How a Stranger Changed the Course of My Life
Long story short. The hospitality of a stranger opened up the world of storywork to me. My life hasn’t been the same since.
In 2012, I moved from Nashville to Belfast for grad school. I was fresh off a three-month sojourn in the West Bank with Christian Peacemaker Teams, and I finally made my decision about grad study—an MPhil in Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation from Trinity College Dublin’s Belfast campus. Despite my genuine elation to be moving to Northern Ireland, I was also scared. Moving across the ocean by myself to a place I’d never been before felt really intimidating. So I asked a local friend, who had lived in Belfast years before, if he’d recommend some people for me to reach out to so I’d have some local connections. He gave me three names.
I sent emails to all three a few weeks before I flew out. The first person responded politely saying she’d be happy to meet up sometime once I arrive. The second person asked when I would be arriving and offered to have a coffee that first week in the country. And the third person, a fella named Pádraig Ó Tuama, wrote to ask, “Who’s picking you up from the airport?”
I slept better that night.
As it would happen, Pádraig and his partner Paul Doran were the founding hosts of a monthly live storytelling night called Tenx9, where nine people had ten minutes each to tell a real story from their lives. On our drive from Belfast International Airport into the city, Pádraig invited me to come along to an event. And I did—every month I lived in Belfast. I’d grown up with a love of stories—having penned my autobiography at the age of 12, after all…. This was my first time, though, to hear personal stories told aloud on stage. I was hooked, almost giddy with excitement after the first one I attended.
Pints, people, and their stories are a delicious combination.
When I left to return to Nashville the next year, I asked Pádraig and Paul if I could plant the Tenx9 seed and try to grow the event there. They told me to go for it. And for seven years, I did. From 2013-2020, Tenx9 Nashville saw over 800 stories on stage over the course of 80+ events.
Telling a story at my last Tenx9 in Belfast, 2013.
Running Tenx9 for those seven years changed the course of my life. I noticed that I began to be recognized around a town as “the storytelling guy.” The reputation and consistency of Tenx9 gave me sufficient experience and credentialling to receive a watershed grant in 2015 to travel the world gathering stories of conflict and reconciliation, that would eventually become my 2020 book I Am Not Your Enemy. That trip would lead to a story-banking advocacy job back in Nashville, which opened up the possibility a few years later of running a regional hub for Narrative 4, a story-based empathy-building nonprofit. All of this, plus the continued monthly production of an increasingly celebrated storytelling event, led to the opportunity to study public narrative at the Harvard Kennedy School, and to get noticed by Nashville-based organizational storytelling expert David Hutchens. David invited me to become his partner in facilitating his world-renowned workshop The Storytelling Leader. This invitation opened up access to the world of organizational storytelling, which is now how I make my living: helping organizations and groups find, develop, and tell their most meaningful stories.
And all this happened because an Irish stranger offered to pick me up from the airport one September day in 2012.
Thanks, Pádraig.
Pádraig delivering kisses to me in Nashville from our mutual friends back in Belfast, 2015.
