Program teaches the art and craft of live storytelling

For nearly two decades, the Stanford Storytelling Project, an arts program housed in the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, has shown the Stanford community the transformative power of live storytelling through courses, workshops, podcasts, and live events.

While a number of the program’s students have gone on to work in public radio or with organizations like StoryCorps and companies such as Audible, Director Jonah Willihnganz says SSP’s main focus isn’t training professional storytellers. Rather, it’s teaching skills students can apply to their lives. “We equip students in using story practices to help them meet the world creatively and compassionately,” he said. “Most go on to use story practices in their chosen fields, such as medicine, technology, or law.”

Willihnganz teaches courses in narrative theory and craft across the university in the schools of Education, Medicine, and Humanities and Sciences, and is also the co-founder of the LifeWorks Program for Integrative Learning in Stanford Living Education. Like SSP, LifeWorks aims to equip students with tools for self-inquiry, expression, and engaging a challenging world. Here, Willihnganz reflects on why story craft matters.

How has the Storytelling Project changed over the years?

Since its founding in 2008, SSP has grown considerably through successful collaborations with other Stanford programs and departments. The program began with a few undergraduate courses, a small public event series, and one eponymous student podcast, and it has evolved to seven to eight courses each year, four podcasts, a weekly Writer’s Studio Workshop, the Braden grant supporting student audio documentaries, and the Dalai Lama Fellowship teaching social change leadership. We offer one-on-one storytelling mentoring for students, staff, and faculty through StoryLab at the Hume Center for Speaking and Writing, as well as a variety of workshops, including our popular 90-minute Story Exchange, which uses storytelling to build community and empathy in classrooms, dorms, academic departments, and co-curricular programs.

What Storytelling Project students and alumni say

“The narrative interview skills I developed helped me craft deep connections with my interview subjects, and even with friends and colleagues. The lessons on narrative structure help me on a daily basis when I approach technical writing for my PhD. The lessons I learned from the SSP have carried me professionally and, more importantly, very personally.”

—Max Du,’24, computer science PhD student, former student producer

“SSP taught me that storytelling goes beyond plot beats, craft, and structure. Storytelling is emotional resonance. It’s about finding Truth and allowing that Truth to reverberate through the story. Now, when I write my books, I think about the Truth at the heart of the tale, and endeavor to carve it out in every character interaction, emotional beat, and story landscape.”

—Aparna Verma, ’20, novelist, former student producer

“SSP has helped me to learn how to write for the ear, which I’m intertwining into how I write my dissertation because I’d like to make my dissertation accessible to a much broader audience – including many of my family members who live in the rural South and have no affiliation with the academy.”

—Shameeka Wilson-Brown, education PhD student

“When people ask me, what made you decide to do journalism? This is the same story I tell them every single time. When I got to Stanford, I knew I liked creative writing, and I just joined Stanford Storytelling Project on a whim. I was just so impressed by the stories people were putting together there. I thought to myself, hmm, what if I just did this for the rest of my life?”

—Carolyn Stein, ’24, Chicago Tribune reporter, former student producer

I still reference materials and lessons I learned at SSP with students I teach now, in my audio documentary work, and as an editor. Signal Hill, the audio magazine I co-founded this year, is in some ways an attempt to recreate the best parts of the SSP experience – a space for learning the art and craft of audio storytelling and helping people develop their own voices in the medium.

—Jackson Roach, ’17, freelance radio producer, former student producer

The program offers opportunities for students to experience professional storytelling and also to tell their own stories in front of an audience. How does this impact the community and the students?

We bring a wide variety of storytellers to campus, from famous authors like Alice Walker and Barbara Kingsolver to master storytellers in popular media, like Ira Glass. In the conversations we host, these master storytellers help the Stanford community appreciate how profoundly we are shaped by stories and how we can use stories to create change in our own lives and in our world. In workshops with students, they share how they work, and how their work helps them grow and see more clearly.

Live storytelling is a medium of authenticity that cuts through all the image consciousness and fronting we so often experience. That authenticity is also very grounding and creates real belonging.”

Student storytelling events, like our collaboration this year with the student group Ideas Out Loud called Black Voices, give students an opportunity to share aspects of their lives they might not otherwise. Live storytelling is a medium of authenticity that cuts through all the image consciousness and fronting we so often experience. That authenticity is also very grounding and creates real belonging. It is something we’ve come to prize in the social media era and will prize even more so in the AI era.

Finally, these events are just a lot of fun – they create vivid, unmediated connections and joy. We’ve just started a new series in collaboration with On Call Café called Story Eclipse, where every once in a while we plunge the café into darkness, stop all activity, and a student tells a five- to 10-minute story, accompanied by music.

What’s the next big thing in storytelling – will it be new technology, new audiences, new platforms?

The next big thing in storytelling entertainment will likely be AI-driven and likely be interactive story experiences. New or new-ish narrative forms are likely to arise, as they have whenever new media (like film) or capacities (like literacy) have spread widely. But we are not terribly interested in how narrative forms will evolve.

For us, the next big thing is already unfolding: understanding how creating and sharing stories helps us cultivate core human capacities, such as courage, empathy, and gratitude. While we may recognize how stories are important to identities and ideologies, we are just starting to appreciate how storytelling practices can help us deepen our capacity to meet suffering.

Starting next year, we’ll be emphasizing this through a new collaboration with Stanford Life Design Lab and Stanford Arts called The Story Pharmacy. Each year, a cohort of fellows will learn skills in the narrative arts, design, positive psychology, and wisdom traditions that will help them interview others for stories that have become significant way-finders, healers, or touchstones – stories that might help others on their paths. They will then gather stories that people have turned to in challenging times, building a pharmacy of stories that people can turn to when faced with particular conditions that we all experience at one time or another.