Welcome to Story Garage. This podcast is a production of the Storytelling Program at East Tennessee State University.

Here in the Garage, we pop the hood and kick the tires, exploring how story, storytelling, and narrative impact human lives. Our contributors are students, faculty, and alumni of ETSU’s Department of Communication & Performance.

In Laughable Loves, Milan Kundera wrote, “We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.”

That’s what we take time to do in the Garage today. This episode is both a retrospective and an homage.

When the Storytelling program began at ETSU, it was (and is) a one-of-a-kind blend of storytelling theory and practice combining the safety of classroom participation and real-world practicum. When the program began in 1989, one person spearheaded the effort of many to see Storytelling accepted as a legitimate academic and professional pursuit.

In an interview from the Fall of 2021, Delanna Reed sat down with Dr. Flora Joy for a frank discussion of what influenced her love of story, the path that led her to lead the way in founding the first master’s degree that included a Storytelling program, and the significance of Story to every person’s life.

The quest is an essential element of storytelling. Joseph Campbell frames the entire concept around ‘the heroes journey’, or the idea that every character has to travel a great distance, whether literally, like Odysseus’ adventure to return home, or figuratively, as Nora, the protagonist in Henrick Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, who by the end of the play has journeyed so far inside her own mind that she is no longer the same person.

But what happens when the search is for the story itself? That is what we wanted to explore today.

First, a choreographer determined to put the Arts back into Athletics, as she looks for the story only a body can tell. Vianna Isbister is a graduate student in the ETSU Communication and Storytelling Studies Master’s Program. Vianna specializes in personal stories and aerial dance.

Later in the episode, a sister sets out to find the real story of her family hidden underneath the one she’s been told. “Are we running our lives off of a story that isn’t true?” Three sisters have a long overdue conversation where they confront what it means to begin to question the narratives in their family they have heretofore accepted as fact. Wendy Folsom is a writer and performer living in Montana. She received her master’s in Communication and Storytelling Studies from ETSU in 2021. Wendy recently helped launch the Ignite Story Lab, a writer coaching organization.

In a Doll’s House, Ibsen spoke to us through Nora when she said, “I believe that I am first and foremost a human being, like you – or anyway, that I must try to become one. I know most people think as you do, Torvald, and I know there’s something of the sort to be found in books. But I’m no longer prepared to accept what people say and what’s written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.” She had to find her own story.

Through the discovery of Story the hero finds herself, we uncover our hidden pasts, and find ourselves in unexplored territories of the heart and mind.

The stories we tell ourselves, who we think we are, what we believe we are capable of may be one of the biggest influences on how we behave, who we become, and what we can accomplish.

In this episode, we explore the way personal narratives affect the shape of our real-world footprints. Up first, storyteller and graduate student Cory Howard weaves together the lives of three random people who look back on some of their most impactful stories, connecting them to where they are now in their life journey. In part two, Addiction specialist and longtime medical veteran, Dr. Schuyler Geller, discusses what it takes to change the narrative of yourself with a former patient and opioid addict, who has learned how to reclaim her life by telling a different story.