Calgary Story Slam

Calgary has a rich cultural landscape and we want to add Storytelling to it. Storytelling is an art form that we all practice every day and it has been part of the human journey since the very beginning—we are going to elevate, acknowledge and celebrate storytelling.

We want to develop a community of storytellers and listeners within Calgary and to do this we are going to hold two storytelling events within the next eight months. We will model our events after the popular storytelling ‘Moth' in NYC and ‘Once Upon A Slam’ in Ottawa.

A story slam is an event where people gather to tell crafted, real-life stories. Our story slam will welcome all storytellers and listeners! Anyone can come and tell their story—after all, we know that everyone has a story to tell. Stories will be practiced and rehearsed and told without notes to create an evening of compelling story-sharing. Judges will be selected from the audience to rate the storytellers based on things like timeliness, audience appeal and story quality.

Our first event will be held on October 24th at Shelf Life Books with Sheri-D Wilson as M.C. We will promote this event well in advance to give tellers time to craft their story. A second event will be held in January at the Auburn Saloon. Our story slam will gain momentum and create a constituency and a profile for storytelling in Calgary. We intend to keep this slam going as a new and permanent part of Calgary's cultural scene.

Organizers of our slam include experienced storytellers and programmers from TALES (The Alberta League Encouraging Storytelling) and our event has the support of The Calgary Spoken Word Society.

The money from this grant will help us pay for promotion of the events, audio-visuals, M.C. honorarium, web connection and small prizes for the slam winners. 

We want to give Calgarians a reason to craft their stories by providing a fun, engaging place to share them.