Story First Podcast

In this episode of Story First, Brian McDonald talks with novelist and longtime teacher Shawn Wong about writing, Asian American literature, teaching, and the ways stories can help people heal.
 
Shawn began teaching in 1972. That same year, he started teaching Asian American literature at Mills College, when the field was only beginning to take shape. In 1974, he co-edited Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers, a landmark collection that helped bring Asian American writing to wider attention. He joined the University of Washington faculty in 1984.
 
Brian and Shawn also talk about the Red Badge Project, where they taught storytelling to veterans. The project brought them together through actor Tom Skerritt, known for Alien, Top Gun, and Picket Fences. Skerritt co-founded Red Badge to help veterans tell their stories.
 
Brian is dedicating this episode to Tom Skerritt.

A lot of aspiring directors spend their time learning about cameras, lenses, lighting, composition, and how to make beautiful images. But one of the most important skills a director can develop is often one of the least discussed: knowing how to work with actors.
 
How do you communicate what you need from a performance? How do you help an actor understand the story they’re telling? And how do you create an environment where actors can do their best work?
 
In this archive episode of Story First, Brian McDonald answers questions about directing, with a particular focus on working with actors.
 
Directing requires more than technical knowledge. It requires communication, an understanding of human behavior, and a clear sense of what the story needs.
 
After all, the audience isn’t there to admire your equipment. They’re there to experience a story.

Why do some stories survive for hundreds, even thousands of years, while others disappear almost as soon as they’re told?
A good story can travel across generations, cultures, and centuries because the human experiences at its center remain recognizable.
The circumstances may change. The language, technology, and customs may be unfamiliar. But fear, love, jealousy, courage, loneliness, and the need to belong are things human beings have always understood.
In this archive episode of Story First, Brian McDonald and Jesse Bryan explore the enduring power of good storytelling.
Stories help us navigate life. They allow us to learn from experiences we haven’t had and recognize something of ourselves in people whose lives may be very different from our own.
The best stories continue doing that work long after the people who first told them are gone.
A good story doesn’t have an expiration date.

Storytelling is one of the most important jobs there is because stories help human beings survive.
Stories allow us to learn from experiences we haven’t had, recognize dangers we haven’t faced, and understand people whose lives are different from our own. They help us navigate the world physically, socially, emotionally, and spiritually.
In this archive episode of Story First, Brian McDonald and Jesse Bryan discuss storytelling as a service profession and the responsibility that comes with it.
If stories exist to help people survive, then storytellers have an obligation to the people receiving them.
But serving an audience doesn’t necessarily mean pleasing an audience. Sometimes the story people need is one that challenges their assumptions, confronts an uncomfortable truth, or asks them to see someone else differently.
Stories can help people heal, but they can also do harm. They can encourage understanding or reinforce fear and prejudice. What storytellers choose to put into the world matters.
Storytelling isn’t simply an opportunity for self-expression. It’s a responsibility to other human beings.
The storyteller’s job is to give people something they can use.

What happens when every creative decision has to earn its place?
In this archive episode of Story First, Brian McDonald talks with animator and filmmaker Nathan Engelhardt about Forever Green, the animated short Nathan and his collaborators spent more than five years making with the help of roughly 200 artists and technicians.
Their conversation explores armature, creative constraints, collaboration, and a simple question that can transform the way you work:
If it isn’t supporting the story, why is it there?
Nathan talks about applying that idea throughout Forever Green—examining shots, story choices, and details to make sure each was serving the larger purpose. The limitations of a volunteer production made that discipline practical as well as artistic: every unnecessary shot meant more time and work for someone else.
It’s a conversation about clarity, purpose, and what can happen when all the parts of a piece are working toward the same thing.
Great work isn’t a collection of good ideas.
It’s a collection of choices serving one purpose.

People often reach out to Brian McDonald with questions about story and craft. This archive episode of Story First is an opportunity to answer some of those questions.
The questions may be specific, but the answers can be useful to anyone interested in becoming a better storyteller. Sometimes someone asks the same question you’ve been wondering about. Other times, the most useful question is one you never thought to ask.
In this Q&A episode, Brian answers questions from listeners and explores the larger storytelling ideas behind them.
Sometimes a good question can open a door.

Storytellers have always been magicians.
They make us believe in people who don’t exist, places we’ve never been, and things we know are impossible. And through those illusions, they create something very real in us.
Derek DelGaudio understands that better than most.
A writer, performer, and magician, Derek uses illusion not simply to fool an audience, but to tell stories. His acclaimed stage production In & Of Itself, directed by Frank Oz and later adapted into a film, uses magic to explore identity, perception, and the stories we tell about ourselves.
In this archive episode, Brian McDonald talks with Derek about his work, storytelling, and the unusual tools he uses to connect with an audience.
The illusion may not be real.
What it creates in us is.

In this archive episode, Brian McDonald and Jesse Bryan talk about creative nutrition.
If you only consume what’s familiar, your sample size stays small—and you might not even know what you’re missing. Getting past barriers like “I don’t like black-and-white movies” or “that’s too old” can open doors you didn’t know were there.
The classics have lasted for a reason. Exploring great work from different periods, styles, and voices can introduce you to techniques, ideas, and ways of telling stories you may never have encountered otherwise.
What you take in affects what you’re able to put out.

What happens when we stop treating creativity, emotion, and healing as separate things?
Brian McDonald talks with poet and therapist Jacky Power about the surprising connection between poetry and therapy—and the ways both can help us make sense of the human experience.
Jacky describes poetry as a bridge between the life we think we should be living and the life we actually are living. Together, she and Brian explore grief, dyslexia, creativity, vulnerability, community, technology, and what happens when we privilege intellect over the heart.
They also talk about an older understanding of the artist: not simply as someone who makes things, but as storyteller, healer, and even magician—roles that were once far less separate than they are today. Jacky calls poetry a kind of “human technology”: a way of witnessing experience, making meaning, and helping us recognize ourselves in one another. 
It’s a conversation about what art can do when it brings us back to the thing underneath all the categories:  our shared humanity.

Years ago, Brian McDonald met a young Gene Luen Yang at a comic book convention in San Jose. Gene was hanging around a group of working professionals, listening, learning, and soaking up whatever he could. Before they parted, he gave Brian a little comic he’d made himself.
For years afterward, Brian wondered what had happened to that kid.
It turns out he was busy becoming Gene Luen Yang.
Gene would go on to create American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints, write characters including Superman and Shang-Chi, become a MacArthur Fellow, and serve as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.
In this archive episode of You Are a Storyteller, Brian catches up with Gene to talk about comics, storytelling, craft, and some of the lessons Gene took from Brian’s Invisible Ink.
It’s also a reminder of something that’s easy to forget when we’re starting out: we don’t know what we’re capable of becoming.
The kid standing next to you may someday become an important artist whose work reaches millions of people.
And if you’re the kid, you may not know it yet either.