A Celebration of Life Stories - Aussie Style

Events that encourage people to tell their stories have been building around the globe for at least twenty years. Individuals and groups have been doing this for much longer, such as indigenous and non-indigenous story recorders who have been recording Australian aboriginal dreamtime stories for many decades. It is now widely acknowledged that recording stories is essential to preserve the memory of past generations and to create meaning for displaced groups and individuals. Since the mid 1990s, digital storytelling has become the norm, combining oral histories with written, acted, danced, pictorial and other media.

But on a more personal level, telling stories about our lives provides a way of understanding ourself better, of celebrating our lives, and of tapping into our memories of meaningful things that have happened this.

A range of storytelling forums have been popping up around the world.

The virtual story space, Museum of the Person, which started in Brazil but now has a presence in the USA, Canada and Portugal celebrates an International Day of Telling Stories with a special theme on May 16 each year, in celebration of the birthday of Studs Terkel, who collected stories from everyday people and turned them into books. One of these is called Working, exploring the lives of everyday Americans. Their website is http://www.museudapessoa.net/ . Find out more about Studs Terkel and his projects, including Conversations with America, at http://www.studsterkel.org/.

World Storytelling Day- a global celebration of storytelling is another forum. It is celebrated every year on the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere; people get together and exchange stories in as many languages and at as many places as possible over 24 hours. The idea is to connect with and inspire one another through stories of celebration. This year (2010) the theme is Light and Shadow. http://www.freewebs.com/worldstorytellingday/

There are also individuals who call themselves storytellers.

Kevin Cordi lives in the USA and has told stories in over 35 US states, England, Japan, Singapore and Scotland. He claims to be the first ever "Academic Storyteller-in-Residence" for the year at The Ohio State University and believes that "together we make a difference with story", using stories to create cross-cultural understanding and harmony. He has written several books and is the founder of YES (Youth, Educators, and Storytellers) SIG with NSN. http://kevincordi.com/

I am keen to work towards a National Day of Storytelling in Australia as part of the Transformative Narrative Project, which has two central goals - to create an archive of stories to describe transformations that have already occurred in people's lives, and to use story to facilitate a transformation in the future. A good time for this would be the Birth of Spring - which in 2010 is on 23 September in the southern hemisphere.