This past academic year saw the successful launch of the Stanford Storytelling Project. The project, conceived by Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) instructor Jonah Willihnganz, aired its first program on November 5, 2007 and continued with broadcasts every Monday evening at 6 p.m. on KZSU, Stanford’s student–run radio station. Podcasts on Stanford iTunes are available for prospective listeners; the project’s website is storytelling.stanford.edu.

The project aims to promote the craft of the performed story—the story told with the voice, the body, images, and/or sound. Each program features fiction and non-fiction on a single theme (past themes have been as varied as “Remaking the World We Live In,” “Belief Meets Non–Belief,” and “The Animal Kingdom”), bringing together stories from across disciplines and across the campus—fiction, memoir, journalism, academic inquiry, poetry, song, film, and the photo essay. All of the stories are written and produced at Stanford, and anyone in the Stanford community can submit stories.

According to Willihnganz, the idea for the project occurred to him during a fellowship year spent at the Stanford Humanities Center. “I kept hearing how much people missed oral storytelling and I kept meeting great storytellers from all over campus—not just fiction writers, but anthropologists, journalists, linguists, musicians, you name it. I realized two things: first, there’s a goldmine of storytelling at Stanford, but most of us can attend only a handful of readings and performances each quarter; second, there’s a widespread, growing interest in the craft of oral and visual storytelling.

“I thought, what we need is a way to gather together great storytelling at Stanford and make it easily accessible—a radio show, an iTunes podcast, a web site. And then I thought, while we’re at it, we can explore the craft of this kind of storytelling. I got some help, some grants, hired a staff, and presto: the Stanford Storytelling Project.”

According to Willihnganz, the current programming format of the project is but a modest start. He hopes to scale up the project over the next few years by expanding the weekly program, adding more image-based storytelling to the podcast, and hosting a symposium on non-print storytelling.

The Stanford Storytelling Project is supported by grants and assistance from the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, Stanford Continuing Studies, the Oral Communication Program, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Hume Writing Center.