The Art of Storytelling: From Parents to Professionals

No wonder and what he was gonna do and and he would follow him out to his workshop and my great-grandfather My grandfather said he'd watch is that great-grandfather. He would take these poplar boards good wood Poplar is good lumber and he'd take that board and he'd set it down on his workbench and he would take out a plane and He would start planing that that poplar wood and and those shavings They would just curl up off of that piece of wood and my grandfather just sitting there on the ground he would watch as those shavings curled up and fell onto the floor in front of him and could I Could smell that wood it smelt so good He'd he'd take those curled up pieces and he would just stretch them out. He said they'd be long, you know 24 inches or longer and he'd stretch those those shavings out and he watched his father and as he watched he learned And my grandfather he took those young hands when he came of age and he started planing the boards himself And when the war broke out He took those hands to Guam and he put those hands inside the engines of bomber planes and when the war was over He came home and he took those hands and he wrapped them around his bride when he came home alive live from the war Those strong hands that shook his father's hand and the hand of preachers and and young couples in our town because he built houses and he built churches with his father and He always said now we don't build homes. We build houses. You can't build a home You have to make a home. It takes a heap of living in a house to make it home Those hands that that he washed and washed so that he could hold his baby girl that tiny head just nestled in the cup of his palm Those hands he washed again as as he held his second girl that had just nestled into those fingers Hands that held the rod and the reel and and the fish And the fork and the belly Hands that planed like his daddy had Hands that held a walking stick as he continued to exercise after triple bypass surgery Hands that held the walker held the bed frame Held the tiny foot of his great grandson that tiny foot It was just dwarfed in that big hand, but that skin it was smooth now A hand that held mine like he'd done all my life Like he still does even though those hands are far away now You can tell a lot about a person just by looking at their hands Now that's a story about my family and it's about something so small and every day a person's hands But, and this is key, that story takes us to something larger It even taps into universal themes about aging and love and and questions such as what does it mean to make a home? What happens to us when we die? In the Academy, you'll find storytelling studies across a wide variety of programs Because storytelling directly taps into so many different fields Because storytelling directly taps into so many different fields Communications and theater and performance studies, education And because of my background, I approach the classroom as a scholar artist Which means I do storytelling and I coach storytelling in a very practical way And as a scholar, I'm interested in understanding the very nature of story and storytelling And my students and I have found that by analyzing how storytelling works How we use stories in everyday life and why we tell stories By asking these how and why questions about those stories that have staying power We become better practitioners of storytelling as an art form Now, I'm a professional, but often I'm telling stories to my friends and neighbors And on the sofa with my little son My goal is to show you how professional storytelling techniques Can help you in telling your own stories day to day So at this point, I guess somebody would ask us to define our terms What's a story? What's a storyteller? Someone once posed a challenge to Ernest Hemingway His friends bet that he couldn't write a story in six words Here's what he wrote For sale Baby shoes Never worn So a story can be very small about a person's hands or or six