Three Meaty Storytelling Goodies — Yours Free for the Asking

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I continue to marvel at the generosity of the storytelling community. Storytelling fans can find so many wonderful freebies out there. Here are three I’ve come across recently.

    • [Thanks to Thaler Pekar for alerting me to this one.] Stephanie Tolan has a new Web site, StoryHealer.com, where she’s offering a free e-book on a theme that has fascinated me for several years — Change Your Story, Change Your Life, which is also the title of the 145-page book. The only cost is the ink or toner to print the book out if you’re like me and don’t want to read it on screen. I haven’t printed mine yet (and thus haven’t read much). She also offers an excerpt — the first chapter — in case you want to preview it before downloading the full book. Here’s what Tolan wrote in an e-mail announcing the new site and book download:

The book describes what I call Story Principle and provides methods for putting it to use to improve one’s life experience. It can be downloaded as a free PDF under a Creative Commons license. On the website there is also an excerpt that allows people to sample the material; a list of “Resources”–the books I read over the fifteen years during which I came to understand the power of consciousness to affect experience–and a page devoted to “Stories That Work.” These are stories sent to me by people who read early drafts of the book and began using Story Principle to make changes in their lives.

    • A fairly new discovery, Spoken Stories, which I’ve been enjoying a lot recently, has a wonderful page of Storytelling Sources/Websites. These skew somewhat toward oral-performance storytelling, but there’s something for all storytelling fans. Categories of materials include General Storytelling; Storytelling Organizations/Discussion Lists; Warm-up Exercises; Creative Dramatics; Tale Type, Motif Indexes, and Folklore Research; Personal Narratives; Oral Tradition; Ethics Resources; Copyright; Storytelling-Related Codes of Ethics; Grants and Funding; Working with Audiences; Storytelling in Schools and Curricula; Programming Resources; Special Populations; Props and Storytelling; Folk and Fairy Tales; Storytelling through Music; Poetry Resources; Beauty and the Beast and Bluebeard Sources; Storytelling in the Movies; Environmental/Ecology Story Resources; Family Stories; Holiday Stories; Oral History; Peace and War Story Resources; University Oral History Projects; Urban Legends; Worklore & Business Leadership Storytelling; Multicultural Stories; Mythology; Digital Storytelling/Globalization; Samples of Digital Stories; Storytelling and International Festivals; Terms and Definitions; Storytelling Resources; and Storytelling Quotes.
  • For folks who enter their name and e-mail address here, story coach Lisa Bloom offers her e-book, 5 Common Mistake People Make That a Good Story Can Fix, in the form of a new chapter every two days. At the end of this email series, readers have the opportunity to download the entire book in PDF format.