Healing Storytelling

Healing Storytelling: The Art of Imagination and Storytelling for Personal Growth

In this step-by-step companion guide, Nancy Mellon explores the secrets of a good story and how to become a confident teller of stories made from scratch. The healing power of stories is a strong antidote to today’s world of electronic screens and games. Storytelling is an engaging and meaningful way of sharing our thoughts and feelings. As a path of self-development, storytelling awakes archetypal experiences, symbols, and inner forces for healing others and oneself.

Nancy Mellon shows how to create a magical atmosphere for telling tales, how to use movement and direction in a story, how to set a “storyscape,” making beginnings and endings, and how to use the rhythms of voice in the most effective ways. Here, too, are the subtler ingredients of storytelling, including moods, the elements, the seasons, and using the symbolism of magic words, objects, and weapons to represent outer and archetypal forces in our world.

Healing Storytelling is the third edition of the book originally published as Storytelling and the Art of Imagination.

C O N T E N T S:

Foreword by Susan Perrow
Introduction

1. Beginning and Ending
2. Movement and a Sense of Direction
3. Storyscapes
4. Journeying through the Elements
5. Seasons and Moods
6. Story Characters
7. Power and Protection
8. How to Nurture Storytelling

Story Bibliography
Afterword

About the Author

Nancy Mellon is a storyteller who teaches the healing art of storytelling. She operates a School for Therapeutic Storytelling and lives in New Hampshire. Nancy has helped lead the rebirth of storytelling internationally since the 1980s and continues to pioneer storytelling in the healing arts movement. She is also the author of the classic Storytelling with Children. Healing Storytelling from Hawthorn Press.