Story Power: Secrets to Creating, Crafting, and Telling Memorable Stories

“The best thing about sharing stories from your life is that you are the author. If only you could craft your adventures, anecdotes, and memories into a memorable art form―you can with the tips and ideas offered in Story Power! Kate Farrell holds your hand, offering guidance and encouraging you to develop your own stories and tell them anywhere and everywhere, from entertaining family and friends to storytelling performances. Story Power shows how crafting and telling stories is a winning combination.” ―Ruth Stotter, former director of the Dominican University Certificate-in-Storytelling program, Fulbright scholar, and recipient of the Lifetime Oracle Achievement Award from the National Association of Storytellers

“In this fascinating compendium Kate Farrell goes to the heart of one of the most ancient traditions on earth–storytelling; what is most important is that she brings the tradition up to date and brings us along with her. You will read its pages for the insightful words of published writers and examples of their storytelling, a joy in themselves, but you will also read it to learn how to bring your own stories to life on the page, on the stage, around a campfire, or a dinner table. Story Power is both a toolbox and a treasure chest. You will go back to it many times.” ―Mary Jo McConahay, award-winning journalist and author of The Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin America During World War II

“Stories define us, give us identity, and shape us into who we are and will become. Threads of our stories take us into the unknown caverns of the self where new gold may be found, the treasures of our truths that can set us free. In this storytelling guide, you will be inspired to consider the stories that have shaped you and those you can share: Having witnesses to our lives and an audience are important parts of creating wholeness. Story Power offers the inspiration and the clues about how to incorporate stories and storytelling into the fabric of your life.” ―Linda Joy Myers, founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers and author of Don’t Call Me Mother and Song of the Plains

Kate Farrell, MLS, is a graduate of the School of Library and Information Studies, UC Berkeley. She has been a language arts classroom teacher (pre-school and grades kindergarten through 12th), author, librarian, university lecturer, and storyteller in Northern California since 1966. She founded the Word Weaving Storytelling Project, in collaboration with the California State Department of Education funded by grants from Zellerbach Family Fund, San Francisco, 1979-1991, to train educators at all levels, and published numerous educational materials.

She is author of Word Weaving: A Storytelling Workbook, 1980; co-author of a monograph, Effects of Storytelling: An Ancient Art for Modern Classrooms, 1982; author of Word Weaving: A Teaching Sourcebook, 1984; producer and co-author of a training videotape, “Word Weaving: The Art of Storytelling,” 1983, distributed by the University of California, Berkeley; and author of the professional book, Storytelling: A Guide for Teachers, Scholastic, 1991. She is also senior author of Storytelling in Our Multicultural World, an oral language development program for early childhood education, published by Zaner-Bloser Educational Publishers, 1994.

Farrell has edited and appeared in numerous anthologies of personal narratives. She is author of the fabulist novella, Strange Beauty, and a collection of short stories, Woman Wonder Tales. http://katefarrell.net/

She currently offers storytelling workshops to writers in CWC branches and Mechanics Institute Library and the San Francisco Public Library and hosts a weekly storytelling blog: http://www.storytellingforeveryone.net/

Susan Wittig Albert is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Loving Eleanor (2016), about the intimate friendship of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok; and A Wilder Rose (2014), about Rose Wilder Lane and the writing of the Little House books. Her award-winning fiction also includes mysteries in the China Bayles series, the Darling Dahlias, the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter, and a series of Victorian-Edwardian mysteries she has written with her husband, Bill Albert, under the pseudonym of Robin Paige. She has written two memoirs: An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days and Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place, published by the University of Texas Press. Susan Albert is founder of the Story Circle Network, an international not-for-profit membership organization made up of thousands of women who want to document their lives and explore their personal stories through journaling, memoir, autobiography, personal essays, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and mixed-media, based in Austin, Texas. Susan Wittig Albert is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and lives in the rugged Texas Hill Country, in the small town of Bertram, just northwest of Austin.