Story Power

Verbal Communication Through Telling Stories

“…learn how to bring your own stories to life on the page, on the stage, around a campfire, or a dinner table.” ―Mary Jo McConahay, award-winning journalist

Winner 2020 Indie Book Award for Non-Fiction Writing/Publishing
CIBA I&I (Instructional & Insightful) Non-Fiction Awards Finalist
#1 New Release in Writing Researching & Publishing Guides

The art of telling stories has been around as long as humans. And in today’s noisy, techy, automated world, storytelling is not only prevalent―it’s vital. Whether you're interested in enlivening verbal communication, building your business brand, making presentations, sharing family wisdom, or performing on stage, Story Power shows you how to make use of a good story.

Tell your story. Telling stories is the most effective verbal communication―if you know how to use it. Story Power provides techniques for creating and framing personal stories alongside effective tips for telling them in any setting. Plus, this book models stories with unique storytelling examples, exercises, and prompts, as well as storytelling techniques for delivery in a spontaneous, authentic style.

Learn from the verbal communication experts. Story Power is an engaging, lively guide to the art of telling stories from author and librarian Kate Farrell, a seasoned storyteller and founder of the Word Weaving Storytelling Project. In Story Power, more than twenty skillful contributors with a range of diverse voices share their secrets to creating, crafting, and telling tales.

In this book discover:

• How to share your own coming-of-age stories and family folklore
• The importance of a personal branding story and storytelling marketing
• Seven Steps to Storytelling, along with helpful tools, organizers, and media options

Booklovers who have read Storyworthy, The Storyteller's Secret, Long Story Short, or the classic How to Win Friends & Influence People, will find Story Power to be a great read.

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.