Lit!Commons: Storyteller S1

This pathway, led by Shannon Gibney, is focused on skillbuilding around your fiction. Live sessions will include Q&As, conversations, activities, and shared support.

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Your Teaching Artist

Lit!Commons Subscribers Gain Access to All 10 Teaching Artists. The Storyteller path is led by Shannon Gibney.

The Storyteller Shannon Gibney

Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), and Dream Country (Dutton, 2018) young adult novels that won Minnesota Book Awards in 2016 and 2019. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis College, where she teaches writing; she was recently selected as one of three Educators of the Year in the entire Minnesota State College and University system. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, her new novel, The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be, explores themes of transracial adoption through speculative memoir (Dutton, 2023). Gibney’s other recent publications include the picture books Sam and the Incredible African and American Food Fight (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), and Where We Come From (Lerner, 2022; coauthored), and a YA anthology of stories by adoptees about adoptees, co-edited with Nicole Chung (HarperTeen, 2023).

The Storyteller Path

This curriculum will build over time. You get access to it all!

1. Welcome from Shannon Gibney
2. Shared Values and Rules
1. True and Untrue Stories
2. Lesson One Exercises: True and Untrue Stories
1. Character Sketch Exercise
1. Building Characters Through Dialogue
1. Exercise Exploring Plot
1. Exercise on Excavating Plot
1. Setting Activity
1. Point of View Lesson and Activity
1. Next POV exercise
1. POV Collage
1. Revision in our practice
1. Building Conflict
1. Storyteller: Using Poetic Language
2. Lit!Series Guest Lindsay Hunter on Seeing Your Novel, All at Once
1. Endings Exercise
1. Getting Feedback
1. Breaks for a Storyteller
1. The Stories We Tell and Don't Tell
1. Secondary and Tertiary Characters
1. Establishing Deep Connection Between Characters
1. Multifaceted Characters
1. First-Person Histories
1. Using Humor in Your Storytelling
1. Storyteller Activity: Things That Don't Go Together

About this path

Weekly On-Demand Lessons
Live Follow-up Sessions
Shared Community