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Reflections on Primary Sources
Arnie Pritchard © 2018 Last Veterans’ Day our church’s congregation was invited to bring in mementos of our own or family members‘ military service to display during coffee hour. I brought in several items, including the telegram which my father’s parents received when he was wounded in 1944. I was chatting with a fellow parishioner when […]
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Be Loud, Be Loud – But Not Too Loud
Simon Brooks © 2018 This autumn (September 2018) I watched a non-storytelling performer do his act. He had a portable system and was thrilled with it. However, out in the audience it was painful to hear. The sound was tinny, thin and not clear. “It only cost…” I was told by my friend. The equipment […]
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Food Stories
Contributed by Susi Shaeffer Ormond Beach, FL. One day I noticed the majority of the tales I was telling had something to do with food. Some are about a character with a prodigious appetite who devours everything in sight. Others feature an unlikely hero who uses cleverness to keep from being eaten by a […]
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The Birthing of the Bridgeport PechaKucha
by Nina Lesiga and Bill Derry © 2018 On May 9th, 2018, at the historic PT Barnum Museum, a new story village was born. It had 14 story sharers and a full house of audience listeners. There was laughter, surprise, delight and a few tears. Each story was exactly 400 seconds, a total of […]
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FALLING INTO THE NEST (the 2018 Sharing the Fire Conference)
©2018 Michele Carlo In 2003 I discovered a wonderful performing art form called storytelling at a Moth story slam. Back then the Moth wasn’t the international presence it is today, but a once-a-month gathering of friends and like-minded writer/performer folk at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café […]
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Stories On Purpose: Connection in a Time of Fragmentation
By Linda Schuyler Ford It started with Sandy Hook. I had friends with children at that school. Besides, the cluster of villages and small towns around Danbury, Connecticut – Bethel, Brookfield, New Fairfield, Newtown, Redding, Ridgefield-form the communities of Northern Fairfield County. One community. One tribe. What happened to one of us happened to all […]
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Telling My Story
© Meghann Perry, 2018 STF Presenter I step up to the podium, clutching my tattered papers in my shaking hands, sweating inside my suddenly too-tight shirt. I don’t know how to do this! But the crowd of hundreds falls to a perfect silence as I begin to speak and I can feel them – their […]
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Not Quite the Way I Pictured It
©2018 by Madelyn Folino, 2018 STF Presenter I had been searching for the lost photo for decades. It would settle a simple argument with my children, skeptics all, that once upon a time, I really had been known as the kid with the freckles. The picture had been snapped by a family friend in […]
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Beyond the Traditional Tale
“Once Upon a Time,” “Mukashi, Mukashi,” “It was or it was not,” “Si lo creo, o no,” are words that bring us to the other side of the Looking Glass. These beginnings open doors to realms that sharpen our imaginations and invite us in a more heightened way to suspend reality. To find the personal […]
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A Peek at Busking ~ Tips for Performance
© by Papa Joe Gaudet, 2018 STF Presenter There are a lot of storytelling venues that follow the general format of the street performance. Examples include larger festivals like First Nights and Old Home Days, with or without a stage. Or more intimate settings like block parties and family reunions. Generally speaking though, those venues […]
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