The stories we are willing to share with one another give our culture its values, beliefs, goals, and traditions, binding us together into a cohesive society, allowing us to work together with a common purpose. Storytelling lives at the heart of human experience—a compelling form of personal communication as ancient as language itself. Since the beginnings of humankind, we have shared through stories the events, beliefs, and values held dear by our families, communities, and cultures.

In this complex and diverse world there exists something that we all have in common and upon which the success of our entire civilization rests. It is the almost magical way in which we communicate and understand each other. Simply said, it is storytelling.

Storytelling is the human action whether verbal or visual that conveys feelings and thoughts; it is as fluid as water taking many shapes and forms from dance to sculpture.

Stories and storytelling lie at the heart of human experience. Since the beginnings of humankind, we have shared through stories the events, beliefs, and values that make us who we are and form our families, communities, and cultures. Some of these stories have been collected in myth and canonized in scripture. Others have become literary classics. Still, others have become tall-tales and humorous yarns. Looking inward, story patterns and characters intertwine with the hard-to perceive forces that shape our lives. Looking outward, story-threads join us to a larger cultural fabric. The most important stories may be those we share with family and friends, but all help preserve memory, explain our present, and imagine our future. Sewn across time, story-threads bind individuals to families and families to society, defining our collective values, beliefs, goals and traditions.

Storytelling, as used today, often refers to an interactive experience between a teller and a listener. In a purest sense, many mediums such as novels and television, while they contain stories, are not seen in the same light as "storytelling" which permits live storytellers the opportunity to morph and change their stories based on the reactions of storylisteners. Most of us recognize story in every facet of life. The great American writer and psychiatrist Robert Coles expresses that stories, whether written or heard are an encounter with metaphors that bear on everyday life. Those of us who are careful listeners come to see peoples lives as stories—that in speaking to one another we tell our stories, and that the stories we reach out and identify with can help us make choices, find direction, identify moral hazards, and understand our personal lives with more clarity.

Above all there is no one definition of story or storytelling. What is agreed upon, however, is that story is all around us, and it is simply our choice whom we choose as our storytellers.

...taken from "The Call of Story". • www.callofstory.org • (used by permission)