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"I am very impressed by the practicality of [Egan's] introduction of the use of story-forms in curriculum for young children. His model is fascinating, and its various possibilities in a range of fields makes it worth a good look by many kinds of teachers."—Maxine Greene, Teachers College, Columbia

How are our memories, our narratives, and our intelligence interrelated? What can artificial intelligence and narratology say to each other? In this pathbreaking study by an expert on learning and computers, Roger C. Schank argues that artificial intelligence must be based on real human intelligence, which consists largely of applying old situations, and our narratives of them, to new situations in less than obvious ways.

In July 2012, the 8th Deaf History International (DHI) Conference featured 27 presentations from members of Deaf communities around the world who related their own autobiographies as well as the biographies of historical Deaf individuals. The presenters came from 12 different countries, but their stories traverse many other locales. Thus, they created a transnational phenomenon of widespread interest in the collection, documentation, and dissemination of Deaf history by and for members of the deaf community. Telling Deaf Lives: Agents of Change brings together the best of the DHI Conference offerings in this volume.

     Due to the dearth of formal research on deaf people, Deaf community historians drove the preservation of the stories in this collection. Their diversity is remarkable: Melissa Anderson and Breda Carty describe the Cosmopolitan Correspondence Club, a group of Deaf individuals who corresponded in the early 20th century from Australia to Western Europe to the United States; Ulla-Bell Thorin recounts first-hand growing up deaf in Sweden and her process in authoring six memoirs; Harry Lang reflects on writing biographies of numerous Deaf Americans in the arts and science; Akio Suemori profiles the first Deaf president of a Japanese school for the Deaf; Tatiana Davidenko writes about her Deaf family’s experience during the World War II siege of Leningrad; Theara Yim and Julie Chateauvert look at the evolution of ASL poetry by analyzing works of prominent ASL poets Clayton Valli, Peter Cook, and Kenny Lerner. These and the other contributions here enshrine Deaf people in collective memory by virtue of disseminating and preserving their stories.

Among the Kiowa, storytelling takes place under familiar circumstances. A small group of relatives and close friends gather. Tales are informative as well as entertaining. Joking and teasing are key components. Group participation is expected. And outsiders are seldom involved.

This book explores the traditional art of storytelling still practiced by Kiowas today as Gus Palmer shares conversations held with storytellers. Combining narrative, personal experience, and ethnography in an original and artful way, Palmer—an anthropologist raised in a traditional Kiowa family—shows not only that storytelling remains an integral part of Kiowa culture but also that narratives embedded in everyday conversation are the means by which Kiowa cultural beliefs and values are maintained.

Palmer's study features contemporary oral storytelling and other discourses, assembled over two and a half years of fieldwork, that demonstrate how Kiowa storytellers practice their art. Focusing on stories and their meaning within a narrative and ethnographic context, he draws on a range of material, including dream stories, stories about the coming of Táimê (the spirit of the Sun Dance) to the Kiowas, and stories of tricksters and tribal heroes. He shows how storytellers employ the narrative devices of actively participating in oral narratives, leaving stories wide open, or telling stories within stories. And he demonstrates how stories can reflect a wide range of sensibilities, from magical realism to gossip.

Firmly rooted in current linguistic anthropological thought, Telling Stories the Kiowa Way is a work of analysis and interpretation that helps us understand story within its larger cultural contexts. It combines the author's unique literary talent with his people's equally unique perspective on anthropological questions in a text that can be enjoyed on multiple levels by scholars and general readers alike.

Through performance and the spoken word, Yucatec Maya storytellers have maintained the vitality of their literary traditions for more than five hundred years. Telling and Being Told presents the figure of the storyteller as a symbol of indigenous cultural control in contemporary Yucatec Maya literatures. Analyzing the storyteller as the embodiment of indigenous knowledge in written and oral texts, this book highlights how Yucatec Maya literatures play a vital role in imaginings of Maya culture and its relationships with Mexican and global cultures.
 
Through performance, storytellers place the past in dynamic relationship with the present, each continually evolving as it is reevaluated and reinterpreted. Yet non-indigenous actors often manipulate the storyteller in their firsthand accounts of the indigenous world. Moreover, by limiting the field of literary study to written texts, Worley argues, critics frequently ignore an important component of Latin America’s history of conquest and colonization: The fact that Europeans consciously set out to destroy indigenous writing systems, making orality a key means of indigenous resistance and cultural continuity.
 
Given these historical factors, outsiders must approach Yucatec Maya and other indigenous literatures on their own terms rather than applying Western models. Although oral literature has been excluded from many literary studies, Worley persuasively demonstrates that it must be included in contemporary analyses of indigenous literatures as oral texts form a key component of contemporary indigenous literatures, and storytellers and storytelling remain vibrant cultural forces in both Yucatec communities and contemporary Yucatec writing.

Five men and a woman, all African Americans, huddle in the rattling darkness of a boxcar headed north, away from a brutal South, seeking freedom and opportunity. They are joined by a white intruder whose own quest puts them all in great danger. Like Chaucer's pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, each of these travelers has a story to tell, and these stories—of humor and humiliation, of prostitution and pride, of love and murder—unfold in the course of the journey. They reveal the lives and secrets of the tellers and give this transient community self-respect and solidarity as it hurtles toward arrest or worse.
 The Big Boxcar, written from a totally black perspective by a white author, bears witness to the structural racism of a social order that sets ordinary people of different colors against each other to the disadvantage of all. Alan Wald's introduction documents Maund's life of activism and his uncompromising commitment to social emancipation.
 

This volume offers the first theoretical and experiential translation of Napo Runa mythology in English. Michael A. Uzendoski and Edith Felicia Calapucha-Tapuy present and analyze lowland Quichua speakers in the Napo province of Ecuador through narratives, songs, curing chants, and other oral performances, so readers may come to understand and appreciate Quichua aesthetic expression. Guiding readers into Quichua ways of thinking and being--in which language itself is only a part of a communicative world that includes plants, animals, and the landscape--Uzendoski and Calapucha-Tapuy weave exacting translations into an interpretive argument with theoretical implications for understanding oral traditions, literacy, new technologies, and language. A companion websiteoffers photos, audio files, and videos of original performances illustrates the beauty and complexity of Amazonian Quichua poetic expressions.

“Even after dark, if you are quiet and attentive, you can hear a Killdeer far off. Sandbars, mud flats and grazed fields are where you find them. They are commonplace. So much so, that you might miss them if not for the unique sound they make as they fly overhead, or dart back and forth on the ground, as if wondering which way to go next. So it is with Michael Cotter’s stories. They are like a comfortable pair of slippers. Not flashy at all, but each time you put them on and walk in them, you are so glad you did. They appear so ordinary, but the way they wrap around your soul surprises you. And like slippers you thought you’d never buy, Michael’s stories surprise you. Even though they are not flashy, energetic or dramatic in ways we have come to expect in this digital age, they are grounded in universal truths, with timeless characters. They provide us with a sense of memory, wisdom and peace that celebrates the human spirit, and revels in the common man, woman, boy and girl that is in us all. When Michael tells his stories, it’s as if time stands still. We are reminded of who we really are….down deep….after the television is turned off, the radio is silenced, and we have put our egos on the shelf to rest a spell.” 
 
 --Rex Ellis, Director of Museum programs, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

The Radical Act of Community Storytelling is everything it claims in the title. It is the story of a radical step of faith taken by Penelope Starr to open her life by bringing community storytelling to her community. It is the story of voices that often go unheard having the opportunity to speak and be heard. And it is about community building from start to finish ... including everything any radical would need to start a community storytelling organization in any community.
—Adam Hostetter, Adult literacy educator, writer, and community storytelling producer

Making and experiencing stories, remembering and retelling them is something we all do. We tell stories over meals, at the water cooler, and to both friends and strangers. But how do stories work? What is it about telling and listening to stories that unites us? And, more importantly, how do we change them-and how do they change us?

In The Story Is True, author, filmmaker, and photographer Bruce Jackson explores the ways we use the stories that become a central part of our public and private lives. He examines, as no one before has, how stories narrate and bring meaning to our lives, by describing and explaining how stories are made and used. The perspectives shared in this engaging book come from the tellers, writers, filmmakers, listeners, and watchers who create and consume stories.

Jackson writes about his family and friends, acquaintances and experiences, focusing on more than a dozen personal stories. From oral histories, such as conversations the author had with poet Steven Spender, to public stories, such as what happened when Bob Dylan "went electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Jackson also investigates how "words can kill" showing how diction can be an administrator of death, as in Nazi extermination camps. And finally, he considers the way lies come to resemble truth, showing how the stories we tell, whether true or not, resemble truth to the teller.

Ultimately, The Story Is True is about the place of stories-fiction or real-and the impact they have on the lives of each one of us.

This is the seed of The Storytellers' Journey, Joseph Daniel Sobol's history of the past thirty years of American storytelling. In this compelling examination of the contemporary search for myth, Sobol explores the social and psychological roots of the storytelling revival and the ever-resurgent power of the storyteller.
 
Drawing on interviews with dozens of storytellers around the country, Sobol paints the revival as part of a larger process of cultural revitalization. He traces the growth of the preeminent revival organization, the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling (NAPPS), and details the individual passions, the organizational politics, and the economic, social, and mythic forces that have combined to transform a ragtag assemblage of enthusiasts into a national and international network of arts professionals.
 
A seemingly chance encounter between a restlessly ambitious high school teacher and a coonhunting tale on the car radio sets off a chain of inspirations that changes the face of a small southern town, touches lives across America, and revitalizes a homely but treasured art form.
 

     In the years between the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976—a period that was both the height of the apartheid system in South Africa and, in retrospect, the beginning of its end—Harold Scheub went to Africa to collect stories.
     With tape-recorder and camera in hand, Scheub registered the testaments of Swati, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu storytellers, farming people who lived in the remote reaches of rural South Africa. While young people fought in the streets of Soweto and South African writers made the world aware of apartheid’s evils, the rural storytellers resisted apartheid in their own way, using myth and metaphor to preserve their traditions and confront their oppressors. For more than 20 years, Scheub kept the promise he made to the storytellers to publish his translations of their stories only when freedom came to South Africa. The Tongue Is Fire  presents these voices of South African oral tradition—the historians, the poets, the epic-performers, the myth-makers—documenting their enduring faith in the power of the word to sustain tradition in the face of determined efforts to distort or eliminate it. These texts are a tribute to the storytellers who have always, in periods of crisis, exercised their art to inspire their own people.

There are many collections of African oral traditions, but few as carefully organized as The Uncoiling Python. Harold Scheub, one of the world’s leading scholars of African oral traditions and folklore, explores the ways in which oral traditions have served to combat and subvert colonial domination in South Africa. From the time colonial forces first came to southern Africa in 1487, oral and written traditions have been a bulwark against what became 350 years of colonial rule, characterized by the racist policies of apartheid. The Uncoiling Python: South African Storytellers and Resistance is the first in-depth study of oral tradition as a means of survival.

In open insurrections and other subversive activities Africans resisted the daily humiliations of colonial rule, but perhaps the most effective and least apparent expression of subversion was through indigenous storytelling and poetic traditions. Harold Scheub has collected the stories and poetry of the Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, and Ndebele peoples to present a fascinating analysis of how the apparently harmless tellers of tales and creators of poetry acted as front-line soldiers.

First runner-up for the 2019 John Leo and Dana Heller Award from the Popular Culture Association

Surprisingly, Hollywood is still clumsily grappling with its representation of sexual minorities, and LGBTQ filmmakers struggle to find a place in the mainstream movie industry. However, organizations outside the mainstream are making a difference, helping to produce and distribute authentic stories that are both by and for LGBTQ people. 

Turning the Page introduces readers to three nonprofit organizations that, in very different ways, have each positively transformed the queer media landscape. David R. Coon takes readers inside In the Life Media, whose groundbreaking documentaries on the LGBTQ experience aired for over twenty years on public television stations nationwide. Coon reveals the successes of POWER UP, a nonprofit production company dedicated to mentoring filmmakers who can turn queer stories into fully realized features and short films. Finally, he turns to Three Dollar Bill Cinema, an organization whose film festivals help queer media find an audience and whose filmmaking camps for LGBTQ youth are nurturing the next generation of queer cinema. 

Combining a close analysis of specific films and video programs with extensive interviews of industry professionals, Turning the Page demonstrates how queer storytelling in visual media has the potential to empower individuals, strengthen communities, and motivate social justice activism.