Hi Everyone,

I’m going to try to do an FGS Zoom show on our regularly scheduled day of May 21. Since I’ve never hosted an online show I’m going to start by doing an hour-long showcase of some of our regular tellers. It’ll be 7-8 folks telling stories I’ve requested. If all goes well, I’ll try to do a regular open mic FGS show on the third Thursday in June. Of course, if the CDC lets us out of the house before then we’ll have our regular live show 🙂

FGS will survive! 

In the meantime, I want to tell you about Podapalooza this weekend and two great free story workshops coming up. 

Workshops:

One of Seattle’s best storytellers, Bill Bernat, is holding an online workshop Monday, April 27, for anyone with a 5-minute story they’d like help with.

https://www.meetup.com/Stay-Awesome-Storytelling-Virtual-Workshop/events/zjtsrrybcgbkc/

Our regular monthly FGS workshop (now online) is happening Sunday, May 3
https://www.meetup.com/Fresh-Ground-Stories-Storytelling-Workshop/events/270206596/

The organizer of Podapalooza reached out to me a few days ago and asked if I’d let the FGS folks know about it. Tickets are pay-what-you-can. 100% of the proceeds go to GiveDirectly (https://www.givedirectly.org/), a non-profit delivering $1000 cash payments to families struggling amid COVID.

Below is info taken directly from his email:

Podapalooza (https://podapalooza.org) is a virtual podcast festival to benefit COVID-19 relief. One of the events on the schedule is a Saturday Night Story Slam, a live stream of seven storytellers worth seeing:

Dessa (https://twitter.com/dessadarling): a hip hop artist and the first person ever to have the distinction of both performing at Podapalooza and Lollapalooza.

Olga Khazan (https://twitter.com/olgakhazan): just released a book about being WEIRD

Maria Konnikova (https://twitter.com/mkonnikova): New Yorker writer turned professional poker player

Shannon Cason (https://twitter.com/shannoncason): Moth GrandSlam Champion

Gulnaz Khan (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/contributors/k/gulnaz-khan/): Nat Geo writer who used to document violence against women for Human Rights Watch

Jude Brewer (https://twitter.com/judebrewery): named the best storyteller in Portland

Juleyka Lantigua Williams (https://twitter.com/JuleykaLantigua): Founder of Lantigua Williams & Co, the podcast production studio  

The story slam is this Saturday, April 25 at 8pm ET.

To attend, go to the Podapalooza website (https://podapalooza.org) and purchase a ticket to the festival. 

On the day of the event, you will receive a link to the live stream.

https://www.podapalooza.org/live
https://www.givedirectly.org/

That’s all I have for now. I hope to see a bunch of your smiling faces online May 21! Not only will you hear some great stories, you’ll get to see me flail around trying to figure out how to unmute myself and get confused over who’s talking. Exciting, yes? I’ll also have a special, secret guest helping me run the show from California. Without her, FGS wouldn’t exist but almost none of you have ever met her. I think it’s time to reveal the rarely told FGS origin story. 

Take care. Wash your paws, Write a letter to someone you love.

See you soon!

Paul
freshgroundstories@gmail.com

 

Hi All,

A number of people have asked if I’m going to do an online FGS show while we’re all stuck at home. I’ll probably do some sort of online FGS show in May. I’m in the middle of moving right now so I don’t have the time to do anything like that this month. 

Because I’ve never run a live Zoom show, I’ll more than likely just ask a few people to tell one of their favorite stories and see how that goes. I attended a few online shows recently and I can tell just by watching that MC’ing an online show is much different than hosting in person. So I’ll probably start out by doing a couple of curated shows and see how things go from there.

In the meantime, if you want to tell a story yourself online I know of two shows where you might be able to do that. Both producers are looking for tellers. Contact them through their Facebook pages for more info.

Iridescent Robot Storytelling Club
https://www.facebook.com/groups/500915187244804/

COVID Stories Quarantine Connection
https://www.facebook.com/SeattleCOVIDStorytelling//

I’ll leave you with a story and a TED talk.

This a story I just found tonight. It’s a sweet and funny story about a KitKat bar.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvyPn0FFPio

This is a TED talk from Matthew Dicks about how he comes up with so many ideas for stories  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7p329Z8MD0

Take care of yourselves. Keep writing. Keep talking. Keep noticing.
Stay out of your head as much as you can. 

Love,

Paul