"The Backstory on Storytelling: A Practical Guide For The Storyteller in Everyone" is the outcome of a five year project to reverse engineer how story actually works in modern work and life. What began as messy index cards, talks, workshops, and personal journal entries became a practical field guide for people who know they have something to say, but aren't always sure how to say it.

The book is organized into four parts: Foundations, The Craft, The Performance, and The Practice. Foundations traces the making of a storyteller—from a chaotic Philadelphia childhood and agoraphobia to the realization that humans are biologically and culturally wired for narrative. The Craft captures battle tested tools like the 5 Slide Rule, the Book Slide, "3 Is More Than Magic," "Dialoging for Diamonds," and "Arcs of Uncertainty," all designed to help you respect attention, make thinking visible, and turn curiosity into clear, compelling stories.

The Performance section focuses on poise, presence, and posture, plus reps in uncomfortable arenas like The Moth StorySLAM, showing how you show up physically can amplify or undermine your message. The Practice closes with five core questions, methods for handling curveball questions, and repeatable ways to build narratives that work across interviews, pitches, workshops, and everyday leadership moments.

Across those five years, I treated the book as a live lab—testing ideas with teams and clients, documenting failures as rigorously as successes, and refining everything down to what's useful Monday morning. The result is a practical handbook for leaders, creatives, and operators who want to communicate clearly, lead through teams, and use story as a working tool, not a performative buzzword.