I’ve posted two new stories at Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling website.
David Chittenden chimes in with “Billy Joe, Where Are You?”
Monah Li gives us a story from her battles with bulimia in “Beauty and the Lonely Feast.”
These are the second stories for both authors to appear on the ether of TYTT.
As with most TYTT stories, these are not to be missed!
And as always, I’m eager to look at more submissions, so send em on in. You know you want to!
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
Two new stories up this week on Tell Your True Tale. Both grew from a writing workshop I did with students this month at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, CA — a town where I was once a crime reporter for several years.
The stories were terrific and I’ll be posting several of them in coming weeks.
Perhaps reflecting some of the town’s grit, the tales themselves are rough, but really great, reads — confirming my faith in community colleges as story goldmines.
These are the first two:
–Christian Lockwood, a former cop, writes of the final day of his drunken homelessness, in The Last Day.
Check them out. Please share them on social media. I’m always interested in looking at new submissions, so take computer in hand and get writing.
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
I’ll be talking about storytelling and writing.
I’ll be telling some stories that I love and discussing students’ stories from their own lives — a little bit of my Tell Your True Tale workshops.
Hope to see you all there…
Thanks Library Club of Cerritos College!
Last week, I was lucky enough to spend some time in Stockton, California, one of my favorite towns.
I was the crime reporter there for the Stockton Record from 1988-92.
This time, I met with students at San Joaquin Delta College, the area community college, in a class taught by poet/instructor Pedro Ramirez. We were talking about writing and how they could tell their own stories — part of my Tell Your True writing workshops.
I’ll be posting some of them soon on my TYTT storytelling page.
The town has taken a lot of hits, entering bankruptcy in the wake of the housing collapse — which seemed reflected in the tales the students wrote, most of which were pretty grim.
Cops have left for departments elsewhere — Oceanside is one, I understand — when they lose their houses due to their salaries being reduced. Crime is again on a track to break records. I did notice a lot of the parolee/addict/hooker kind of folks downtown.
One of Stockton’s problems is that, by design or not, it is within a hundred miles of something like half the prisons in the state: this includes Folsom, San Quentin, Deuel, and the new prisons down by Corcoran/Delano, as well as a women’s prison and a youth-authority prison. That’s a lot.
But there’s a backbone to the town that I always liked, and a down-to-earth quality to folks that I did not feel, for example, when I moved to Seattle for my next job. (Civil folks, those Seattlites, but not at all friendly. And then there’s the rain, or should I say the constant drizzle.)
In Stockton, I note still a lack of graffiti, which is good. When I was there, it was the graffiti that most seemed to drag down the town and give it a defeated/defeatist feel.
These photos suggest the town’s stiff upper lip remains.
Filed under California, Prison, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
A great and touching piece is up this week on Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling page.
Check out “Emri’s Chest” by Rachel Kimbrough, a great young writer from Kansas, about the death of her toddler son.
http://www.samquinones.com/category/true-tales/
Please share it on FB, Twitter, etc….
Above all, write one of your own and send it in……Sam
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
This week on my storytelling website, Tell Your True Tale, a new story by Angelino writer Julian Segura Camacho.
Check out Being Saved – the story of how a young man from Inglewood was asked to convert to evangelical Christianity.
I’m very eager to read more submissions, so if you’ve got an inner writer, write a story of your own and send it in.
Hey folks —
There’s a new story up on Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling page.
Southern California writer David Chittenden contributes “Climbing the Mesa.” Cool piece.
You can also read the story Huffington Post recently used,which I posted to TYTT a few months ago.
My First Bank Robbery is by federal prison inmate Jeffrey Scott Hunter about his, you guessed it, first bank robbery.
Again, I’m always interested in submissions to the site. I do edit, don’t pay, and love good true stories. So get writing and send one in….
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale, Writing
The Huffington Post has re-posted one of the stories that I put up earlier this year on my storytelling site, Tell 
Your True Tale.
It’s by convicted bank robber, Jeffrey Scott Hunter. My First Bank Robbery is the title of the tale.
You can see more cool stories at Tell Your True Tale.
Read ’em, share ’em, send in one of your own. I’m always looking for good stories.
Filed under Prison, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale, Writing
There’s a great appreciation of Ray Bradbury, who died yesterday at 91, by Scott Timberg in Zocalo.
In it, among other things, Timberg wonders why it was California where science fiction writers flourished. He concludes that it was because there was no literary elite or hierarchy to disapprove of the genre.
Reminds me of Tijuana in the 1950s through the 1980s, where lots of poor people could join the middle class because there was no wealthy class controlling opportunity as there was in the long-established cities of Mexico’s interior.
Timberg sees a California vibe in Bradbury’s stories about Martians, and notes the author was a young autograph hound, with no college education, who wrote his first stuff on butcher paper, and Fahrenheit 451 on a UCLA library typewriter into which he had to keep pumping dimes.
“Libraries raised me,” Bradbury is quoted as saying. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.”
Timberg writes the MisreadCity blog.
Filed under California, Los Angeles, Storytelling, Writing
One thing I’ve learned is that you can always count on something hip at the blog written by C.M. Mayo.
Here, she talks about writing an essay on the legends surrounding Maximilian, the Austrian emperor that Mexico imported to rule it for a few years in the 1800s — which has to be itself one of the weirdest chapters in the history of any country.
Then they set him before a firing squad and that was that. Except that his body was embalmed and put on display for a while. His wife, Carlotta, died many decades later.
I’m hoping C.M. writes that essay, since in the duel between legend and fact, legend is usually more interesting. In another life, she was an economist who wrote a lot about informal methods of savings/finance. Now she does other stuff.
Meanwhile, check out the C.M. Mayo blog.
Filed under Culture, Storytelling, Writing
On Tell Your True Tale — my storytelling page –David Orr contributes a new story about his first day in Catholic school.
Check out “The New Kid.” Very hip story.
Share it if you like it, and send in one of your own…..:)
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
For several years now, writer and bohemian-about-town Conrad Romo has been hosting Tongue and Groove, a monthly get together of writers, poets, musicians and spoken-word folks of all ilks.
The next one is this Sunday.
Gig starts at 6pm at Hotel Cafe, 1623 1/2 N. Cahuenga. Check it out. Well worth the trip.
Filed under Los Angeles
