What’s your story? How do you understand who you are, what your purpose is, how you are impacting others and the broader world around you? In what ways do stories and storytelling pervade our world—not only as literature (oral and written), but also as a form of both practical and spiritual seeking and understanding? What is the relationship between verbal storytelling (our main focus here) and other forms of visual and digital storytelling? This seminar offers an exploration of the many ways in which we tell and are told stories. We will read and listen to fairy tales, folk tales, indigenous stories, “literary” short stories, as well as stories told by professional and non-professional storytellers in a range of public settings (such as stories on the Moth Radio Hour and stories collected by StoryCorps). We will ask how we use stories, or evoke established storytelling conventions and contexts, to make sense of our lives and the lives of others around us. We will pay attention to both oral and written traditions of storytelling and we will ask what makes a story compelling. Finally, as a culminating project, students will have the opportunity to craft and deliver their own stories.