Thank you Michael for the warm welcome and thank you for allowing me to share my passion about our event and community.

How many of you have been to one of our events? I’m going to share a few stories with you to introduce you to how our event started and how I brought it to Lancaster.

We choose themes for each month that are posted to our website. These themes could be Love & Marriage, Home Sweet Home, Broke, Embarrassing Moments, or anything in between.

When folks arrive at the venue, they sign a release and we put their name in a hat. There are usually 10 spots for stories.

Storytellers tell a story about 5 minutes in length based on the theme and as true as they remember it.

They are not allowed use notes, music or props.
3 judges in the audience score each storyteller on content and presentation

Winner of the night wins one of our prized pint glasses

(I don’t drink beer but I hear that beer tastes better if drunk from one of our glasses)

All winners January through October return in November for our Grand Slam event.

The winner of Grand Slam wins a trophy and title of Best Storyteller in Lancaster.

Our event happens at Tellus360 on the 4th Tuesday of every month.

Here is a photo of my friend, co-producer and mentor, Jim Breslin, who lives in West Chester. In 2009, Jim had become a big fan of storytelling podcasts found on NPR -- like The Moth and This American Life -- and wondered if there was a similar event happening in Chester County.

He posted a tweet asking if there were such an event in the West chester area. Someone messaged him back stating I don’t know of any but if you start it, I’ll come.

He began listing names of friends who might be interested.

So in November 2009, Jim Breslin hosted the first West Chester Story Slam in his living room. By January of 2010, he moved the event to a bar in downtown West Chester. Jim and I met in 2012 at a networking meeting and I learned about West Chester Story Slam. Quickly, I had become a raving fan and attended each month.

What I love about Story Slam is that for two hours, each storyteller takes the mic and open their heart to you. The rest of the world seems to melt away for those two hours.

One minute a hilarious story will make you cry from laughing so hard, and then the next story is heart-wreching bringing you to tears.

West Chester Story Slam is now so popular that it sells out in 10 days. The Grand Slam event that Jim hosts must move to the Chester County Historical Society to fit the audience of 300 that his event draws.

Jump ahead to spring of 2014. My husband had taken a job in the area, we decided we’d be moving to Lancaster and our house in Chester County was on the market. About the same time, I’d seen an article written about Jim and Story Slam. By this time he had expanded to have both West Chester Story Slam and a DelCo Story Slam, and was running storytelling workshops. The last paragraph of the article mentioned that Jim wanted to expand Story Slam to other cities like Philadelphia and Lancaster.

At the next event I approached Jim, mentioned the article, and explained that I’d be happy to help him search for a venue. He said at that point in time he felt like he was spread too thin and couldn’t do it, but Carla if you want to do it...and left it hanging. I was able to convince him that I didn’t want to do it without him. His model had proven to work, and I felt we could collaborate to make it work in Lancaster too.

In October of 2014, Jim and I spent a rainy afternoon walking up and down King Street. No venue seemed to be perfect. We wanted a big enough room that could hold about 80 people, but we wanted it to be the right layout as well.

As we walked by Tellus360, we noticed there were some guys working inside. The bar wasn’t open, but they were doing construction on the front stage. I had never been there, so we peeked our heads inside to see if we could get a better look. We were welcomed inside by Ken Mueller, marketing director at Tellus. We explained what Story Slam was and how we ran the show and that we were looking for a venue. They wanted to host less live music and more spoken word events like ours. He gave us a tour of the whole building. Of particular interest was a venue in the back of the first floor called The Temple. The Temple can hold about 275 folks.

At the end of our tour, Ken mentioned he’d have to talk over our event with Joe DeVoy the owner. As we were about to part ways, in walks Joe. AFter giving him the run-down of our plans and our search, he said, “You’re having your event here. That’s exactly the type of event we want.” Needless to say, things were falling into place neatly.

We set up our website and online marketing presence and social media campaigning. Tellus shared our event in their newsletter and in their marketing. People started reaching out offering to volunteer. People started reaching out to interview us for their publications.

When doing our forecasting Jim and I figured we’d get 60-75 folks for the first few events before breaking even. We were selling tickets online and we had a volunteer that would be working at the door for us to help check people in. The week before the event we sold 80 tickets online in advance (oh, that was exciting because we had exceed our expectations). and we knew we had about 20 people on our guest list. We thought maybe we’d get another 20 folks at the door. We reached out to Tellus to ask them to set up 120 chairs for us.

January 28, 2016 our inaugural show of Lancaster Story Slam - had arrived. We got to Tellus early to make sure everything was set up. As promised, the back room in Tellus was set with chairs. As sound guy, my husband was there to make sure our one microphone was plugged in and working. We got our ticket table set up and about 7:15 our first guests arrived.

I was welcoming folks, getting folks signed up as storytellers, finding judges. Suddenly I look around and my husband is running back and forth. I stop him to ask what’s going on, he said honey, you won’t believe it. Folks are lined up through the bar, out the door and around the building. He and another Tellus employee were snagging chairs from corners and office upstairs to bring into the venue for guests.

We got the show started about 20 minutes late. 22 folks signed up for 10 storytelling slots. We had a 3-way tie for first place. At the end of the night, we counted 190 people in the room on a cold Tuesday night in January.
That first night of Lancaster Story Slam was truly magical for us. We floated out of Tellus on Cloud 9. Since then, we’ve been averaging about 100 folks for each event. If you are not connected to it, I’m here to tell you there are are many gifted storytellers in this town. So let me introduce one to you.

Last week’s event was themed “Brush With Fame.” As you can imagine we had our fair share of stories about encounters with celebrities. The winning story that night was not about a celebrity, but about a plan hatched to achieve fame in 4th grade. Please allow me to introduce Tony Crocamo…


Now you see why Tony was our winner on the night. He has earned a spot in Grand Slam and will return to tell stories again in November to compete.

As I close, I would like to invite you to our event. Lancaster Story Slam is always held the 4th Tuesday of each month. June’s show will be on Tuesday June 28th at 8pm. Our theme for the evening will be “Foreign Soil.” Please arrive early to grab a pint and a good seat.

Thank you for this opportunity to tell our story.