"I think I got storytelling ability from my mother. My father had a lot of stories-he was a used car salesman-but he had a dead-pan approach. My mother could go to the grocery store and turn the trip into an opera. She’d always find some story that took place during the trip, and she would play all the parts, using different voices and gestures when she returned home. "I didn't get into storytelling professionally until I was thirty-eight. But I was storyteller before that. I taught high school English for thirty years until I retired in June of 2000, and I always told anecdotes in my classroom. I liked to share moments in my life when they were relevant. Kids are thirsty to know who you are. Adults don't talk to them enough.  Certainly, connecting people is one of the great values of storytelling. Stories that contain universals teach us we are not alone. It's wonderful to laugh and cry together. In the summer of 1982, I took a week-long course in storytelling, and it changed my life. I found my art form. My first show was in my town library: one hundred people, ninety friends. And I was so afraid, I thought that not only would I forget the stories, I'd forget which stories I was going to tell. I had my wife sitting in the front row holding a sign board with the titles of the stories written on it. I've come a long way since then. I've been featured at festivals around this country including three visits to Timpanogos and six at the National festival and have been as far away as New Zealand. I also served as guest storyteller and host on American Public Radio's Good Evening. I've been at it for nineteen years and I enjoy storytelling as much as I did when I first began. It's such an intimate art form. No matter how big the audience I am looking people in the eye and telling them a story. The story is created somewhere between my words and audience's imagination. In a way, we are working together. I also love storytelling because it reminds me of being...