Stories that Help: Courage and Hope in a Difficult World.
This is a book of fifty short stories, all written to be read out loud. Some of the stories are gentle, others are tougher. Some of them are very old, others are new. The stories are in four suites: Earth, Love, Resistance and Peace.
The intention to be read aloud is part of my advocacy for the value of storytelling to aid individual and community well being - hearing and telling stories can nurture resilience, learning, remembering and power. Of course you can also just read them to yourself!
To envision and build a better world, we need flourishing imaginations. By telling stories aloud, I try to encourage this in listeners and readers alike.
A review:
“This is not the kind of book one reads from page one to one hundred, with the TV on in the background, or while dropping off to sleep at bedtime. This is the type of book you pick up from the shelf, from time to time, not even everyday, just when you need to. You do it when something inside is asking you to look at those pages” Claudio Molinario
Oh but listen…
Here, in thirty stories, are radical, sometimes topsy-turvy, retellings of moments in a two thousand year old story that swirls through our year, seasons and culture. In different versions of this story, in many books called the bible, voices of children, women, some men and of the marginalised, the difficult or the dangerous have often been disappeared, weakened or just ignored. Hopefully their retelling will make them challenging, heart-warming, encouraging and deepening in new ways. After all that's what they were meant to be.
Oh, and they are all written for telling out loud.