Gabriella Evelina Britth, who offers expertise in concepts, design, and storytelling, has declared in her Twitter profile that she plans to produce “50 tweets in 5 days. A Storytelling Experiment where I will share myself n [sic] my resume. Manifesto: Honest. Ironic. Sarcastic.” (I’m not sure if that’s meant to be “in my resume,” “and my resume,” or something else.) She started tweeting two days ago.

Britth had posted nearly two dozen tweets at the time of this writing. Most are creative ways of showing glimpses of her story, her lifestream, if you will. The first tweet, for example, is on PinintheMap and shows where in Stockholm, Sweden, Britth was born. In other tweets, she links to her LinkedIn profile, samples of her work, pictures of schools she’s attended and companies at which she’s worked, a video of a song she likes to sing while in the car, snapshots, a flowchart of how she likes to work (pictured), the Facebook profile of fictional Hollywood agent Ari Gold, a Lady Gaga video with art direction Britth admires, a blog she admires, a Survey Monkey quiz about herself, a Google street-view map of where she lives now, and a clip from Pineapple Express, the movie she considers the funniest ever.

The tweeted story/resume is clever and whimsical, and it does provide a good glimpse of Britth’s story. I’m not sure it work for employment (at least not in the U.S.) because it contains a few mildly risque elements.

I’d love to see job-seekers adopt some of Britth’s ideas for artifacts to link to as they seek to tell their stories. But tweeting the story doesn’t do much for me. I’d like to see some of these elements integrated into some other form of online resume.

[Thanks to Gregg Morris for alerting me to this tweeted resume.]

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I recently read of someone’s passion for writing, and it gave me pause. Writing is integral to my existence, but do I have a passion for it? When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a writer. I have wanted to be a writer since third grade, when I wrote a story that was published in the school paper. The fact that my father was a writer was a key influence. Since I moved out of the retail and clerical realm, virtually all my jobs have had writing as a key element. I’ve written eight books and countless articles. But do I have a passion for writing?

I would have to say that my relationship with writing goes beyond passion. It’s simply part of my identity, part of who I am, something that is in my DNA. I often say writing is like breathing for me; it’s just something I have to do.

And that brings me to time management. Ever since our big move to Washington state, I’ve had a barometer of how “busy” I am. It’s an e-mail list I belong to that contains queries by reporters. Expert sources can publicize and promote their expertise by responding to appropriate queries. I receive e-mails three times a day from this list. Since we left Florida, I have deleted every one of these e-mails without reading it.

As I wrote about here, I’ve also often felt too busy to give this blog my best effort. I could rationalize by saying I come nowhere near making a living from this blog; the money I earn from the advertising it carries amounts to pocket change. Yet, if I truly had my druthers, I would spend the bulk of my days researching material for and writing for this blog.

My best friend is an expert at time management, and her favorite rule on this subject is “Do what you love. Don’t do what you hate.” What could comprise better time management than spending our time doing what we’re passionate about and avoiding what doesn’t make us happy?

Still, living in a rural woodland is pretty labor-intensive. My husband does a lot more work here than I do simply because he has skills I don’t have. But I have plenty of regular chores, as well as house-finishing activities that are within my skillset. The beauty of nature here also beckons, saying, “Come outside. Enjoy the beauty. Go for a bike ride or hike.”

In the end though, applied storytelling is my passion. Writing about it goes beyond passion. I must constantly strive to balance the have-tos of my life with the activities that stoke my passions. Today, I rededicate myself to doing what I love.

What’s your passion, and do you spend as much time on it as you want to?

PS: NPR recently ran a story on why writers write.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

When I was preparing to enter high school, my father told me I had to take Latin. I was not enthusiastic about the idea. I wanted to take French. My father and I compromised. I would take two years of Latin.

My Latin teacher, as it turned out, was fresh out of college and in his first year of teaching. He was only nine years older than I was (even now in his 60s, he still has a boyish look, as you can see in the photo at right).

And he was a fabulous teacher. Energetic, interesting, and passionate about his subject matter, he brought the allegedly dead language vibrantly to life. I immersed myself in studying Latin with Mr. Rhody, a.k.a. “Magister,” the Latin word for teacher. I was a good student in most of my subjects, but I worked especially hard in Latin and earned excellent grades. As you may have guessed by now, my compromise with my dad proved unnecessary because I eagerly took four years of Latin (I did also take French, but that experience was far less memorable). I enhanced my immersion in ancient Roman culture through involvement in Latin Club and two spring-break trips to Italy. At the end of the four years, I won the Latin Prize, an accomplishment I have always valued more than most (even though I kind of thought my cousin Vicki deserved it more than I did; she earned straight A’s for all four years of Latin, where I had gotten a B in the first grading period because I had mono).

Even after the years of high school, college, and graduate school, David Rhody remains — by far — my favorite teacher and one of my greatest influences.

Not that many students take Latin today, and many schools don’t even offer it. (I would have invoked the same requirement for my two children that my father did for me, but Latin was not offered at their highschool.) That’s a shame. As my Magister taught me, 60 percent of the English language comes from Latin. Mr. Rhody assigned us to keep “derivative notebooks” to catalog the English words derived from Latin. My four years of Latin were an enormous boon to my vocabulary and my life as a writer. A knowledge of Latin helps a person figure out the meaning not only of unfamiliar English words, but also words in any of the Romance languages.

But I digress … I have kept in touch with Mr. Rhody over the (too many) years since high school, and last year, we became friends on Facebook. He has been retired for several years now, but I like to think his legacy lives on just as vibrantly in the classroom (jokingly referred to as the “Latin wing” of our high school) since his successor is one of his students.

A few weeks ago, I received a Facebook friend request from Larry Smith, co-founder of SMITH Magazine, which I’ve written about many times in this space. Larry had noticed we had a mutual friend — David Rhody. Turns out Larry had had the Magister experience 15 years after I had.

It’s fascinating to speculate about whether anything about our mutual high-school or Latin experience led us both to storytelling. In fact, Larry told me Latin class did influence him, noting that he couldn’t remember where his passport was but could vividly remember Hannibal crossing the Alps on elephants. For me, The Aeneid mesmerized me with its storytelling by the poet Vergil.

I have a good chance to learn more about Larry’s Latin-storytelling connection as he has agreed to participate in a Q&A soon.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

My earliest and most sustained ambition was to be a dancer — specifically a ballerina. After five years of childhood dance lessons, I realized I was no good at learning steps. Many years later, I identified my disability as a very poor capacity for kinesthetic learning; my brain simply could not observe a teacher doing dance steps and translate the same movements to my own body.

My inability to learn dance steps has always seemed like a cruel joke of nature, and there’s still a tiny part of me that feels as though I was meant to be a dancer, but my body and brain won’t cooperate. I probably could have confronted my disability; after all, I’ve seen auditions and performances of dancers who are deaf, who are amputees, who have scoliosis. But I didn’t, so it seems unlikely at my advancing age that I will ever be a dancer.

But I love dance and gravitate toward watching dance as entertainment. I’ve written before about my love of the reality dance competition “So You Think You Can Dance” (in fact, now that I look back, I see I also wrote about my dance ambitions and kinesthetic learning deficiencies). This show has a level of heart and authenticity that separates it from many other reality competition shows.

One indicator of how special this show is: Its personnel have initiated today’s National Dance Day, a day to get people moving and appreciating dance. Popular show choreographers Tabitha and Napoleon (a.k.a., NappyTabs) even designed a dance number that the masses could learn and perform for today’s celebration.

So what does all this have to do with story? Most of the dance numbers choreographers give contestants to perform on the show have a story behind them, and the judges to a large extent evaluate the numbers based on how successfully the contestants communicate the story. When the numbers have no story behind them, they are, in my opinion, less successful and memorable. Last night, show judge Adam Shankman, a director and choreographer, told one contestant to let the story drive the dance — that keeping the story in mind as he danced would inform and enhance his dancing.

The stories behind the contestants — and how much the audience knows about those stories — often play a strong role in how successful they are in the competition. This year’s most popular dancer, for example, is Kent, a hayseed from a tiny Ohio farming town — who dances like a god. Two winners in recent years have been street dancers with little formal training. A contestant who is a favorite with the judges and a wonderful dancer is less popular with viewers because we learned very little about his backstory during the audition phase of the competition.

Today I celebrate National Dance Day and the show that inspired it, as well as the dancer deep within me — and all the stories that propel dance into the dazzling art form it is.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

NPR and Flickr have added more scanned pages from girls’ diaries, as part of the project I reported on here. I also belatedly realized that this diary project is connected with the Hidden Life of Girls project I wrote about here. I wish the connection were more clear on these sites.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I made several attempts to keep a diary when I was young, but none of them lasted.

My most interesting effort was in junior high, when I fashioned my diary (a spiral-bound notebook) into a sort of newsletter with an audience of — who? I don’t quite remember if I intended to share the newsletter with others. The publication was called The Reader’s Raisin. As I recall, The Reader’s Raisin contained drawings and other doo-dads not typical of diaries.

In that way, it was perhaps typical of the project NPR has launched on Flickr, The Hidden World of Girls and the page shown here from Theresa Anderson’s diary.

I wish I knew more about the purpose of this project and what inspired it. Neither the Flickr site nor the NPR page on the project say very much beyond this on the NPR site:

With enough of them, they could form a comprehensive tapestry — from elation to depression — of life experiences.

The NPR page also offers interesting comments on folks’ experiences with diaries.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

One of my occasional forays into my own story…

I am extremely uncomfortable — nay, phobic — when it comes to talking on the phone. I dread making phone calls and very rarely answer the phone.

Many people find my problem very weird. Some even disdain me. I don’t think my issue is any stranger than the phobia my mother and sister have about driving over bridges. (Neither can do so, and they have to plot out intricate routes when they drive to ensure they won’t encounter any bridges.)

I wasn’t always this way. I would not say I went out of my way to talk on the phone, but I had people in my circle that I would have regular, long phone conversations with. I don’t remember having my current dread of the phone in my earlier years.

Two things happened in the 1990s that gradually made me anti-phone. The first was the Internet. I first went on the Internet in 1993, and I think I came to a subconscious realization that, for the most part, I didn’t have to talk on the phone anymore. I used to have at least monthly long conversations with my best friend, who for years has lived far away from me, but once she went on the ‘Net a month after I did, we carried out virtually all our conversations online. We’ve had personal phone calls only twice in these last 17 years — once to discuss the OJ Simpson verdict and once when my father died.

Which brings me to the second influence on my phone issues. When my dad died in 1997, I learned that he, too, had hated the phone. Somehow that made my quirk OK. I was validated. It was genetic.

It’s usually not that hard to work around my discomfort. In my role as associate publisher for Quintessential Careers, I get a fair number of requests from media for interviews. I either ask to do them via e-mail or pass them off on my partner.

Some phone interaction is unavoidable, though. Some people press me to communicate by phone. I did a number of phone interviews when I was actively pursuing a college-teaching position. My phobia made me absolutely awful at these interviews, but I did learn to get somewhat better (my husband suggested pacing while on the phone to channel nervous energy; that helps a lot). I do monthly conference calls for an executive board I serve on. I am capable of making phone calls if I absolutely have to. I generally have to psych myself up for days. My greatest triumph in confronting my fear was the teleconference I did last fall for Worldwide Story Work.

I know there are ways to get over phobias, and some friends have even suggested methods. But I’m not sure I want to get over it. If my phobia does not greatly impede my personal and professional lives, do I really need to get over it?

The same best friend with whom I no longer have phone conversations has a simple rule for life: Do what you love. Don’t do what you hate. I feel as though I have earned the right at my age to not have to do what I hate.

What do you think? Am I selfish, inflexible, and bizarre for refusing most phone contact and being unwilling to get past my fear?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

One of the recent podcast interviews in Michael Margolis’s The New Storytellers series featured the wonderful Christina Baldwin, author of one of the seminal books in the current storytelling movement, Storycatcher.

I was particularly fascinated by the part of the conversation about introverted vs. extroverted storytelling. Storytelling on social-media venues like Facebook is an example of extroverted storytelling, Baldwin says, and it’s often incomplete and unsatisfying storytelling. Baldwin uses a status-update example, “Just ate a hamburger,” that leaves the audience hungering (my pun intended) for more, or leaves them asking, “So?” and “What happened next?”

Baldwin says that if people aren’t attached to their interior stories, they get addicted to feedback. Although I would have considered myself attached to my interior story, I also recognize a social-media feedback addiction in myself. I’m always curious about what kinds of comments that my, for example, Facebook status updates, have generated.

People are longing for a deeper conversation, Baldwin says. We need to push technology aside and just talk slowly face-to-face in a social space that creates connection. Her prescription for such a space is the circle conversation, the subject of her newest book, The Circle Way.

It’s a very worthwhile and thought-provoking conversation. Give it a listen.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

This is a story I never expected to write.

A dear friend, Monique, died suddenly yesterday at age 43.

We were colleagues and friends at Stetson University, where we taught in the Management Department, and in fact, Monique was responsible for my getting into teaching, the job I’ve loved the most in my career. Back in 1996, long before I was truly qualified to teach at the college level, she suggested me for a teaching position in the department. Eventually I was asked to step aside in favor of someone with a PhD, but as I approached the end of my own PhD program, Monique brought me back to Stetson to teach in 2005 after my replacement left.

But I knew Monique well before Stetson. She was in the management PhD program at Florida State in Tallahassee at the same time my husband Randall was in the marketing program. I was a bit suspicious and jealous of Monique back then since she was young, pretty, single, and spending a lot of time with Randall. But she soon met and married Chad, the love of her life. Beginning in Tallahassee, Monique and Chad, who did not want children of their own, developed a special bond with our two children.

When she came to Stetson to teach a couple of years after Randall had begun to teach there, she instantly developed a reputation as a superb and student-centered teacher. Two weeks to the day before her death she had won Stetson’s most prestigious teaching award. She was universally beloved by her students. All the RIP notices on Facebook yesterday called her the greatest teacher students had ever had.

Many students also called her a mentor, and though she was a dozen years my junior, she was a mentor to me, too.

Monique and I were close in the sense that either of us could always have called on the other in a time of need (and I called on her far more than she called on me). But we did not spend huge amounts of time together. So one of the many tragic aspects for me of her too-soon death is that I didn’t know that much about her story.

She was adopted. She grew up in Columbus, GA, a city I visited long before I knew her and dubbed the most depressing city I’d ever been to. She was a good and attentive daughter who spent countless hours helping her mom move and acclimate to Florida after Monique’s pharmacist dad died. Monique really liked to have a good time. She had a deep, throaty, infectious laugh. She and I shared a Myers-Briggs type — INFP. She loved the Beatles. Chad called her Moni, and so did Randall and I.

Is that really all I knew of her story? One of the lessons I have quickly learned from her untimely death is that life is, of course, too short, and you never know how quickly and suddenly your opportunity to spend time with someone will be cut off. The other hellish aspect for me is that I had tried to say goodbye to Moni before we moved to Washington, but we couldn’t work it out. I thought our move might mean I’d never see her again, but I could not have imagined it would be this way.

If there is any comfort to be had, it is in the fact that thousands of stories about Moni are out there, carried by hordes of former students, along with family, friends, and colleagues. Because she was such a shining light who touched so many lives, stories of her by those she taught, mentored, and loved will live on and on.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The third annual International Day for Sharing Life Stories is a week from Sunday — on May 16. The day’s Web site notes that last year more than 200 organizations in 20 countries around the world held activities to celebrate the day, and to call attention to countless life story organizations and projects.

To be honest, I find the event’s Web site not well designed and frustratingly hard to navigate. The site makes the statement: “Through hundreds of reports, audios, and videos that were posted on the website, we saw many practical examples of how life story expands the process of democratization and transformation of culture,” but I cannot find these “hundreds of reports, audios, and videos.” It also refers to a mysterious blog where this year’s events will be posted, but I can’t find it. Perhaps one has to be a member of the site to find that information.

Among the types of activities that have been part of the past two events and are encouraged for this year are:

• Story Circles in schools, community centers, homes, and churches
• Public open-microphone performances of stories
• Exhibitions of stories in public venues as image, text, and audio-visual materials
• Celebratory events to honor local storytellers, practitioners and organizations
• Open houses for organizations with a life-story sharing component
• Online simultaneous gatherings, postings, and story exchanges
• Print, radio and television broadcast programming on life stories, and documentaries that feature oral histories and story exchanges

The event is a collaboration between the International Network of Museums of the Person (Brazil, Portugal, USA and Canada) and the Center for Digital Storytelling (USA, Canada, Denmark, South Africa), the founder and director of which, Joe Lambert, said of International Day for Sharing Life Stories:

The interest and excitement in life story work continues to grow. Everywhere our organization has traveled in the last year, China, Guatemala, Korea, and India, from the frozen tundra of the Canadian Arctic to the tropical forests of the Congo, we are seeing greater and greater interest in our methods of practice. We are also witnessing the development of new methods of capturing and sharing stories, and new approaches to using the stories to promote social change and democracy. Despite the struggle of working through this period of the international financial crisis, people are coming to see that listening to each others’ life stories is central to the development of cohesive societies.

Organizers note that the day is “an opportunity for you and your organization to meet to share stories with others from around the world.”

Will you be participating in International Day for Sharing Life Stories, and if so, how?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.