Here’s how to tell your story at our August StoryShare:

First, purchase your tickets to our August 23 show. Our shows sell out quickly, so be sure to get your ticket before they are all gone. The theme of this show is FATE, KARMA, or PLAIN OLE LUCK. Do you have a great story about something destined to be: an encounter, a win, finding something/someone/your way out of a situation?  Your story can be funny, touching, sad, or all three!

Your story should be true (embellished is fine) and it should be your story, not your friend’s or mother’s or something you read online. We are looking for a narrative, something that happened, so think of one incident and build your story from there.

Conjure, channel, craft and compose your story.

Practice so you can remember it without the benefits of paper. Then practice it so you can keep it down to five minutes. Tell it to your plants but know that they are a tough audience. Revise. Rework. Curse your plants for not believing in you! Revamp. Finesse. Shave off another two minutes. Try again. Voila! Forgive your plants. Indeed, they helped you see the light.

Come August 23 and put your name in the StoryShare hat. If you’re one of the lucky ones picked, you’ll have five minutes to entertain the audience with your tale of FATE, KARMA, or PLAIN OLE LUCK. Unpicked? Fear not, we’ll be doing this type of show again in Season 3. Maybe more than once!

We’ll have an audience-judged winner at the end that wins bragging rights. Stories are judged on:

(1) sticking to the five-minute time frame (the mic actually gets turned off at 5:30)

(2)sticking to the theme, and

(3) having a story that has a conflict, crisis, and a resolution.

Need inspiration? Check out stories at TheMoth.org and listen for how the storytellers build up to a crisis in the story, and then signal the crisis with phrases like “I realized that,” “That’s when I knew,” “And just like that, everything changed,” etc.

“He’s amazing.” –Jim Lauderdale

“Dude’s a juke-joint professor emeritus”–Rolling Stone

Kevin Gordon’s Louisiana is a strange place. It’s a place where restless teens road trip to where the highway dead-ends at the Gulf of Mexico; a place where prisoners who are in for life compete in a rodeo while the town watches; where a character can get lost in the humid afternoon and where religion may not signify hope; and where rivers, never far away, carry secrets behind levees. “One of the things I like about it and am mystified by is that what passes for normal in Louisiana would not make the grade elsewhere,” he says.

The kicker? All of these postcards are based on true stories. It’s a place that he’s been exploring for twenty years now, on the eve of the release of his astonishing new album ‘Tilt & Shine’ on Crowville Media. It is work that has earned him fans like noted author and Elvis Presley biographer Peter Guralnick; New West Records artist Buddy Miller; journalist, songwriter, and Country Music Hall of Fame staffer Peter Cooper; Todd Snider; head of the Americana Music Association Jed Hilly; and Lucinda Williams, with whom he dueted on the song “Down To The Well” (which was featured prominently on an Oxford American compilation).

Before you even hear his vivid lyrics, you start feeling the sound of that ’56 Gibson ES- 125 tuned down to open D, often with the tremolo flowing like a river, and an unstoppable groove distilled from swamp blues and Sun Records. His MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop allows him to capture it with a degree of precision. As the New York Times put it in its headline of a feature on Kevin, “A Musician Or A Poet? Yes to Both.”

Kevin sums it up, “There are so many stories in north Louisiana and it’s a place that nobody pays attention to. For me, you can feel the arc of time passing there. I’m captivated by the power of strong memories—those films that run continuously in your mind, if you let ‘em.” With ‘Tilt and Shine,’ those movies translate into rock and roll poetry.

Epiphany “Big Piph” Morrow is a Stanford-educated international emcee and community builder.  This noted TEDx speaker is a solo artist and front man for the 7pc jazz and funk infused, hip-hop ensemble, “Big Piph & Tomorrow Maybe”.  His music, talks, and workshops have taken him abroad to countries such as Morocco, The Gambia, Seychelles, Thailand, Myanmar, and more. After a decade plus in the industry, his unique entertainment is relayed through the lenses of purpose, humor, creativity, race, and a global perspective.  His latest project is a new age narrative, one-man show entitled, “The Glow”, with Corey Harris as music director.