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Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.
Powerful ideas from narrative therapy can teach us how to create new life stories and promote change. Our lives and their pathways are not fixed in stone; instead they are shaped by story. The ways in which we understand and share the stories of our lives therefore make all the difference. If we tell stories that emphasize only desolation, then we become weaker. If we tell our stories in ways that make us stronger, we can soothe our losses and ease our sorrows. Learning how to re-envision the stories we tell about ourselves can make an enormous difference in the ways we live our lives. Drawing on wisdoms from the field of narrative therapy, this book is designed to help people rewrite and retell the stories of their lives. The book invites readers to take a new look at their own stories and to find significance in events often neglected, to find sparkling actions that are often discounted, and to find solutions to problems and predicaments in unexpected places. Readers are introduced to key ideas of narrative practice like the externalizing problems - 'the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem' -and the concept of "re-membering" one's life. Easy-to-understand examples and exercises demonstrate how these ideas have helped many people overcome intense hardship and will help readers make these techniques their own. The book also outlines practical strategies for reclaiming and celebrating one's experience in the face of specific challenges such as trauma, abuse, personal failure, grief, and aging. Filled with relatable examples, useful exercises, and informative illustrations, Retelling the Stories of Our Lives leads readers on a path to reclaim their past and re-envision their future.
The things we tell ourselves affect how well or poorly our path in life goes. It’s time to flip the script on the internal stories you tell yourself and live life on your terms. Most of the “self-stories” you tell yourself—the kind of person you say you are and the things you are capable of—are invisible to you because they have become such a part of your everyday mental routine that you don’t even recognize they exist. Yet, these self-stories influence everything you do, everything you say, and everything you are. Choose Your Story, Change Your Life will help you take complete control of your self-stories and create the life you’ve always dreamed you’d have. Author Kindra Hall offers up a new window into your psychology, one that travels the distance from the frontiers of neuroscience to the deep inner workings of your thoughts and feelings. In Choose Your Story, Change Your Life, Kindra will help you: Uncover the truth of how you have created the life you have; Challenge everything you think you know about how your life has been built; Uncover the clear steps you can take to create the life you want; Take control of your self-story to become the author of who you are; and Live your life in a way you never have before. This eye-opening, but applicable journey will transform you from a passive listener of these limiting, unconscious thoughts to the definitive author of who you are and everything you want to be. Changing your life is as simple as choosing better stories to tell yourself. If you can change your story, you can change your life.
From The Social cohost Cynthia Loyst, a deeply personal lifestyle book about how to take the guilt out of pleasure and get to the heart of what you need and want in all aspects of life—from family, home, and work to love and sex. Find Your Pleasure is a pleasure revolution: where society has told women to feel guilty or ashamed for embracing pleasures, Cynthia Loyst shows you how to get to the heart of what you need and want, in every aspect of life. Live: Uncover the beauty of everyday moments, celebrate family and friends, find fun and satisfaction in your workdays, and enjoy the immense rewards parenting has to offer—all while being mindful of taking care of yourself. Love: Cynthia reveals everything from learning to enjoy your body more, ways to feel intimate and communicate effectively with your partner, and the keys to having better sex. Inspire: Find out how to let your creative self bloom, seek out exciting new pathways in life, and let kindness guide you with Cynthia’s tips and tricks for mastering mindfulness and meditation. Through her insightful anecdotes, Cynthia empowers women to revel in all of life’s joys, even the messy ones. Filled with beautiful color photographs, Find Your Pleasure is a treat for the soul that you can devour in one go or savor in tiny bites.
"The Storytelling Non-Profit is a portable consultant for fundraisers, communicators and executive directors who want to tell great stories. In this book, professionals will learn a process for telling a story that inspires and resonates with a target audience."--Back cover.
In this revised and expanded edition of The Redemptive Self, McAdams shows how redemptive stories promote psychological health and civic engagement among contemporary American adults.
“Truthful and empowering.” —Booklist From Amy Reed, Ellen Hopkins, Amber Smith, Nina LaCour, Sandhya Menon, and more of your favorite YA authors comes an “outstanding anthology” (School Library Connection) of essays that explore the diverse experiences of injustice, empowerment, and growing up female in America. This collection of twenty-one essays from major YA authors—including award-winning and bestselling writers—touches on a powerful range of topics related to growing up female in today’s America, and the intersection with race, religion, and ethnicity. Sure to inspire hope and solidarity to anyone who reads it, Our Stories, Our Voices belongs on every young woman’s shelf. This anthology features essays from Martha Brockenbrough, Jaye Robin Brown, Sona Charaipotra, Brandy Colbert, Somaiya Daud, Christine Day, Alexandra Duncan, Ilene Wong (I.W.) Gregorio, Maurene Goo. Ellen Hopkins, Stephanie Kuehnert, Nina LaCour, Anna-Marie LcLemore, Sandhya Menon, Hannah Moskowitz, Julie Murphy, Aisha Saeed, Jenny Torres Sanchez, Amber Smith, and Tracy Walker.
Change the story. Change your life. From imagined catastrophes to play-by-play interpretations of others' behavior, we are expert storytellers, quick to fill in the blanks. Unfortunately, all too often our behavior is determined by baseless suspicions, which trigger needless pain. Real life passes us by as we fall for powerful fantasies of our own creation. It doesn't have to be this way. In The Stories We Tell Ourselves, author and therapist Scott Gornto shows us how to break the cycle of false assumptions that lead to unnecessary anxiety. By taking control of our reactions to the people around us, we can learn how to be truly present in our lives as we nurture the relationships that matter most. Based on more than 20 years of research and experience, Gornto demonstrates how family narratives, media, and past experiences shape compelling story lines that blind us to reality and wreak havoc on our relationships. Through persuasive examples, he models fresh, life-enhancing approaches to engaging with friends, business associates, and loved ones alike. Don't waste your life making up stories. The Stories We Tell Ourselves is a wake-up call and a compassionate, accessible guide to transforming your relationships-and your life.
In a culture obsessed with happiness, this wise, stirring book points the way toward a richer, more satisfying life. Too many of us believe that the search for meaning is an esoteric pursuit—that you have to travel to a distant monastery or page through dusty volumes to discover life’s secrets. The truth is, there are untapped sources of meaning all around us—right here, right now. To explore how we can craft lives of meaning, Emily Esfahani Smith synthesizes a kaleidoscopic array of sources—from psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists to figures in literature and history such as George Eliot, Viktor Frankl, Aristotle, and the Buddha. Drawing on this research, Smith shows us how cultivating connections to others, identifying and working toward a purpose, telling stories about our place in the world, and seeking out mystery can immeasurably deepen our lives. To bring what she calls the four pillars of meaning to life, Smith visits a tight-knit fishing village in the Chesapeake Bay, stargazes in West Texas, attends a dinner where young people gather to share their experiences of profound loss, and more. She also introduces us to compelling seekers of meaning—from the drug kingpin who finds his purpose in helping people get fit to the artist who draws on her Hindu upbringing to create arresting photographs. And she explores how we might begin to build a culture that leaves space for introspection and awe, cultivates a sense of community, and imbues our lives with meaning. Inspiring and story-driven, The Power of Meaning will strike a profound chord in anyone seeking a life that matters.
A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras. This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.