10.37 Dispatches: Big News
I send out a newsletter every month with information about what I’m up to. It’s fun and short and I’d like to try and interest more people to join. For the next few months, I’m going to post what I wrote in the newsletter the week after it’s sent out. You can have a look and see if this is something you might want to appear in your inbox every month. Scroll to the bottom to sign up.
Last month I promised you a big announcement. Well, here it is: you know that storytelling show I’ve mentioned before, Stories We Don’t Tell? We’ve published a book. It’s aptly called - Stories We Don’t Tell: The Book! The Book and the exclamation point are my own additions specifically tailored for this newsletter.
Stories We Don’t Tell is turning five years old this month, which means we’re not a toddler anymore and we’ve just learned to walk and talk? I dunno, I don’t know anything about how kids develop. You get it. I stand by my analogy. Anyhoo, my co-conspirators and I came up with the idea to put together a book in order to celebrate this momentous birthday. We record every story at the event, and after looking at the hundreds of stories in our archives, we felt there was an opportunity to share them with a larger audience.
We started in earnest in the spring, communicating with storytellers from the past five years, and seeing whether they wanted to participate or not. To be honest, I thought most of them would tell me to go jump in a lake. But alas, the response was not only positive but damn right enthusiastic. As we collected the stories, we set about bringing together all of the many pieces of a book: the cover design (thanks, Tyler), the editing (thanks, Steve), communication (thanks, Stefan), and other stuff. Luckily, I had just been through the book layout process with Dreams of Being a Kiwi, so we pretty much had all parts of the process covered.
I love all the stories from our event. Storytellers work so hard on them and put so much of themselves into them. I knew we had something special. But it only really hit me when I had all the finished stories and was going through them one by one during the layout process. Word by word, sentence by sentence. What emerged was something beyond special. It is funny, weird, poignant, profound, wise, and downright entertaining. We worked hard on retaining the voice of the individual writers, but also to create a consistency throughout the entire book. We’re pretty proud of the finished product.
We are officially launching the book at an event on Thursday, October 17th, 2019. It’s going to be a wild night where we tell the entire five-year history of Stories We Don’t Tell in 60 minutes. Buy your tickets at the link below.
Hope to see you there! Have I mentioned before that you’re all the best? You are.
High Fives all round!
Paul
