The Story Tells Me

Telling stories is my life story. Even before I could write I was spinning yarns. Whether born with it or I simply developed the talent as a result of my environment, there is nothing I enjoy more than creating a good story.

Everything I do is to move me on to the next story. Even this moment, answering a challenge on Vocal is a concerted effort to move my storytelling along because last week was the least productive week of writing all year. I’ve discovered that it is easier to simply start writing than to think about what to write. My best stories often come from a stream of consciousness that was most decidedly a subconsciously fired synapses a split second before it appeared on my screen. I have said many-a-time that I don’t tell my stories, my stories tell me.

However, for a couple weeks now, in the midst of other tasks, I have bounced these queries around in my head. How do I monetize my passion for the story? Aside from the obvious of putting my stories up for sale with purveyors of fine word, or displaying them on earn-per-read sites like Vocal or Medium, how do I compel readers to join and follow me for a price? Oddly enough, I’ve been doing just that for more than 17 years. Profit has seemed elusive, but my family has survived on my passion all this time and I am only now having this epiphany.

In 2005, more than eight years before I would retire from the Army, I was assigned to the 3rd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division in Fort Carson, Colorado. With more than 10 years as an Army Engineer, this was my first assignment as an Army Public Affairs officer. I would finally get to use the journalism degree I earned.

Less than a year before, the Army reorganized all of its brigades. My new assignment as a PAO would make me the first brigade public affairs officer to step foot in that unit’s headquarters. Additionally, when later that year we deployed to Iraq, I took over the sector Army public affairs duties from the first assigned brigade public affairs officer in the theater of operations. This was a new position for me and the brigade. Needless to say, performance of my duties and responsibilities as a brigade PAO was still being developed. Regardless, for four years I told the Striker Brigade’s story in and out of Iraq to Americans, Iraqis, and the world; I told the brigade’s story to friends and family of the brigade, to military and civilian, to city, state and federal officials and most importantly to our own 3000 soldiers the brigade counted on to perform our mission.

After the Striker Brigade, I went on to tell the story of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (a bi-national command between the US and Canada) and U.S. Northern Command (a bi-lateral command with the same U.S. commander) for another four years. There I told the command’s story about protecting North America from both foreign and domestic threats; assisting local, regional and federal civil authorities and law enforcement across the country in times of disaster like wildfires and severe weather; monitoring and assisting with border enforcement; or performing the search and rescue mission for operations like U.S. manned-spaceflight.

I was fortunate to tell many stories throughout my 25-year military carrier – some good, some not so good. But among my most pleasant and memorable moments were helping to facilitate and tell the story of NORAD Tracks Santa, a not-for-profit, world-wide community event. NORAD has been tracking Santa for a world audience, 25-hours nonstop, every Christmas Eve Day to Christmas morning from its headquarters in Colorado Springs since 1955 when a young child accidentally dialed the red phone (reserved for the President or Secretary of Defense) to NORAD’s predecessor the Continental Air Defense Command. The girl was following the instructions in a Sears and Roebuck’s ad in the Colorado Springs, Gazette-Telegraph but two numbers had been transposed putting her on the phone with Col. Harry Shoup, the commander on duty at the time. In a legendary feat of compassion and leadership, Col. Shoup directed his crew to start answering children’s calls all night and NORAD Tracks Santa has continued every Christmas since.

Even while in the Army, I was doing side work telling the story of my wife’s retail business in Monument, Colorado. Frog on a Limb Primitives was born out of necessity for a venue to share her incredible talent as an artist and crafter. Jessica is a frog fanatic, especially tree frogs. "They've got suckers," she says.

For more than 20 years, she has subtly included her character frog, Whimsy throughout her creations. It was early 2011, the economy was still struggling after the 2008 crash, and we were skeptical about opening a new business. We were going “out on a limb” so to speak. Thus, Frog on a Limb Primitives was named. I even created a children’s story series about Whimsy and his supernatural friend Muse to help market her business. The first story in that series I posted here on Vocal titled Green State of Mind: Whimsy meets Muse.

Of course, Monument was a tiny little town off I-25 between Denver and Colorado Springs and didn’t have a huge following, so I formed a Shop Local Monument social media campaign and even volunteered to help tell the stories of many of the other businesses in town to create a social network of Monument and Tri-Lakes shops to spread awareness. Frog on a Limb Primitives did well for seven years in Monument, Colorado until we were called back to our native Tennessee.

I retired from the Army at NORAD and USNORTHCOM in December 2013. Before joining corporate America, I volunteered to tell the story of the recently founded, nonprofit Healing Warriors Program as their director of communications. Founder, philanthropist and all-around great person, Ana Pallés Yelen reached out to me personally and asked for my help. At that time, I was privy to far too many service members suffering from post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injuries and other injuries that doctors far too often treat with narcotics. Healing Warriors offered another solution to pain management through acupuncture, craniosacral therapy and healing touch that allowed veterans to throw out the narcotics and to be more attentive to talk therapies. It was brilliant, and of course I would help.

I stayed on with Healing Warriors, based out of Fort Collins, Colorado, for about 10 months, facilitating their website, social media platforms and helping to organize fundraisers, before financial needs forced me to find a paying job. Before I left the organization, they were granted federal funding and provider recognition by the Veterans Administration. Today, Healing Warriors operates a 5-room treatment clinic in Fort Collins five days a week and has offered more than 15,000 sessions to date. I'm happy that my efforts early on had something to do with the success of the organization and its benefit to veterans.

Before the end of 2014, I went to work telling the story of the Better Business Bureau of Southern Colorado as a business development consultant. In short, I was a salesman, selling memberships to the BBB. It was here that I learned the best salespeople are good storytellers. Most know the BBB as a place to go to lodge a complaint against a business they feel did them wrong, a place to vent. The story I chose to tell, and the one that kept me working at the BBB for nine months was the organization’s assumed responsibility of advocating for seniors, teens and military against the dregs of society – filthy and disgusting scammers. In a community teeming with retired military, that was the story I needed to tell.

After an hour and a half telling the BBB story to a New York Life registered representative, he put his arm around me and said, “we need you at New York Life!”

“Hell no!” I replied. “I don’t want to be an insurance salesman.” That was my feeling... until I heard the New York Life story.

Originally founded as the Nautilus Insurance Company in 1841 at the dawn of the life insurance industry in the US, they catered to merchant marines. The company’s attention to clients in the way of life insurance and financial services burgeoned it into a Fortune 500 company and one of the largest mutual insurance companies in the world. Today, the beautiful, gothic headquarters of New York Life take up an entire New York City block at 51 Madison Avenue. I spent five years telling the rest of New York Life’s story including the story of the New York Life Foundation, which seeks to benefit youth in educational enhancement and childhood bereavement support, to more than half a hundred happy clients before deciding to return to my roots in East Tennessee. I turned over my client portfolio to a good friend and colleague and up-and-comer in the company who is still doing quite well. He keeps me posted from time to time on everybody’s stories just so I know they are still doing fine, and he is never short of gratitude.

Since returning home, I started telling our story about the old family homestead and Buffalo Creek Farm and now our forever home in Rogersville, Tennessee, Fain-XX Farm. The home at Buffalo Creek was built by my great grandfather in 1941 and a cousin still produces beef cattle and tobacco there. Jessica and I did pretty well at the farmer’s market the first year back home selling sweet corn and other vegetables grown at Buffalo Creek. Our Fain-XX Farm is pronounced fān’nĭks, named for the first family that settled here in the early 19th century, our reverence for the legendary phoenix and the year we settled here, 2020. In the years to come, a multi-fruit orchard will grace the hills and valleys of Fain-XX Farm and it will grow in popularity because of its story I tell.

Since being back in Appalachia, my storytelling skills have earned me payroll from a small insurance firm that caters to farmers, a local eye surgeon whose story includes growing up a minority and the son of an addict in Utah, and a family-owned commercial roofing business first founded in 1976. Although it is comfortable to have a steady paycheck telling someone else’s story, being too comfortable will stifle growth. Until my own yarns produce enough revenue to sustain my family, I need to maximize my capacity with a burgeoning freelance business. I need paying customers to sign up with me and let me tell their story.

In the last three months, my client list has expanded 200 percent to give me a whopping two clients with stories to be told. Sure, with only two clients and a full-time job, it seems a bit farcical to call myself a freelance marketer, but it’s a start and I prefer freelance storyteller. My first client, a globetrotting business consultant based in Kingsport, Tennessee, contacted me after I answered his job posting. His first full-length sales book will be out in August and I’m the guy he is expecting to virialize the trademark he has had since 1986. Charles Clarke's Bulls, Owls, Lambs and Tigers has already revolutionized the sales strategy of hundreds of corporations. The new book will take it to the next level.

Shortly after meeting Charles Clarke III, friends dropped my name to a local hip-hop music crew looking to go nationwide. The four emperors of Imperial Inc. Music, 7 Figgaz, Biggs, Wi-Phi and Myster Rhythm, are already putting out singles, producing for other artists, performing shows and entertaining audiences all over East Tennessee to a growing fan base in the 10s of thousands, but they are looking to get away from DIY marketing and they have hired me to be their professional storyteller. It is still their story; they are just putting their faith in me to tell it.

I love a good story and though I would prefer to spend my days telling only my stories, others have good stories to tell, and I have a gift to tell a good story. I have long commiserated over what has seemed to me failed ambitions to live a life as a storyteller, but this challenge has helped me to see that I could not be more wrong. For nearly 17 years now I've almost solely made a living by telling stories and it took writing this story to prove that to me.

I'll still tell my stories, but this God-given gift shouldn't be wasted on only me. My success is inextricably linked to the success of those I can encourage to hitch their story to my horse. My narrative will not suffer for it; in fact, it will ferment into a fine tale variegated with the history and experience of others. For terms the hopeful and ambitious can afford I can perform for them a chore that gives distinction to them and confidence to me. Then their stories become mine and I don’t tell my stories; my stories tell me.