Instructions on The Wandering Story say: Add to a story or start your own. It only takes a sentence.

The Description says: A collective effort. Add a sentence and pass it along. Let’s see where this story goes.

The Note: Make sure you share this page on your profile after you add to the story so that it gets passed along to your friends.

There’s no indication who is the originator of this collaborative storymaking page on Facebook. So far one sentence has evoked 42 following sentences.

It is the “exquisite corpse” of the digital age.  According to wikipedia, exquisite corpse is defined as “a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule . . . or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.”  The term was coined and the technique was utilized by the Surrealists in the early 1920s as an exploration of odd  juxtapositions that was characteristic of their works.

At www.poets.org, they have rules for doing the same with poetry. They say, “participants should agree on a sentence structure beforehand. For example, each sentence in the poem could be structured ‘Adjective, Noun, Verb, Adjective, Noun’.”

When I was a kid we did the same thing with drawing (instructions here.)  You would fold a piece of paper into thirds and draw feet and legs on the bottom, fold it so all the next person saw was the “connecting” lines so they knew where to begin their torso and pass it.  The torso person would pass it on to the head and neck person, and then we would have the great unveiling. A clown’s head on a stocky body with ballerina legs.  Always good for a good laugh.

I found some great examples of drawings by the original Surrealists at the Exquisite Corpse website.  But, anyone can play this game. You don’t have to be an artist to make these drawings, you just need to jump in and draw.

Using this model for drawing and for telling stories is a lot of fun to do with children of all ages, including your grown up friends.

(Drawing from Ryan at Let’s Share: The Berkeley Blog.)

In the latest Story Works Group newsletter Glenda Bonin explains how she responds to the question, “what do you do?”

Looks of interest, amusement or skepticism are three responses I often get when I tell people I am a professional storyteller. Since my work does not seem to fall into a familiar job category, I am usually asked to explain what I do as a storyteller, what sort of stories I tell, who hires me and if it is actually possible to make a living telling stories.

Although I have been somewhat involved with performance of one kind or another for most of my life, I didn’t think of storytelling as a possible profession until 1996 after I had been downsized from a position in marketing for a non-profit organization. It was then when I took personal inventory, revisited old skills and discovered the joy that only comes from doing what I love to do. Whether I tell to audiences of children, tweens, teens, adults or seniors, if I do my job right I am able to make a connection through the art of story that might otherwise be impossible.

Every storyteller brings something unique to their work, making it possible to enrich the experience in a special way. Some people sing beautifully or play a musical instrument; others are poets, visual artists or dancers. Years ago I used puppetry and magic when I learned how to be a clown, so it is easy for me to call on these skills when I tell stories.

When I work in schools, I make certain my workshops and classroom exercises address specific educational learning standards and complement state common core standards. It is essential for storytellers working in schools to be well informed about what is expected, and be ready to provide connections in performances and workshops to as many educational goals as possible.

The popular thirty-second elevator speech that job seekers are told to perfect seldom covers all the questions I get about my work. This might be because many people inaccurately equate storytelling with pre-school story time where a book is read to a group of tiny tots. The fact is that storytelling is an age-old person-to-person form of communication allowing a storyteller to share stories with people of all ages and from every walk of life.  Stories are told by different storytellers in almost every setting imaginable, and some storytellers specialize in order to meet the story interests of a specific niche: business/corporate, healing/therapeutic, educational, religious, cultural, historic, nature, environment/ecology. This is why it is so difficult to make one single statement to answer the question, “what does a storyteller do?”

You can contact Glenda at Glenda@storyartsgroup.com.