success studies, white papers, blog posts, and articles.
• BB&Co Strategic Storytelling: The site of Bill Baker, who uses a StoryFinding process enables corporate and organizational leaders to collectively determine what makes their brand most meaningful and distinct.

• Brandtelling: Arthur Germain coaches professionals to tell the story of their brands.
• DUO Strategy and Design: Publishes unforgettable stories with clients and marry the stories with imagery.

• Free Range Studios: Works across all disciplines that drive positive change — from the visual to the strategic — to bring great stories to life.
• GameChangers: Improvisation for business in a networked world.
• Narrative Network: Specializes in corporate business stories and personal narratives and comprises storytellers in communications, public relations, social media, journalism, marketing, events, design, graphics, photo/video, multimedia, creative and academic professions.
• The Storybranding Group: Consulting practice of Cindy Atlee, and home to her collaborations with a variety of like-minded partners. The Storybranding Group helps clients define and give voice to what’s best and most distinctive about them—and use the power of who they really are to create compelling brands, develop inspired leaders and deeply engage their workforces.
• Your Story Communications: Communications agency specialising in writing, social media and event management. The Web presence of chief communicator/strategist/writer Sandy Galland seems to be this Facebook page.

Story Practitioners/Consultancies/Authors: Other

• Zette Harbour: Story Maven: Traditional storyteller, retreat leader, and founder of the Pacific Storytelling Center.
• Idea 360: Janine Underhill’s graphic recording and graphic facilitation and storytelling firm helping thought leaders and CEOs experience breakthroughs as they turn meetings into profitable outcomes.
• Influence Through Stories: Video training on how to communicate your message in a more compelling manner through stories.
• Living Proof: Advocacy storytelling tied to book of the same name by John Capecci and Timothy Cage.
• Lynne Griffin: Author and family-life expert who appears regularly in TV segments, Family Works and Family Life Stories, featuring important family life topics and recommended books.
• Presentation Storyboarding: Helps clients to succeed in giving presentations.
• Sharing Stories: Freelance journalist Jane Gregory supplies real-life stories to women’s magazines and national (UK) newspapers.
• Story Partners: Strategy, consultancy, training, workshops, production editing, music, talent sourcing, media management, data analysis. Support for stories.
• Your Story Matters: Author and entrepreneur Angela Schafers’ platform to share her own and others stories of hope. She produces and hosts her weekly show Your Story Matters, interviewing those around the globe with amazing stories.

Storytelling: Narrative Theory and Research

• Project Narrative: Sims to promote state-of-the art research and teaching in the field of narrative studies. Drawing on ideas from multiple disciplines, the Project focuses on narrative in all of its guises, from everyday storytelling in face-to-face interaction, to oral history and autobiography, to films, graphic novels, and narratives associated with digital environments, to the multitude of stories found in the world’s narrative literatures.

Visual Storytelling

• Question Bridge: Transmedia art project that seeks to represent and redefine Black male identity in America. Through video mediated question and answer exchange, diverse members of this “demographic” bridge economic, political, geographic, and generational divisions.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Roben-Marie, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, and Part 3.

Q&A with Roben-Marie Smith, Question 5:

Q: If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/ narrative with readers, what would it be?

A: One of my favorite quotes is “Comparison is a thief of joy,” by Theodore Roosevelt. Realizing that each voice is unique and valuable is key to fighting the negative thoughts that bombard you as you put yourself out into the public arena. Art, as with story, is meant to be shared — to encourage and inspire others. There is a reciprocal relationship that strengthens both the artist and the audience which makes facing down those fears worthwhile. It can be intimidating at first to put yourself out there but I have found it very rewarding.

I encourage every person with a desire for art in any form to start, just jump in, no delays. Be bold and just DO.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Links to Blogs that Relate to Storytelling

• 365 Stories in a Year: Lee Pound posts a new story every day.
• A Storied Perspective — Bill Baker’s Blog: The blog of Bill Baker, of BB&Co Strategic Storytelling.
• The Depictionist: An exploration of personal and professional storytelling through narrative branding.
• Food Curated: Blog based on the premise that all good food has a story. A mix of video and text posts.
• Gimli Goose: Kim (Valgardson) Zinke’s blog, tagline: “Your storytelling curator — helping you discover ways to find and tell your story your way.”

• Ben Hoare: Author Ben Hoare blogs about storytelling and autobiography, among other topics.
• Business Life Stories: Blog about entrepreneurs, startups, small-businesses, solo-practitioners, investors, and philanthropists. “Why I Love What I Do” is a center-piece in BusinessLifeStories.com.
• Change of Perspective: The blog of Mary Daniels Brown, PhD, in part about this premise: “The same event narrated from two different perspectives will produce two different stories.”
• Narrative by B. E. Berger: Barbara Berger’s blog about “Sharing the world through characters, settings and plots.”
• Small Business Storyteller: The blog of Doug Rice, founder of Small Business Storyteller, an Internet marketing company dedicated to helping independent professionals develop their personal and professional brands via the Web.
• Storyteller’s Campfire Blog: The blog of Bob Kanegis, founder of Tales & Trails Storytelling and executive director of Future WAVE-Working For Alternatives to Violence Through Entertainment.
• Small Business Storytelling Project: A project of Living Story, the creative counseling and coaching practice of Juliet Bruce, Ph.D.
• Storyati Blog: Jim Signorelli’s blog about Storybranding: Creating standout brands through the power of story.

• Storyteller Uprising: Hanson Hosein’s blog about the “uprising” — people seizing control of communication by building ongoing credible connection through story and digital technology.
• Storytelling to Create Impact Brands: Storytelling To Create Impact Brands is a site dedicated to the discussion of branding, marketing and sales using the power of storytelling.’s blogdedicated to the discussion of branding, marketing and sales using the power of storytelling.
• Story that Matters: From the unnamed blogger: “I work with people in organizations to discover and develop stories that lie beneath the surface — narratives that advance strategic objectives, build brands and strengthen connections to customers and communities.”
• Story Travelers: A tribe of concious-travel-enthusiasts with a shared passion for storytelling/narrative talents with understanding how a contempory story is told and retold.
• Succeed with Success Stories: A blog by Nemeth Consulting, which focuses on content marketing or content strategy.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Roben-Marie, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

Q&A with Roben-Marie Smith, Questions 3 and 4:

Q: You seem to have become successful in the art-journaling world, andyour work has appeared in many venues. Given that lots of people do art journaling, why you? What do you think made you so successful and driven to share your knowledge?

A: I attribute my success to a combination of things. I work hard to find the right balance between business and personal life. As a woman of faith, I believe that blessings are given to those who serve. Being accessible to people whether by teaching, blogging, or correspondence allows me to encourage and support other artists along that way.

I feel driven to share what I have learned with others. Inspiration is a two-way street. A desire to learn, to stretch and an unquenchable curiosity keeps my fingers inky and my heart happy.

Q: What has surprised you most in your work with story/art journaling?

A: There was a turning point in my evolution as an artist that was very unexpected. I took a class with mixed media artist, Traci Bautista in Hampton, VA, where I was teaching at an art retreat. Up to that point, my style was very vintage and lacked color and vibrancy.

Traci taught me how to embrace color in a way that stopped me in my tracks. My world was literally exploding with vibrant color and after class I filled my hotel room with works of saturated color. Every surface in my room was covered with drying art pieces.

That experienced changed how I viewed color and myself. I realized that I had been reticent to use color as I felt that was the domain of “real artists.” My fears and presuppositions were erased and my confidence grew. I became a different artist that day, embracing both color and my talent in a new way. It changed everything!

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Today’s rollout of finds that will eventually end up on an inside page is in the category of Links to Organizational Storytelling Resources. These links mostly represent organizational-storytelling practitioners and sites/blogs about organizational storytelling.

Many of my most recent finds in this category have resulted from my curation of organizational storytelling, business narrative, career storytelling, and job-search storytelling using Scoop-it. You can see the curation here or in the widget embedded below:

• History Factory: Heritage management firm that helps today’s leading global corporations, organizations and institutions discover, preserve and leverage their unique history to meet business challenges.
• Leadership Story Lab: Esther Choy’s consultancy that teaches storytelling to institutional and individual clients who are searching for ways to more meaningful ways to connect with their audiences.
• Only Human Communication: Uses creative approaches to help organisations and groups improve how they are seen, understood and valued: both inside and out.
• Roger Edward Jones: Consultancy that helps leaders “harness the hidden ROI of Storytelling.
• Seth Kahan: Seth works with leaders of world-class organizations to drive change.

• Seven Story Learning: The consultancy of Andrew Nemiccolo, who helps professionals communicate more effectively through stories.
• SOAR: Significant Orientations, Amazing Results: Consultancy of Mary-Alice, New Zealand’s leading narrative practitioner. At the heart of her work is the practice of recognising, working with and transforming the personal and group stories, conversations and inquiries that impact on success.
• The Story Doctor: Consultancy of Moya Sayer-Jones: “Making stories better.”

• Storytelling Bean Counter: All about narrating the financial story behind the numbers for small business.
• The Storytelling Studio for Business: The business branch of Doug Stevenson’s Story Theater International, a speaking, training and consulting company.
• Strategic Narrative: Dr. Amy Zalman’s consultancy to advance the practice of narrative to solve complex problems among people, cultures and organizations.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Roben-Marie, her bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Roben-Marie Smith, Question 2:

Q: What has been your favorite or most meaningful story-related project or initiative and why?

A: “Points of Two” was a year-long weekly project that I did with fellow artist Kira Harding. We approached each week based on a different theme, prompt, or art supply.

Kira and I are very different in age, geography, lifestyle, and stage of life, which made for a diverse juxtaposition in our viewpoints. This diversity was illustrated from the very beginning with our first prompt — “where I live,” which featured sand and beaches for me and fresh snow for Kira.

This project pushed me into new territory as we took turns choosing the weekly prompt. Kira often chose things that were outside of my comfort zone. She pushed me to use more words, to become more vulnerable and to share more openly. The response was overwhelmingly positive as my readers identified with my emotions.

The week that garnered the greatest response was “how to be a miserable artist.” Our project resulted in a treasured thick art journal that was featured in both Art Journaling and Somerset Digital Studio magazines.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

For some time now, I have wanted to include some folks from the more visual worlds of storytelling in the Q&A series — scrapbooking, “scrapmoir,” art journaling, for example. I got my wish in Roben-Marie Smith, who hails from very near my former home in Central Florida. Delighted to introduce readers to a form of storytelling that may be unfamiliar to them. This Q&A will run over the next several days.

Bio: Roben-Marie is a little kooky in many ways and clearly OCD in others. She doesn’t like wearing shoes, is a loyal friend, would rather give than receive, is afraid of heights, is an introvert who works hard to be an extrovert, and her favorite color is green.

She has been married for more than 22 years, digs football, can converse on many subjects, is a God’s girl and a computer geek. Her favorite movie is Pride and Prejudice, she is a college graduate, likes to read historical fiction, embraces a variety of music genres, once rode a camel, and she makes amazing made-from-scratch brownies, or so she is told!

She is into a bunch of craft and art forms, including mixed media, art journaling, sewing, digi designing and more. She likes to laugh but sometimes take things too seriously and one day would like to say that “making things for others” is her job!

Paperbag Studios was formed seven years ago when mixed media artist Roben-Marie began designing rubber art stamps to reflect her distinct altered art voice. Featuring a collection ranging anywhere from children to doodles and houses to shoes, Paperbag Studios offers a unique mix that appeals to not only the rubber stamper but visual and altered artists alike.

In addition to designing products, Roben-Marie shares her love of mixed-media art, handmade journals and scrapbooking through her inspiring blog, Every Life Has a Story, offering video tutorials, step by step how-to’s, give-aways and workshops.

Q&A with Roben Marie Smith, Question 1:

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/ narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

A: A spiral notebook and a pen were my beginnings into narrative. I was a teenager committed to recording my outfits each day which may sound a little silly, but I was all about making lists and maybe in some way that helped me feel in control during those difficult years. These notebooks evolved into a dumping ground where I expressed the frustrations of a teen missing her military father and dealing with the day-to-day life of a family under pressure.

The evolution continued throughout college as the notebooks became a collector of ticket stubs, photographs, and feelings. Memorabilia joined words and the pages began to express a fuller view of my life. During my early 20s, I took a break from journaling when I got married and began my career as public-relations consultant.

When I was introduced to art journaling, through the work of Kelly Kilmer and Kira Harding, a fire was ignited to learn as much as I could about combining artful expression with words. I researched art journaling, stamp making, and mixed-media artists and found a form of expression that was a great fit for me. I started my artsy stamp company, Paperbag Studios, began developing my art-journaling style and never looked back.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Continuing my rollout of finds that will eventually land on my inside pages (even as I place on inside pages the finds I listed last July).

Today’s list belongs to the category Links about Journaling, Memoir-Writing, and Personal Storytelling

• Beyond the Trees: Brainchild of two Cincinnati women with stories of their own to tell who support the idea that each life event or transition calls out to be remembered and documented before it is forgotten.

• Every Life Has a Story: Roben-Marie Smith’s site about mixed-media art, handmade journals, and scrapbooking, offering video tutorials, step by step how-to’s, give-aways and workshops.
• Life Biography: Users are provided questions and an online template for writing an autobiography. Fee-based
• LifeStoryTriggers.com: Site of Hella Buchheim, whose company, Personal Histories, gives voice to people who had a story to tell. Personal Histories works with people who want to write their own stories.

• Live On: Web application helps users share important moments, while keeping those memories alive and safe for future generations to enjoy tomorrow. Offers interesting promise “to keep everything you upload to LiveOn forever, and we’ll do everything in our power to keep that promise!” Most features are free.
• Oxford Center for Life Writing: Home of life-writing at Oxford University and beyond; founded to bring together a rich variety of approaches to the writing and study of life-stories and encourage those who write biography, memoir, and those who undertake research on life-narratives.
• Save Every Step: Enables users to save and share personal family stories on a timeline. Basic service free; fees for additional storage space.
• The Social Voice Project: Uses audiography to capture, preserve, share, and celebrate expressions of the social condition.
• Story Preservation Initiative: The initiative’s mission is to create and make available to the general public a diverse collection of oral histories of people who have exhibited a talent, passion, commitment, or way of living that has served to enrich the human experience. The sole function of the collection is to serve as an educational, historical, and cultural resource.

• Story Tree: Helps users preserve your precious family memories and share them with the ones they love.
• Timesketch: Provides unique and customized experiences to individuals and corporations through the venue of memoir writing and legacy development. Presumably fee-based, but no information given.
• True Stories Well Told: Personal historian Sarah White’s place for people who read and write about real life.
• Write My Memoirs 2.0: Free system that makes it easy for people to start recording their memoirs and stories about their families.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Today begins a rollout of finds that will eventually land on my inside pages (even as I place on inside pages the finds I listed last July).

Today’s list belongs to the category Links to Storytelling Platforms, Prompts, and Tools

This article, A Plethora of Writing Prompts for Creative Writing and Journaling offers links to numerous tools and writing prompts.

• 750 Words: The idea is that can getting into the habit of writing three pages a day will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day.
• 1000 Memories: A way to organize, share and discover the old photos and memories family and friends.

• Cowbird: A small community of storytellers, sharing heartfelt, personal stories.
• Dear Photograph: Submitters take a snapshot — usually one featuring one or more people and dating from the film-photography era — and hold it up against the original setting so that past and present blend into a new work of art. They also write a brief piece about the work. (Description courtesy of TIME magazine.)
• History Pin: A way for millions of people to come together, from across different generations, cultures and places, to share small glimpses of the past and to build up the huge story of human history.
• Ideo Labs Exquisite Corpse Experiment: The folks at Ideo Labs asked a group of collaborators to submit sentences/fragments to create a dynamic visualization for the “exquisite” story its writers had crafted. These collective fragments formed a base on which they layered sensory artifacts, from voice-over to tagged visuals.

• ImaStory: Free website that allows users to create a story they can share with their friends and their family, a story that can be kept private or broadcast to the world.
• Insyde Story: Allows users to discover, create and share threads of videos, recordings, music, images and text inspired by the world around you. Location matters and Insyde Story provides a narrative space for you to connect and inform others about the people, place and stories that are important to you.
• Life Biography: Users are provided questions and an online template for writing an autobiography. Fee-based
• Live On: Web application helps users share important moments, while keeping those memories alive and safe for future generations to enjoy tomorrow. Offers interesting promise “to keep everything you upload to LiveOn forever, and we’ll do everything in our power to keep that promise!” Most features are free.

• loggel: A free lifelog community, using the innovative format of The Lifelog.
• National Short Story Day: Site for UK national day, celebrated on the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. Site encourages consumption of short stories.
• Save Every Step: Enables users to save and share personal family stories on a timeline. Basic service free; fees for additional storage space.
• Singly: Gallery of apps that automatically gather users’ photos, friends, check-ins, and links from a ton of services and “make them into something new.” Brings your social media accounts in one place.
• Slidestory: Free app to make slide presentations with narration and share them on the Internet. Note: Does not work on Macs.

• Small Demons: Collects and catalogs the millions of references to real-world and fictional music, movies, people, and objects that are found in literature and provides a place — a Storyverse — where users can draw meaningful connections between stories and everyday life. (Description courtesy of Cool Hunting.)
• The Social Voice Project: Uses audiography to capture, preserve, share, and celebrate expressions of the social condition.
• Storie: A simple Web browser plug-in that lets you right-click on any picture you find on the Web and add it directly to your stories.
• Storyful: Storybuilding app that lets users build a story using tweets, videos, and images.
• Storyseeking: Combines the elements of a good short story with the thrill of a treasure hunt. Requires smartphone or tablet with GPS.
• Story Tree: Helps users preserve your precious family memories and share them with the ones they love.
• Twine: App that lets users organize a story graphically with a map that they can re-arrange as they work. Links automatically appear on the map as they are added to passages, and passages with broken links are apparent at a glance.
• World Memory Project: Allows the public to help make the records from the US Holocuast Memorial Museum searchable by name online for free — so more families of survivors and victims can discover what happened to their loved ones during one of the darkest chapters in human history. Anyone, anywhere can contribute to this effort; even just one record and a few minutes.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Among the many wonderful resources my colleague Karen Dietz offers through her Just Story It site is a terrific monthly email newsletter. This month’s came with the enticing subject line, “Feb. Goodies from Just Story It.”

The newsletter is really attractive and accessible. And goodies there are, such as the article, What Story Are You Telling Yourself?, along with Tiny Love Stories and Love Quotes for Valentine’s Day.

Karen also keeps readers up to date on how she’s helping clients.

If you’re a story fan, you’ll want to sign up for this one.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Visual Storytelling and Art Journaling image curations

As you probably know, Pinterest is the hottest social-media platform going, having grown phenomenally in the last few months. Users describe it as addictive. “Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web,” the site states. “People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.”

Though I usually like to try out new social-media platforms, I wasn’t sure about Pinterest because it focuses on images. I wasn’t sure how images would relate to applied storytelling or whether I wanted to use Pinterest for interests outside storytelling.

But as more and more people I knew started using it, I got sucked into the lure of hopping on the Pinterest bandwagon. I requested an invitation and waited for it impatiently.

I concluded that two topics I could “pin” that relate to storytelling are Visual Storytelling and Art Journaling. Sometime in the future I may create pinboards related to my crafts interests.

I have periodically presented roundups of visual storytelling on this blog. In my Pinterest curation, I am including almost anything that claims to be visual storytelling even I don’t personally agree with the storytelling value of the image. (And, of course, I know some story purists who do not believe any image can convey storytelling since storytelling requires actual telling and an audience.)

Visual storytelling is truly in the eye of the beholder. The story an image tells is formed in the mind of the person who views it, no matter what the artist intended. Thus the greatest value that visual images possess may be their ability to prompt our minds to create stories.

Early in my personal storytelling curation on Scoop.it, I included some pieces on art journaling (something I’d like to do someday). I found, however, that they did not lend themselves well to the Scoop.it format since they were so image-driven. They are a much better fit for Pinterest.

Whether or not you follow any of my other curations, I invite you to follow these two new image-rich topics:

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Michael, his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, and Part 3.

Q&A with Michael Galbraith, Question 5

Q: If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/ narrative with readers, what would it be?

A: Probably not to judge someone until you have met them, talked to them, understood them and for them to do the same with you. It is all too easy to label someone as being something that they are not simply because of historical prejudices. Blind hatred breeds because people are unable or unwilling to challenge the things they hear. As President Kennedy once said, let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved.

And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Michael, his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

Q&A with Michael Galbraith, Questions 3 and 4

Q: How important is it to you and your work to function within the framework of a particular definition of “story?” (i.e., What is a story?) What definition do you espouse?

A: In dealing with areas of conflict, the definition of a “story” is difficult because there is rarely an accepted form of events. Even a simple story, which normally would be readily accepted by everyone, can produce passionate and fierce debate amongst opposing sides in the Middle East. At New Story Leadership for the Middle East, we seek to write a new story of possibility by bringing young Israeli and Palestinian students together. Through living, learning, and working together, these future leaders strive to become a team of compelling witnesses to their newly discovered hope about building a better future. We do not approach the Middle East with bias or partisanship. Our story is the challenging of blind prejudice, the development of friendship and the hope that goes back to the Middle East in these young people.

Q: The storytelling movement seems to be growing explosively. Why now? What is it about this moment in human history and culture that makes storytelling so resonant with so many people right now?

A: I don’t think that there is one reason in particular to explain it because history, culture and storytelling mean different things to different people. However, I do think that the onset of the digital age has helped create an environment for people to explore the world in which they live in. Much can be said for the Internet, both good and bad, but there is no doubt that it has greatly shrunk the world and facilitated the discovery of truth and understanding through storytelling.

I also think that narrative history is winning some new support as a result of a backlash against celebrity culture. People are not willing to accept this new form of role model or entertainment and so are looking to storytelling, narrative history, and other branches like genealogy as a means of breaking free from the monotony of today’s “being famous for being famous” culture. By contrast, storytelling is the ultimate in reality programming, because it is real!

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Michael, his bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Michael Galbraith, Question 2

Q: Can you talk a bit about NSL’s 2012 campaign and why people should be interested? Beyond the young people who actually participate in the program, how can others help the cause?

A: New Story Leadership seeks to inspire a new story of possibility for the Middle East by bringing outstanding Israeli and Palestinian students to Washington DC to experience American culture and democracy. Coming to Washington forces participants out of their comfort zone. Everything is new. A team of total strangers comes to America to work in new jobs in a new city, in a new country, sharing a new family with a new roommate, experiencing one unforgettable summer. They have to work together to get through it. The NSL program is however not political or partisan. It does not take any side in the Middle East conflict, other than being unambiguously on the side of the young people from the region. The program does not engage in lobbying activities of any kind, and it is not within its purposes to pursue any political agenda. Its distinct focus is on education in leadership and demonstrating the power of stories for personal and cultural transformation.

We are however a relatively new organisation, we do not have the 15-year history of our sister program, Washington Ireland. These first few years have thus been spent perfecting the program and bringing our first students from the Middle East. It has not always been easy and certainly, like most other new groups, we are almost always talking about money and advertising. As a result we rely heavily upon social media not only to advertise our program but also to interview our prospective candidates and to seek financial donations. For those wishing to help, we ask them to go to our Facebook site and to register their interest on our wall. Even a simply “Like” of the page helps spread our message that little bit further.

Those interested in donating can make their pledge at our Web site.

At NSL, we value everyone’s input and assistance. Whether its social media expertise, photography, video editing, research, fundraising, or promotional work, we are interested in hearing from anyone who would be interested in giving up their time to help write a new story for the Middle East.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

For some time now, I have wanted to feature the organization New Story Leadership for the Middle East on this blog. I was partnered with its founder, Paul Costello, in an activity at a conference a few years back. Perhaps someday Paul will be part of this Q&A series. In the meantime, a Q&A with staff member Michael Galbraith seems like an excellent way to introduce readers to the important work of New Story Leadership for the Middle East. This Q&A will run over the next several days.

Bio: Michael Galbraith is the social-media and outreach manger for New Story Leadership for the Middle East. Here’s his bio in his own words: “In this role, I am responsible for the management and coordination of our social-media network and increasing the brand awareness of our program in Washington, DC. Prior to my work here in the United States, I was a political consultant and campaign manager for Mr. Michael Copeland, a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. It was in this role, that I first discovered social media and its potential in advertising. My background in New Story Leadership comes from my love of history, I am a master’s graduate from Queen’s University Belfast, specialising in American and Irish History. Through my love of history, I was connected to Mr. Paul Costello, and seemingly was one of the few people in the world never to have met him! Paul has helped me immensely with my quest on getting to America and continues to this day in my daily toil to get a coveted visa to work here full-time. As of writing, I am managing the social-media advertisement of our 2012 Program, which is due to begin in the summer, and I am continuing to manage the day-to-day running of NSL’s social-media network.”

Q&A with Michael Galbraith, Question 1:

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling /narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

A: I first became interested in storytelling primarily because of Mr. Paul Costello. Paul has been at the forefront of narrative history for over 20 years through his work with not only New Story Leadership for the Middle East, but also Washington, Ireland, South Africa Washington Program, and The Centre for Narrative Studies. His passion for telling a new story, one of peace, mutual respect, and understanding has resonated with a great number of people over the years. As someone from Northern Ireland, I instantly understood the objectives of what Paul was doing because in areas of conflict, old stories have had the result of igniting blind hatred amongst young people for generations. The approach of New Story Leadership for the Middle East is to dispel these myths by bringing diverse groups together so that they can learn the truth of one another, which in turn can foster a new beginning and new hope for the region.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Megan, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

Q&A with Megan Sheldon, Questions 4 and 5:

Q: The storytelling movement seems to be growing explosively. What is it about this moment in human history and culture that makes storytelling so resonant with so many people right now?

A: When I was studying in Edinburgh I was introduced to the concept of Mythos (myth) and Logos (logic). These two notions were once the pillars of society and life functioned by giving equal weight to both frames of thought. Slowly, this subjective idea of myth depreciated and instead value was placed on science and technology — i.e., things that could be proven — which created an imbalance in the way people interpreted their experiences. I believe we are beginning to recognize this imbalance and are turning to storytelling to connect with people, ideas, and brands on a more personal level. Technology is advancing at an alarming rate, and we are being inundated with more brands than ever before. If we can’t distinguish a brand’s story, and see how it directly affects us, it loses power. Technology can be an excellent tool for sharing our stories, as long as you focus on the message and not simply the medium.

Q: What’s your favorite story about a transformation that came about through a storytelling act?

A: My process involves interviewing not only the decision-makers of a business, but also their staff, clients, friends, and supporters. Almost every one of my clients is amazed when they hear the different experiences people have in relation to their own business. Too often we believe the business is “ours,” and we forget that it is being experienced by so many different people, each of whom should ideally bring or take away something of value. I worked with the Sarah McLachlan Foundation for two years, helping them launch the Sarah McLachlan School of Music, a free music school for at-risk youth in Vancouver, B.C. The breakthrough came when we recognized that while Sarah’s story was integral to the brand, it was the stories of the students, the instructors, the staff, and the community that were feeding the vision. I was then able to weave together the unique perspectives and experiences into a brand story that embraced diversity and acknowledged everyone’s contribution.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

When I was a preteen, my favorite uncle read aloud Irish fairy tales by James Stephens to me and my cousin at our family’s vacation cottage in Western Massachusetts.

I don’t remember anything about the tales themselves, but I recall being enthralled not only by the stories but by Uncle John’s rendering of them.

Those stories and the pleasure of having them read to me sprang to mind when I was offered a review copy of The Last Storyteller, a novel by Frank Delaney. I don’t often write about fictional stories in this space, but the connection with Uncle John, James Stephens, and those Irish fairy tales was irresistible. Here’s a snippet:

Every legend and all mythologies exist to teach us how to run our days. In kind fashion. A loving way. But there’s no story, no matter how ancient, as important as one’s own. So if we’re to live good lives, we have to tell ourselves our own story. In a good way.” So says James Clare, Ben MacCarthy’s beloved mentor, and it is this fateful advice that will guide Ben through the tumultuous events of Ireland in 1956.

In conjunction with the release of The Last Storyteller, Delaney has launched The Storytellers Project:

Long long ago, when the pigs ate the apples off the trees and the birds flew upside down — so begins a tale by an Irish fireside. And thereby Frank Delaney, the New York Times bestselling author of Ireland, launches Storytellers, a new series of short stories in the oral tradition, created specially for e-readers. In his first story, this master of the legendary form creates The Druid, a fascinating character full of cunning and false magic, who tries to win the hand of a beautiful girl.

Now, here’s the cool part: The first two stories in Frank Delaney’s new series of Storytellers e-books, “The Druid,” and “The Girl Who Lived on the Moon,” will be free on Amazon for two days, starting today, February 7.

By the way, you can also read James Stephens’s fairy tales for free. Since they are in the public domain, they are available in several formats through Project Gutenberg. I might just peruse them to see if any of them tickle my memory.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

See a photo of Megan, her bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Megan Sheldon, Questions 2 and 3:

Q: When did you see the connection between marketing and mythology?

A: Growing up, I was always suspicious of marketing; the last thing I wanted to do was build brands that were inaccurate or deceitful. What I recognized in storytelling was the ability to embed many different experiences into a single story, allowing people from all walks of life to connect with a brand message. For me, branding is about listening and interpreting people’s experiences and finding the common threads that connect them back to a business. I always ask my clients “What do you want people to feel when they hear about your business?” Our day-to-day experiences with a business impact our decisions and ultimately determine the success of a company.

Q: Describe one of your favorite projects or initiatives.

A: When I worked in Ghana as a community engagement coordinator, I saw the power of story first hand with the young girls I worked with. While I was living there I was introduced to the work of Shannen O’Brian, a fellow Vancouverite who was working tirelessly in Northern Ghana to build a charity (Create Change) that sends young girls to high school and university and provides rural communities with access to clean water. I was immediately inspired and told Shannen about my vision for Narrative Communications. Shannen approached me last year and I worked with her to build the brand story for Create Change, which is being launched later this year, as well as the brand story for her new social enterprise Karma Exchange, a way for businesses to align themselves with charity while marketing their products to new audiences. Shannen brought four of the girls from Ghana to Vancouver this past November for a six-week documentary speaking tour (For Our Daughters), and I volunteered to be their story coach, helping them weave together their experiences into a powerful presentation. Working with Shannen on all three of these projects has proven to me that storytelling can be a powerful way to connect people to a cause and ultimately change people’s mindset.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

It’s a great pleasure to feature another up-and-coming story practitioner, Megan Sheldon, in this Q&A series. Canada seems to boast a strong contingent of story folks, and since my state of Washington borders British Columbia, it’s a treat to spotlight a BC neighbor. This Q&A will run over the next several days.

Bio: With ten years of experience in public relations, marketing, and advertising, Megan has worked both client and agency side with clients such as UNICEF, Sarah McLachlan Foundation, and the Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC). Narrative Communications is a story writing and branding agency that works primarily with artists, entrepreneurs, social enterprises, and small businesses. Megan is a Strategic Storyteller who draws out the many stories that surround an organization and then turns those stories into a powerful brand. Through her network of creative individuals, including designers, web developers and videographers, she collaborates to then bring that brand to life by producing and launching integrated marketing and social media campaigns.

Q&A with Megan Sheldon, Question 1:

Q: How did you initially become involved with storytelling?

A: When I was in my late teens, my mom introduced me to Joseph Campbell and other Jungian mythologists as a way of understanding my place in the world. At the time, I was studying English and media at McGill University, and I wanted to be a journalist. Six years later, after working as a journalist, an editor, a PR strategist, and a marketing consultant, I decided to pursue this passion for mythology and completed a master’s from the University of Edinburgh examining myths that have been told and retold over the centuries. I started to recognize the patterns and archetypes that emerged from so many stories, and wanted to explore our innate connection to stories further.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Bob McIntosh (pictured) is a Career Trainer with “a tenacious appetite for learning and staying abreast of the latest job-search trends, and disseminating that knowledge to jobseekers of all levels.” He shares an interest in storytelling in the job search. He was kind enough to submit this parable.

A risk not taken is an opportunity lost

Many people with fishing poles are standing around a vast body of water with their fishing lines cast in it. They believe the water is abundant with fish, and, in fact there are some fish. They’re content standing there exchanging a word or two, speaking of hope and opportunity. They feel like old friends who are in it together.

Before a cave stands one man looking into it, and from within the cave eyes stare at him. The eyes are frightening, for they could be the eyes of monsters; but on the other hand they could be the eyes of friendly people. The man’s just not sure which. So he waits. The people are comfortable standing around that body of water with fishing line dangling from their poles. There’s comfort in numbers. The weather is fine — fine as in comfortably cool, not sticky hot. Life is grand.

Because the man in front of the cave is afraid of dark spaces, he won’t enter it even if someone were to beat him with a stick. It’s better to wait, he thinks.

Eventually the people grow tired of standing around the body of water with nothing happening. Hours have passed, morning turned into afternoon into early evening….They get hungry and their arms get tired from holding their light fishing poles. They start lowering their poles, grumbling from hunger. Life isn’t so grand.

The man standing before the cave doesn’t feel particularly courageous and stands before it wondering if it’s worth entering. It’s damn cold out and whatever’s inside the cave seem to be comfortable. Whoever’s in there continue to look out, almost taunting him. It’s as if they know something he doesn’t, and this begins to bug him.

Risks are hard to measure and the outcomes are not certain. Because they’re hard to measure, safety (as in numbers) and a common belief (there has to be plenty of fish in the water) seem to be more viable. This is exactly why the man is having a hard time entering that cave; it’s risky. Unbeknownst to him, he is a risk taker, an explorer. At the moment he’s unsure of what to do.

The people at the body of water, who are now beginning to drop their fishing poles and swear about being hungry, aren’t risk takers. And look what it’s getting them. They’re getting no fish. Further, they’re beginning to think that even if there are fish in the water, there are too many people with whom to share the fish.

Eventually the man standing at the entrance of the cave decides that entering the unknown is better than standing there and getting nothing accomplished. He takes a breath and puts one step forward, backs up, takes another breath, again puts the foot forward, then puts the other foot forward, until he’s in the cave. And guess what, it doesn’t seem that dark when his eyes adjust.

What he sees around him is opportunity that was hidden from him until he took the risk of entering the cave — only it wasn’t really a risk, as it turns out. He only has one regret; he wishes he’d entered the cave a lot sooner.

Meanwhile the people round the body of water have left, each believing that there are fish in the water. The fish weren’t biting today, but tomorrow will be a new day with hope renewed. They’ll discover much later that the promise of fish was an empty one.

Learn more about the hidden job market.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

As a refreshing change from the periodic articles that declare “the resume is dead,” Rachel Emma Silverman’s No More Résumés, Say Some Firms merely notes that some employers are turning to methods other than resume screening to initially evaluate candidates.

These methods include LinkedIn profiles, a job-seeker’s Web presence, and videos. Each of these venues is an opportunity to tell a story.

I should note that Silverman’s article doesn’t mention story or storytelling. She does however, quote employers saying things like:

• A résumé doesn’t provide much depth about a candidate.
• We are most interested in what people are like, what they are like to work with, how they think.
• A résumé isn’t the best way to determine whether a potential employee will be a good social fit for the company.
• If we had just looked at their résumés … we wouldn’t have hired them.

Those observations suggest that candidates have an excellent opportunity to project their personalities and help employers get to know them better by telling their stories. I’ve written about the storytelling potential in many of the methods Silverman discusses.

• Many experts are suggesting LinkedIn profiles be less resume-like and more story like, as I wrote about recently.
• It’s tricky to tell a cohesive story about yourself across your entire Web presence, but a good beginning may be a social-media resume or a transmedia effort.
• I don’t believe video storytelling will ever become mainstream for hiring — because it’s time-consuming and problematic for record-keeping — but from what I’ve seen when companies do seek videos, those that tell stories are far more compelling and engaging than those that don’t. Here’s a case in point.

Even the methods cites that would not seem to provide storytelling opportunities might be. For example, one company asks candidates to complete a questionnaire. A questions like one of the samples Silverman lists, “What’s the best job you ever had?”, begs for a story.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Project 365 Vets is a site I would normally list on one of my inside pages rather than featuring here, but because its mission is so worthy and may be time-limited (it’s not clear to me whether the project will continue for more than one year), I’m giving it the spotlight.

The site was found by two moms “who are on a mission to honor a Veteran a day, every day of the year.” The founders say:

We want to honor veterans through their stories told in their own words. Our goals are simple. We want to honor our heroes, raise awareness about the issues veterans face every day, and preserve veteran’s stories for future generations.

Project 365 Vets actively seeks veterans who would like to share their stories. Wednesdays have been set aside for Memorial Stories, so that those who would like to honor a fallen hero may also participate.

Those interested in participating in the project are encouraged contact the project founder Tina Shang.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.