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Do You Know? Finding Family Stories by Carly Davis
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…
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My Grandmother’s Fruitcake Recipe by Matthew Knotts
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…
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Stories, Grandmothers, and Biscuits – or As Big as You Have Ever Been by Melissa Soza Fees
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…
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The Big List of Story Prompts by Liz Warren
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…
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Story Telling and Story Reading by Diana Dinshaw
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…
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Wear A Story Like an Interchangeable Necklace by Anna Blocher-Rubin
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…
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Transformation Comes from Within By Mindy Tarquini
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…
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Ramblings of a Teller of Tales: Lots of Questions, Not as Many Answers by Diana Dinshaw
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…
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The Threshold Guardian by Mindy Tarquini
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…
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The Need for Storytelling in an Increasingly Connected Yet Never More Disconnected World by Laura Mazzocchi
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…
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You Don’t Know Jack – but here’s why I think you should by Rebecca Love
You know Jack, right? Yeah, that guy with the beanstalk, magic harp, and golden egg-laying goose. But did you know there’s so much more to him? Jack has been keeping me company for the last few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. And I found out that his adventures are not limited to the beanstalk, but…
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Eating Stories by Dean Shapiro
At Passover, the Jewish festival of liberation, we EAT a story. It is the great narrative of our people: we were enslaved; now we are free. Families gather from all parts. Some clean and cook for days. Tables are set with finery (and often an extra chair or three) and Haggadot – the guidebooks that describe the…