Whose Story Would You Like to Hear? Suggest 3 Respected Luminaries for ‘America Remembers’ Campaign

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Sarah McCue is a force of nature who is involved in several projects aiming at making the world a better place.

One is The Remembering Site, a non-profit initiative that McCue co-founded with D.G. Fulford and launched in 2004 “to make it easy for anyone, anywhere to write, share and publish their life stories.”

McCue has an exciting new project and needs your help. I’ll let her describe the project in her own words:

Five years and so many fascinating life stories later … we are planning an America Remembers campaign where we will approach 100 thought leaders in the arts, business, education, research and science, and service to others to write their life stories. We plan to invite people from all walks of life — from the very well know to the rather unsung unknown.

McCue is asking readers to send her “the name of up to three people whom you respect greatly in your personal or professional network who might be a great candidate to invite to write.”

She continues:

We’re planning the have 100 “luminaries” to write their life stories by completing a question-based template that will then be printed — our printer partner creates the most beautiful memoirs.

McCue is in discussions with well-respected organizations to form non-financial partnerships with America Remembers to “encourage their members to celebrate the 100 but, more importantly, to encourage their members to write their stories.”

The culmination? McCue explains:

At the end of this year, we will invite these 100 to the Statue of Liberty for a media splash to have their books in hand with a few family members and the message will be, “It was so fun and easy to do this; I encourage everyone to write their life memories to leave for future generations.”

The project seeks both “fairly recognizable faces” and “lesser knowns.”

McCue seeks “bold, courageous readers” to e-mail her to say: “I accept your challenge, and I am going to use your template to write my story, upload and caption my cherished photos so that I can participate in the celebration at the end of the year.”

“The memoir [i.e., answers to our questions] would need to be completed by July,” McCue says, “so we can get them all graphically designed and published and posted at our website for our late fall launch.”

Am I a Storytelling Expert?

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I’m currently reading The Huffington Post’s Complete Guide to Blogging, which makes the point that many people blog to establish or share their expertise on a topic. Similarly, a Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008 report indicated that “To share my expertise and experiences with others” is the second-biggest reason bloggers blog (after “In order to speak my mind on areas of interest.”)

My blogging life is more about the Huffington book’s exhortation to “blog your passion.”

I do not consider myself a storytelling expert. I’ve read and heard a ton about storytelling, and I probably know more than many people about the topic, but I would not describe myself as an expert. I am more like a student and passionate fan of storytelling.

I started A Storied Career as part of the learning process of my PhD program. The blog continues to be a vehicle for my own learning, and I hope, my readers’ learning. Interesting that “learning” isn’t listed as one of the main reasons people blog.

  • A few other interesting points from the Technorati report:More than half of bloggers are better known in their industries [than before they blogged]. It is certainly true that I am better known in the storytelling than I was a year ago when this blog lay dormant. One in five bloggers have been on radio or TV as a result of their blogs. I haven’t reached that stratosphere yet, nor do I consider myself enough of an expert to do so.
  • Most bloggers (two-thirds) openly expose their identities in their blogs. That info surprised me a bit because I often have a hard time identifying the bloggers behind the blogs I come across, and frequently wish they’d reveal more about themselves even when they do identify themselves.
  • The third-largest topic that bloggers blog about is the topic I blog about: “Other.” It’s fascinating to speculate about the many topics that must fit into “Other,” given that the non-other topics in the survey included personal/lifestyle, technology, news, politics, computers, music, film, travel, business, family updates, TV, science, religion/spirituality, health, sports, gaming, and celebrity.
  • Readers’ preferred blogging styles are sincere, conversational, expert, and humorous. I would like to think I am the first two consistently and the latter two occasionally.
  • I fit in with the majority of bloggers who measure their success in terms of their own personal satisfaction. Like other bloggers, I’m also interested in other measures like number of comments, and number of visitors, but I don’t obsess over those. One measure, page rank, flummoxes me. In mid-2008 when I first started measuring the Google Page Rank of the revived A Storied Career, my page rank was 7; it has now inexplicably dropped to 4.
  • Most bloggers don’t make money on their blogs, but close to half would like to. I fall in the category of “My blog is a source of supplemental income for me,” although “supplemental income” is a stretch given that I probably make less than $5 monthly.
  • I join the large numbers of bloggers whose experiences with blogging have impacted their personal lives by introducing them to new friends they’ve never met in person (as well as friends they have met) and made them more interested in their interests/passions. I have met so many wonderful friends from the storytelling world in the past year, especially toward the end of 2008.
  • I was intrigued that 21 percent of bloggers blog to enhance their resumes and 26 percent have used their blog as a resume or have directed potential employers to their blogs. Ditto for me, but I’m not sure it has helped in my academic job search.
  • Four percent of bloggers quit their jobs and started blogging full-time. That was sort of true of me, but I had already been planning to quit my job for other reasons, and my blogging time remains limited by my need to pay my bills.

Add Lifestreaming to Personal Narrative Trends

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This entry is a bit of an addendum to my New Year’s Eve posting about 2008 as the year of personal narrative in which I agreed that 2008 was a starting point but predicted that personal narrative will just get bigger and bigger.

I talked about social media as part of the exploding world of personal narrative, but beyond social media is the need to aggregate various forms of one’s social-media participation into some sort of cohesive format. This type of aggregation has been dubbed “lifestreaming.”

On Wired, Michael Calore includes lifestreaming among 6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now:

Sites like FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and Digsby serve as social-network-activity aggregators. They’re like virtual funnels. Dump in all the notifications, feeds and updates from your various networks, and the services will bring it all into one master stream, relieving you of the responsibility of visiting a dozen or more sites to learn what your friends are up to, what they’re listening to, who they’re snogging and so on. Controls let you dial back the flow by sorting and filtering the flow, pruning it down to only what matters most.

[“Snogging” was a new one on me; as near as I can make out, it’s a Brit term for making out.]

Lifestreaming is unquestionably a form of personal narrative. It doesn’t provide a complete picture of one’s personal narrative; often the beholder is left to try to fill in the blanks, connect the dots, and assemble puzzle pieces. But in many ways, this lack of comprehensiveness is part of the charm. The little bits of information and media serve almost as story prompts that enable the reader to construct his or her own story about the lifestreaming person. And you can always ask the lifestreamer to fill in details or explain cryptic status postings.

The perfect aggregator does not yet seem to have been developed. Calore likes FriendFeed (as do others I know), and he disdains Facebook. (“The network lets all sorts of data in, but precious little out,” Calore contends). Interestingly, though, Facebook is my preferred aggregator. I like FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse, but not enough of my friends are on them to make them satisfying for me. Facebook is the social-media venue that I have the most friends on, so it works just fine for me as an aggregator. Facebook’s News Feed and Live Feed provide sufficient lifestreams for me to follow the personal narratives of people I can about.

[graphic: MasterNewMedia]

Flokka: Story Prompts for Entrepreneurial Stories

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Flokka, the tagline of which is “Where women in business blog,” encourages women to share their stories. Aliza Pilar Sherman, in an article reprinted from Her Business magazine, tells women readers of having lunch with other women at conference and sharing stories of business woes with another woman at her table:

As we each told our very painful and private professional stories, we instantly shared a bond. … Looking back, I realise that the very act of telling my story over lunch one day to another woman was a turning point for me. Telling my story was a tremendous relief. Almost equally as important was hearing [her] story and getting a reassuring feeling that I was not the only woman going through a difficult and emotional time with her business.

Sherman notes that “stories heal” and “women learn most readily when they hear the stories of other people’s experiences.”

Sherman describes how hearing the stories of others facilitates change:

Even if we … ask for help, we often get defensive when we realise that the advice suggests we need to change something about ourselves or change our situation. We might not feel comfortable changing, at least not at someone else’s request. Yet if we hear a story of someone else’s experience of change, we tend to listen. If we listen closely and hear the message in the story, we learn. Sometimes, we are motivated to action by hearing someone else’s story. Other times, we are simply motivated to tell our own stories, an act that can be just as powerful. When we tell our own stories, we often do it because we think we are helping others, but more often than not, we end up helping ourselves.

Sherman suggests some story prompts for when a group of women entrepreneurs are gathered together to share experiences:

  • Why did you start your business?
  • What about your business keeps you up at night and how do you deal with it?
  • What has been your proudest moment in business?
  • When was the last time your business made you cry and why?
  • What is the best business advice anyone has ever given you?
  • What drives you crazy about your business and what can you do about it?

I was reminded of the list of questions I used to submit to business-owners speaking to the entrepreneurial seminar I used to teach. Here are some additional prompts for telling entrepreneurial stories:

    • Your entrepreneurial aspirations as a child or young person.
  • At what point did you know you wanted your own business?
  • Did you have any businesses as a kid (lemonade stand, paper route,

etc.)

    • Your educational background.
  • To what extent did your education relate to entrepreneurship?
  • How well well did your education prepare you for entrepreneurship?
    • Career background, if any, before starting your business.
  • What jobs, if any, did you have before starting your business?
  • How did you like them?
  • What did you learn from them that you have applied to your own business?
  • How difficult did you find it to transition from working for someone else to working for yourself?
    • Other businesses, if any, you started before your current business.
  • How did they fare? Successful or not?
  • What did you learn from them?
    • Starting your business.
  • How did you develop the idea for your business?
  • Why THIS business?
  • What were the most challenging aspects of starting your business?
  • Finances? Personnel? Partnerships? Marketing? Customers?
    • Keeping the business going
  • What do you like most about being an entrepreneur?
  • What are the biggest headaches?
  • How has your business evolved since you started it?
  • How did you know when you had achieved success?
  • How long did it take for you to feel successful?
    • The future
  • How do you see your business changing, expanding in the future?
  • Do you want to always have this business?
  • What happens when you retire?
  • Are you considering starting other businesses?
    • Family life
  • Are you married?
  • Have children?
  • How do you balance family life with your business?
  • Does your family participate in your business?
    • Advice for other who want to be entrepreneurs
  • Biggest myths about entrepreneurship.
  • Advice you wish you’d had when you started out.
  • What characteristics does a successful entrepreneur need to have?
  • If you could give would-be entrepreneurs just one piece of advice, what would it be?

Further description of Flokka:

flokka is a place for women in business to create a blog, or link an existing blog; so that together we can share our business ideas, dreams and journeys and support and encourage each other as we grow our businesses and ourselves.

Two New Discoveries for the New Year

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Regular readers must tire of my constantly expressing my astonishment at making new storytelling discoveries. After searching for story material on the Web for four years — partly for this blog and partly for my PhD program — I would have thought I would have found it all. Yes, of course new resources pop up all the time, but many of the treasures I find have been around for at least as long as I’ve been treasure hunting.

Here are two I discovered in the past week or so, both of which I have peripheral connections with:

Turns out I have a cousin who’s a digital storyteller. He’s Alex Lucas, the son of my first cousin Bethe, so I believe that makes him my first cousin once removed. His Milwaukee-based company is Mythtaken:

Mythtaken Productions is one-stop resource for those looking to tell their stories or to hear others. Through video production, editing, animation, writing, and web services, we communicate these stories to those who truly want to hear.

Secondly, I have decided that Yvette Hyater-Adams is who I want to be when I grow up. She sent me a lovely e-mail yesterday and shared some terrific stuff.

Yvette is doing the kind of work I aspire to — counseling and workshops that help people change their lives by changing their stories. (My connection here is that Yvette seems to be based in South Jersey, where I grew up).

I am absolutely fascinated by Yvette’s assessment instrument, Transformative Narrative Portrait, which Yvette says “takes a collection of stories along a lifeline to look at the pattern of experience and make decisions on ways to ‘re-story’ unhelpful habits into new and thriving stories that move toward a desired vision.” Yvette calls the Transformative Narrative Portrait “a collection of past, present, and future stories along with action stories that help facilitate personal change.” She plans to offer a certification for people who want to use this method for coaching. Count me in. I am dying to learn more about this assessment.

She also offers writing workshops through her site Renaissance Muse.

Has 2008 Been The Year of Personal Narratives?

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Gena Haskett, writing on blogher, thinks so:

From identity politics to Twitter tweets this has certainly been the year of the personal narrative. It is the search for your story told by another being that shares or reflects your thoughts, feelings and, at times, pain.

It is the need for connection. If we can’t find someone standing next to us then we search for them in magazines, books, music or online.

My opinion? It has been perhaps the year when personal narratives took off. The “Journaling and Personal Storytelling” category is one of the deepest on my sidebar. In 2008, I’ve blogged about and/or listed on the sidebar these personal storytelling sites, venues, and tools. Many pre-date 2008, but I only discovered them this year. Others emerged for the first time this year (I’m lazy and not including links, but you can find links to all these on my sidebar): Dandelife.com, The Circle Project, The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, ThisDayInTheLife.com, This American Life, This I Believe, The Story, Your Unique Story, StoryCorps, Smith Magazine, British Library: National Life Stories, Life Story Telling, The Remembering Site, Memory Writers Network blog, Tera’s Wish, Fray, Story Circle Network, PNN (Personal News Network), About Personal Growth Stories Section, The Experience Project, Telling Our Stories, The Moth (not new in 2008, but started a highly successful podcast this year), The Monti, Story Salon, First Person Arts, Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), Boomer Cafe, Tintota, Association of Personal Historians, Storytlr, Great Life Stories, Tokoni, Always Stories, The Timeslips Project, We Are Storytellers, The Timeslips Project, The Legacy Project, Flokka: Share Your Stories.

Yikes! Just realized I don’t have Heekya on my sidebar, and I know that site was new in 2008.

This was also the year Sharon Lippincott and Jerry Waxler founded Lifewriters Forum, a Yahoo discussion group.

And then there is the massive, exploding realm of social media, which many would contend is all about personal narratives — Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, blogs, ad infinitum. And the narratives off the 2008 election. And the emerging world of digital storytelling, which often involves personal narratives. This is the world that Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine call “Storytelling 2.0.”

I contend this year has only scratched the surface. I predict that as more and tools and venues become available for telling and disseminating personal narratives, Storytelling 2.0 will continue to experience tremendous growth.

If you thought 2008 was the Year of Personal Narratives, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

By the way, Haskett has several nice examples of touching personal narratives in her post.

‘Storytelling Is Hard Work, But the Result Is Worthwhile’ — Ron Howard

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I’ve always felt a strong affinity for Ron Howard. I literally grew up with him; he was born the same year I was — in fact the same month. I’ve always felt that if I passed him on the street, we could strike up a conversation like old buddies. I imagine millions of Americans feel the same way about him, having watched him grow up as Opie and Richie Cunningham.

Watched a nice documentary about him last night on Turner Classic Movies. The tagline of the piece was “50 years in film.” Can you imagine being 54 and having been in the movie biz for 50 of those years?

Ron talked repeatedly in the piece about seeing his directorial role primarily as a storyteller. The headline of this entry is a pretty close paraphrase of what he said about his early education on “The Andy Griffith Show.” He noted that that gig was serious show business. No one phoned it in. Ron learned about the hard work that goes into telling a good story.

Having seen most of Ron’s films, I’m convinced that his hard work has made him an excellent storyteller.

I’m not sure if this documentary will be shown again, but if it is, I recommend it.

In Case You’re Curious about “The Best…”

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I blogged the other day about a group writing project in which bloggers identified their best blog entry of the last year and explained why they felt it was the best.

Project initiator Joanna Young has published the results today — 38 entries. I enjoyed seeing some fascinating blog posts, including one from my pal Tom Clifford, and I even spotted a storytelling aficionado, Barbara Rozgonyi, I was previously unfamiliar with.