Slow Fear, a Saturday Story

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Today's Saturday story comes from my listening to many friends who are talking about not wanting to be afraid right now, and it features a postcard from The Courage Connection, an organization headed by my friend Elizabeth McGreal Cook who helps people survive domestic abuse.

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What Storytelling Is (Not)

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Everybody is talking about "storytelling" lately... When you hear the word "storytelling" so much, it seems like anything and everything can be storytelling. But it's important to define it so you know what I'm talking about. As written previously, I define storytelling as a dynamic exchange between the tale, the teller, and the audience. Understanding what is not storytelling--according to the definition I am developing based on the tradition of storytelling in librarianship--may help to further illuminate what storytelling is. But perhaps I should start with a quick definition of what storytelling is. Stories are fascinating; lots of  people are deeply interested in story structure, but I focus most on storytelling. To understand the "telling" part, I see benefits to focusing on the dynamic of storytelling as a three-part interchange. We learn about listening from this model in ways that other models miss by focusing solely on the story.
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Finding Stories to Tell

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For the tenth year, nearly rounding out a decade, I am preparing to teach a graduate seminar in Storytelling. This course requires many kinds of skills, from public speaking to understanding audiences and much more, but the first skill that every student must acquire is the ability to find stories to tell. Specifically, for their first stories, each student must acquire the ability to find folktales. You could head to the local public library and browse the 398.2 section, or you could start online With the task of finding folktales at hand, my students find that there are fewer excellent online resources for finding folktales than you might think. Those linked here offer good starting points because they have reasonable information documenting origins either as source notes or as annotations or because they situate tales in relation to each other. Aaron Shepherd's Folktales  http://www.aaronshep.com/stories/folk.html D. L. Ashliman's Online Folktale Finder  http://www.pi
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Data Storytelling for Librarians and the Data Storytelling Toolkit

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 This fall, with Dr. Matt Turk and RA Xinhui Hu, we launched the Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians project ( https://imls.gov/grants/awarded/re-250094-ols-21 ) with a free webinar on 9/30 (recording publicly available at  https://mediaspace.illinois.edu/media/t/1_69ag1gj0 ) and 675 registrants!  The Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians (DSTL project website:  https://uiucdstl.wixsite.com/uiucdstl ) will connect real-world examples of data use with data stories (including narrative strategies and data visualizations) as adaptable templates for communicating and related online free resources for data exploration and visualization. The long-term vision is to cultivating data storytelling expertise as a signature expertise of our field, so that when communities have data storytelling needs, they are met at libraries and by librarians. As of 11/15/22, we have collected 11 data use scenarios, which we're now calling "common storytelling needs." The goal is to develop
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