Christine Taylor is a mighty force

Meet this story evangelist whose work you need to be following

I leave every conversation with Christine Taylor feeling like I’ve just spent time in the best indie bookstore ever/ stayed up late talking about ideas into the night. She makes me laugh, she makes me think, and she is constantly referencing obscure, fascinating books, in between telling me about the latest journaling technique she’s playing with. I love Christine’s story of becoming a storyteller (meta, much?), and envy you the chance to discover her for the first time. Enjoy.

If we met at a dinner party, how would you hope the host would introduce you?

I’d love it if someone introduced me with something about who I am as a person instead of a tick-box category. “This is Christine and…” “her family gave up wrapping paper three years ago,” or “she’s the person who told me I should read [insert title of interesting non-bestseller list title].” 

Tell us a bit of your own story. Where did you grow up? 

I usually ask people if they want the long version or the short version here. I was born in California to a Taiwanese mom who married an Air Force guy from Chicago. I spent my language learning years in Germany, so my first two languages were English and German. When I was 4, my dad was stationed in South Dakota, where I lived until I was 12. He retired from the military and got a job in Saudi Arabia, but that was 1990, so things got a bit crazy.

I moved to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1990. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August and the company evacuated all the women and children three days later. I spent a school year with my sister and mother in Tacoma, Washington. The next summer we returned to the Kingdom, but at the time, there were no high schools for non-Muslim foreigners, so we all went to boarding schools. The company paid an allowance for tuition and travel back home and I went to Switzerland for three years of high school. I didn’t touch American soil for those three years.

When I graduated from high school, we all moved to North Carolina because I’d gotten into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I got to live out every college freshman’s fantasy of living at home that fall. It wasn’t great for any of us, and I ended up in the dorm in the spring semester. 

The short answer is that my parents live in North Carolina.

Looking in the rearview mirror — what narratives were core to your childhood?

Well, as a kid, my family was always different and visibly different. In Germany, we lived in a village and they called me the das Ami Mädchen, the American girl. In South Dakota, I cannot remember another person of color on our street or even in the neighborhood. My mom’s fried rice was a wonder at potlucks. But living off-base was something my parents were fully committed to, even though my dad was enlisted and our neighbors were all military officers, meaning they earned a lot more money. 

So, on the one hand, we were the biracial family, and on the other hand, we had fewer financial resources than our neighbors. As a result, our lives looked different. My mom made German Schwartzwälderkirschtorte for birthday cakes — still does, if we’re lucky. We used a Chinese word for “fart,” which I didn’t realize until I tried to spell it. But also, we couldn’t afford some of the things our neighbors could. My parents were smart about it, though; they framed things in terms of choices. I remember my mom sitting me down when I was eight or ten. I was disappointed because the neighbors went to movies and ate fast food every week. We didn’t. My mom asked me if I enjoyed our summer vacations. I said yes. She said we had to make choices. We could go for a movie and fast food every week, or we could go on that family vacation once a year. Even then, I wanted the vacation more. 

“We were always doing our own thing.”

So, we were always doing our own thing. I got used to seeing what was going on around us and just not fitting in. It made me a life-long observer of people and their habits.

The other narrative was to be strong. We moved a few times and the message from my parents was that we don’t feel sorry for ourselves and we don’t look back. They meant well, but what actually happened was things like my dad selling most of our children’s books when we left South Dakota because we’d be young adults by the time we got our belongings out of storage. We never went back to South Dakota as a family after moving and I wasn’t encouraged to keep in touch with people. There was a severing of ties with the immediate past, which I can understand somewhat as an adult, but was hard on my self-worth as a child. I ended up feeling like maybe I wasn’t worth keeping in touch with.

Lucky for me, the way I fought that feeling was by becoming an avid pen pal with all kinds of people. By my last year in boarding school, it was rare for me to go a day without receiving a letter and I spent a lot of pocket money on stamps!

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A garbage truck driver and a waitress. Those were the little-girl dreams. Later, I wanted to be a writer. Still do. My dream was to find a way to make money reading books. If anyone knows how to do this, please contact me ASAP!

What was your own journey to realizing the power of story?

There were two key moments. One was a major health event in our family. My husband was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma a couple of years after we moved to Nijmegen. He’s completely recovered now but at the time, our kids were two and four years old. We had just moved into a new house and were still sleeping on a mattress on the floor.

When something like this happens, it never just happens to you. I was the one who called every member of his family and mine to tell them he was sick. We told parents at school and colleagues and neighbors. What I saw was that everyone brought their own narrative to our situation. Some people seemed to need our story to work through their own story. It became important to me that we decide what the experience meant to us, and I corrected people who tried to rewrite it for us. It was the beginning of thinking deeply about how important it is for people to control their own narratives, which starts with realizing it’s yours and taking time to figure out what it means to you. 

The other moment was my last job interview. I had been at home with kids for three years at that point. My daughter was in preschool and one of the first times I looked at the university job site, I saw a new position that I was perfect for. They wanted someone to create a program for international staff to help them feel at home on campus and in The Netherlands. I ended up writing a cover letter that took everything from my international student orientation volunteering in my MA program to my experience teaching intercultural awareness to my international moves with children and turned it into a neat little package about how I was perfect for the job. They hired me.

“We draw a false dividing line between experience in a professional setting and life experience.”

The experience made me realize that I controlled the story of who I was. I saw myself as a stay-at-home mom for a few years there. But with a flick of the story muscles, I turned myself into a perfect candidate. I also used my personal life as professional experience. We draw a false dividing line between experience in a professional setting and life experience. That isn’t necessary. Instead, it’s all about how you frame your experiences. I had two toddlers and my husband was admitted to the hospital the weekend before my interview, and they asked me about multitasking and prioritizing. My answer was the story of my weekend and the fact that with all that and a family birthday party in another town, I had managed to turn in my interview assignment on time.

For a long time, I felt uncomfortable about my answer. It was so personal and vulnerable to talk to a future employer that way. But I see it differently now. They learned a lot more about me than how I balance priorities and I think we should tell more of these stories. We should normalize the work of life. How can we expect people to understand the particular challenges women face if we don’t tell those stories?

Those two events — my husband’s illness and that job interview experience — showed me how much it mattered to me to be in control of my story, and the fact that stories are crafted. We make them from the raw material of our lives. We get to shape and present them. That’s powerful.

Why did you start StoryCraft?

I started StoryCraft in the Netherlands in 2017 and my first clients were academics. My husband does academic research and his presentations have been giving me the heebie-jeebies since we met. We’re talking enormous, printed poster presentations for conferences where I just look at them and think, “no human on earth will wade through that ugly to find out what you’ve been doing.” But no, he was conforming to a norm in his field. Over time, I convinced him to use different techniques, first for those posters, later for PowerPoint, and eventually for his talks as well. He was my guinea pig and it was fantastic training. He’s basically a traditionalist, not an innovator. But when he tried better layouts or adding storytelling to his talks, people liked his work so much that he became an example.

I wanted to help other academics learn to talk about their work with audiences outside their fields. In fact, when I talk to science people, I talk about them being able to talk about their research outside of their hallway — that’s how specialized a lot of them are. So, those were my first clients, and I still work with academics, particularly on grant writing or for presentations for a lay audience. I also give workshops for students at all levels who are working on preparing themselves for the job market.

“You have agency that you didn’t realize because you get to tell your story.”

Soon after starting my business, I got involved with a new women’s expat organization in my area and they invited me to speak and give workshops for their members. Around that time, I also gave my first workshop for interculturalists at a European congress about how you can use storytelling in intercultural work. I found myself very interested in both areas.

What I’ve seen in working with these audiences is that my interest leans towards personal stories. I am constantly encouraging people, particularly women, to tell more personal stories about their lives and their work. I’ve also seen time and time again that story work is personally transformative. When you set out to tell your story, you have to re-examine your life and the assumptions you’re living with about who you are and your role in the world. You have agency that you didn’t realize because you get to tell your story. It’s powerful and terrifying.

Over time, I’ve come to focus on working with women in transition. That transition can be physical, like moving; it can be professional, like switching careers; or it can be personal, like entering the workforce, or transitioning from full-time parent to a parent who also does paid work. We get stuck seeing ourselves through a single lens and it isn’t always flattering. Story work can help people see themselves differently, which helps them tell better stories about themselves.

(Check out Christine’s go-to story diagramming tool.)

What has been your most rewarding experience as a professional storyteller/ story coach?

One experience that stands out: Working with a woman who had just become a professor, which, in The Netherlands, is a huge deal. There’s a special event that includes a public inaugural address in which the new professor introduces themselves to the academic community and friends and family. They describe their work and future research ambitions. The talk ends up bound in a little book and it has to be accessible to Aunt Martha as much as Professor Hupppeldepup.

The woman I worked with was going to tell her personal story for the first time. Her father’s struggle with dementia when she was a teenager and his early death had driven her work for two decades, but she had never spoken about it in public. We worked hard to craft a speech in Dutch that was a great story, scientifically accurate, and true to her voice. I was blown away time and time again by her bravery. In addition to telling this story, she asked a graphic illustrator to draw images for her presentation and book. So, in the end, she had this incredibly personal story and presentation that was delayed at least twice by COVID, which only made it more emotional when she finally got on stage. I was so proud of her and honored by how much she trusted me with the project. It was a huge success. She made it through the talk, the booklet was gorgeous, and they had a proper celebration of her success, her story, and her father.

If someone reading this thinks they don’t have a story to tell — what would you say to them?

I always want to give people a gentle shake when they say this. Everyone has a story to tell, it’s just a matter of figuring out which story, and having a method for putting that story together. Listen, most comedy is original observations of everyday things. Your life is so shockingly different from mine. Or hers. Or his. Or theirs. You make different choices than all of us. You do it for different reasons. You have a history and a way of thinking that is uniquely you, and you cannot share that with the world unless you tell your stories!

I have lived in seven countries and more than 20 cities. You know who fascinates me? People who live in the same place they grew up in. How did that happen? How do you make that choice? What did you decide not to do? What kind of relationship do you end up having with your parents? Do you run into old schoolmates? How does that feel? Do you have to see your seventh-grade crush at your kids’ school events? Is it awkward?

There is no such thing as a boring life. I get this question a lot, though, so I wrote a blog post about how you can tell exciting stories about your (boring) life. Like a lot of things in storytelling, it starts with perspective.

Tell me about some storytellers you admire and why.

When it comes to traditional storytelling, I have learned a lot from Ashley Ramsden as a participant in his workshops, through his book, and by watching his performances. He’s a British storyteller who can take you on a journey far outside of yourself. I’ve seen him tell the story of Tistou, a young French boy with green fingers, and perform A Christmas Carol as a one-man-show. Both blew my socks off. But the most riveting experience I’ve had was a Rumi evening in which he completely embodied Rumi’s poetry. It was hard to figure out where his introductions ended and the poetry began. He wasn’t reciting it, he was living it. It was amazing.

I also love Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber which is not, she is emphatic about this, a retelling of fairy tales. Carter takes on popular stories like Bluebeard and Little Red Riding Hood and finds new layers of meaning in them. The result is stories that feel familiar but then take a wild left turn at some point and leave you disoriented and amazed when they’re over. She sees lots of opportunities for different starting points and outcomes in these stories and they’re unforgettable. I’m very interested in the idea of the hero and perspective in stories and how those choices change stories. I think Angela Carter was asking similar questions.

Why does the world need more women’s stories?

I once had a conversation with someone who told me they didn’t see the sense in reading literature. They saw literature as just a bunch of stories whereas nonfiction taught them something. My counter argument went like this: nonfiction may tell us facts, but stories tell us how to live. They tell us how other people go through the world, the challenges they encounter, the choices they make, and about the consequences of those choices. If you don’t read literature or listen to stories, you will go through life thinking your perspective is the only one, and it’s a short step from “the only one” to “the only one that matters.”

In his book The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gotschall searched for the evolutionary reason for storytelling (here are my reading notes). Why would we as a species do a thing that doesn’t contribute to our safety or our multiplication on earth? His conclusion was that stories help us have the wisdom of experiences we haven’t lived. 

Too many of the experiences we share through story are men’s experiences and men’s stories. The world needs more women’s stories so we can share more women’s experiences and wisdom. We need those stories because they are half of the human experience. We need our young people to hear these stories. We need our decision-makers to hear these stories. We need women’s stories because women are here and we count. All of us.

Amen. Please gobble up more of Christine’s wisdom on her blog, subscribe to her newsletter, and just for funsies, since I compared her to an indie bookstore in human form, tell me: What’s your favorite indie bookstore? Help us feel what it’s like to be there… when you close your eyes and picture yourself in the shop, what do you see and/or feel and/or remember?