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    Tell Me A Story: 104 Short Stories in 52 Weeks
    Tell Me A Story: 104 Short Stories in 52 Weeks
    Tell Me A Story: 104 Short Stories in 52 Weeks
    Ebook173 pages1 hour

    Tell Me A Story: 104 Short Stories in 52 Weeks

    By Kevin Rhodes and Gillian Rhodes

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    About this ebook

    In 2016, father/daughter storytelling duo Kevin and Gillian Rhodes took on the challenge of writing 52 short stories in 52 weeks, based on the prompts of an online writing blog. Tell Me A Story collects their stories and celebrates their unique creative perspectives. Dad limited his entries to 100 words (exactly), producing piercingly realistic snapshots taken over his lifespan. Daughter preferred fantasy, sci-fi, post- apocalyptic fiction, and futurism. Their strikingly different stories are a testament to ingenuity, imagination, and creative commitment.

    Their adventures in storytelling begin with a prompt calling for a story entitled “A New Beginning” and end with a story entitled “The End.” In between, they wind through an array of prompts, from a retelling of a fairytale, a creepy story, stories about loneliness, secrets, and romance, stories set at sea and on another planet, one told from the villain’s perspective, another that takes place entirely inside a vehicle.... Kevin and Gillian’s responses vary from comedy to tragedy, dramatic to whimsical, autobiographical to fantasy. Their stories of past and future offer often poignant and relevant perspectives on the present, often drawing on the simplest and most profound experiences of human life.

    The Rhodes family has a long history of storytelling, beginning with Kevin’s often raucous bedtime stories. More recently--a decade ago--Kevin abruptly left a successful law career to create and produce a stage show called Not This Day!, enlisting Gillian as his co-collaborator. Kevin and Gillian previously collaborated on an ebook entitled Not This Day! Special Features, a collection of videos, music, photos, newspaper reviews, graphics, and essays about what the show meant to them, then and now. A guest essay from daughter Hilary (herself a storyteller--she writes historical fiction) reveals how this family continues to engage with the show’s inspiring and challenging message of finding courage and hope to live in an often fearful world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKevin Rhodes
    Release dateApr 18, 2017
    ISBN9781370422524
    Tell Me A Story: 104 Short Stories in 52 Weeks
    Author

    Kevin Rhodes

    Kevin Rhodes left a successful law practice to start a creative venture, and got way more than he bargained for: it became a powerful (and often traumatic) time of personal transformation. Now, when he’s not working out, he writes, blogs, and conducts interactive workshops on the topic of personal growth and transformation.

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      Book preview

      Tell Me A Story - Kevin Rhodes

      Gillian’s Preface

      This project began very simply. I was browsing the social media site Tumblr, and happened upon a post on a writing help blog (Our Writing Therapy). It was fifty-two writing prompts, one for each week of the year. I glanced through it, a usual practice for dash scrolling, but something about the prompts captured my imagination. I decided to give it a go – it was only halfway through the first week of January at that point.

      I can’t remember now why I shared it with Dad; perhaps I just thought he, as a writer, might be interested, or perhaps I was looking for a partner to hold me accountable. But for whatever reason I did it, Dad was all in, and we started right away.

      It started as just a fun little thing we sent each other every week, but quickly we both found that we were surprised and delighted by the stories that came up. Dad had decided to limit himself to 100 words exactly for each story. I didn’t regulate my word count, but I did decide to not use my first idea for the prompt. Instead, I tried to see it from another angle, or question the meaning of the words – something to approach it from a different angle.

      Perhaps for that reason, I found somewhat to my surprise that many of my stories tended towards the science fiction, the futuristic, the post-apocalyptic, the dystopian. In week 30, for example, we were prompted to write about a magical object – so I wrote about a radio, but set in a time in which electronics had gone extinct. A radio would seem magical, in that world!

      As the weeks kept ticking and we faithfully wrote our stories, I started looking for ways to share them. Eventually I decided on the online writing platform Medium, and created a publication entitled 52 Stories in 52 weeks. That sowed the seeds of the idea for publishing this book.

      Over the course of the year, Dad and I did not miss a single story. A few weeks we forgot and sent it late, but those were few and far between. It began part of my Monday routine to write the story, and when the year ended, I missed it.

      I found, in the end, the project an excellent creative experiment, completed by doing it in tandem with one of my favorite partners in crime.

      I’m delighted to present all our stories side by side in this collection. As I read it, I’m struck by how different our interpretations of the same prompts are – but that is half the fun! I hope that you will enjoy these stories as much as we enjoyed writing them!

      Gillian Rhodes

      Kevin’s Preface

      In a moment of weakness, I actually applied for a job. Well, sort of--it was a setup, a lure I couldn’t resist. I took the bait, got hooked, reeled in, and netted before I knew what hit.

      It started with one of those email popups that makes you wonder how it got through and figure you need to change your settings. It announced a new article on LinkedIn Pulse: The Most Unconventional Job Posting Ever. Job wasn’t on my radar, but I’m a sucker for unconventional. I started reading faster than I could hit delete.

      The article delivered on unconventional alright. You couldn’t tell what it was. But then it told you, at the end: The article... it wasn't really an article... or a job post. It was a story about me.

      A story.

      About me.

      About me, finding my way as a writer.

      Being known is a powerful sensation; it happens so rarely that you remember when it does. Who was this guy writing this article, who knew what it was like to be me, in love with writing since I was a kid? I tracked the article to a real job posting from a startup with a mission to help employees adopt behaviors and mindsets that improve individual and team performance. They were looking for a writer.

      Ah, so that’s it.

      Mindsets and behaviors interest me. Teamwork, not so much. I work alone; most writers do. I almost quit there, but then something else snagged me: they wanted to know if you could tell a story in 100 words.

      Seriously? I had no idea. I needed to find out. Besides, a steady income wouldn’t hurt….

      I applied for the job. It was fun for awhile, then I dropped out for reasons unimportant now, leaving the question unanswered.

      About then, Gillian proposed the 52 Stories in 52 Weeks challenge. This was my chance: my stories would be 100 words. Exactly. I would sit down the same time every week, read the prompt, write the first thing that popped into my head no questions asked, and finish the story in exactly 100 words. Exactly. All in one sitting.

      Gillian and I got started, and right away I envied her. She could read the prompts ahead of time, think about her response, then use as many words as she wanted. Her reactions to my compact entries gave me quick feedback on how well I was doing. If she struggled to find the story, I missed it. If she got it right away, it worked.

      So it went, for a whole year, and now I have an answer. Can I tell a story in 100 words? No, not really. But you and I can tell a story together if we both doing our part. My weekly 100 words set up the possibility of a story. Then it’s your turn--you, the reader, the imaginative one, the one who can’t resist the allure of a story, the one who must track it to its source, like I did with the mystery job posting. When you read my 100 words, something happens like when you get a joke or get to the end of a haiku: there’s that burst of surprise when you get it, and then--bango!-- your imagination floods the spare outline with all the details you need to create the meaning. It happens just like that, just that fast.

      That’s the plan: for you and I to create these stories together.

      I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask that of you. I think stories always work that way. We start to read, and a deep creative magic goes to work on us. We like to experience that magic, and so we read--not so much for what the writer gives us, but for what the writing says to us about ourselves and our own lives. We welcome the story, invest ourselves in it, make it matter. We create meaning for ourselves, make the story come true for us.

      We do this whenever we read. That’s why you and I can read the same thing but it becomes something different in you than in me. We fill in the details differently, see and hear and feel what’s written in a way that matches the sense of self each of us brings to it. We shape its meaning to fit ourselves, make it something we can take into our own selves and use in our own lives.

      I didn’t know all of that before I started, but I know it now, thanks to Gillian’s storytelling challenge and her responses to my entries over the year. Over time, I felt I sort of got the hang of it --like when you do crosswords or Sudoku or play Jeopardy or charades or solve riddles or do something else like that a lot: you get into the swing of it, learn the codes and secrets and shortcuts, get quicker on the uptake. I suspect that will happen for you, too--that the stories will come quicker, and that you will find yourself telling your own stories more easily.

      They are about you, after all.

      I believe that, but we’ll see if it plays out that way for you.

      And then I’ll really have my answer.

      Thanks for giving it a try.

      Kevin Rhodes

      Week 1: A story entitled A New Beginning

      Gillian 1: A New Beginning

      On the day after the world ended, the

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