Recently, storyteller Eric James Wolf turned the tables on me. I’ve conducted more than 57 Q&As with story practitioners — and now Eric has done a Q&A with me. I thought it would be worthwhile to excerpt some of it here because it explains some of my philosophies and approaches with this blog.

In this entry, Eric asked me how I define “storytelling” and why I’m interested in it:

I am among the storytelling fans who do not like to be boxed in by a specific definition of “story” or “storytelling.” I’ve found in the more than 57 interviews I’ve conducted with storytelling practitioners that most of them, perhaps surprisingly, prefer not to define “storytelling.” (However, a few feel a strict definition is vitally important.) Of the definitions offered by the practitioners who prefer to define story/storytelling, I’ve liked some more than others. One of my favorites is: “Story is context.”

I think I have been interested in storytelling for most of my life, but I didn’t really recognize the passion until I began my PhD program. I was taking an organizational-behavior course that focused on postmodernism. While researching the concept of postmodernism, I discovered an entire academic (and applied) discipline I had never heard of: organizational storytelling. This field instantly resonated with me, causing me to realize how much I had always loved storytelling, going back to eating up the anecdotes in Reader’s Digest as a child. I was so intrigued by organizational storytelling that I made it the centerpiece of my doctoral dissertation, which combined my professional background in career management and job search with storytelling.

While in my PhD program, I started [this] blog as part of my coursework. As I completed my doctoral program, my storytelling interests began to expand. Organizational storytelling was too narrow to encompass my interests, so I broadened the blog’s scope — and my own passions — to the field of “applied storytelling,” a term I first heard from Michael Margolis.

My work on the blog was sporadic for its first three years; I would go long stretches without blogging. But in February of 2008, I made a commitment to blog 7 days a week. I have mostly lived up to that commitment, although I have skipped some days during my recent major, cross-country move.

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Michael Margolis has proclaimed a 12-week story blogging challenge for himself and has invited others to join him. He’s challenged himself in conjunction with his Social Media Jedi Program, which launched last week. The challenge is to blog at least weekly.

In the comments to his entry announcing the challenge, I said:

Great idea, Michael. How do you define “story blogging” and how does it align with “personal musing[s], stream of consciousness idea[s]?” (He had used the terms “personal musing, stream of consciousness idea” to describe what he would be doing during the challenge.)

Michael used my comments as the jumping-off point for a subsequent blog entry elaborating on what he meant by “story blogging.” Here are some excerpts:

For me story is more than just performance/telling/anecdotes. Story is about relationship; who am I; where do I belong; what is mine to do?

Story blogging is about bringing people into one’s world through conversation and dialogue. It begins by seeking to map, explore, and understand convergence and context. I stand at the unique intersection of many worlds. I’ll be sharing many of these musings and reflections in real time.

Story blogging. There’s a quick recipe I’m playing with:

Passion – this is the fuel and motivation that lights the fire. If it doesn’t excite me and give me energy, how I can possibly expect to do the same for you?

Perspective – point of view is what gives it all distinctive flavor. The same reason why FOX NEWS and MSNBC are succeeding, and CNN is flailing.

Relevance – discussing issues, questions, and challenges that others can relate to – that’s what makes the whole meal easy to digest, puts a smile on people’s faces, and encourages people to come back.

Nourishment – is what I’m trying to create through my story blogging. Provide meaningful, playful, and generative contribution into readers’ lives.

Michael also says he’ll clarify some of the principles of story blogging during the 12-week challenge.

Since my personal mandate is to blog daily, blogging weekly isn’t much of a challenge for me. But I could challenge myself during this time to “story blog.”

How about you? Will you take the challenge?

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Lou Hoffman, president and CEO of The Hoffman Agency, writes about storytelling as seen through a business prism in his blog Ishmael’s Corner.

He has identified his top 10 storytelling-related blog posts of 2009 in two parts:

• Part I
• Part II

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Two new story blogs emerged in the waning months of 2009, produced by story folks I highly admire and respect:

Story Route, published by Cathryn Wellner, features entries in such categories as business narrative, organizational storytelling, personal narratives, poems, social myths, and storytelling quotations. Cathryn writes: “Join me on the Story Route. We’ll explore personal stories, stories organizations tell, even some stories countries tell.” She shared with me this heartwarming video story — with a twist — about training a service dog.

Meanwhile, Cynthia Kurtz has started Story Colored Glasses. Cynthia wrote in her first blog entry back in October, “The point of this blog is to give some of the ideas that chose to land on me new places to go. May life surround them.” Many of Cynthia’s early entries have focused on her “eight observations about stories and storytelling in groups, and about helping people tell and work with stories.” She writes that her eight observations “were not scientific findings; they were just things I had encountered that had surprised me and that gave me food for thought. (Nor were they original thoughts, if there are such things; many others have talked about them as well.) As the years go by I find myself returning to the eight things often; so I thought a good way to start this blog might be to talk about each observation and what I think it means for those of us who work with stories.”

I want to wish my readers a fulfilling and story-filled new year!

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Reader Raf Stevens’s challenge to me to present examples of good storytelling had the interesting effect of getting me thinking about categories of storytelling that one can access on the Internet. Here’s the list so far:

• Digital/video storytelling
• Live storytelling performance, captured on video
• Live storytelling performance, captured on audio
• Stories — preferably nonfiction — that are told purely with words in print (as opposed to spoken words); in other words, a story that must be read. I asked for nominations here, but have not received any yet.

I’ve come across a couple of examples of sub-genres in the last category:

• The founding story of an organization. Thaler Pekar turned me onto the story of how Mercy Corps was founded 30 years ago.
• Blog storytelling. I’ve written before about blogs that consistently present good storytelling, and Moon Over Martinborough remains one of my favorite examples. Here’s a single story in a blog that touched me: Reprise: Ode to FM Sunday Mornings, by Jesaka Long, whose a.k.a. writer blog is a delightful new find.

Why is it important to categorize, appreciate, and identify good examples of the narrative Web? To counter assertions like Ben MacIntyre’s “the Internet is killing storytelling” that I took on here. All of these examples show the Internet’s capacity for enhancing and disseminating excellent storytelling.

(I smell “Best of the Narrative Web” awards.)

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I'm delighted to have participated in yesterday's Blog Action Day 09 (thanks to guest writer Cathryn Wellner), joining 13,222 blogs from 155 countries with more than 17 million readers. Also blogging were the governments of the United Kingdom and Spain along with The White House.

From a roundup post toward the close of the event:

For the past day bloggers in 155 countries across six continents have written about a single issue that impacts us all, and turned BAD09 into one of the largest social change events ever held on the web.

Your participation helped change the conversation and showed the power of the web to connect people across the world who despite their varied backgrounds have one shared desire: to make a difference. According to blogpulse, we increased the number of posts about climate change on a given day by about 500%, and CNN wrote a great article covering the excitement and diversity of today's event across the web and around the world. ... We are about to hit 27,000 total trackable blog posts, and our current estimate is that together we reached at least 17 million people today. We are also about to exceed 12,000 registered bloggers on the site ...

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“One thing that people ask me all the time is: ‘is storytelling dying?’” said Dale Jarvis, the Intangible Cultural Heritage development officer for Newfoundland, in a transcript of a podcast interview on PreservationToday.com

I know what Dale’s talking about. I constantly see articles lamenting “the lost (or dying) art of storytelling.” Maybe it’s because I am acutely tuned in to storytelling, but “lost” and “dying” are the last adjectives I would apply to storytelling.

Dale’s response:

I really believe that things are always in a constant state of evolution. I think traditions are always changing, and I think that the rise of things like YouTube indicate that people are really passionate about storytelling. They really want to share their own personal stories.

So, it is sort of a really great democratization of storytelling in a way. Maybe people don’t sit around and tell the long-form fairy tales in quite the same way that they used to, but people are incredibly interested in sharing their own personal stories and creating stories and sharing them.

Yes. On Friday, I talked about this phenomenon particularly with regard to blogging. In that entry, I quoted academician Cynthia Franklin: “I argue that blogs are serving as a kind of ‘memoir-on-the-go…”

Here are a few more examples of blogs that are “memoirs on the go” (suggested by Joel Kelly on Ingenioustries in an entry entitled The keys to a storytelling blog:

• The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, the blog of Jelisa “J-Money” Castrodale, “a freelance writer and stand-up comic who is fueled by an enamel-eroding Diet Coke habit and an insane love of music, both of which put her in the categories of ‘good at Jeopardy!’ and ‘annoying to have at parties.’” Kelly describes the blog like this: ” The story is Jelisa’s life. We know she’s kind of broke, loves running, and has had plenty of hilarious dating misadventures. And she’s trying to get more professional writing work. The content [comprises] her posts about what goes on in her life.”
• Gaping Void, the blog of Hugh McLeod, a cartoonist who sells limited-edition prints, published a book in June (which as of today, Aug. 17, is No. 1 in Amazon’s “creativity” category. He is also CEO of Stormhoek USA, a small wine brand out of South Africa, which just launched in America. Kelly says: “The story is Hugh living in Alpine, Texas, doing some futile marketing and making awesome artwork after having been a traditional ad man for 10 years. The content [comprises] his cartoons and marketing insights (often the same thing).”
• Vegan Dad, who describes his blog this way: “When you have kids, supper has to be on the table every night. And when you are a vegan, the drive-thru, the deli counter, and TV dinners/frozen convenience foods are not an option. So, you do the best you can. This blog is a record of what my family eats. It’s not always a totally complete meal, not always photogenic, and sometimes it’s leftovers. But, it is a realistic look at a vegan family in a northern Ontario city that is not always vegan-friendly.” Kelly: “Story — A, well, vegan dad who wants his family to be healthy and eat great food. He’s got a few boys and a brand new vegan daughter, and he wants to share the cool food he makes for them with other vegans. Content — Amazing recipes. They’re usually fairly simple because we know from the overall story that he’s a busy guy.”

• Maximum Fun, of which Kelly say: “Story — Jesse Thorn, 28, is living his dream of hosting a public radio show (and podcasts), despite the odds (it doesn’t really make him much money). He struggles, he finds success, and you’re on the journey with him of living his dream. Content — The episodes and blog posts themselves. The things he creates and controls. Each episode of his show or podcasts are framed by the fact that he’s young, fairly broke, but having a huge amount of fun interviewing his heroes and hanging out with his friends.”

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I came across an interesting interview last week with Cynthia Franklin, author of Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today. I was attracted to the interview by Scott Jaschik because I sometimes think about and consider writing about my all-too-short academic life as a college instructor.

But the part of the interview that grabbed me the most was this response by Franklin:

I argue that blogs are serving as a kind of “memoir-on-the-go,” one that allows for dialogue and also a large readership. … I believe the permeability between memoirs and blogging — and also practices such as “facebooking” — will, if anything, feed the memoir phenomenon: these sites are further popularizing autobiography; increasingly eroding the boundaries between the personal and the public; and extending the practices of personal narrative by combining it with political commentary and analysis. Rather than replace the memoir market or the desire to write autobiographically, then, I think the habitual public sharing of private life — and the increased blurring between the personal and the public, the political, and the professional — will, if anything, stimulate memoir writing and probably also influence its shape. An example: I have a friend who blogs, and then links his blogging to his Facebook site. The blogs, accounts of concerts he has attended, combine personal narrative, analysis of the dynamics of race and class and region in the U.S., and commentary on music. He is amassing a significant body of writing that is losing its extracurricular feel, and his readers have started petitioning him in their comments to write a memoir based on these writings.

Having suggested earlier in the interview that memoirs are more popular them ever, Franklin makes two important points here:

1. The storytelling that many people do in blogs in indeed a sort of a memoir in progress, certainly rough notes that could become a memoir. I immediately thought of a blogger, Jared (pictured at left), who wrote to me recently about his blog (Moon Over Martinborough): “I’m now getting 1,800 pageviews a month, and I’ve got 80 fans on Facebook and 273 followers on Twitter. Not bad for a blog that’s only 5 months old and is mostly about chickens and olives!” The blog is pure storytelling about “an expat American city boy lands on 20 acres and an olive grove in New Zealand.” Jared could easily turn the blog into a fascinating memoir. The blog as memoir-on-the-go also has the advantage of offering the memoirist feedback and support.
2. The “storytelling” folks do in social-media venues is also memoir fodder. People who probably had not the slightest notion of ever writing a memoir are probably more inclined to do so because they have become more comfortable with publicly telling their stories. Now, I’ve been chewing on this idea of social-media as storytelling for along time now and asking the opinions of many others. Perhaps the best we can say about social-media storytelling is that it is a crude, fragmented, incomplete sort of storytelling; yet there is much storytelling in social media that transcends that characterization and is truly memoir-worthy. And, as Jared’s experience shows, social-media and blogging also cross-pollinate each other.

I for one am heartened by these cultural influences that turn more of us into storytellers.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

An organization called JTA created a huge flap recently by denouncing the storytelling capabilities of bloggers.

JTA must be one of those acronyms whose letters once stood for words but now is just an acronym; in any case, I could not find out on its Web site what the letters JTA do or did stand for. But here’s how its Web site describes the organization:

JTA is the definitive, trusted global source of breaking news, investigative reporting, in-depth analysis, opinion and features on current events and issues of interest to the Jewish people.

The trouble arose when JTA made this pitch in an e-mailed fundraising letter:

Without a strong JTA, the storytelling will be left to bloggers, twitters, and non-professionals. Is this the best way for our future Jewish stories to be told and recorded?

Oops. As “Dan” on eJewish Philanthropy reported, some 1,500 participants had attended the First Annual International Jewish Bloggers Convention last year, and many were steamed at the JTA pitch.

In an entry headlined, “Jewish Bloggers Are Not the Enemies of Jewish Storytelling,” Esther Kustanowitz at My Urban Kvetch wrote: “Demonizing a group of people who are united only in one characteristic — the technology they use to ensure that their stories are heard — constructs unnecessary barriers between mainstream media and the communications wave of the present.”

“The business of media has changed. Media outlets that raise money by inciting fear of bloggers… these are not the outlets that are going to survive.” wrote the author of the blog Leah in Chicago/Accidentally Jewish.

Yup. Newspapers are dying, and even the president of the United States is calling on bloggers in news conferences. Blogging is not always flawless journalism, but bloggers surely have a significant role in telling the stories of our culture.

Right?

(It should be noted that JTA apologized for the letter. Dan Sieradski wrote: “The characterization of bloggers and Twitterers as ‘non-professional’ and unreliable was not only counterproductive but arguably false. Worse yet, by seemingly attacking the blogosphere and Twittersphere, JTA has turned itself into a straw man in the battle between old and new media.”)

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Seth Kahan posted to the WorkingStories e-list of the Golden Fleece group wondering why the blog entry he posted on his Fast Company Expert Blog, Leading Change, on Feb. 12 generated a request for a book proposal, an offer of representation by a literary agent who wants to shop a book proposal around, and a ranking in the top 10 of blog posts (in terms of visitors) among February’s Expert Blogs.

Here’s a snippet from the entry, which is titled, “When on Fire, Practice Judo!:”

Philip Anschutz, the American businessman with an estimated net worth of $7.8 billion, started in the oil business drilling his own wells. His first efforts in the 60s were unsuccessful, turning up one dry hole after another. When he finally hit oil, everything looked great… for a day. A crisis followed which he called “the most important single event” in his business career. A well he owned caught fire!

Anschutz heard that Universal Studios was making a movie called Hellfighters about the legendary oil-field fire-fighter, Red Adair (who later put out the oil well fires in Kuwait during the Gulf War, 1991). Anschutz persuaded Universal to pay $100,000 to film Adair putting out his well fire for their movie. The studio cut the check. Adair put the fire out. Anschutz pocketed a profit and saved his business. The footage is in the movie.

Seth says: “Now, I did not do anything special to promote this entry — nothing I didn’t do for my other entries that month. But, clearly this post was different. Why do you think that is? I’d like to know. Can you tell me?”

How would you answer Seth?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.