Twitter storytelling

A newsletter from Michael Margolis last week showcased the @NotTildaSwinton twitter craze as an example that stories can be told on Twitter.

What came to mind as soon as I saw Twitter and storytelling together was an entirely different example.  That of @AngelaShelton's Twitter stories of sexual abuse from April 2010.

I'm surprised that I haven't blogged about this before, it was so powerful.

Stories have been told on Twitter in several ways.  I know I have bookmarks of @NeilHimself and other authors telling stories 140 characters at a time.  It's a new version of the serial - a story spaced out over a given period in bursts of just a tweet.

As part of her efforts to raise awareness of abuse and its impact on the lives of more around us than most would realize, Angela told 3 victim stories over a week: a teen who survived abuse by her father and attempted murder by his friend and testified against both, a man finally coming to terms with a childhood rape kept silent for years, and a young woman still trapped by a father who trafficked her.

The stories were incredibly powerful.  The community that sprang up around them was amazing - fellow survivors who identified with each piece shared, supporting each other through tough moments.  I made friends with people in this community who I'm still connected to today.

Here's a presentation done about 6 months after the stories were tweeted where Angela talks about some truly exciting connections made during the event:


As I told Michael, 140 characters can force you to strip away any preamble.

And the connections enabled by Twitter stories are just as strong as elsewhere.

(Two years later, I'm having problems finding the actual tweets - here's the speech that kicked it off at #140Conf NYC)

Stories for GOOD - a hindsight review

...or, as I'm calling it, a post-mortem.

First off, thanks to all who voted for the Neighborhood Stories idea. I greatly appreciate your support and the feedback that I received in the comments.

Early in the contest, my idea was in the middle of the pack and it pretty much stayed there. I ended up at rank #41 of 82, with 24 votes. I'm not happy with the number of votes that I received, but I also have learned a lot and am using this as a learning experience and springboard to move forward and use other venues to get this project off of the ground.

So, what did I learn from the process?

1. Stick to the theme of the contest.  This was a local contest.  My idea starts local, but can scale, so I initially tried to sell it as a broad solution.  I think this diluted its power.  This was especially true for the project name - Mine was very generic and I think got lost in the mix amidst some creative names and others that had specific ties to places with stories of their own.
2. Make the initial content more compelling.  I chose video because I could get more of the story across in it, as I knew I was limited for what I could submit officially for the contest.  J pointed out after the fact that the video insert made the entry look like the posts he specifically ignores on Facebook.  The video did get 72 views - more than I got votes, but many people may not have wanted to take even a few minutes to get the initial point.  Late in the contest Jenny and I returned to an initial sketch idea that I had had, but that didn't get posted.
3. Amplify with supporting materials outside the contest bounds/ as the vote period progresses.  I did post a couple of posts here that I thought would supplement the contest entry materials, but I think I could have done more.  The video could have been on the blog, instead, and I could have pulled in some starter stories and testimonials to show community support.
4. Rally more local support early and often.  Midstream I reached out to some media contacts locally and a couple of organizations, but I didn't make a strong enough push.  I also need to think of a creative way to break something seeking support into the mainstream media, as that always seems to happen after the fact here. I could take more advantage of clubs, grassroots orgs, neighborhood merchants associations, and the neighborhoods themselves.
5. Go grassroots for a local effort.  Late in the game, Jenny and I came up with a gorilla idea that was really fun, but it didn't get fully implemented (ran out of time to post) and I think it could have gone further.  Flyers, stickers, being at big events.  All may have helped.

I'm not done with the idea.  I still would like to start local and then scale it for other locations and scenarios.  I have new ideas on ways to spread and share the stories after they are gathered.  And to get some initial stories out there to kick off the gathering effort and grow interest in the launch event.  This still can be very cool.

Thank you for helping me to learn, for the supportive comments, and for the votes that did come.

Watch for Round 2 in the ROC - before the end of summer.

Using location to mark a story

My husband, J, is currently reading on storytelling as he works on his Industrial Design thesis. The other day, he told me of an essay on Apache storytelling.

There's a certain type of Apache story that deals with morality lessons. Each of these stories starts and ends with a place name - so envision the story opening and closing with "This happened at White Pine Ridge". The places in the stories are from nearby, ones that the audience - and the intended recipient of the lesson - know well.

By marking the story with a place, it is locked in memory. The story and the place become intertwined, so that whenever someone goes by the place, the story comes to mind.

I had not thought of this when first developing my story idea, at least not consciously, but tagging the stories to the neighborhoods they come from will do more than help people to understand they have common threads across different parts of the city. It will provide an identity for that place, a tie to it. People could get more vested in community efforts that cross neighborhood lines, and then perhaps more stories will be shared and more bonds formed, all categorized by a place.

When my brothers and I were younger, we moved several times. Since then, we've often used the house we were in as a reference point for placing a story in time. J and I also do that with our past apartments. Place as a means to mark story then isn't hugely new, but formalizing it might be, and using it to help people in the community connect could be a whole new adventure.

***Don't forget to VOTE for Neighborhood Stories in the Stories for GOOD contest so that I can bring these connections to Rochester!***

Neighborhood Stories

I promised more details on Focus #2, connecting people through story, so here it is:

GOOD magazine is running a grant contest called: Stories for GOOD (!) Here's the description:

Stories unite. Stories educate. Stories inspire. GOOD wants to know how you would use storytelling to unite your community and bring people together.

With 2 hours of submission time left, mine is one of 60 ideas vying for the $3,000 grant prize. You can check out my video and contest entry (and vote, if you so please ;) )here.

As I've said before - the truly awesome aspect of stories is their ability to make connections. I thought about what I could do with a grant to make connections here in Rochester - in a concept format that could potentially expand in scale.

It struck me that people from different parts of the city do not always have a way to connect (or see a need to) - that there are biases about people from Pittsford vs the ABCs, Browncroft or the 19th Ward that may keep people from truly hearing their stories and thus that may keep potential connections from forming.





Knowing that story can tear down these walls, I want to gather stories at the neighborhood level. Each neighborhood has plenty of stories of its own that are often trapped in the heads of the neighborhood association members - so I want to create an outlet at the neighborhood level, to paint a portrait of Swillburg or Charlotte...

Through the members of the neighborhood associations, I plan to reach out to people from each area willing to tell a story of their own. Ultimately, a web site may be constructed for submission of stories, for now it will be mainly in-person, perhaps via email.

These stories will be printed next to silhouette portraits of the tellers and displayed in a local studio setting, with an opening on the First Friday circuit of art events and running for a month. People can come and read the stories in a way that does not automatically reveal the identity or neighborhood of the teller. After the stories have a chance to sink in, the answer will be revealed. Tellers and audience will now have the common threads of story as a means to connect and overcome any neighborhood walls.

Along with the exhibit will also be a short run of soft-cover photo books.

The more I think on this, the more I like it. Largely focused on in-person and print narrative for the local scale and budget, I can see how it could grow across various media and cover much larger geographies - it could also focus on particular topics and themes. Working off of ideas spurred by Elif Shafak and Jeff Gomez, we can bring people together based on the common themes their stories share. It's a smaller world each and every day and if we don't do anything, the walls between us could pen us in. Let's knock them down using one of the oldest tools in our arsenal - story.

What do you think? Comment here or on my idea page - and vote if you think it's cool! - A

Little fluffy clouds...

At the tender age of 3, my brother, Sonny, would spend hours with Grammie Roelle, watching the clouds. Like examining inkblots, they would play a type of “I spy” in the sky – picking out familiar shapes in the puffy forms.

I can pinpoint this to when he was 3 because I was 5 and was hospitalized with a broken arm and he told me this is what they did while I was away.

I like to think that this had some influence on his current career as an artist, but that's his story to tell.

As a kid, I often wondered how other people thought. Was the dialogue in their brains like the one in mine? Did they even have such a dialogue? How did they take in, process, and decide what to do with all the sensory information around us? What shapes did they see in the clouds?



In my teenage years, this became a quasi-crisis (as, I suppose, many things do for teens). I was convinced that I was different and, in the search for the root of that difference, perspective was a key culprit. Everyone else just didn't understand the stories my brain was telling me.

My brother, Dan, is red-green color blind. They discovered this when he was in kindergarten or first grade – he did the color by numbers all wrong until he learned to read the names on the crayons. To him, the lawn is orange. Our Uncle actually sees in only shades of gray. I remember trying to play Trivial Pursuit with him and it just didn't work because the color coding meant nothing.

Knowing that Dan sees the grass as orange fascinates me. If he has this colorblindness, how does he know that it's orange that he's seeing in the grass? Wouldn't oranges look a different color to him? How does he create his frame of reference when his perspective is so shifted from “the norm”? Does a color shift change way you experience things? Does a purple strawberry taste the same?

Oliver Sacks did a study on an island of folk in the South Pacific, where almost everyone saw in shades of gray. In the book, he describes the artwork of some (Scandinavian, I think) people with the same condition. Paintings done in black, white, and various grays that have patterns and details those of us who see the whole spectrum of colors cannot distinguish. Only visible to those who perceive the world just as the artist does. Cool!

Shapes in the clouds and orange grass, with a bit of teen angst thrown in. This is the root of my fascination with perspective, which in turn is key to the importance of connections. It's only by connecting to others and hearing their stories that we can understand what the world is like for them – and by so doing understand a bit more of what is unique about our own point of view.

The human search for connections

Photo: Danny's birthday, which was also Easter (hence the ears).

When we were young, we moved rather frequently, or so it seemed to us at the time, when the majority of kids we knew lived in the same house from birth to graduation. The longest we stayed in one house, until junior high, was four years. The moves weren't dramatic for their distance, but a few were enough to put the three of us Roelle kids in a new school and new social situation.

From age 3 to 7, we lived in a suburban track neighborhood full of kids. We had easily unlocked the secret of the circle as a gathering point and made several close friends with whom we spent many an afternoon adventuring. There was a bully, a couple of annoying kids, a spoiled kid who just assumed everyone would like him - a whole society.

From there we moved to a small town about 45 minutes away. As it was early April, we had a few months left of the school year, but didn't really connect with anyone at school. My brothers and I formulated a plan. We would play primarily in the front yard, with occasional forays up and down the street, so that kids would see us and we could make friends.

It didn't work all that well. There were a couple of kids in the neighborhood. I became friends with a girl on the corner of the street. Sonny found someone to hang out with. But it wasn't the whole society of kids we had had at our last place.

We were there for just over a year. The following summer we moved to a farmhouse with a bunch of land on a relatively busy road for the country, just about 15 minutes from our last place – but at a new school.

Again, we spent the summer playing in the front yard, desperate for connections, for friends and playmates to “fall in our laps”. It had been so easy in the suburb. In the country, cars passed at 55mph and people had huge properties to walk and play in, they didn't come by.

I don't want to give any impression that we were harmed by the moves or that we were sad and lonely. Everything else aside, we had our cohort of 3 for the summer until school started. We fought like crazy and created our own adventures.

But we yearned for connections and weren't sure how to make them. That was missing. The companion crowd, the society of kids that we had experienced briefly, didn't emerge in these other places.

Today, when I think about the value of connections, I think about those summers in the front yard, trying to be noticed. It's the first major evidence I have of the importance of a tribe in my own life. And the start of a search for the tool to create connections - story.

Sea serpents haunt my daydreams

Source: http://grandnavigators.wordpress.com/aeldreth/flora-fauna/sea-serpents/

I recently made an "about me" video where I talk about how I put the pieces together and came to story and some of the things that get me really excited. In it, I make an analogy to American Gods, by Neil Gaiman.

In American Gods, incarnations of gods travel from their lands of origin to the US with immigrant believers. Once here, they struggle to maintain belief in this new land of opportunity, variety, and distraction and - in more recent years, in a time of emerging technology gods, like the Internet, TV, and Media.

Stories face a similar issue. I don't think that there's a risk that humans will ever stop telling stories - it's too much a part of how we function, of how our brains work, for that. Rather, the playing field has shifted from small local communities to an increasingly connected world across geographies, languages, and cultures. From oral retelling or the printed word to an ever increasing array of near instantaneous connectivity and multimedia wealth.

Story will have to adapt. The question isn't "if" so much as "how".

I have a print above my desk of a sea serpent by Daria. Its tangled and twirling length is made up of sections of scales in varying patterns and colors. Each of these, as I stare at it, is a story.

They're growing like catfish in Chernobyl's holding pond. (Catfish continue to grow until they die, which when undisturbed can be past the century mark. Chernobyl's catfish are now about 8 feet long.) Layer by layer, story by story, the serpent grows. I want to put a webcam near his lair (or his hunting ground) so that we can share and spread the wonder of his stories without disturbing his normal existence.

Storytelling that heals - digital style

Saturday, Jenny and I went to BarCamp Rochester. We were a bit wary. It was our first time going to a geek unconference and several of the presentation titles seemed way-over-our-heads-geeky. But we both wanted to share and to test ourselves and keep up our presentation skills. As we think about getting ourselves and our thinking out in front of people more often, this seemed like a good place to start.

I wanted to present something about story, but it took me a while to craft the exact angle I wanted to take. Working in healthcare market research, I had started to gather a bunch of articles and posts on storytelling in that space, so I decided to focus there.

The result is the prezi below. I talked more to the opening parts of the presentation, so I'm also posting a video. Note, however, that the video includes some Q&A and runs about 16 minutes. (OK, video upload being a pain, so I'll just update this post when I get it up)

It went well! Yes, I read from the screen more than I should, but I also didn't want to read from the laptop and some of the quotes were long. It's all a matter of chops. I like presenting in these environments, so I am bound and determined to chase more opportunities coming up. The Q&A was a good exchange and I think people enjoyed and learned from the prezo. Here are reactions in tweets.

What do you think? And what can we do to roll some of the ideas in here forward, to crank up the support for storytelling as a healing tool?

Object-oriented stories

The Reading Glove is designed to present a tactile storytelling experience. You go into a room that has a table covered with objects and put on a glove with an RFID sensor. Each object is tagged and will give you a bit of the story as you pick it up and pass the tag by the glove.



I find this fascinating as it integrates storytelling with tech in a novel way. Karen Tanenbaum talks in this interview about how the Reading Glove's current state is a scaled down version of her original idea of an entire "haunted" room that could tell a tale.


I had a couple initial reactions:

• Haunted room?  Coooolness.
• This reminds me a lot of exploring within many of the puzzle games that I enjoy. You go around the room - looking for a cursor change to indicate that this is an object that you can interact with. You can add things to inventory for later use, get backstory through reading notes and journals and looking at photos,and interact with buttons, bells, knobs etc, sometimes just for silly effects.
• Moving these type of interactions into the physical realm to tell a stand-alone story is pretty cool, but I'd like more. Some sort of visual interaction perhaps (the glass of a mirror or photo frame is actually a display that plays a bit of a visual story or has a visual narrator). Maybe a way to link stories in different locations into a larger tale - or to spread a story out over a city - a scavenger hunt object-oriented story - love it!
• I like the ability for a group of people to experience the story together, but I'd like if there was a private feed option (headphones or something) that could bring the storytelling to places that might not be rooms explicitly set aside for it - into public spaces.
• This could easily be adapted to make interactive displays in museums even more interesting and functional.

Reading RFID isn't super new.  A few years ago, companies got started selling codes that other companies could put on their products that could "record and share" the story of whatever it was.  The examples that I saw I remember being a bit "tired" - quick updates like "bought here on this date", etc.  "Jane gave this to Sue".  But the possibilities were there.

What the reading glove does is provide an interim step where people don't have to get creative on their own with a new technology to boot, they just need to experience it.  I think there could be some really cool things we could do in the object-oriented story space.  Hopefully we'll see some happen.

The power of stories

To brighten your week - here's the Oscar nominated short

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

One of five nominations for the 2012 Academy Awards’ Best Animated Short category, this film inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, “Morris Lessmore” is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor. Morris Lessmore is a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative powers of story.

(via invisibly)(via BookshelfPorn)

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

The evolution of myth

I just finished Book #2 A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong. In it, she walks through each of the stages of civilization and
discusses the myths of those eras. She's quite matter of fact, which on a subject like myth can be a bit disappointing, because it seems like the richness of the subject is lost in her translation, but she did outline an evolution of myth that I found quite interesting and wanted to share.

People have pretty much always spun myths. These weren't codified in writing, obviously, in the early days, but signs of them still remain. Traditions formed around the myths and children were taught their intricacies. These were life lessons - beliefs on how to deal with the existence we are faced with and as existence changed, so did the character of the myths, although they always dealt with answering the main questions about our life and death.

The earliest myths (based on paleolithic graves and observations among pygmie and Aboriginal tribes) were about transcendent experiences. The Sky God overlooked all and represented the ultimate transcendence. But transcendence is a hard thing to hang your understanding of the universe on. Myths cannot focus on the supernatural alone, but need some connection to humanity. They need to be put into practice in order to reveal their hidden truths. The Sky God eventually "disappeared". Some cultures have myths that details how he was removed from the picture. It would put some mobsters to shame.

Shortly after the Sky God exited, myths were formed that focused more concretely on the reality of death. Society was becoming agrarian and struggled to tie the cycle of the harvest to the passage of their lives. Strong, vengeful female goddesses emerged who set the cycle of life, death, and rebirth in motion.

From the farms, man moved to towns and cities. Myths in the era of urbanization were built to explain order's fight with chaos.

Finally, at the dawn of many of today's established religions, in the scientific era, man turned to logic before myth. To order, to experiment, to evidence. Without myth to give structure and meaning to life, society began to despair. Cruel acts of unspeakable violence emerged as the myths that taught compassion, the ability to identify with your fellow man, were pushed aside in favor of cold, hard facts.

So here we sit. Desperately seeking someone to pull us back to a life full of stories and myth and hope. In need of myths that can help us to understand the latest permutation of life on this planet. Who will take up that lead? Organized religion is mired in ritual that has lost its meaning. Perhaps the arts is a better place to look. And to each and every one of us, telling stories and making life a little better for all who listen.

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow beings, not simply those who belong to our ethnic, national, or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion,which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a 'resource'.

We need stories - go tell one.

My day job is all about data, and yet...

I believe in data driven decision-making. I believe that data can be the backbone to a story and is often a compelling aspect of changing corporate minds.

But data isn't everything. Data alone is a snore to those not equipped to or interested in swimming in it. Personally, if I'm thrown a bunch of data and forced to digest without the ability to look at the angles that I want to explore myself, I get quite upset and then bored.

In Lincoln on Leadership: Executive strategies for tough times by Donald T Phillips, he talks about Lincoln's proclivity for using story to bring his message home. Many important statements and answers had a story involved, often stories of simple folk on the frontier. Phillips includes a quote from Thomas J Peters and Nancy K Austin:

"It turns out that human beings reason largely by means of stories, not by mounds of data. Stories are memorable. ... They teach. ... If we are serious about ideals, values, motivation, commitment,we will pay attention to the role of stories and myths."

So it depends in part on what the objective of your communication is. Data still has a role in making reasoned decisions. But when seeking emotional buy-in, excitement, motivation, commitment to a cause or value, then the most powerful tool you can use is story.

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Leveling up in 2012

Challenged to think about my next level and how I plan to attack it, I focus on much of what I've already posted regarding my themes and challenges for the year. The next level for me will mean cutting down on piles of materials (physical and mental) by starting to USE them. Taking risks, making commitments, staying disciplined - all at levels that aren't default for little miss "you'll find me in the corner with a book".

On this journey, I expect some key guides to help (no commitment needed guys, just by being you). J. Jack & Lorraine. Jenny. Mom & Dad. Probably others.

Let the games begin. (Or crank, since we're a couple of weeks in already.)

What ties us together

There are different arguments about how and why we as humans feel a need to connect with others of our kind.

I've been reading and rereading an outline by Stowe Boyd about Social Cognition. He starts off the presentation talking about how language is universal, in a social environment. Lose a kid in the woods to be raised by wolves and he will have no language. Drop two kids on a desert island and they will create their own language.

Stowe then moves to how relationships/ conversations/ and connections unite us and have been proven to help advance adoption of new ideas, scholarly performance, happiness in the workplace, and so on.

Cognition is social, at the core, and much of what people do, or decide to do, is channeled and amplified through connection with others.

Social Cognition, as a discipline, studies how our brains work on relationships. It's a key element of understanding the struggles of the autistic, who make fewer social connections in their brains than the average Joe.

So we are wired to think socially. To draw from relationships to solve the problems that we encounter day to day.
We are also wired to socially build and evolve language.
Social transcends the development of both.
And I would argue that story transcends it all. We are compelled to share our experiences, to work through problems, morals, wonders, and discoveries together, via language and the way we encapsulate this and work things through together is story.

It's universal, fundamental, and shapes our lives at the core.

Stories and Paris

My husband and I went to Paris recently for a wonderful, though brief, vacation. After our arrival, and a nap to return us to humanity, we headed to Notre Dame. It would be, I thought, a good place to visit without having to think too much.

We approached from Ile de la Cite, crossing to Ile St Louis at the back of the cathedral. And the bells were ringing. My heart and soul filled with the sound, it echoed in the tingling of my fingertips and toes. The line to enter, we discovered, was quite long. Instead, we spent our time scrutinizing the exterior, the statue of Charlemange (talk about 'staches! but that's a different story), and the buildings & people visible in and around the square.

For me, Notre Dame is a great representation of one of the reasons I love Paris. Walking the square, eyeing the gargoyles, being there, I connect to the stories of ages past - of its creators, real and fictionalized accounts of life in days gone by. I feel a part of something big and long-lived. I feel closer to those who inhabit these stories, as well as those that I see around, and those who have been before.

It is energizing, a rush, and can become overwhelming.

It brings to mind a brief synopsis I read of Stowe Boyd's talk on Social Cognition from the 140 Characters conference in June. I have just found this link and plan to read it more and report back. I think stories are a key element of the connections he is talking about.

Stories are powerful tools that, as I've said before, help us to process our experiences and to pass our learnings and culture on to others, to create and explore identity and a whole slew of other things (running out of time for this post).

Adding another layer of contact - standing beneath the gargoyles or shaking a hero's hand - boosts the power of stories exponentially. It brings them home and puts us inside them.

I have to take this somewhere.

Punching holes in the walls that surround us

I recently watched a talk by novelist Elif Shafak on TEDGlobal 2010. She talked about her background growing up in a diplomatic life, about the expectation critics have that her books reflect Turkish issues, even when she's writing novels in English set in Boston.

She described the circles we build around ourselves, the walls we use to enclose our groups of friends who tend to live lives so similar to our own. How associating with others like ourselves can blind us to the way other people live, and the stories that they have from their own point-of-view.

One way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling. Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls and through those holes we can get a glimpse of the other and sometimes even like what we see.

This is one reason why my bookshelf, Google Reader, and Twitter friends are so diverse (at least I think so, hope so). I love seeing the world thru different eyes, getting a perspective on lives so different from my pretty sheltered Western NY existence. Being obsessed with stories and language as I am, it's not just about the subject material, but how the stories are told - the language people use, the tone and meter of their prose. For more on the benefits of following a diverse Twitter crowd, see Twitter Strangers on The Frontal Cortex.

Now, Shafak is adamant that her work is "JUST A STORY" and doesn't have any underlying meaning other than what the story intends to say - no hidden messages. I don't think that holds true across all stories.

Explore, open your eyes, punch holes in your walls - see what life can be like beyond the circle of those just like you. And let me know what you find.

Art in the Community

It's that time of year again. Humongo (formerly Plaid), the agency that is super-smart about everything social media and confectionery, is touring the US and visiting bunches of cool people on the way. My favorite stop so far was early on in the tour - the NuPenny store.

Image via boingboing

The store is an art installation in retail space by Randy Regier- a store of retro-looking, not quite real toys in shades of grey - that you can only see thru the windows.

I love this on 2 major points:

Unexpected Art. As most of you know, my brother, CW Roelle, is an artist. While in Baltimore, he'd often show his work in a cafe. He did not want people walking into his show with "expectations" or preconceived notions about "art". Instead, he wanted them to see the art in "living spaces", to be surprised by it, and therefore elicit perhaps a more honest response. NuPenny is much like this, as it could be just another store on the street, but there's something special and unique about it.

Peering into someone else's dreams. Regier talks about the project as a dream space. Seeking to give people the impression they're peering into someone else's dreams. Giving an almost tangible essence to the experience, akin to the physical reactions we can have to vivid dreams. By not letting people into the space, he's keeping the experience at arm's length. It doesn't become "too real" so the dream-like atmosphere is not broken. This is awesome. It brings TOM associations with the film Inception and with the intense dream-communications Shadow experiences in Gaiman's American Gods. It is a physical embodiment of the principles behind good stories. I'd love to hear stories from visitors about the experience...

Episodic stories

My favorite TV shows are enhanced by sharing with people who love them [almost] as much as I. With Mom over the phone, with friends at work. Heroes was that much better for the Tuesday Heroes review lunches at work. We shared our favorite details, theories, I shared the scoop on the graphic novel backstories - alas, no more :(.

This is also enhanced by getting the story in bits & bites. It gives you enough to talk about but not so much that details are forgotten in favor of the overall gist.

I'm noticing the importance of this as I participate in #1b1t (One Book, One Twitter) - a twitter-wide bookclub started by @Crowdsourcing. We are reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods - there's a reading schedule that the general conversation (using the hashtag #1b1t) follows. Chapter-level discussions allow those who are reading faster to still talk about details without spoiling for others (hashtags #1b1t_1c, _2c, etc).
Because of this setup, I find myself pausing after I finish each chapter to spend some time in the discussion for that chapter, before moving on.

I've been in a bookclub before, where we'd read a book over a month (or a couple of months) and discuss it when everyone had completed the whole book. I'm afraid I wasn't a great bookclub member. When I read a book straight through, I'm finding that what I get from it is mostly gist of plot. I focus on language and tone and style of storytelling, rather than absorbing details about characters, placenames, and whatnot. (I also tended to take a much more critical view than others - sorry I just don't find Mitch Albom's style compelling)

In an episodic construct, however, the Heroes fan comes to the fore. I'm tracking conversations, doing a bit of research on my own, keeping threads at hand for when the story weaves them back in. Part of this could be that it's my second time through the book, but I really think it's the way #1b1t is running. The book is striking home more.

And it follows me around, so that I look at things through the lens of the book's premise of the gods we bring with us from our countries of origin - and what happens when those beliefs and traditions are left by the wayside.

It's those bits & bobs - the bite size story consumption rather than a massive binge. Hmmmm - Twitter-style storytelling (like the stories told by @AngelaShelton a few weeks ago to showcase abuse) is a bit like this - although it needs a bit more structure to accommodate varied paces and thread conversations a bit more clearly. Potential, potential.

"Ecstatic truths" and everyday stories - some thoughts from 140

Returning from 140Conference, I got hit with a massive cold and slept two days then continued in misery several more. When that was over my parents moved. So now, here I am, finally able to share some of my thinking following the mega-meetup...

The night before the conference I shared the seed of an idea from Jonathan Harris - contrasting "accountant" and "ecstatic" truths and the type of stories that emerge. How the truly powerful and amazing stories are the ones full of emotion, the "ecstatic" stories that require something more than our day-to-day status updates. I headed into the sessions thinking about how to make the stories we share in social places more powerful, or how to transfer them to a place where the power could be put back in.

And then 140Conference happened and the wonderful people that took the stage had me hollering, wiping my eyes, laughing, and yes, making farm noises. The stories they told in the brief moments they took the stage ranged across a wide spectrum, but there was one huge point - Twitter and other networks & spaces provide a tool to share big emotions, too. To rally people to a cause. To save lives. To give voice to the voiceless. Pretty darn emotional.

I realized, too, that the day-to-day does not lack value. I skimmed an article recently on the similarity of tweets to diary entries from the 1800's (or earlier, I don't exactly recall), when ink, paper, and time were in short supply and people just conveyed quickly (in, oh, 140 characters or less) what they were up to. But imagine finding such a diary from an ancestor. It wouldn't be like reading American Gods for plot, but you'd find it fascinating to get the view on their life.
"Accountant's truths", the every day flow of life, have value, too.

There are so many stories we can tell and each day brings new ways to tell them. This is an awesome space!

The stories of objects

During each of the last couple of moves I've helped with, I've found areas of surprise & delight. Themes that keep popping up and bring a smile and giggle each time they do. Giggles that can be shared with the others in the house because the themes are so universal for that particular case. For dear Jenny, it was marveling at the sheer number & variety of her collections :).

At my parents, it was Dad's paystubs. For the past 20 years or so, he would collect his weekly paystub at the store, bring it home, and tuck it away somewhere "safe". We found them EVERYwhere, tucked into drawers, corners, shoeboxes... We took a paper-box of them out to a burn barrel in the backyard and fed them in bit by bit. And still found more.

I find it exciting that even such simple things can generate a story. Mom and I will be able to giggle about this months from now as we recall the move.

My parents move brought a lot more stories to light, especially because we had a little more time to pack than expected... The outfit I wore in kindergarten that our neighbors, the Goebbels had given me. Dad's Boy Scout uniform. Strange things from Danny's closet, like art projects none of us had ever seen before.

I think that's part of where I got my appreciation for story. When we were kids, we moved several times - the longest in one place was 4 years (until the house my parents just moved out of, where they had stayed for 20+). Mom asked this time why it was so much harder than when they had kids to herd and our stuff to deal with. I think the relatively frequent moves forced us to create a system. Each kid had a paper box of their important stuff. Each kid knew their room & stuff. There was a tomato box of pictures. As part of this system, we reviewed the contents of these boxes. We shared the stories of what was in them and why it was moving with us. All very informal, of course, and I probably see more of a pattern than my brothers might.

But I appreciate it, these stories of objects - important and trivial - in our lives. I'm adding them to the pile of story types that I want to explore further.

The wonder of stories

I left ... that afternoon, marveling at how different stories can be, how some stories can make us laugh, while others make us cry. I thought about bedtime stories, which send us off to sleep, and Zen stories, which wake us up with their strange paradoxical twists.

In his book, The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness, Joel ben Izzy explores the power and meaning of story. As a travelling storyteller who loses his voice, ben Izzy takes us along on his journey of discovery. A wonderful, quick read - interspersed with classic tales that have a direct relationship to his path.

It's the beauty of stories; whatever you give, you get back more - if you listen.

I am excited to listen and absorb the stories of those around me - and learn from them how to help others build their own.