HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT STORY SLAMS?

A Story Slam is a live storytelling event, often a competition, quite similar to poetry slams. Originally organized in 2001 by The Moth which is a non-profit literary society from New York City, the slam phenomenon has rapidly spread across North America. If you live in or near a reasonably sized city in Canada, the chances are good that there is a Story Slam event happening there.

While Story Slams don’t necessarily have to be a competition, there are some simple rules that govern how the slam experience unfolds. Each storyteller, called a ‘slammer’, has five minutes to tell a story. Usually it has to be a personal story that is true but more recently, some Slams have been allowing what they call ‘partly true’ stories to be told. You can’t read your story, you can’t use notes or cue cards to prompt you. Exceeding your five minutes is really discouraged and if you are in a Slam competition, you lose points for going over five minutes.

Competition Slams require judges and a score card. Often members of the audience are chosen from random volunteers to be judges. Or sometimes there are celebrities or professional storytellers who act like the judges on American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance.

As a relatively new storyteller myself, I am slowly becoming addicted to searching out and watching Story Slam videos on the internet. For the most part, many of tellers you see in these clips are not the pro tellers, just Jim and Jane, the couple next door. But gosh darn are some of these folks entertaining and their stories really grab you, body and soul.

A browser search of the internet while I was writing this post, revealed over 80 million hits for the words ‘Story Slam’. While some of these sites may not be the type of slam we are writing about here, many will be, so you can see the huge interest in this form of storytelling.

One of the most popular sites to check is The Moth (www.themoth.org). I started with this one but quickly checked out many other sites and their videos.

If you are thinking about getting into storytelling for fun or profit or both, start checking out the Story Slam sites. But be cautious. You just might be starting something that you can’t stop. And then you will find yourself seriously seeking out a local storytelling group to get your ‘fix’ as a teller or a listener or even better, as both. 

Who knows? I may see and hear you at our next storytelling meeting!

Get Slamming!

Author is Don Herald (member of Peterborough Storytellers) August, 2012