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A Kid Just Like Me by Mikky Cunningham
When I was growing up, I heard it all the time: I hope you have a kid just like you. It was always spit like a curse meant to come back and get you when you least expected it, no matter how prepared you were to keep it from coming true. Because what a terrible…
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I Went to a Storytelling Class and Accidentally Became a Better Comedian by Ernesto Ortiz
I’ve been doing stand up comedy for 13 years. About three years into my comedy journey, I discovered storytelling completely by accident. I found the class while flipping through a course catalogue while picking up a friend from Phoenix College. A class called The Art of Storytelling caught my eye. It sounded fun, so I…
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Beyond the comfort zone: The disruptive power of storytelling by Rigo Tavena
“Great stories happen to those who can tell them.” — Ira Glass As I mentioned in a previous blog post, public speaking was never really my bag of chips. Standing in front of people trying not to sound like I forgot how English works? Yeah… not exactly a dream of mine. But this season of…
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Unlocked, Loaded, and Told with Purpose: How storytelling helped me reclaim memory, voice, identity, and safety by Angelina Miller
I took my first storytelling class in Spring 2025 because I needed a Humanities credit. I did not walk into that class expecting it to change how I saw myself. I was just trying to keep moving forward, finish school, and finally earn a degree. When I first came to South Mountain, I chose Engineering…
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Your Story May Be Someone Else’s Voice By Kalemma Austin
Well, mini background about me is that I love to talk but get so nervous and anxious when speaking in front of people I don’t know! When I signed up for Traditional Storytelling Around the World, I thought to myself “I am absolutely nuts!!!” Me being so scared to speak to people but taking a…
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Words – Not a story by Kate Smith
Over the last eighteen months, I’ve been a student at South Mountain Community College. I’ve taken Storytelling classes. I thought I’d show up, tell stories, listen to other people tell, give and receive feedback, and get better at storytelling. We also had to do homework: reading, writing, and interacting with our classmates. It’s a college…
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Storytelling in a Business Setting by Rita Kelly
When I started storytelling, it was an opportunity to learn speaking skills in order to publicly share some of the short stories and allegories I had written. My logical mind thought I would keep my creative pursuits separate from my dull day job as an accountant. I became so immersed after my first storytelling class,…
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You’re Perfect – Now Work It! by Liz Warren
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,…
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Tell Me Something Good by Elonda Faith Matthews
There are some titles that don’t just name a piece—they invite you into it. Tell me something good is one of those titles. It isn’t a demand. It’s a reaching. A soft request that assumes there is still good to be found, still something worth telling, still a note worth playing. And maybe that’s where…
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The Journey of the Hero, the Heroine, and the Path In Between by Coral Evans
For years, the Hero’s Journey has been presented as a universal roadmap for growth: a call to adventure, trials to overcome, and a triumphant return. Only recently have many of us begun to ask whose experiences that roadmap truly reflects. When we look moreclosely, we see that the Heroine’s Journey often follows a different rhythm—one…
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One Degree from the Teller by Carly Davis
Intending to incorporate a handful of Spanish phrases while learning a new set of traditional stories, I picked up “Watch Out for Clever Women” by Joe Hayes. Hayes is an early adopter of bilingual storytelling and his collected works are often alternating pages of English and Spanish. It becomes easy to find matches for phrases…
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Chosen Revelations by Cic Cicolello
Who knew 24 fellows could stir a curiosity so strong that I want to have a cup of joe or a mocktail/cocktail with each of them to get to know them better? Through our “personal story” assignment, I’ve learned that one fellow and a police officer watched his vehicle that was stuck on railroad tracks…