I first learned about Fray through a colleague at my university, Andy Dehnart (of Reality Blurred fame), who organized Fray events at the school. One year, my son participated in Fray Day, telling a largely fictionalized story of growing up as a gang member on the streets of Newark, NJ (OK, he was born in Newark, but that’s about as much truth as the story had in it.) Fray Day no longer happens, but as the Fray site explains, the Fray concept keeps morphing:

FRAY BEGAN as a website. We presented individually designed, true first-person stories. Each one ended with a question that prompted the audience to tell their stories, too. You can see an archive here. THEN IT EVOLVED into a series of live storytelling events, Fray Days and Fray Cafes, that took place all over the world, attended by thousands of people. You can see some photos and listen to audio of those events, too. AND NOW Fray is evolving again - this time into a quarterly series of independently produced books. Each one will be on a central storytelling theme, and include personal stories, articles, and original art. They will come out quarterly. They will be awesome. But the core of Fray remains unchanged: It’s about true stories. It’s about proving that extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. It’s about finding that common thread that connects us all together. And it’s an invitation and a dare to get involved: What’s your story?

Fray also offers a blog.

I so wish I had captured more of my family’s stories, especially those of my dad and his five brothers and sisters who are now all gone but one. In her article in the Christian Science Monitor, Marilyn Gardner writes about senior citizens who are ensuring their stories will live on.

Gardner cites Hedrick Ellis, who hired a personal historian to interview his parents.

“You hear these stories over the years, but nobody ever really gets around to writing them down,” says Mr. Ellis of Arling­ton, Mass. “This seemed like an easy and practical way of capturing them.”

Gardner quotes Paula Stahel, president of the Association of Personal Historians, who niotes “an increase in the number of elders who want to be sure their stories are handed down.” Another personal historian, David O’Neil, is quoted as observing that “it’s always a baby boomer who has children and aging parents. They look at their parents and their children and wonder, ‘What are my children going to remember about my own parents, and how do I capture and preserve their life stories?’ As the World War II generation is passing away, there are a lot of efforts to record their stories.”

Gardner writes that “many people don’t think they have stories to tell,” but most find they have much more to relate than they imagined.

Gardner cites Project Storykeeper, the mission of which “is to preserve our families’ heritage. We believe that by capturing the life stories of our oldest and wisest citizens future generations can benefit from a wealth of experience and wisdom.” The project provides certified audio-biography training, support and audio tools to StoryKeepers “to preserve the past, enrich the present and strengthen the future — one story at a time.” StoryKeepers are people who record life stories and connect the family to hear them.

Dennis Stack, founder of Project Storykeeper, offers tips in the extended portion iof this entry for interviewing folks about their stories.

The “Family Wealth Legacy” of this entry’s title comes from a blog entry in Family Wealth Secrets Online Magazine.

“It’s about capturing the assets that are most often lost when someone dies … the intellectual, spiritual and human assets that make up a great majority of our family’s wealth and passing them on as well,” writes blogger and attorney Alexis Neely. She urges a “Family Wealth Legacy Interview process” at the end of planning an estate with a loved near the end of his or her life to “help you capture the most valuable family wealth you have and pass that on for successive generations by building a legacy library that will be far more valuable than any dollars you could ever leave behind.”

Do you ever think of the “what-ifs” that led to your existence? The accidents and coincidences that resulted in your birth? Or how close you came to not existing if X, Y, or Z hadn’t happened?

Both my maternal and paternal ancestors came to America — Southern New Jersey to be precise — on the same ship, the Good Ship Kent, from England in 1677. Was that piece of history responsible for my existence? Perhaps just a little. More responsible probably was the fact that two teenagers at Moorestown High School in South Jersey — both descendants of the travelers on the Kent — had a passion for horses. Also responsible was the fact that first child of this couple — who had married — was tragically hit by a car and killed. I might have been born to the couple at some point anyway, but because they wanted to fill the empty space created my sister’s death, I was born almost a year to the day after she died.

The Danish Poet is a charming animated story of the chain of events that led to the narrator’s birth? The video asks: Is our existence just coincidence? Do little things matter?

I thoroughly enjoyed this funny, poignant, thought-provoking story. What chain of events led to your existence?

Susan Scanlon writes about the Leadership Story in The Type Reporter, a newsletter about [Myers-Briggs] personality type “and how it affects you in all stages of life.”

Her husband, John, developed the concept of the Leadership Story, “a narrative that excites people about what you stand for.” John, she said, “began to discover that everyone, armed with a leadership story, can become a leader.”

Using the aspects of Myers-Briggs types, Scanlon talks about:

• Feeling: “We become leaders when we become enthusiastic about something.”
• Sensing: “The ‘defining moment’ … tells about a specific moment, with specific sights and sounds, so it lets people experience what we experienced. We can feel what they felt, and it can be a defining moment for us too.”
• Intuition: “Defining the future we want to see adds the Intuitive part to our leadership story, where we ‘see’ what isn’t there yet. It advances us from saying ‘I want to go somewhere,’ to “I want to go THERE.’”
• Thinking: “This is the final piece to our leadership story, the Thinking piece, where we design a game plan to lead us to our goal.”

The other view of the Leadership Story comes from Katie K. Snapp, writing on the Neuroscience of Leadership on her Better-Leadership.com site. She writes:

A life story — whether we read it in a bestselling memoir or participate in it each day —contains silent assumptions and emotional scripts. Our assumptions tell us what to look for, and how to perceive and process experiences.

What about your identity as a leader in that story? Who defined it up until now? What events formed it? Were you an agent of the change or were you a victim? Change is not simple …

The good news is that we are not hard-wired for life. With new experiences, new neuronal pathways and new neural networks are formed. New highways to new communities in your brain. And, some remarkable new research shows, consistently repeating new experiences even alters gene expression. When we write a new story—and change our minds — we change our brains.

Snapp goes onto detail four principles of change, one of which is: “A new story can only occur by living in the present moment.” I have trouble with that one. The message has been coming at me from several directions — yoga class, my brush with Eckhart Tolle’s teachings this year — but I still find it a hard concept to embody.

She closes with: “The powerful use of story to examine what your leadership history leads to intention. Take control of the author in you. Rewrite what needs a change.”

I believe my life is slowly leading me in a direction in which I can impart this message to to others: Change the story, change your life.

Snapp teaches a 3-part workshop that seems similar to what I’d eventually like to teach: Reinventing Your Leadership: Using Brain Business and Mind Matters to Author Your Future.

I’ve been writing recently about telling organizational stories in “About Us” pages, but, of course, “About Me” pages, seen most often in blogs, serve a similar purpose and come off best when told in story form (which I realize this blog’s “About Kathy Hansen” really doesn’t. Must fix that).

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

The cover article of the current issue of American Scholar, published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, carries the headline “The End of the Black American Narrative,” with this subhead:

A new century calls for new stories grounded in the present, leaving behind the painful history of slavery and its consequences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other day, I blogged about storytelling on About Us pages. Following on that discussion, Jim Randall of The Raconteur, describes a process he takes clients though to “create enterprise through stories.” He writes:

To be successful we need to connect with, inform and engage those we serve and those who contribute to our success. Engage them in developing ideas and initiatives, building relationships and facilitating our progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A press release on Two Men Talking explains the origins:

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

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

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

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

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

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