Notes From Story At Home, Part One

This conference took place on Friday and Saturday March 9th and 10th. I loved that this conference was in downtown Salt Lake City.  I rode the train from where I live.  The first day was all in the Conference Center Theater.  The second day there were classes in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building.

Friday
First we heard from the keynote speaker for the conference, David E. Rencher, who is a genealogist that works for the Church.  He gave tips on telling your family history story.

• Remember and record the story.
• Notice the politics of the story.
• Engage the youth in the story.
• Record the everyday story.
• Record the personal story.

Those were the five biggest key points I pulled from his address. 

Next we heard from Courtney and Christopher Kendrick.  They have a blog that I guess is popular.  Mostly, they just told their story as an example of how to tell a story.

After the Kendricks, we got to hear performances from two great storytellers:  Syd Lieberman and Kim Weitkamp.  They were quite entertaining and I enjoyed their stories.

Friday afternoon
We first heard from Carol Rice and Shantel Park. From what I can tell, they are contributors and possibly owners of the website and company Cherish Bound, which put on this conference. They ran a writing workshop on how to transform telling your story into writing your story.  "We perceive something based on how it's packaged."  We learn to communicate orally before we learn to communicate with the written word."

• Write like you're writing to a best friend.
• Add other senses--what do you hear, smell, etc.?
• Don't always write a chronological story--consider doing it by theme/topic/lessons learned, etc.
• Write the Hero's Journey.  People love stories of how someone ordinary overcame odds.

Next, we heard from Rustin Banks, who is the CEO of BlogFrog.  He talked about writing our own stories, like choosing our own path in life, basically.  I'm not sure his presentation was helpful in any way to my blogging pursuits, but it was interesting.

After that, there was a video presentation put on Family Search about some snippets people had learned from their own family histories.  The little clips were all quite amazing--everyone has such a unique and incredible story to tell!

I did not attend the evening's "Story Slam".  I still don't even know what a "Story Slam" is, but I wanted to get home to my family!

More to come tomorrow about Saturday's workshops...