“You may have come to advocacy on your own, it may be part of your job or you may have been asked to put a face on a campaign by serving as its spokesperson. You may be acting as a lone crusader or ...”

“What does it mean to be an advocate?In its broadest sense, advocacy means any public action to support and recommend a cause, policy or practice. That covers a lot of public actions, from displayin...”

“The power of your story may not lie in its drama, but in its absolutely perfect relationship to your cause.”

“The space between the private and the public is the nexus of the personal and the social, if not political. Its where we meet the strong or subtle cultural censors who attempt to define what commun...”

“Advocating well with a personal story is not a call to simply Insert Story Here.”

“A recent survey of Top Five Fears places public speaking alongside identity theft and mass shootings. In the 1980s, it completed with nuclear destruction. In the 1970s, shark attack.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.”

“Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Sh...”

“Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.”

“Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes y...”

“I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when Im working on a story, Ill find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where theyve taken the story. Its as if ...”

“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.”