Joe Lambert, November 2021
This is the beginning of yet another adventure in story.
I turn 65 this year. My 39th year as someone tied to the non-profit arts world. I'm now based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With a working and life partner, Brooke Hessler, a dog Naja, and a wonderful co-housing community, The Commons, in which I'm an active member. I have found a new home.
From my perch here I'm imagining a new sort of purpose for myself and my closest collaborators tied to my organization, StoryCenter. We have touched the lives of thousands with our processes, initiated them into the power of personal narrative work in digital media. Yet our ability to sustain long term conversations with our alumni, to make spaces for them to connect, and build upon these initial skills, has been limited.
StoryHost is meant to be an experiment in advancing our support for our alumni community. Here you will be able, as a member of StoryHost, to connect with others, perhaps those you shared a workshop, or a new group of fellow alumni, to continue to develop your digital stories, and to get feedback.
It will be a membership-based support network. Membership is free to any StoryCenter public or custom workshop alumni. Just fill our the membership application and remind us when and where you were part of one of our workshops.
We will for the first time, have a story coach consulting service to have you schedule and connect with one of our many expert facilitators to get feedback on a story concept, script, digital story or project. Depending on your interest, we will match you with someone at a rate we hope you can afford.
Finally, my hope is to use this site to have you help me develop a new book. In 2012, I began a series of workshops that would lead to the publication Seven Stages: Story and the Human Experience. Since then, a dozen or more workshops have used this as a source book for writing and exploring meaning emerging from our lives.
Ten years on, I will return to my original impulse of that book, to imagine a new book assisting in the process of life writing and digital storytelling. Core to the project will be imagining a new curriculum, Signpost Stories, that invites us all to create and tell specific stories that serve as markers for the major events of our lives, and our evolution as human beings. I will be coordinating curated workshops out of this site with those interested in working on these story concepts with me.
This site will also be a place to find my own versions of these stories, share contributions I have gathered over my many years of teaching/facilitating, and as a place where the efforts of some of my past and future workshop participants can also be published.
This will be a participatory site for its members. You can connect and share stories by creating groups for your own discussions and story sharing.
I welcome your thoughts and feedback as this project emerges in 2022. As always feel free to email me at joe at storycenter dot org.