Spring 2023 Special Topic: THE SPOKEN STORY

In this course, we’ll be focusing on the ancient and recently resurgent genre of the spoken story. While spoken narratives pre-date written ones, the dominance of text as the default vehicle for storytelling has recently been challenged by live platforms like The Moth Radio Hour, Storycorps, TED and many, many others. In the first half of the semester, we’ll be engaging with these various platforms, studying them for structure and image, lyric and movement (just as we would with any narrative). In the second half of the term, we’ll be developing our own stories and learning how to produce them for both live and digital consumption. Students should be prepared to “perform” narratives in this class—a skill that will draw on the poet’s mind for memorization and compression, the fiction writer’s mind for plotting and pacing, and the nonfiction writer’s mind for engaging with the raw material of personal experience. The semester will end with a (small scale) live storytelling event.