I believe stories speak for themselves.
When performing on stage, I have felt the little tug in a new direction, as though the story I was telling knew best how it should be heard.
As a narrativist, I pay close attention to how stories guide our lives. We are meaning-making creatures who long for sense and structure. When we review our past, our decisions, and our dreams, we can trace the bright thread of our greater story. This is the scaffold of our self.
I bring both academic rigor and strong creative training to my practice.
I am not a therapist, but as a trained ritualist and teaching artist I have witnessed the profound impact story slanting can have.
Storytellers I work with dive into deep introspection to uncover new context and clarity embedded in difficult personal experiences. I work with you to help your story bloom in profound and maybe unexpected ways.
Writings
It’s just no good to describe the act of writing. You’ve probably been served one of those glossy photos of a person in starched white, smiling and tapping at computer keys or scribbling in a journal. A shapely mug of coffee is always cooling, un-drunk beside them. This isn’t an accurate image, of course. But it is dull watching a writer sit quietly alone. She tilts to rest her head in one palm. Her other hand scratches away at a notebook page. The clock ticks.
You want to hear instead what she is writing or learn the value of the words she’s putting down to paper. You want to know what it’s all about. It is hard to say why, but a lot of us keep writing despite moody isolation and occasionally hair pulling problems. There’s the fascination with world-building, the texture of the sounds, the thrill of solving that extra tricky problem.
I’ve covered the local beat at a newspaper, written academic papers I presented at conferences and published freelance travel writing, features and book reviews. Through it all, it’s the curiosity and creation that draw me on. Trying on new perspectives, seeing the world fresh and being utterly transported by story.
Storytelling
Once upon a time…
I watched a tall Hawaiian man capture the attention of a crowded room with the tale of Maui dragging his island up from the deepest blue of the ocean. The storyteller looked each of us in the face. He walked near and swung his arms up to demonstrate Maui’s great feat. I resonated with the full-body engagement, the simple narrative voice, and the face-to-face engagement.
I began hosting full-length show with casts of musicians and dancers and presenting small pop-up stories in neighborhood bars and cafes. I went off to get my graduate degree in Folklore in order to connect more rigorously with the ethics of story collection and research and learn collaborative ethnographic practices to de-centralize narrative authority.
In graduate school I helped women tell bold and heartbreaking stories about belief, bodies, aging, and fear. These heroic stories, which often bloomed from women’s marginalized experiences, were the seed of my Story Slant project. This passion to kindle strong stories from our secret places still guides my work.
