brer rabbit
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Magic by Sally Jo Bannow
Stories have always been magical to me. I remember my dad reading stories to me every night before bed. My dad specialized in telling long story-jokes to anyone who would listen. He held the listeners’ attention with fun details and voices, always ending with some corny punchline. And now, like him, I’ve spent my whole…
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This Is Not a Lie by Bridget Murphy
I come from a long line of Irish storytellers. We love nothing more than to while away an afternoon over coffee, tea (or beer) talking… about anything. We talk about politics, we talk about what made us mad that week, we talk about the family, we tease each other (relentlessly) over our idiosyncrasies, but our…
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Seeking Upstream by Matthew Knotts
In a recent blog post, Liz Warren described telling a story as providing stepping-stones across a river. Jack Maguire notes in The Power of Personal Storytelling, “An essential part… is having a clear sense of where you’re going when you tell a story – which ‘stones’ you need to reach, in what order, to go…
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Story vs. Speech by Liz Warren
In our Creating and Telling Personal Stories class last Thursday night, Shelly Siegel asked an important question: What’s the difference between a story and a speech? That stayed with me, and this is my attempt to concisely describe some of the differences between these two narrative forms. Oversimplified? Probably, but not untrue. Function: A story…
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Busted! by Kate Craer
“I’ll be here all week busting up stories”, said my colleague at a week-long event where she would lead a group of 10 professionals on a self-discovery journey. And she did. Anytime she heard someone talking about things they wanted to change but couldn’t, she’d interrupt with “busted!” and help them to see if there…
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The “Aha” Moment by Shelly Siegel
Storytelling can bring about the "aha moment". Not just for the listener, but for the teller as well. Oprah Winfrey defines an "aha moment" as, "A moment of sudden inspiration, insight, recognition or comprehension." I'm wagering that most who have heard someone tell a compelling personal story, have had some type of emotional response. Or…
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What Story is Sitting On You? by Melissa Soza Fees
I almost missed it. The power of personal stories to transform a person’s worldview as presented by Donald Davis in his TedTalk, “How the Story Transforms the Teller.” It’s in his closing remarks and I think the first time I listened to it my mind was still visiting one of the images he had created…
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Humble Magic: Being a Storyteller is More than Telling Stories by Liz Warren
“Everyone is a storyteller.” I’ve read or heard that sentence, stated as an emphatic and definitive truism, more times than I could ever count. It is not true. Everyone has stories, and sometimes they tell them, but not everyone is a storyteller. Here’s a parallel: Most people can cook, and some people can cook very…
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We Are History by Myranette Robinson
Lizzo says in her song, “Juice", "that I’m out here making news." The fact of the matter here is that all of us are. It was hard for me to believe that my little every day existence is going to be a part of history until I took Creating and Telling Fact-based and Historical Stories…
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A Trip to the Zoo, by Kaden Sheffield
To get into the Phoenix Zoo you must cross a bridge over a long lake. Pigeons walk along the bridge, strutting out of your way as you cross, while turtles bask on half-submerged logs many feet below. Whenever I used to visit the zoo, I would notice the pigeons and turtles, but only…
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Folktales: Skirting on the Edge of Reality by Diana Dinshaw
Recently I created a list of stories I had crafted and told and stories I would like to tell and roughly categorized these by type: personal stories, fact based stories, myths and legends, wisdom stories and folktales. I wasn’t surprised to see that the highest number of stories were listed under the personal stories category.…
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Finding New Life in One’s Root System: A discovery through the Crafting and Telling of Personal and Historical Stories by Diane Saunders
“That’s it!” I exclaimed as I was browsing through my pictures of a family trip to Yosemite last summer in celebration of my husband’s 60th birthday. My daughter had snapped this picture of me standing in front of this expansive root system of a Sequoia tree in the Mariposa Grove. Now the picture here illustrated…