Liz Warren | Storyteller

I know Apple, Inc. doesn’t need me to amplify its voice in the world, but the short Spike Jonze film, “Someday,” created to promote the noise cancelling technology in AirPods, has captivated me. And its message of self-acceptance echoes what I hope to create in our storytelling classrooms. The film features Pedro Pascal dancing, emoting, and looking straight into the camera as he lip-synchs, “You’re perfect. Now work it.”

I often tell my students that storytelling is about connection and not about perfection, but I interpret the lyric “You’re perfect” as implying “Just as you are.”

I want students to know, believe, and experience that they come into the classroom with everything they need to tell a story in our community – in the classroom and beyond – and to become storytellers if they wish.

If you were in my class, here’s what I’d tell you about how well equipped you are to tell a story:

• You have your life experiences.
• You have your family, biological and/or chosen, and cultural heritages.
• You have your body and its capacity for expression, and your brain, hardwired to learn through story.
• You have your language, or languages, and your unique voice.
• You have the inherent human capacity and need to connect meaningfully with others, which storytelling fosters and sustains.
• You have the foundation for that capacity provided by millennia of ancestors all over the world who relied on storytelling to preserve and share what was most important to their and your survival.
• You have our classroom community, whose whole purpose is to support you in telling stories to others and in growing as a storyteller.
• You have me and the other faculty of the SMCC Storytelling Institute, who have devoted years of our lives to becoming storytellers and to preparing to help you tell your stories.
• You have the college, the community college district, and the citizens of the county and state who decided they wanted SMCC to be created over 40 years ago so that we could all be here studying storytelling together in 2026.

You have all that.

Your job, in turn, is to honor that by being dedicated members of our community, and by your sincere preparation of the stories you choose to tell.

I know that isn’t a simple ask. At a minimum it means committing the time to find, learn, craft, and tell your stories. For many of us it means facing the anxiety we may feel about speaking in front of others, or – something that might be even more challenging – facing the emotional issues that inform the stories, that might be holding us back from telling them.

And, yet, the vast majority of students who have taken storytelling at SMCC over the last thirty years have managed it very well. They learn that our classroom is a little corner of the universe where it is not only okay, but ideal, for them to be themselves as they own their place in a story community.

Sam i & Tropkillaz, “You’re Perfect”

Spike Jonze, “Someday”

Liz Warren is the director of the SMCC Storytelling Institute.