Storytelling Workshop

In this class participants will learn how to find, shape, and tell stories. You can bring existing stories to shape or find new stories from your life. We will discuss the five main elements of a story and how to discover them. By learning dynamic storytelling elements, you will gain the tools to pull short stories out of everyday life. Participants will learn how to turn an anecdote of something that happened to you into a story that illuminates a central truth about your life. We will also teach techniques to communicate your story in an engaging manner. This will be an interactive class with a mixture of mini-lecture, 1:1 dialogue, small group work, and story presentations. This workshop can help you with written stories in addition to spoken stories but is not a traditional writing workshop. The class is co-taught by Jen Rubin and Brendon Panke.

Jen Rubin leads storytelling workshops around the state; leads the Odyssey Beyond Bars storytelling project, co-produces and co-hosts the Human Powered podcast of Wisconsin Humanities. She is the author of We Are Staying: Eighty Years in the Life of a Family, a Store, and a Neighborhood and can be found on the Great Midwest Bagel Quest. Jen loves teaching this class to share the skills that can help you tell your story exactly how you want to tell it.

Brendon Panke teaches storytelling workshops for diverse audiences; these include students who are currently or have been incarcerated, veterans, volunteers, scientists, and the general public. Brendon has performed in Madison for over 10 years as a storyteller, an improviser with Atlas Improv, and event host. He loves to help people uncover the stories they want to tell.