Thought it would be nice to have a daily lit quote as an entry:

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’m intrigued that a TED Talk about stories that is nearly three years old is getting attention. If I had seen any buzz about Tyler Cowen’s presentation about the problems with stories when it was first posted, I would have written about it or certainly seen others write about it.

I first wrote about the speech earlier this month. I’ve included a question about it in the set of general questions I ask my Q&A participants, and Jim Signorelli and Doug Rice have weighed in with their responses.

Donald Miller (pictured) is the latest story guru to offer a rejoinder to Cowen.

In railing against stories, Miller notes, Cowen is “telling a story and he’s made himself a character in that story.”

Miller contends that by the time Cowen confesses to have told a story, it’s too late:

He’s already positioned story as suspect, the way a culture might present shovels as suspect if they’d been used in too many murders. I’d rather have him show us how to use a shovel than scare us about how we are going to be killed by them. What we need, then, is people who tell great stories with their lives, based in truth. We need people to live better stories so those around us can learn to live better stories themselves.

Instead of merely exhorting us, Miller asserts, Cowen could offer suggestions for improving our stories:

A better method would not be to attack stories (who would win that fight? An earth without Middle Earth is boring) but rather to warn us about making our stories too simplistic, and warning us that stories can be used to manipulate.

Why do you suppose this talk is getting so much attention now (I admit I manufactured some of the attention by asking Q&A subjects about it) — and why didn’t it get attention back when it was posted in 2009? Or did it, and I somehow missed it?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The Earth is a wonderful storyteller.

When we spent our first summer in Eastern Washington, I became absolutely fascinated by the diverse geology of our new locale. We live in an area that, 250 million years ago, was under the Pacific Ocean, though not far from the coastline — at that time, roughly the border between present-day Washington and Idaho.

It’s also an area that, 17 to 6 million years ago, saw thousands of years of lava flows pouring over it.

And, during the most recent Ice Age, advancing glacial ice resulted in cataclysmic flooding that formed gigantic, deep lakes and resulted in many of the geological formations that exist today, such as Dry Falls, pictured at right.

I stand in awe of dramatic stories that unfolded long before the human story began.

The Earth tells her stories through what has been left behind after these dramatic events. The stories of undersea existence, volcanic activity, glacial flooding, and more are told all at once and in a nonlinear fashion. In our area, we can see the legacy of glacial lakes from 10,000 years ago and then travel a few miles to see volcanic evidence from a much earlier era. And the story continues as the earth continues to evolve. Volcanoes erupt. Tectonic plates clash. Floods and landslides change the landscape.

A week ago, I went on a geology field trip led annually by a local geologist. As fascinating as it was, much of the science went over my head; I wish our leader had been a bit better as a storyteller. Some scientists are brilliant storytellers who facilitate the layperson’s understanding. Our leader wasn’t awful, but I wish I could have grasped more of the story.

I was so fascinated by my area’s geology when we spent our first summer here in 2009 that I bought several books on the geological history of the region. But like the field-trip leader, they didn’t tell the Earth’s story in a very accessible way. The best, most storied, easiest-to-understand resource I found turned out to be a free 14-page booklet I picked up from the National Park Service.

Despite my struggle to fully understand the story, I’ll continue to study it. The field-trip geologist said the trip route he’s considering next year includes geological phenomena that are more a billion years old.

Can you imagine?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve been interested in the relationship between creativity and storytelling since I began my experimental foray into crafts this past summer.

I further explored the connection in a discussion with Annette Simmons related to her new interest in painting.

I was thus recently interested in an interview Michael Margolis did with Michelle James on Storytelling and the Creative Process. (At this writing, the podcast has been taken down because it had technical issues, but check back to see if it comes back up.) I was able to listen to about half of the interview.

Michelle, who is CEO of The Center for Creative Emergence, notes that the creative process is nonlinear and is about pushing boundaries.

In the portion of the podcast I listened to, I picked up two threads connecting creativity with storytelling:

• Creative people can expand the limited stories they carry about themselves.
• Story-based activities can facilitate creative thinking.

A common limited creativity story that creative people carry, James notes, is one in which creativity is split from income-generation, and the creative person is constantly balancing and compromising to reconcile those two sides of the story. The questions James poses include, “How can we create a new, larger story where you can both create and generate income?” and “How can you expand the story to include all the aspects you want?”

That’s one I can certainly relate to. I wish all my income could come from writing this blog, writing books, and working with my hands. I am slowly working on expanding my story.

One way to expand the story, James says, is to accept your current reality, but add something news, such as in the well-known, “Yes, and …” exercise, in which one partner proposes and activity, and the other partner — instead of rejecting it — expands it by saying “Yes, and let’s [do something that goes beyond the activity you proposed.”] Instead of automatically poo-pooing an idea and saying it won’t work, you expand your framework, do something to break your pattern and unstick yourself.

“Be willing to expand beyond what you already know,” James suggests. “Base your story on where your energy is coming from.”

Story-related activities that get creative juices flowing, she says, include those that feature right-brained visual thinking. James suggests anthropomorphizing inanimate objects and giving them a voice, as well as acting out concepts.

In group workshops, James asks participants to tell a 30-second story of their name. Another activity involves telling stories about things participants know to a partner and then looking for “deeper, shadow aspects,” such as beliefs, stories, and assumptions. Especially in organizations, the question then becomes, “What new story do we want to move into?”

A very quick glimpse at the articles on Michelle’s site doesn’t reveal a whole lot about story, but inspiration for creative people is plentiful.

Oh, and a little update on my creative pursuits: I wussed out of having a sale of my creations this fall. The date I planned for the sale sneaked up on me and just felt a little too real. Yes, I had a tiny fear that people would regard my handiwork as crap, but the bigger part of backing out was a practical view that a sale would be more successful in the spring. I’ll also now see how it feels not to have this creative outlet during the colder months.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

My friends Karen Dietz and Lori Silverman have just developed a nice, free resource — a seven-page handout, Narrative Forms and Stories: Narrative Forms Chart, which you can download from here.

The question of what is and isn’t a story has been a particularly hot topic among practitioners in the past year or so, and this resource enriches that conversation. The piece discusses the full story, anecdote, case study, description, example, news report, profile, scenario, testimonial, and vignette. Here’s the intro:

Not every narrative is a story. … Several [narrative forms] are often mistaken for stories. The examples of how a story changes into a non-story, or a particular type of story, are in the following pages…

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In memory of the lives lost 10 years ago today. Each life lost was a story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Sigh … another uncomfortably long period between posts …

Several years back, my husband and I discussed an old piece of furniture we had. It was a hutch that had been in his family for many years — not an antique by any means, but a piece with sentimental value. Yet a piece that didn’t fit in with our decor and we didn’t have space for.

I’m not sure what inspired me, but I decided to paint the hutch and see what use might be suggested by the transformed piece. The project took me a long time, the better part of an autumn, as I recall. But I was enthralled with it. I fell in love with the idea of using creative paint techniques on furniture. I bought a big stack of books on furniture painting. I wanted to make this craft my new hobby.

I was in my PhD program at the time, and I horrified a couple of my classmates by suggesting that after I earned my doctorate, I might just like to dedicate myself to crafts. That’s how much I was in love with this work — that I would consider setting aside a degree that cost me $80,000 … to paint furniture.

Stuff happened. I got a teaching job I wasn’t really expecting. I rededicated myself to this blog. I got involved in a couple of book projects. I didn’t have time for furniture painting. After the hutch, I did only one other project. I utterly underwhelmed my husband by painting a tiny chairside table for him for Christmas. I thought my work on it was absolutely brilliant, but the piece was not very structurally sound to begin with, and the carpenter in Randall disdained the wobbliness of the table.

Still, I always had it in mind that I would return to crafting in a big way. Even before we moved from our Florida home, I set up a crafts room.

When we purged two-thirds of our belongings before moving to Washington state, I sold both the hutch and the wobbly table. I attained a tiny modicum of validation as an “artist” because I had sold my work.

Here in Washington, I set up a crafts studio in our guest house. I knew I would be able to do the furniture painting only in the summer because it requires lots of messy sanding and painting that needs to be done outside. I have a lovely deck right off my studio.

And so it came to pass that I would dedicate much of summer 2011 to my grand crafting experiment — see if I really had the passion for it that I believed I did. The end of the story remains unwritten, but I’ve learned a few things so far.

Furniture painting is a very expensive hobby. I can acquire thrift-store and flea-market pieces fairly cheaply, but even the equipment and materials needed to remove old paints and finishes are expensive, let alone paint and polyurethane sealers. I started out believing that if I sold any pieces, I might make a little profit. Then I felt I might just break even. I now know that any proceeds will only put a dent in recouping what I spent.

About two-thirds of the time, I do feel the same sense of passion and enthrallment I did those years ago working on that hutch. The other third, I feel horribly inept. However, from ineptitude springs, I hope, learning and improvement.

Because I rehab and repurpose old pieces of furniture, it’s fun to imagine the stories behind the pieces — what kind of life did they have before I got my hands on them? Were they loved and enjoyed? Why would anyone get rid of the clever, all-in-one child’s desk and chair pictured above — other than the fact that it was painted a hideous brown? It’s also fun to think of the new stories I’m creating by transforming the pieces.

The end of the story, or at least the end of this chapter, will come in mid-September. One of our neighbors opens his wholesale nursery to the public during a fall plant sale, and I hope to capitalize on his traffic by having a craft sale the same weekend. Maybe I’ll sell my pieces and feel more like an artist. Maybe I won’t sell them but can use them in our guest house.

So where am I going with all this, and what does it have to do with storytelling?

At some point during my summer crafting adventure, it occurred to me that storytelling author and luminary Annette Simmons was on a similar trajectory. She had been showing on Facebook some beautiful pictures she had painted. I wanted to interview her and write a piece about creativity and its relationship to storytelling. When one person is phobic about using the phone, and the other person has physical discomfort when typing, arranging an interview is not easy, but thanks to the wonders of technology, we finally pulled it off.

Annette’s thoughts about her painting, creativity, and how it all fits into her storytelling life is the subject of an upcoming post.

My foray into a different kind of creativity than I’m used to has some similarities with Annette’s, as well as some differences. Creativity is important to both of us. Every assessment I’ve ever taken has emphasized creativity as one of my central characteristics.

For more than three years, this blog has been my main creative outlet. My desire to express my creativity in a less virtual way led me to my experimental summer — though also to blogging less frequently. I hope you’ll join me this week in exploring Annette’s creativity journey and what it means in her current life.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

As I’ve looked back at pop-culture forms I loved as a child — anecdotes in Reader’s Digest, serialized comic strips, romance comics, soap operas (many of which are dying forms and all of which I’ve touched on in this blog), I am, of course, no longer surprised that the common denominator in all of them has been story.

The same is true of another form I’ve loved since age 7 and continue to love today — the advice column. Growing up in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia, I had access to two major newspapers, The Evening Bulletin and The Philadelphia Inquirer. My family subscribed to the Bulletin, which published Dear Abby. I’ve written a couple of times about how I learned about Santa Claus through Dear Abby.

After high school, I lived with my uncle for a year and began reading Abby’s twin, Ann Landers, because my uncle subscribed the other paper, The Inquirer. I learned to like Ann better because I felt Abby would often make a pun or joke at her advice-seekers’ expense.

That these and all advice columns are storied forms can barely be disputed. Most people when asking for advice have to set up their question with a story explaining the background of their need for advice. They are often hoping the advice columnist will write the ending to their stories.

I have been known to read advice columns about topics I’m not that interested in — car repair, home improvements, personal finances — just to read the stories in the questions.

Today, I consume the “advice columnist I love to hate,” Carolyn Hax, who, without warning, will sometimes lash out at her advice-seekers and imply that they are stupid, selfish, or just plain wrong.

I don’t believe, however, I ever read a storied response to a question in an advice column — until this week.

Writing in Lifewriters Forum in a post title “Tears Streaming Down My Face,” my friend Sharon Lippincott said:

If any of you have the slightest question in your mind about the Power of Story, reading this rather lengthy blog post should put it to rest … The rugged Truth in this story cracked my heart in pieces, but like a crocus coming through coal dust, hope peers up at the end.

The post in question is in an advice column I’d never heard of called Dear Sugar. As stated in The Sun, “SUGAR is the pseudonym of an advice columnist for The Rumpus, an online literary and culture magazine (www.therumpus.net). A new “Dear Sugar” column is posted most Thursday afternoons. She has two children and also writes fiction and memoir under her real name.”

The advice-seeker can’t seem to recover from a miscarriage. Naturally she tells the story of the miscarriage and what her life has been like since.

As Sharon pointed out, Sugar’s response is uber-long — for me, 10 pages when printed out — but well worth reading.

When we don’t have the same experiences as others — when we don’t live the same stories, Sugar points out, we can’t understand what another is going through:

The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you’re talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be over-estimated.

After giving some sage advice, including the above, Sugar begins the long story that encompasses most of her response. Why? Because “every now and then one of the questions I get seeps its way into my mind in the same way characters or scenes or situations in the other sorts of writing I do seep into my mind and I am haunted by it,” Sugar writes.

She tells of having been a youth advocate to a group of middle-school-aged girls for a year. The girls were all from the most miserable of family and socioeconomic circumstances. Their lives were, Sugar says, “unspeakably harrowing crap stew.”

Every time one of them would suffer some terrible abuse, Sugar would report it to the authorities, to child protective services, and ask for help. Not one agency ever helped one girl. There was no money, and children under 12 were the priority.

Finally coming to grips with the fact that no one would help, Sugar faced one of the girls and yet another heart-wrenching narrative of abuse:

She sat down in the chair near my desk where all the girls sat narrating their horrible stories and she told me another horrible story and I told her something different this time.

I told her it was not okay, that it was unacceptable, that it was illegal and that I would call and report this latest, horrible thing. But I did not tell her it would stop. I did not promise that anyone would intervene. I told her it would likely go on and she’d have to survive it. That she’d have to find a way within herself to not only escape the shit, but to transcend it, and if she wasn’t able to do that, then her whole life would be shit, forever and ever and ever. I told her that escaping the shit would be hard, but that if she wanted to not make her mother’s life her destiny, she had to be the one to make it happen. She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.

Here’s where Sugar’s advice finally comes full circle and we understand what Sugar’s story of being a youth advocate has to do with the advice-seeker who can’t recover from her miscarriage. Nothing can right the wrong of a dead baby, but we can transcend, and endure, and hold onto the desire to heal.

Please don’t be satisfied with my summary. Please read Sugar’s response for yourself.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A week or so ago, I kind of ambushed some of my closest colleagues in the story world — Gregg Morris, Cathryn Wellner, Thaler Pekar, Lou Hoffman, and Terrence Gargiulo — bloggers and luminaries all, and made them into an ad hoc advisory board to ask about preventing blog-readership decline.

Among many brilliant observations and suggestions, Gregg made an interesting comment about why the attention of folks interested in story and storytelling is currently getting diverted:

There is more “noise” in the story space now than at any time over the last few years. I used to be able to get through the Twitter stream and Google in reasonable time when searching story and storytelling and the derivatives. I can’t do that anymore now that “storytelling” is the new “everything.”

The others agreed that the story space is cluttered with noise, so I decided to analyze where that noise is coming from. Let’s say that, like Gregg, you use Twitter as one of your main sources for your news of storytelling (currently I don’t, but I have in the past). I get a daily email that aggregates tweets with the keyword “storytelling” and the hashtag #storytelling. Let’s look at the tweets on a random one of these emails, the one from Friday, July 29. Some initial categories of “noise” (and these might not be noise to everyone, but they are to me):

• Tweets in languages I can’t read.
• Multiple retweets of the same resource. Once I’ve checked out the first one, subsequent retweets are just noise.
• Tweets that announce specific storytelling events (often oral performance or library story hours) in remote cities.
• Tweets of resources that the tweeter has newly discovered but that I have known about for months or even years, and probably most serious story folks know about. A good example is the series of YouTube videos by Ira Glass on storytelling that repeatedly gets tweeted.
• Tweets of resources that seem to be at best peripherally about storytelling and are perhaps in the Twitter stream because they have “storytelling” in the URL (Example: 6 ways Twitter has made me a better writer). Or because they are given a #storytelling hashtag.
• Tweets that contain no links, so there’s usually no place to go with them. Sometimes these are good quotes about storytelling. Hannah Arendt’s “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it” gets tweeted frequently.
• Tweets that comprise little more than a video. I’m probably in the minority, but I just don’t have the time or patience to check out most of these.
• Tweets that contain bad/dead links.
• Tweets that label something as “storytelling” that is not storytelling. For example, this link was touted as a “great example of activism via storytelling.” Can you find any storytelling?

So, discounting all of the above, here’s what’s left from Friday’s storytelling Twitter stream. Tweets about …

• Storytelling in social media. For example, Why Storytelling is Key to Social Media Marketing, which falls into the category of items I’ll certainly want to check out even though many articles of this type turn out to have a vague notion of what storytelling is and offer minimal examples.
• Same goes for storytelling in marketing and branding. In Crowdsourced Co-Storytelling: Brands Invite Fans to Assist in Idea Generation & Content Creation, Reb Carlson says, “Today, consumers comprise a huge part of a brand’s overall story,” but the article does not support the idea of storytelling or demonstrate how crowdsourcing contributes to storytelling.
• Storytelling in screenwriting and filmmaking, a topic of interest to some in the story space, but marginally to me because I veer toward nonfiction and applied uses.
• Curations and aggregations, like Gregg’s. I tend to already know about these. One new one was Twylah, where Jan Gordon’s curation is kind of a curation of curations!
• Transmedia storytelling, which is huge right now and certainly has implications for folks in the applied-story space. Much of it tends to be noise, however, for the same reasons that items about screenwriting and filmmaking are. Here’s a provocative one from April currently making the rounds: TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING IS BULLSHIT… And Michael Margolis calls this one a “fascinating example of transmedia brand #storytelling.”
• Pop-culture blockbusters like Harry Potter. Again, not of primary interest because it’s fiction.
• Amazon Japan. In my Scoop.it curations in particular, I have noticed huge numbers of tweets of books listed on http://www.amazon.co.jp/. I think Amazon Japan must pay people to randomly tweet book titles. Serious noise here.
• Children’s story books. Generally not of interest to adults in the story space.

• Various forms of visual storytelling, such as Friday’s More on Storytelling With Your Camera. Like social-media storytelling tweets, these are usually worth checking out, but often the “storytelling” aspect is questionable. One item showing promise is a beautiful slideshow by visual storyteller Matt Knisely, along with his downloadable quick reference guide to storytelling (partial screenshot at left).
• A song called Storytelling by Belle and Sebastian.
• Storytelling in videogames. Surely of interest to some in the story space, but not me because I loathe games.
• A kind of uncategorizable piece about how story makes content more entertaining.
• Storytelling in fiction. Not of primary interest.
• An Exquisite Corpse experiment. An intriguing experiment (that takes a while to load) by IDEO Labs, which explains that the creators “asked a group of collaborators to submit sentences/fragments … to create a dynamic visualization for the “exquisite” story our writers had crafted. These collective fragments formed a base on which we layered sensory artifacts, from voice-over to tagged visuals, and we were curious as to how far we could take the experience.”

So, of 100 tweets in that one day’s email of storytelling tweets, I would strongly consider writing about, or including in one of my curations, maybe two of the items tweeted about. Perhaps two others would get secondary consideration. Indeed the noise-to-valuable content ratio is high. That’s one reason I eventually determined that culling through Twitter streams was not a good use of my curation time, but the noise is nearly as bad in other channels as well.

Gregg predicts: “I think that you’ll see your traffic pick up again once this madness has run its course. Cream always rises to the top.”

I hope he’s right.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

On the Internet, you will find no lack of efforts to collect and share stories, either on an ad hoc basis, or as a site’s raison d’etre. Following are a few that have caught my eye recently. I have also attempted to categorize the purpose for each collection/collection point:

Stories to illustrate a point: As part of the Washington Post’s StoryLab Project, Brigid Schulte has collected stories from working-mother readers share stories of opting in and out of the workforce. I found this collection especially interesting, having just read When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins, which noted that, as much as women’s place in society is different from what it was 50 years ago, women still face great difficulty in integrating work and motherhood. Similarly, Schulte’s conclusion from the stories she collected: “It ain’t working now, and something’s gotta give.”

Stories to inspire: In Learn From Student Stories of Scholarship Success, Scholarship America shared five stories of students, who without scholarship assistance, would either graduate with thousands of dollars in debt, or not attend college at all.

Stories for sharing experiences. DRINKING DIARIES is a forum for women to share, vent, express, and discuss their drinking stories without judgment. “Whether you drink or not,” the blog states, “are the child of an alcoholic or the mother of a future drinker, sip wine on occasion or binge drink for sport — we want to hear your story.” Regular readers will understand my special interest in this collection. I’m fascinated that Drinking Diaries is equally about drinking and sobriety.

Similarly for sharing experiences, ExchangeStudentStories appears to collect cautionary tales for exchange students in hopes of including them in a book. (It’s not clear because the site has no “About” page.

Stories for “the memory economy” and fundraising. I’ve mentioned the TOTeM Project before (TOTeM = Tales of Things and Electronic Memory). I have a hard time grasping this project, but here’s a description of an aspect of it about a “memory booth” at an event:

… We spent 4 days gathering visitors’ stories … We had a selection of blank objects, painted white and unbranded to create a generic signifier for the object itself. This meant that people were free to add any stories they liked to the objects, putting the emphasis on the memories rather than the objects themselves. At the end of the 4 days we gathered a lot of great stories from memories of traveling, looking cool in that first pair of jeans through to the trouble of kissing with sunglasses on! Once these stories were attached to a QR tag people could visit the Oxfam Originals store to pick up a memory. Every time someone bought a pair of jeans for example they would be given a QR tag loaded with other people’s memories.

Ultimately, people could (and presumably still can) “buy into the memory economy and help raise money for Oxfam.” You can see the collected stories here.

Stories for promotion via social responsibility: Purina’s Rally to Rescue program, which “recognizes the importance of the work pet rescuers do to help protect homeless pets,” is holding a contest via Facebook in which visitors can vote (through Oct. 3) on their favorite of 10 stories of rescued dogs and cats. The winning Rally to Rescue® group wins coupons good for up to $5,000 in pet food.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.