Anyone can do it. All you have to do is have a personal story that will fit the theme (see list of themes at the bottom of this post), send a brief synopsis to the curator, and be somewhat articulate. The Odyssey Storytelling staff will help with coaching and support. You don’t have to be an expert public speaker; as a matter of fact, the experts often want to learn this different way of telling because they are not used to talking about themselves and their lives.

For the last six and a half years, each month six people have been getting on stage at Odyssey Storytelling and telling ten-minute stories from their lives. I started the event at the (sadly) defunct Wilde Playhouse and moved to the Hotel Congress about five years ago.  Now almost every first Thursday of the month, you can see your friends and neighbors (and people you’d like to meet), on stage in the Club Congress. You can check out the hundreds of storytellers that have told at our website.

Adam Hostetter joined as assistant producer and co-host a few years ago. A couple of times a year we have a guest curator who’s job it is to invite the storytellers and be the host that month.  You can see volunteer and sometimes guest curator Sarah K. Smith tell a story at the “Exposed: Naked in Public” show here.

Odyssey’s tag line is To Create Community, One Story at a Time, and each month we invite audience members to announce community events, pass out flyers and make their creative ventures known.  Networking, entertaining and (sometimes) enlightening is the goal.

Email penelope@odysseystorytelling.com if you have a story to tell:

Odyssey Storytelling 2010-2011 Themes

September 2, Crazy for You: An Evening about Insanity

October 7, Bad Behavior: The Crime Show

November 4, Masks: the Hidden Identity Show

December 2, Belly Laughs: Humor for the Holiday

January 6: The Devil Made Me Do It

February 3: The Hidden Gem Show: Tucson Tales

March 3: Chutzpah! The Audacity Show

April 7: Shoulda Been Dead: Stories From the Edge

May 5: Its All Relative: Family Stories

June 2: Summer Camp

July 7: Two Sides to Every Story: Tandem Telling

August 4: Guess What? Stories of the Unexpected

September 1: The Things We Do For Love

November 3: Falling: Stories of Plunging In

December 1: Superpowers: The Extraordinary Show

Odyssey Storytelling in a program of StoryArts Group, Inc, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization.

Last year we were fortunate to capture a video of Maurice as he presented the story of his life at A Colorful Life series. Those of you who were in the audience will fondly remember his vitality and how excited he was to be in the spotlight and share some of the fascinating adventures he’d had in his 81 years.

With Maurice’s unexpected passing last week that video is even more precious because now we have another way of remembering him and his accomplishments.  You can see some of it on YouTube.  Goodbye, Maurice, you will be missed!

When I was the Senior Programs Coordinator at Wingspan, Southern Arizona’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Community Center, a member of Senior Pride suggested that we start the Colorful Life project in order to preserve our LGBT history and the stories of our elders.  With the help of some wonderful volunteers and camerawoman Luanne Withee using Pan Left equipment, we were able to make six videos that are available at Wingspan’s library.  Our storytellers were – Richard Zelens, Alta Fly, Hannah Blue Herron, Shellie Lynn, Maurice Grossman and Deitrich Benjamin.

Now this important work will continue under the auspices of StoryArts Group, Inc. an Arizona non-profit (disclaimer, I’m one of the organizers).  Our big project, The Adobeland Project, will be a film documentary of the life of Joan “Adobe” Pepper and telling the story of Adobeland, women’s land west of Tucson.

LGBT elders tend to become even more invisible than their straight counterparts.  Some are not out, some don’t think that their stories are important, some don’t want to relive painful memories, some are estranged from their families.

Arden Eversmeyer and Margaret Purcell are working on  remedying this by writing A Gift of Age: Old Lesbian Life Stories through the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project (OLOHP).

The Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project seeks to find and document the lives of old lesbians who were born in the early years of the last century. The lives that they led were difficult and in many way difficult for us, today, to understand. There were no lgbt publications, institutions or even personal examples to help guide their lives. They had to make it up as they went along. We seek to record their oral histories, known here as their herstories, to preserve what will soon be lost when they are all gone.

Let’s keep the stories alive!  Please contact me if you or someone you know would be a good candidate for the next Colorful Life.