A Chair Wrapped in Stories

February seemed like a good month to try (again) to organize my office, so I have been working away on the job. I’ll get it right someday. I have one of the chairs that sat on the sunporch of my parents’ last home – not the chair my father liked to sit in, but the [...]

The January mailing has gone out…

 …so now I just wait for your phone calls and emails!
Publicizing this enterprise is always such a shot in the dark. People  don’t quite know what to think of the biblical storytelling idea – an unsettling combination of two already slightly peculiar flavors, like the blue-cheese stuffed olives in the deli at Bloomingfoods.
Well, we’ll see [...]

Getting used to my face…

Nothing much lately is reminding me that I’m a storyteller – although my other responsibilities are showing no hesitation at all about claiming my time. So today I’m thinking about one of the hard things about being a performer: I’m not pretty. I ask myself, why would anybody want to look at me? I try [...]

A wonderful gift

Don and Margaret Jones joined us for Thanksgiving this year. I was going on and on about Tom Boomershine’s practice of carrying a Greek New Testament around with him – one he obviously has been using since he was in seminary, maybe thirty years or so? My situation is, I don’t want a NEW Greek [...]

Circling Around the Apocalypse

I promised myself that this month I would hunker down with the Little Apocalypse in Matthew but that hasn’t happend – instead, the Second Creation Story has stood up and demanded my attention and I have yielded to its demands. My assumption is that something in my head is smarter than I am. This has [...]

Marti Steussy’s Four Commandments of Biblical Storytelling

Found ‘em!
These are from a workshop on Biblical Storytelling Marti Steussy offered in April of 2007 through the Network of Biblical Storytellers.

The Four Commandments of Biblical Storytelling
1. Thou shalt not reduce the story to a lesson.
2. Thou shalt engage the story with all thy heart and soul and mind and strength.
3. . . . including [...]

Wrestling with Matthew

It’s overcast today but not raining (!) and the dog and I are thinking of taking a walk pretty soon.
On Saturday the 20th I told out at Waycross, the Episcopal conference center neat Bloomington, for a group from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Indianapolis. They were *wonderful* – responsive, interested, and full of ideas. I [...]

2007 so far – notes on this year’s storytelling…

October 2007
I told Paul and Silas in Jail at the 20th Annual Hoosier Storytelling Festival, on Saturday in the Biblical Storytelling tent. Cold, windy day & a small crowd in our tent at that time, but *I* had fun. For more information about the Hoosier Storytelling Network, go to www.storytellingarts.org
And I’ve been sorting [...]