“I want to be the kind of person who’s impossible to steal from.” –Utah Phillips

The stories on this website are uncopyrighted. That means you should feel free to share them, copy them, print them and tell them without asking my permission. These are not my stories. They’re our stories. I’ve been lucky to have been a part of some of them, or have people who have been a part of them share them with me, and now I share them with you. The whole idea of this site is that the victory stories of organized people need to be shared more widely.

Whenever I’ve been a participant in a story, I try to make that clear. Whenever the story comes from someone else, I make that clear as well. I suppose someone out there could try to tell or sell these stories as their “own” stories, but I’m not really that worried about it. I think it’s much more likely that uncopyrighting will remove the friction from people sharing/adapting/combining these stories in a way that respects them and the people involved and weaves a connective thread through similar experiences of different people(s).

If you like what you read and want to link people to this site, that’s great. If you can envision a space where oral storytelling could be of use and enjoyment to your community, and you want to have me come tell stories or lead a storytelling workshop, also great.  I would be very happy to spend more of my working time telling stories. But more than anything else, I’d like to see us all tell more stories to and with each other.

For more on uncopyrighting, (I found this inspirational and a strong case for doing it) see Leo Babauta of zenhabits.net’s thoughts here.