guidelines

The Stanford Storytelling Project invites the Stanford community to submit stories for its weekly radio/podcast series. Any Stanford student, fellow, staff, faculty member, visiting scholar, graduate, or former fellow can submit work.

Kinds of Stories

We are interested in all genres of storytelling, from fiction and memoir to documentary and journalism, and we accept audio, video, manuscripts, and even just pitches for a story you’d like to tell out loud. In general, stories we use in our shows describe some sort of transformation—of a person, a place, an idea. They also usually develop a particular, surprising insight of some kind, one that has some universal appeal.

We are working on several themes for our 2010-2011 season and are especially interested in stories that address them. Stories on these themes can be in any genre—journalism, fiction, academic research, memoir, narrative poetry, song, you name it.  The themes this year are:

• Creation and Creativity
• Changing Your Mind
• Surprising Experiences of Love
• Uses of Memory
• Conspiring and Conspiracies

Your story does not, however, need to fit into one of these themes. To get a better idea of the kinds of stories we like, just have a listen to some of our shows.   In most cases, we will be able lend technical support in the recording and production of stories that originate in print, so don’t be shy about submitting your writing.

Length

There is no standard for the length of a story, but most of the pieces we work with range from 5 to 30 minutes. This is true for both audio and video. If you are submitting a piece that is on paper—something that we would convert into audio—this means about 2-15 pages of double-spaced text.