This is when you ask for help

I just made a cup of coffee without the cup. A great brown countertop and a smug looking Keurig machine didn’t photograph well so you’ll have to take my word for it. There’s no use weeping over spilled caffeine - I tossed some towels over it, firmly placed a cup beneath the spout, and asked the coffee gods to give me one more hit. Instead of collapsing into exhausted tears, I’m resorting to prayer.

Note that this coffee incident happened at noon during my first of two solid work days this week. There is no time to get on my knees or pull out a meditation cushion. All I can do is sit at the keyboard and say the prayer that a red-haired Celtic Mary Magdalen named Maeve has given us:

Help, I prayed, help.

(Help, help is one of the best prayers I know; you just have to be prepared for some bizarre responses.)

Another line from this fabulous Maeve creature: “A story is true if it’s well told.” That means that this character in Elizabeth’s Cunningham’s brilliantly told novels are a kind of truth we can tuck into our hearts and swirl into our coffee to get us through.

Ask for help and, somehow, the universe will send you what you need.

When I prayed and typed and clicked and sipped, I wasn’t exactly sure what sort of help I was asking for.

House cleaning. Toddler sleep training. Webinar advertising.

I’m willing to take help in any form it comes, really. Since you probably can’t come over to clean under the coffee pot and my kid won’t let anyone near her but me at 4 AM, I’ll ask you for help with the last one.

I’d be honored if you would share the news about Connect with Readers & Clients: Discover the Story Triangle webinar I am teaching on Tuesday, April 5 at 1 PM ET.

Will you please come too?

Save my seat!

Shared Passions and Outlandish Secrets

It’s rainy, cold, and Celtic as hell out there on this March afternoon in New York. If I ever mention the weather in my writing, you know it is exactly this kind of day. The heavy fog is the perfect screen for my imagination to play out its most fabulous, fantastical visions. This almost makes up for the loneliness, nostalgia, and “what would life be life if only I had…” thinking that soaks through me. I have a great library of memories and stories to wander through as I stare into the mist, tea cup clutched to my heart. But Outlander has been romancing the collective imagination lately, so it’s easiest for my daydreams to gallop off to join Claire and Jamie in the Highlands.

The Frasers belong to anyone willing to pay for premium cable now, so it’s no longer a private reverie. Back when I first discovered Diana Gabaldon’s first novel at 15, it felt like an unknown otherworld. Occasionally the books would find their way into conversation and it would be like finding a member of the underground “Je suis prest” sorority, but generally the series felt like a guilty pleasure you couldn’t really discuss in mixed company.

Now, I’ve gone and given copies to my mother-in-law and my stepmom. My husband is working his way through book 2 and I fully expect my dad to give it a try soon. The television gods have ushered these stories off the pages where we could only imagine the look in Jamie Fraser’s slanted green eyes. Outlander makes the cover of Entertainment Weekly and their whole world has emerged into the culture with such confidence and acclaim that I almost forget it contains a dozen scenes I’d rather die than discuss at a holiday dinner.

And yet, I find these are still secret stories. I can only write about the external phenomenon of sharing the books and watching the show, not the thoughts that swirl around me on a quiet gray day halfway around the world from Craigh na Dun. These visions are still mine, intimate as a reader alone with a book or a couple whispering together in the night.

Claire and Jamie belong to everyone now, but in the most important ways, they will always belong to me alone. If you knew and loved them once upon a time, they’ll always belong to you too.

Writing Prompt: The Most Dangerous Thing

As we prepared for the Easter bunny yesterday, I decided to try blowing the good stuff out of a few eggs (mostly because I cracked half of the hard boiled batch). My daughter looked at me with a mix of horror and hilarity. She declared that what I was doing was "the most dangerous thing I have ever seen!" Clearly, she lives a sheltered life (and I feel pretty proud of that fact), but what about you? What is the most dangerous thing you have ever seen or tried?

Based on this video, I hope you'll see that tongue in cheek answers are encouraged and perhaps even preferred. After all, Easter is a day that can use as much laughter and joy as possible.

Share your own "danger mom" or even "danger bunny" stories on the comments or tag me when you share them on social media.

The Shame of Shushed Story

The Shame of a Shushed Story, #365StrongStories by Marisa Goudy

“Oh honey, let’s not tell that story.” The words flowed easily from my lips but they were terribly hard to hear, hanging there in the air. I’d delivered them as kindly as I could in the voice of a woman with too many worries and too little sleep. All I wanted was the oasis of a quiet shower and to make it to my first cup of coffee before anyone pulled hair or screeched or required a bandaid.

But I know that silence and distrust and disconnection are born of distracted admonishments. This was a tiny sin that hinted at a deeper darkness.

My six year-old was remembering the beach house that the family rented for several summers. Her memories of eating a dozen clementines gave way to remembering when one older family member had fallen and knocked out a tooth.

I don’t like that memory. It was upsetting and it wasn’t pretty. I felt the pain and the worry of that Cape Cod morning. The guilt that I hadn't been very helpful at the time was (my excuse was morning sickness, but that seems paltry now). None of these thoughts were going to ease me into what was going to be another challenging day, so I shushed her and kept moving.

As I dive deep into what it means to tell stories, I'm learning just as much about how to receive and keep stories. Stories need to be held and reviewed when they bubble up. When they are stifled they become the monsters of shame and doubt and fear.

In trying to protect myself from unresolved hurts, I create new ones for my daughter. In trying to stifle the pure, spontaneous sharing of memories, I am creating new ghosts that are bound to be much more ghoulish the next time they come around.

I am a storyteller. I ask people to walk into the shadows with me so that we can appreciate the light. That means I also need to allow others to tell me their stories - even when I find them unsettling or inconvenient, even when I want to wish the memories away.

Learn how to tell your own stories with greater sensitivity and awareness. Join the free online class, The Story Triangle, on April 5.

Sign up now

The People Need Stories, Not To Do Lists

The difference between telling a strong story and writing “just another blog post”

There are million different ways to approach a topic. Say you wanted to write about how to talk with your partner about a struggles a creative entrepreneur.

You could use the good old “people love list posts” approach:

Seven ways you “should” approach the situation including “make a spreadsheet that he can understand!” and “make sure everyone is well-rested and ready to fully engage in the conversation.”

If your readers are worrying about how to get their partner to be more supportive of a business venture, they just might come away with a tip that helps them along.

But then there’s the storytelling approach:

It’s one a.m. when she gets to bed. She’s chilled from sitting at the computer for so long and feels so grateful when he entangles his sleep warmed limbs with hers. Visions of Facebook ads and YouTube clips swim before her eyes as she tries desperately to sleep. The kids will be up soon and there’s so much more work to do to get this new course launched.

He knows the pattern of her breath. He knows it doesn’t mean anything good. “Did you get everything done?” he asks. When she snorts, he asks, “Did you get at least one thing done? Are you upset?

“Yes. And yes.” She starts to cry because finishing up a LeadPage doesn’t feel like much when the to do list stretches across so many notebook pages.

She is not ok. She is tired and she is scared and she is so desperate for all of her work to pay off.

It would have been easy to mumble “it’s all good” and roll over to feed her fears into the lonely darkness. Instead, she chose to be honest. She chose to speak her truth and ask her husband for the kind of help that only he can give - to listen to her in the darkness and make the world feel safe again.

Though they’ll both be exhausted in the morning, there’s one less brick in the wall between them. There’s space for sunshine and support and connection to flow in their marriage, in her business, and in their bank account.

This is why storytelling works

Because it’s a story, the reader connects with you in a real way that builds trust. They get drawn in by the emotion. Even if they’re not looking for “quick and easy tips for having tough conversations with your spouse about your business,” people who understand the challenges of entrepreneurship will be drawn in.

Stories are like giant magnets for the brain -  people want to be invited into the room, into the conflict, and into the resolution. A story like this one shows them they’re not alone and exposes the other side of “grow your six figure online business” sales pitches.

How to make storytelling work for you, your audience, and your business

Is that my story above? Well, I can tell you that I am launching a new course and I’m pretty sleepy today…

That’s not the point of all this, though. My goal is to help you understand that stories are what connect you with your readers and with your potential clients.

We dive deep into why we need stories and list posts in the Connect With Your Readers & Clients: Discover the Story Triangle webinar. The recording will be available through Monday, April 11.

Get Instant Access

Traveling Distances by Guest Storyteller Peggy Acott

Why had she taken a train out of Minneapolis instead of making a direct flight to Seattle? It postponed the inevitable conversation with Bea, true, but made the anticipation of it a torment, stretching out like the endless lines of cattle fence rushing past her window; she had spent the last several hours (last several days, if she was to be truthful) running over various scripts and monologues in her head of how she was going to approach the topic with Bea. Hell, I can’t just walk into her house after all this time and say “Hi! Guess what? Daddy’s alive, but not for long, and he wants to see you.” She groaned audibly though no one heard, unless her moan got picked up by the wind and was now startling some poor prairie dog family minding their own business in their den. But Alice couldn’t deny that she had been happy to see him, terrified by his cancer prognosis. She, who avoided all things having to do with sickness and mortality; she, who could not summon up the courage to visit her mother (for she still thought of Adriane as her mother) until the week before she died; couldn’t bear to see her sick and failing. She knew Bea was furious with her, maybe even hated her. She felt an ugly, malignant sort of cowardice that she wouldn’t admit to anyone. Well, now she was getting paid back in spades.

Alice gazed out into the distance. The parched, dry ochre hills and plains were so opposite to the life she made in the lush Hawaiian Islands; this landscape seemed like the no-man’s land threshold separating her past and her present. Unbidden, her memories started to bubble up: Daddy teaching her about fireflies; dinners around the wooden kitchen table in the dining room or the picnic table in the back yard in summer; her mother reading to her and Bea at bedtime in the room they shared, the warm pool of light from the bedside lamp illuminating the page of Wind in the Willows and their mother’s concentrated expression.

Peggy Acott is a writer in many forms, who shamelessly takes advantage of the rainy weather in western Oregon to help maintain her (mostly) regular writing practice.

The Alchemy of Envy (Or, Why I'm In Love with Glennon)

Glennon Doyle Melton of Momastery began her blog because she needed a place to be honest. That journey into honesty has created an international community of humans who want more love and hope and a whole lot less fear and separation. Oh, and a best selling book and some epic charitable giving.

So, here’s my honest confession: I’ve envied Glennon too much to read all the words and feel all the feelings and experience all the virtual hugs that happen in her digital world.

Based on what I heard in Glennon's must-listen interview on Rob Bell’s podcast, I think she would lovingly escort me into therapy if she heard I envied all that she’s survived in this life. I get that. But envy is one of those stupid emotions that really just needs alchemy - the magical process of turning something base and blah into something shiny and brilliant.

I’m done with envy and it’s petty, perspective stealing black magic. I am done with missing out on all the good stuff because I am terrified I’ve already missed my own “good stuff” train. I’m through with assuming that Glennon’s world is already too full of passionate, big-hearted, creative beings. Who is served by my believe "no one needs little old me to like, comment, and share"?

I’m ready to SHOW UP.

That doesn’t just mean I’ll hang out on her Facebook page more often and pre-order the new book (though on both counts: check). It means that I will choose respect and admiration over envy and isolation. It means I will read and reach out to all the bloggers, authors, and thought leaders I adore and become an active participant in their worlds. 

Choosing participation over envy means I will free myself from the depressing chains of competition. It means I'll get over myself and my "I shoulda created something this vibrant and important already myself" crap.  

When I tell the universe - and all the wonderful, caring people in it - that I am open to play and explore and be a part of all the eye opening wisdom and heart cracking connection I can find, love wins. We all win.

On Being a Woman With Stuff To Do While Children Are Underfoot

It's spring break week here. At a playdate today, my friend asked how I was going to have the time to get out today's #365StrongStories installment. While we spoke at three this afternoon, I had absolutely no idea. I  just knew or would happen somehow. This yearlong writing project has forced me to get even more vigilant about carving out for "me time." But trying to make time to work and create isn't a new problem - it's as old as the concept of women with stuff to do even with kids underfoot.

This story is excepted from last year's post on the trials and tribulations of meeting writing deadlines even during spring break:

My stepmom kindly recommended I take off my coat and get some work done while she took the kids for a walk.

Clearly I was exuding deadline stress, and I risked infecting everyone around me.

How could I be surprised that I couldn’t get clear on my writing and I felt choked with “bad mom” guilt? I wasn’t asking for the dedicated creative time I needed and so I was spreading myself too thin as I tried (and failed) to dot it all. 

I felt like a fraud, offering advice from and “I’ve got this” blogging pulpit when I was actually just being a terrible, distracted house guest with a couple of needy dependents.

Gratefully, I took that gift of thirty minutes free of mom responsibilities to check back in with my real message, my lived experience, my own imbalance.

I think I found a story worth telling and I drafted a new container to tell it. And then I discovered the space to walk to the beach with my girls – twice.

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“But how can it be a good story if it’s so sad?”

“But how can it be a good story if it’s so sad?” It was hard to make out the words because she was burying her face in my belly, but I understood exactly what she meant.

It seems impossible that we could love something that awoke our darkest fears and left us in a weeping puddle. It seems like madness that we would subject our children to such pain. But, like countless parents since the beginning of humanity, I’d merrily offered up some entertainment that would terrify as much as it delighted.

Within thirty seconds I figured out the basic plot of The Song of the Sea, the fantastical animated Irish film about the silkies - those seals who came to shore and became human women for a time. This is another mystery of story - why would we devote so much time and lavish so much emotion on something so predictable?

Well, I could predict that the pregnant mother singing so sweetly to her young son wasn’t going to make it into scene two. What I couldn’t predict was that wondrous journey and the magical images that would pull us along for the next hour and more.

These tales of otherworldly parents and children on a quest for happiness in the real world pretty much always end up the same. When I kept reassuring my six year-old that it was all going to end well I was pretty sure I was telling enough of the truth. After all, everyone was smiling in a sweet family tableau at the end. But my daughter couldn’t see all that through her tears.

While the credits rolled I reminded her of how much she’d loved the rest of the movie. I told her to think of how the children were so happy with their daddy even if their mama was off with the other fairyfolk in the sea. Most challenging of all, I tried to make her understand that the best stories are those that open our hearts to experience something powerful and meaningful. Considering that now, two days after that initial viewing, she wants to see it again, I can only assume she heard me. More likely, it’s just a testament to our devotion to stories that transform our everyday view of the world and make us feel.

Writing prompt: Defend what you hold sacred

I came across this cartoon in The New Yorker. Though I don't have much experience with reflexology, I think there's something to the acupuncture points that correspond to the overall health of the body. I felt the usual "there they go, judging the healers, the ancient wisdom keepers, and the 'airy fairy' contingent" and just kept reading the Annie Proulx short story that had my interest.

This is something I'm used to. And I bet you are too. If you're a vaguely interesting human you hold opinions that will be ridiculed by the mainstream press, the intelligentsia, macho culture, you name it.

Today, I invite you to write into a time you had to defend something you hold sacred. Perhaps it's a story about a time you didn't speak up and you still regret it. 

Tell me about the writing process in the comments, share your story and tag me, or submit you quick piece for publication in a future #365StrongStories guest storyteller post.

What to do when content you loved writing doesn't get read

Even though every creative entrepreneur and every thought leader looking to make a difference has been there, it still hurts. It's hard when content that you poured your heart into does not connect. This morning after St. Patrick's Day, I woke up with a different kind of hangover than might be considered the traditional type you often experience "the morning after the night before." I had something of a "creativity hangover" because I was disappointed the content I had loving crafted in honor of one of my favorite days of the year didn't get read.

Today's #365StrongStories post is a video that explores that tension between the need to create from your core and the need to connect with an audience.

When you take the risk of exploring your passion and focus on telling the story that is important to you, you are almost guaranteed to take your eye off the marketing ball (at least for a little while). You have to do that from time to time if you want to grow new, provocative ideas that will make into someone worth listening to.

Here's to understanding that not everything you write or produce is going to have the luck o' the Irish - even when you post it on March 17! Here's to valuing the comments more than the numbers of retweets. Here's to recognizing that this happens to all of us from time to time.

Created something that you loved that just didn't get seen? Post the link in the comments and I promise to visit and respond!

The Woman and Her Irishman by Guest Storyteller Brenna Layne

Over a century ago, the orphanage burned to the ground, and a chapter of my family's history went up in smoke. With the papers charred to ash, all anyone knew about Timothy Sullivan was what they could remember—that he had been allowed to keep his birth-father's name (an unusual practice at the time) and that he'd been left at the orphanage by a woman with long black hair. Every year when St. Patrick's Day rolls around, my family retells the stories of our ancestors. Timothy's begins in fire and mystery, but it's the woman I wonder about. The suggestion in the story has always been that she wasn't Caucasian, that some Irish immigrant had taken a Native wife or lover.

Last week, the internet exploded over the release of J. K. Rowling's new series of stories set in North America and heavily featuring Native American mythology viewed through a European lens. Many First Nations people decry Rowling's cultural appropriation, while Harry Potter fans spring to her defense.

I don't know what to think. I've been reading articles about cultural appropriation and trying to understand. There is so much rhetoric on all sides. What I do understand is that stories have power. They tell us who we are, shape the way we locate ourselves in this world, pit us against each other. They bring out the best and the worst in us.

So what does it mean that part of my story is missing? Sometimes I try to imagine all the nameless women who came before me, their faces and loves and lives lost to history. My head spins, and the hugeness of not-knowing threatens to overwhelm me. How do I understand myself if I don't know where I come from?

Stories are tricky, and trickiest of all is that there comes a time when we must begin to write them for ourselves. So I pick up the threads, the floating flakes of ash borne on a century-old updraft, and set out into the wide world to discover who I am.

Brenna Layne is a writer and mother in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where she chases words, kids, critters, and sunsets.

"I ask my Confidence for help”

On the way home from Girl Scouts last night my first grader and I had a chat about "the inner critic." Well, I thought it would be a good conversation topic because I was all jazzed up after chapter one of Tara Mohr's Playing Big. Tara wrote something about how it would change the world if girls knew how to change their relationship with that nagging voice of self-doubt before it constrained them. Our sunset drive inspired me: clearly this was the perfect time to transform the future.

Turns out, my six year old didn't really know what I was talking about. She didn't understand that there could be a voice in her head that said yucky things about what she could and couldn't do. Instead, she told me about how she and her Confidence worked together to do hard stuff like reading really long chapter books.

This Confidence creature sounds pretty amazing. 

I know I have my own redhead version who got me through those very same books and lots of really big challenges since then. Clearly the trick is making her my best friend just like a six year-old would.

My Confidence and I are busy at work on my new course, Tell Stories that Matter: Write Online Content that Your Readers Care About.

Guess what? One of the things I promise to help you do is “confidently and easily tell stories that connect.” Please click below to join the interest list to get all the details and the VIP perks.

Tell me more

Stories Hold Us Through Life’s Changes

Last week, my daughter and I lay together and wrote the last sentence of a sacred chapter in my mothering story. Without any sense of occasion, I nursed her to sleep for the very last time.

When she woke before dawn expecting to slip back into our routine, I was sad but resolved. Watching your baby get lost in the delirium of a being weaned against her will is its own unique kind of torture.

This must be doing irreparable harm, I worried. I was withholding mother love and sustenance and introducing her to a cruel world of deprivation and lack.

Less than a week later, I realize that I was in my own state of dramatic delirium. She did recover and she did it fast. Now, when my 25-month-old wakes from a nap she asks for a snuggle and a book. With a child’s gift of living in the present moment she has adjusted and found a new way to connect with me and with her world.

Yes, stories change lives, but, even more importantly, stories hold us when life changes

In this midst of this very personal transition, I have been busily crafting my new online course and outlining webinars and fussing over Facebook ads. I’ve been immersing myself in entrepreneurship. All this work is a worthy way to support the family, of course, but it’s also been a handy place to hide from grief.

Only today, when I sat outside with a cup of tea and my journal to draft this story, did the tears start to flow. Great, heaving sobs echoed off my neighbor’s house, but I didn’t care. The sorrow caught up with me as I realized my body would never be called to mother someone in the same way again.

My breasts have nourished and nurtured two children and, since we do not plan to have any more children, their work is done. I am mourning this ending, but I am also humbled and grateful. Because I paused to write this story, I was able to feel all the feelings and heal the wounds left by this rite of passage.

I can see that there’s no accident in the timing of all this.  The new beginning can be as exciting as the ending is sorrowful. Freed from having someone depend on me at such a visceral, physical level, I am able to reallocate that energy and serve the world in a different way. My mothering commitments are every bit as intense, but I know that energy has a way of shifting and amplifying in ways that stretch time.

Now that I’m no longer performing the magic act of making milk, I can help more people practice the alchemy of turning ideas and dreams into stories that matter.

In April I’m launching my first writing and storytelling course, Tell Stories that Matter: Create Online Content that Your Readers Care about. Please click below get on the interest list to get VIP perks and special pricing.

Learn more about the storytelling course

It's Hard to Write Your Way Through the Monday Blues

What if every weekend was a three day weekend? Sounds like an ideal life, right? From my experience, that isn't necessarily true.

Theoretically, Mondays are a mother-daughter day and I don't work except for during nap time. That never really serves anyone.

Today, I tried my best to write my way through the "I don't like Mondays" blues. I tried to write a story of how I just couldn't show up as a mom when I felt like I "should" be working. I ended up in the worst of both worlds, neither present nor productive.

Every story I tried to tell about the day came out in a tangle. I sounded like a whiny victim or a preachy blogger. After all, the easy solution would be to hire a sitter  for a few hours and just get to work! I'm going to get on that. Promise. In the meantime, here's the Facebook Live quickie for your #365StrongStories shot of video storytelling.

Invisible Design. Temporary Creations. Stories that Connect and Endure.

There are million reasons that an entrepreneur stays up too late. At least 99 of those are actually related to doing the real work that brings in business and enables you to serve more people and make the world a better place. And so, this weekend, my former Online Empowerment partner, Corinna Rake, who is still my website angel, stayed up entirely too late last night to work on my site. The night before, I had pushed myself well past bedtime in order to get her everything she needed to do her tech magic.

This morning, any observant website visitor would spot new sidebars with clearer email opt-in invitations and streamlined categories. Soon, you’ll copy about my approach to making connections and building your online presence through storytelling in a new text area on my homepage.

Thing is, no one is really going to notice.

This isn’t a “poor me” statement. It’s experience speaking. And it’s me taking a deep breath and assuring both Corinna and myself that all of our hard work was important even if no one seems to see it.

The need to be seen and recognized

Raised to make a difference in the world and to always be at the top of class, being invisible seems like utter failure. Working hard on something that no one is meant to notice seems like a bad joke come true.

I know this isn’t the only way to look at the world - it’s the limited perspective of an American perfectionist born in the last quarter of the 20th century. It’s the lament of the individual snowflake who can’t believe she might get lost in a great white sea of sameness.

If I weren’t so tired after all the website-related sleep deprivation, I might be able to call to mind an Eastern parable about the value of work that goes unrecognized or at least temper these statements as a woman who has grown past that competitive ethos of high school.

Right now, all I can do is picture the sand art scene from last season’s House of Cards. I’m feeling just as baffled as the type A White House residents who couldn’t imagine toiling so hard on something that would just get swept away.

But that’s a different story about a different kind of work.

The website work that we did is easy to see, though it’s invisible to most. The web is a volatile realm, but those coding changes were not necessarily transitory. Corinna’s redesigns will help support my message and my work for the next few years until some shift in design and accessibility trends means “that site looks so 2016” becomes an insult.

It’s OK that some good work is invisible.

It’s also OK to writer and create arts that wants to be seen.

After years helping to build websites and write copy that gets a point across and makes people act, I understand the value of work that fades into the background. I understand it, but I can never love it. That’s why I have dedicated myself to storytelling and mentoring other writers, not to churning out sales pages.

This April I am launching a new course called Tell Stories that Matter: Write Online Content that Your Readers Care About. We’re going to explore how to craft stories that connect - not just copy that converts.

This online course will launch in April and I would love to have you with me from the start. Please join the interest list to receiving VIP updates and special pricing. Learn more about the storytelling course

Tell Stories that Matter (Mompreneur Outtake)

Rehearsal for the new course promo video was hijacked by a two year-old.  In the spirit of authenticity and because these 44 seconds tell the universal story of what it means to be a mom entrepreneur, I'm posting it as today's #365StrongStories post.

Plus, I'm pretty sure I said it best in this version. The Tell Stories that Matter: Write Online Content that Your Readers Care About course is for the emerging thought leader who wants to connect to their own stories and to their creativity. It's for you if you want to connect to your readers and build your business by becoming a stronger storyteller. This online course will launch in April and I would love to have you with me from the start. Please join the interest list to receiving VIP updates and special pricing. Tell me more

The imbalance of passion. The recalibration of the scales.

Once upon a time, there was a woman, a woman who was also a writer and a business owner and a healer and a mother and wife. She had wandered in the hinterlands between her various identities trying to root into her most essential, creative self. It was a sweet journey, albeit a scattered one. Most nights she fell restlessly into bed, feeling she’d run a dozen races and sure that she hadn’t finished a single one of them.

But then, in the darkest time of the year, the time we hang with lights and soak with champagne, she heard a call. She was invited to step deliberately into the new year. It was time to bring all the threads together. It was time to embrace a truth she’d long known but often forgotten:

She is a storyteller.

And so, if you happen to have this woman in your digital circles, you have seen the floodgates open. Sixty stories and more have poured from her heart, sprung from her mind, and flowed through frantic fingers. She has dozens of beginnings, middles, and ends to show for herself in 2016.

This writer has never felt so creatively alive.

She is proud. She is weary. She is also afraid.

Though she began this project almost on a whim, she’s not having a casual affair with these #365StrongStories of hers. This project matters and it will endure, she swears it. But at what cost?

It’s time to reevaluate the big project

Ok, enough of the third person (a handy tool to hide behind when emotions threaten to drown out the narrative, but a way to hide nonetheless). I’m standing before you, my generous and supportive community, to say I won’t quit, but I will change.

The #365 project is vital to my mission - walking the talk and showing that it is possible to tell stories that connect with confidence and ease. And yet, flexibility and transformation are just as vital so I can survive and fulfill that mission.

And so, I am further redefining the parameters of this #365StrongStories project.

Not all stories require spell check and copyediting

In this media driven age, it’s obvious that stories do not need to come in written form. Think about it - storytelling thrived long, long humans could write and story will continue to be an engine of the human experience when we start communicating via telepathy.

I’m giving myself to break my stories out of their sentences and paragraphs (and the sizeable time commitment that comes with editing the written word). More than half of the entries in the #365StrongStories projects will continue to be good old stories that you can read with your eyes, but the rest will be video, image, and even art.

In doing this, I am giving myself some creative breathing room. Now, I am liberated to develop the stories and ideas that refuse to be bound by word limits and midnight deadlines. I can go deep and tell the bigger Story when I need to.

I am also being realistic about what it takes to develop a readership for all this stuff. Yes, it really is true that content marketing is 20% content and 80% marketing. I certainly do not have four hours a day to devote to promoting this content, especially when I have a writing coaching business to run.

Tell me what kind of stories fill you up and help you along

In my creative flurry, I think I have occasionally lost track of one of the fundamentals of story: connect with the reader and invite that reader to be the hero.

As I revise the shape of the #365StrongStories project, I am also reconnecting with what matters: you. Please help me do that.

• What kind of stories light you up?
• How do you feel about video storytelling?
• Would writing prompts inspire you to write your own stories (and even submit them to the project?)
• What can't I see about what's working and what isn't about this project that you, dear reader, can see clearly?

Leave  your thoughts and ideas in the comments or post them over on the Facebook page.

This project matters to me, and I know that it matters to many readers too. With your help, Strong Stories will fulfill its mission: to inspire a great circle of people to tell stories that matter.

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When Elder Becomes Child by Guest Storyteller Tania Pryputniewicz

Once my father played guitar in a trio. Once he carried me on his shoulders, paired rotors of elm leaves spiraling to land in my hair. He spun with his hands the playground carousel as I gripped silver rails, metronome wand of his body reappearing each pass where I left it. I fell asleep anchored to the rhythm of his voice reading me book after book from The Hobbit to The Song of Hiawatha to The Chronicles of Narnia.

Once he waved goodbye as I rode off to college on the back of a motorcycle. To the trill of Hermit Thrush, the day I wed, he walked me down a cotton-lined path strewn with rose petals. Once he came every Friday to care for my children when they were infants, then toddlers, just so I could write poems at the coffee shop until we moved 600 miles away along the coast.

 

The days have turned their pages to the part in the story where it is my turn to play guitar for him. My turn to read, record poems, send sound files, so that where eyes fail to see, his ears may hear the family voice he once midwifed as nightly he drifts dreamward in sleep. If I could, I would carry him on my shoulders so he might catch the falling stars. 

Tania Pryputniewicz, author of November Butterfly (Saddle Road Press, 2014), teaches Wheel of Archetypal Selves Tarot Writing classes and is using the Tarot cards to finish writing her second poetry manuscript about an Illinois commune she lived on as a child.

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On Mentorship, Evolution, and a Book We Were Destined to Write

Some stories become so well lived that forget that how you got there is a story worth telling. That is how I feel about my relationship with my mentor and teacher, Eleanora Amendolara. More than a decade ago a Lyme disease diagnosis brought me to a local healer Sue Fick’s table. Within two years I remembered that I wanted to be a healer too and I decided to join Sue at class. After all, I had become a Reiki master in college and I had long yearned for those superpowers to become real in my life.

That was when the Sacred Center was first woven into my life. Though I followed the signs and made the choice to show up, it all seemed meant.

And that’s the way it’s been as healing trainings evolved to become a Mystery School, as those stones that Eleanora uses became the sacred tools behind Chumpi Illumination. Because I was there at the heart of this organic transformation, I barely noticed that the work was sitting at the core of my life.

In the middle of this journey I gave birth to two babies. I clung to the couch fighting morning sickness, I dozed during my third trimester, I brought along infants to class. There were two growing reasons to say "I'll be back when the kids are older," but the decision to make it work seemed as predestined as all the rest.

Becoming Eleanora’s go-to writing and marketing person seemed natural. Writing a book together seemed like the logical extension of our work together. After all, she had evolved from being a teacher to being someone I knew would be one of the surest guides in my life.

Today, however, it’s time to pause and notice how far this work has come. Please take two minutes to watch this gorgeous trailer for our book, Chumpi Illumination: Gateways to Healing and Transformation.