≈ Comments Off on I have more memberships to give away!
I can’t believe I forgot to mention that we had enough money left over in Mr. Coffee that I can give away more annual memberships. I must be loopy from the heat.
I do have enough to pay for three more annual memberships, though, so email me directly if you’d like a chance to get one (Meetup doesn’t always get replies to me).
I’ll collect names over the next three days and add them to The Big List. Friday at 7 pm, I’ll borrow my son’s D&D dice to randomly select three lucky people to get a free annual membership to the club with the best view in town (plus free parking!)
Thank you all so much for your continued donations after the show. It’s the thing that allows us to keep sharing stories and making friends. Fresh Ground Stories will always be free to attend and tell a story. You don’t need to be a member to come to the show. Memberships just guarantee we have a clean, safe place to do it.
If you’d like to get a membership on your own, you can go to the club’s website and sign up there. Remember to get the social membership that’s only $50/year.
Thanks again for everything you do to support Fresh Ground Stories, whether it’s becoming a member of the Swedish Club or coming out to laugh and applaud for the folks onstage.
≈ Comments Off on FGS: Lessons Learned (9-18-2025)
Our theme for September is “lessons learned.” As much as I hate learning a lesson, I have to admit I usually get a story out of it. Whether the lesson is big or small, I can usually work up a story around it based on my inner dialogue that was going on right when everything fell apart.
Yesterday, I was helping someone with a story when I said that most stories happen almost entirely in our heads. One of the best examples of that is a story I heard in 2021 by Stephen Tobolowsky. He spends the first two minutes telling us how he got to LA, and the rest of the story is spent in a car that doesn’t move. It’s a wonderful example of how great stories don’t have to come from bigger-than-life experiences.
Now that you know, you can get a story from doing nothing but sitting in a car going nowhere, come tell a story about a time when you learned a lesson. Was it a big lesson that came from a tiny experience or the other way around? Were you surprised that you didn’t learn that lesson earlier in life? How did your life change afterward?
Of course, our themes are just suggestions designed to evoke memories. You can tell a story about anything as long as it follows our usual rules and guidelines.
Remember, all stories need to have something at stake. Ask yourself what obstacle you were trying to overcome, and build the story from there. Practice the story out loud on as many people as possible and time yourself when you’re doing it. Please don’t get onstage if you haven’t practiced your story. The audience is giving you their time and attention. It’s not fair to them if you get up there and try to wing it.
All stories have to be under 8 minutes. Stories can be as short as you want, but not over 8 minutes. Stories also have to be clean in both language and content. Send me an email if you have any questions about that.
Last Thursday at the Swedish Club was just what I needed. Lots of great stories, and people getting together afterward to talk and make new friends. We had lots of first-timers, and some regulars we hadn’t seen onstage in years. One first-timer, Melanie, thanked us for doing something that can’t be replaced by AI. She’s right. What happens on the third Thursday of each month can’t be done online or with ChatGPT. You gotta show up to feel the magic.
The theme was first love, but we had stories on all kinds of love: First love, last love, dog love, Beatles love, and art love. We even had a story about math tutoring. We heard about Barry Gibb, Richard Avedon, a couple of Kevins, and a guy named Everett.
The only part of the night I didn’t like was having to bump 5-6 tellers at the end when we ran out of time. Among others, I bumped myself, my son, two friends I’ve known for over a decade, and one of the strongest tellers we have in Seattle. We would have had a fantastic 45 more minutes of stories, but everyone would have been exhausted by the end, and half the audience would have gone home before that to go to bed. So I had to bump a bunch of really talented people and let them know that they have a guaranteed spot on any future show they want.
We had an extra special treat when we got to hear a story from Joanna Demerast, the new community director for NW Folklife Festival. Joanna, thank you so much for coming out, sharing a story, and hanging out afterward to talk to people about how to apply to perform at the festival next year.
If you didn’t get the survey I sent out last week for gauging interest in Folklife and a possible 5-week workshop given by the NWFL Festival and the Seattle Storytelling Guild later this fall, click on the link below. It shouldn’t take more than a minute to fill out, and it will get you on the festival distribution list. (all info will be kept confidential). Take the survey if you want to learn how to apply to perform at Folklife. I would love to see FGS’ers on the Folklife stage.
I didn’t get a chance Thursday to tell a new story I’m working on, but I’ll be telling another story at “Inside Story” next Saturday, August 30, at Unexpected Productions. After I tell, an improv group will be doing their take on my story. As our good friend Kent Whipple says, it’s where improv and storytelling make a baby.” So come see me make a baby with the improv folks at Unexpected Productions!
You know it’s you. Don’t pretend you don’t secretly want to be onstage at one of the biggest festivals of its kind in the country. I hear it gets over 250,000 visitors a year now.
Joanna Demerest, one of our tellers, is the community coordinator for the festival and asked me to send out a quick survey to see who wants to know more about applying to the festival and also to gauge the interest in a 5-week Art of Storytelling workshop she and the Seattle Storytellers Guild are thinking of doing.
The guild has always been supportive of FGS, so I’m happy to pass on any info from them 🙂
We had four tellers on the Moth podcast in the last month. Congratulations Bill Bernat, Jeff Birdsall, Lauren Allen, and Saloni Singh!
They even let Saloni give us a shoutout after her story. Thank you, Saloni 🙂
Third juicy bit:
Monday, I’ll be at the new open mic I talked about in my last email. A friend of mine is going and we’re driving up together from Olympia. The show is a great new place to work on pretty much anything. You can tell a story, read a poem, sing, dance, balance a broom on your nose, whatever you want as long as you do it for less than 10 minutes.
That’s all I got for now. I hope to see a bunch of you next Thursday, the 21st. I’m happy to help anyone on a story, so write me directly at freshgroundstories at gmail dot com if you’d like to schedule a call.
Fresh Ground Stories 