Telling Stories from My Life
Here is a look into ways I've explored to tell stories about events in my life.
My life-storytelling journey has evolved over the years. From letters and poems to short stories and spoken word, here are some of my experiences and take-aways.
Looking back, I see how my life storytelling evolved over the years. I didn’t plan ahead for how my journey would unfold. But I did start close to home (with an audience of one – me!), and gradually reached out from there.
From a young age, I kept a diary of notes and thoughts. In my teens and early twenties, I wrote letters to friends and family about goings-on in my life. During my thirties, I shared poems reflecting on some experiences. In my forties, a radio broadcast of one of my childhood tales inspired me to make voice recordings for family members. This led me to write short stories about some of my adventures – big and small – and to speak aloud at a public storytelling event.
My main format is true-life short stories, with other storytelling formats along the way.
Letters
I grew up at a time when people wrote and mailed letters. Long-distance phone calls cost a lot, and the internet was yet to come.
I enjoyed writing letters! I wrote to my parents from summer camp, to my friends after our family moved away, and to my sister when she left for university. I still have some letters my parents wrote me, and my sister and I kept letters we exchanged.
An epic letter that comes to mind, is one I wrote to my sister when I was away at my first summer job at as a teenager. My task was to help look after a family’s children at their summer house. It became like a diary, as I didn’t mail it until the end of my month’s stay!
My sister kept it through the years, and returned it to me recently. The pages are stuffed in the envelope like a little nerf football. There are plenty of stories – and teenage rants! Reading it brings me back to a time in my room (with my work done for the day), when I would listen to songs on the radio like ‘Dreamweaver’ and ‘Seasons in the Sun’ and write (i.e. complain) to my sister.
Take-Away: If you have copies of any letters you wrote – or someone sent you – they’re bound to prompt memories and stories.
Poems
For a time, I lived in a cabin next to a wilderness park. I was often alone, while my husband traveled for work. It gave me time to reflect on things – including troubles – in my life, and about finding ways through.
I made a collection of poems in three chapbooks, printed at my local print shop. I shared them with family and friends.
Self-published poetry chapbooks in three acts like a movie: beginning (intro), middle (action), and end (resolution).
Then I took a poetry workshop to improve my craft. It turns out what I wrote were not like published-poet’s-poems, more like poems-for-the-people. It’s true, friends and family said they didn’t usually ‘get’ poetry but liked mine. Unfortunately, I stopped writing poetry after hearing the instructor’s criticism.
But you know what? My poems really touched some people’s lives. A woman read one of my poems to her husband on his deathbed, when at a loss for words of her own. A close friend confided later that one of my poems helped her from committing suicide. A neighbour asked me to read some aloud for her husband to hear. I was surprised to see her copy of the chapbook all ‘dog-eared’ with parts underlined in pencil. My poems later helped her grieve her husband’s passing.
So, am I a published poet? No. Am I glad I shared my poems anyway? You bet.
Take-Away: You never know who may be touched by even a simple poem, and why it’s worth sharing life stories.
Radio Broadcasts
There I was, stopped in traffic on a rainy evening, as I tried to catch a ferry back to my home on ‘the’ island. I had come to Vancouver, on Canada’s west coast, for several long days at a business conference. A busy consultant, I was feeling burnt out. Tail lights flashed red as my windshield wipers beat fast to clear the water. The rain pounded so hard on the roof that I had to turn up the radio to hear.
“Send us your snowball stories”, said the nationwide talk-show host.
What?
Suddenly, I remembered an episode from a childhood winter in Montreal. I hadn’t told anyone about it, not even – especially not – my mother.
Once home, I wrote my snowball story and sent it in. I was delighted to hear it read aloud on the radio, while the host chuckled in the background. I imagined a ripple of laughter across the country from coast-to-coast as it played in different time zones.
I'm glad I kept this printout, long after the email version is gone. I'll post the full story and audio clip at some point!
My mother – thousands of miles away – got a big kick out of it. She and a friend walked to the scene of the crime, which was just as I described.
Later that week, I went to a friend’s choir performance at a church. I was introduced to someone who recognized my name. I thought “oh no, I’ll have to talk business”. But he remembered hearing my snowball story! That made me smile.
When I heard requests for listener stories on other programs – and had an experience to ‘fit the bill’ – I enjoyed sharing more.
Take-Away: Sometimes it takes a prompt to bring up a story or memory, and help you choose which stories to share.
Voice Recordings
Telling my snowball story made me wish to share more childhood stories with my family.
I recorded different stories for each of my siblings and my mother. Each story told of an experience we had together. Most involved a predicament we faced, and are funny to look back on – although not always at the time!
Audio cassette tapes were the technology of the day. So I recorded the stories on four personalized tapes, one for each of my family members.
Now I could just press voice-record on my iPhone, but back then I recorded these on a battery-run cassette player from my off-grid cabin in the woods!
At the time, I lived in western Canada and my siblings in the east. They had young children at home, and didn’t have time to pay much attention to tales from our past. But as a widow on her own, my mother (not usually sentimental) enjoyed listening to hers each night before bed. It was nice to know that I was telling her bedtime stories from afar!
Short Stories
After I recorded stories aloud for my family, I wished to put the tales in writing. I had written plenty of consulting reports, but hadn’t done any creative writing since high school. I thought best to take a course before I put in a lot of effort. I took a workshop for short fiction, but the writing methods work for real-life stories as well.
After we completed the course, my classmates and I started a writing group. We drafted short stories, read each others’ work, and gave helpful comments. I wrote several of my stories and got their feedback. They said I had a visual style and they could imagine – and would like to see – the movie version!
Over twenty years later, we still get together as a group. In the meantime, we branched out: two of our members had books of literary fiction published – one of short stories, the other a poetry collection. I wrote fictional scripts that were made into short films “based on a true story” of people I knew.
Still, I wished to tell my own true tales - this time about some of my experiences in adulthood. At one point, I laughed while writing one of my stories. I told myself “I really should share these sometime”.
Live Storytelling
‘Out of the blue’, I received a request from one of my writing group friends. The theatre where she worked was hosting a storytelling event, and they needed another storyteller. I had just told myself that I should share my stories ‘out there’. So, I decided I must say “yes”!
The event was just a few days later. I wrote and rewrote, edited and cut stuff out, read my story aloud, then shortened it some more. The rules were: it had to be true, something that happened to you, and you had to tell it without reading from notes. Plus, there was a time limit.
I had made speeches at conferences before, even to parliamentary committees, but hadn’t stood up in public to tell a story of mine. I was pretty nervous when I got to the theatre. To my relief, the event was not at the main stage. Still, there were about a hundred people in attendance.
My comp ticket from The Flame life-storytelling event, "True Stories Told by the People Who Lived Them.”
It came my turn, and I stepped up to the mic. I told myself, “these people are here to listen to good stories, so just enjoy and entertain”! Audience members laughed at all the right places. I went ‘off script’ and lost track of the time. I looked at the moderator, who gave a nod to carry on. Soon I wrapped up, and that was that! Mission accomplished.
These are some of my storytelling experiences. Read some stories from my life in the stories blog.
You can choose from a variety of ways to tell your stories.
written by Barbara L Campbell, 2024