Awakening the Hidden Storyteller: How to Build a Storytelling Tradition in Your Family

This book is aimed at improving the quality of any narrative of a personal experience or event, but it can be applied specifically to accounts of anomalous, exceptional, and exceptional human experiences not simply for the edification of an audience, but primarily as a way to tease out as much meaning from the experience as possible. The book is aimed especially at parents with young children as a way of awakening the storyteller within each person. Moore himself teaches storytelling. The story Moore tells of how he came to specialize in storytelling is an EHE in itself, involving memories of childhood experiences, serendipity, a Eureka experience, learning about and from other experiencers, finding a special group at the national level, deciding to make a living at telling stories, and finally, teaching storytelling, which led him to dream appreciation, shamanism, and visualization. He also learned from his students, both directly and from the process of teaching itself. But the three key turning points/insights are theories often encountered in EHEs. First, he learned that to "work" stories must come from one’s own personal experience; second, that storytelling could be a vocation; and third, that in getting into storytelling he was tapping into "the storytelling renaissance, an awakening interest in storytelling that was spreading quickly throughout the country" (p. 5). He had found his calling, and knew he "would never be the same again."

The first three chapters provide the basics needed to become a storyteller: how to use the inner tools, memory, imagination, and visualization and the outer tools of movement, voice, and gesture. The third chapter is on locating, selecting and preparing sources of stories. Several examples are presented and their key features pointed out. The last two chapters are especially interesting. One is on time and storytelling, which is about how storytellers can alter time perception. "We can go outside of normal linear time" and "explore inner space" (p. 91). Chapter 5 is about inscendence, or exploring our inner landscape and learning how to map the route so we can return when we wish to. It also is about contacting inner guardian animals and other guides and about locating and establishing contact with out inner storyteller. Obviously, if a person is able to enter within in these ways, he/she will be in a very good position to potentiate his or her exceptional experiences and enter and live out of the EHE process.

A guide to resources on storytelling includes organizations, publications, educational opportunities, events; and a bibliography of books, tapes, and other sources.