Liz Warren | Storyteller

One of my favorite things about storytelling is its weird, mystical ability to turn the wretched into funny. Honesty is the storyteller’s best friend in all things, but with humor, it’s just required without question. Nothing is funnier than the truth. In 2015, Kevin McGeehan told a story on The Moth about the final days…

I have a lot of old lady friends. There’s Dorothy, 93, the last of my Mother’s (R.I.P.) great friends. She’s completely with it and seems not to have forgotten anything. There’s Barbara, 85, who I swore I’d never talk to again because she’s such a narcissist, but of course I continue keeping in touch because,…

Hi, hey, hello…! Can I tell you something? I’ve recently been exploring how best to incorporate dialogue into my stories. Hearing myself use dialogue sometimes makes me feel like I’m listening to my voice on an answering machine. It just doesn’t sound right in my head. In effort to feel more confident with my incorporation…

I find myself in a place where moving forward in life is very important. For years now I have wondered what type of legacy I will leave behind for our future generations. Not so much monetary but historically as to our name and our life choices. In the last several years, I had some medical issues…

Idries Shah in his book The Sufis says, ‘Superficially, most of the Nasrudin stories may be used as jokes . . . But it is inherent in the Nasrudin story that it may be understood at any one of many depths. There is the joke, the moral- and the little extra which brings the consciousness of the…

I came into this class suspicious of the affirmative coaching process. This is not to say I looked down upon it or thought negatively of it. It is, simply, far from how I usually think of providing or receiving feedback and wanted to see it in action. I can say that the affirmative coaching process…

In the early days of the Storytelling Institute, I was practicing a story with my colleague, Ricardo Provencio. When the story was over, Pro said, “Well, you have at least three endings to that story. I suggest you pick the one that doesn’t tell people how to feel.” He made me laugh, but he was…

“Do remember a time when you were lost?” That was a storytelling prompt that stood out for me. It triggered a memory. Of Brooklyn summer vacations at my Grandparent’s house. Of being three – four years old. Taking a trip to Coney Island. A big white beach umbrella with red roses that saved me from…

When I was taking the STO297 class, Creating and Telling Personal Stories, I wrote a blog post about how I lost a lake. This is my follow-up, because the lake has been found! I wanted to tell a story about my paternal grandmother’s summer lake house in Connecticut. I very clearly remembered the body of…

When I signed up for the Sacred Stories class, I didn’t really know what I was in for. Would we be examining sacred texts from the major world religions and telling stories featured in those texts? Like examining living mythology? I had a lot of trepidation about what might be expected. Religion can be such…

If you have experienced Storytelling yourself, you probably have heard the phrase, "The story chooses you." I had heard it many times and it did make sense to me. You're going to tell a story that calls to you, that interests you, that you connect with. This part I understood very well. It wasn't until…

As we learn about tricksters I keep coming back to the memory of a talk I heard by theology professor Miguel De La Torre. Rather than tricksters as villains who appear in cautionary tales, Dr. De La Torre draws inspiration from the tricksters in Latino folklore. In the face of overwhelming poverty and injustice across the…