Did you know that Microsoft now employs a chief storyteller? “Every brand has a story,” Gregg Morris likes to say, “Lots of ‘em too.” Morris is a story coach and marketing consultant who helps companies ferret out the stories that make a connection between their brand and their customers.
In its long evolution from campfire to new media, storytelling’s genetic tree has generated many limbs. One branch turned into the novel, another into Lady Gaga videos, and a third, prevalent in the South, stuck with Aunt Gladys on the back porch. Kaze and I trace our story roots back to Homer and the Western literary tradition, but we’re intrigued by this corporate storytelling thing, one of the newer offshoots.
Morris’s blog – What’s Your Story? – is a cornucopia of storytelling in all its glory and many forms. Our favorite section is Curated Stories, his roundup of current links with a heavy social media angle. But you’ll also find here intelligent posts on the narrative hook as it is used in UNC basketball coach Roy Williams’s autobiography, a breakdown of Tiger Woods’s ESPN apology, and an audio interview with master radio storyteller Bill Ratner. Dig deep and you’ll find under Story Resources the religious seed of it all – a summary of Stephen Crites’s classic 1971 essay “The Narrative Quality of Experience.”
Ted the Cat (1994-present) is a domestic shorthair blogger and vers libre poet. He also enjoys sleeping, eating, and lurking. Ted the Cat co-habits with Kaze,
also a blogger at 317am.net.
Thanks for the mention RadoirJ, putting me in the company of the great radio man Jean Shepherd, the true "master story teller" of 20th century radio, (I should also add Word Jazz master Ken Nordeen) and Golden Age of radio aficionados would add Orson Welles, Jack Benny, etc. The interesting thing to me about corporate America's marketing people swimming toward the light of story is: the recent upswing in popularity of live storytelling for nightclub audiences is due in great part to Ira Glass' "This American Life" on NPR and of course Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion, and then the NHL of stage storytelling: writer George Dawes Green's The Moth, filling bars, coffee houses & nightclubs in New York, Brooklyn, Chicao, and Los Angeles with story-hungry audiences for whom today's 4th generation stand-up comedy is not much more than recycled butt-jokes. A producer from The Moth told me when I asked how they survived as a non-profit, "We've been putting on shows long enough that marketing Veeps from Fortune 500 companies have started coming to us asking, 'Could you teach us our to tell OUR story?'" Nice work if you can get it.
Bill Ratner,
Los Angeles
Well said, Bill. Radio has always been a great spot for the human voice telling stories in the dark, and as you point out, radio and other forms of the oral tradition are going strong. Hope to do a post soon on Baltimore's Stoop Stories, a session on stage for mostly ordinary folks.
RasoirJ:
Went on Stoop Stories website http://www.stoopstorytelling.com/about They've really got it together. Looks like you can hear their stories instantly with a click of yer mouse. The story wave, she spread.
As a former radio person, I can but totally agree with you and Bill Ratner. His comment made me a wee bit melancholy and yearning for 'the good old days' (and especially my work).