Liz Warren | Storyteller

There are a multitude of spiritual and religious celebrations and observances, including Christmas, at this time and all through the year. Many of them are steeped in rich and meaningful story. This blog entry is about Christmas, which I observe. It is a time of year that I love. There are many traditions of the…

In the early pages of Arthur W. Frank’s Letting Stories Breathe: A socio-narratology, (© 2010 by The University of Chicago Press), Frank recounts a very short story by South American writer Eduardo Galeano titled “Christmas Eve” in which the protagonist, a young doctor, already very late for celebrations at his family’s Christmas Eve, takes a…

Do you know someone whose face “froze” in a grumpy position? Do you know how your grandparents met? Do you know what went on when you were being born? These are three of the 20 questions developed by Marshall P. Duke, PhD, of Emory University. This list, called the “Do you know” scale, measures a…

My grandmother’s fruitcakes were infamous. Wrapped in paper towels soaked in half orange juice and half whiskey, they packed quite a punch. When I was younger, my parents wouldn’t let me eat them, because she used moonshine from the still in the woods behind my great aunt’s house. Only after the stiIl broke and she…

I love grandmothers.  Today I’d like to thank the grandmother of Donald Davis.  She was an excellent storytelling coach, and her grandson, whom she never met is a storyteller extraordinaire.  She imparted great wisdom to her grandson by teaching his father how to tell his own story.  You see, storytellers know when a story is…

Over the years I've created dozens of lists of story prompts.  Here is a compilation of my favorites, and the ones that have proved most productive in sparking memory. Enjoy! The Big List of Story Prompts! You and your friends got in trouble in school or college A date or an appointment or a meeting…

I am going to start right off the bat and assert that storytelling and story reading are different. I am not saying one is better than the other especially when it comes to young children who are early readers. I am just saying they are different. Storytelling is the art of orally telling a story…

In the past, I have heard of a story as a string of pearls. While I was creating a story that was to be about 20 minutes long, I was finding that I was getting caught on the length of the string of pearls. I was questioning what parts of the story were really needed…

Every story has a hero. We call that hero the protagonist. Every story has a nemesis. We call that nemesis the antagonist. The hero wants something. So does the nemesis. And in a twist often not clear for much of the story, the hero and the nemesis want the same thing. And in a further…

In 1996 I was a special education teacher at a private school for children with Learning Disabilities in Greenwich, Connecticut. At the end of a PE class in which we had played dodgeball one of my students asked, “Ms. Dinshaw which team won?” His team had no doubt lost but being a ‘good’ teacher, I…

In storytelling, the threshold guardian is the obstacle, the limiting factor, that which must be overcome if the hero is to continue. In stories, the threshold guardian may be the ferryman on the River Styx, the three-headed-dog sleeping before the gates of hell. Threshold guardians might be liminal entities, wardens of crossroads, or borders, seasons…

The thing I’ve noticed most in learning about personal storytelling this semester is its ability to connect people. Even in this virtual world, across distances far and near, between introverts and extroverts, among people of various upbringing and experience with perhaps nothing in common, we have formed connections through our stories. Even before this ongoing…