Here's the Story
With this Kickstarter we are putting together all of next year's season. 

There are many ways you can join in on the fun. For a gift of $100.00, you’ll receive a season pass to all of next year's shows at a deep discount, two limited editions art prints from Amy Kuttab, a limited edition Here's the Story Kickstarter t-shirt, our thanks and a cool hand made prayer flag.

We also understand that though some will generously pick up deeper rewards, not everyone in our base has $100.00 to share. Some people don’t have any money to give at all! And that's cool because Here's the Story is for those people!

And if you want in on the excitement rsvp to our Oct 7th event. It's free if you bring a dish! Get excited, download this action pack, follow us @hearsthestory, like us on facebook, go crazy and post a flier up at your favorite coffee shop. Because audience is what we always need most.

Here We Are

Here’s the Story as a non-profit has grown to include all these awesome people, and with their help we have been able to produce shows that tap into people’s inherent wish to play and have adventures well into their adulthood. 

Here's the Story Potluck & Telling

Here’s the Story's main show is one part big old community potluck dinner, and one part theater-full of interested and interesting people who come together to listen and share through the universal art of storytelling.

We wanted to bring people together from Chicago’s various artistic, academic, activist, social and professional communities for the chance to know one another, and to connect across lines that aren’t crossed often enough.

At this show, we feature the stories of 5 people whose lives we find interesting: professors, cab drivers, performance poets, ministers, playwrights, farmers, comedians and of 5 people from our audience. In this way we deliberately share a wide range of experience, and also leave space for the serendipitous and unexpected. The walk-up teller who is given the most audience points after each show is invited to return the next month as a feature, and at the end of the year, we produce a longer solo-show for the teller who receives the most points over the course of a year. In this way we also encourage the art of storytelling, and we foster people who have important stories to tell.

Robot Apocalypse: Journey to the End of the Night

Another thing we do is produce street theater events. Our first of those has been organizing and producing a giant, city-wide game of tag called Journey to the End of the Night. JEN was created by the people who brought you Sf0.org and have now spun out to make supergoing.com. It is an open event that has been replicated all over the world. The theme of our game is a Robot Apocalypse, and the route leads players to discover magical and forgotten areas of Chicago while racing from station to station, proving their humanity at theatrical stops along the way by doing things like sharing the story of their first kiss, doing a math problem wrong, or proving they can dance. If they have the wiles and speed to make it seven miles through the city, they are granted an official Proof of Humanity Card, and greeted with a party at the end.

Our next event is coming up on September 15th, please come and join us!

Open Story Swaps

We also organize site-specific and satellite story swaps in public spaces in the city… hosting stories about cops in a donut shop, travel-inspired stories on a train trip from Chicago to the Indiana Dunes, and sneaky little gatherings in abandoned buildings. We feel strongly that the small, community-based swaps are important, and have plans to produce more of these community-based, site-specific events as we grow. We would like to hold a total of four of them this year!

Story Swaps and JEN will be 100% free forever!

Finally, we have a bustling website where we feature stories inspired by the live lit shows we see in Chicago, we post information about our own workings, and most of all we host the monthly podcast.

Community Building

Everything we publish on our website is done so with a creative commons license. This includes our monthly podcast. Everyone with internet has access to these stories for free, to share, listen, and remix as they see fit.

We feature prominently at other people's live lit shows, help them organize events, create specialty performances, offer hosting services for other shows/panels and--Chicago being what it is--attend copious amounts of street festivals.

When this project gets funded, Here's the Story will do all this and more in 2013!

A Promise of Transparency

Anyone who invests in Here’s the Story will be updated regularly on what is happening with our shows, and how we are spending money. We have had the opportunity to help fund a number of other projects, and the ones that do regular updates and are clear with how they are spending the money are the ones we are most likely to back in the future.

You will know exactly how much money we take in after fees, how much we pay for rewards, and how the remaining money is spent at the time we spend it.

Stretch Goals

First off, if we make 100%, everyone who donated will get a prayer flag. This one will have Flannery O'Connor's face and say, "You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody..."

Flannery O'Connor has been unlocked! As well as a new hidden stretch goal.

$5,500 Secret Project Janna&Dan. 

If we reach an $6,000 we will upgrade the server we host the website on and we will get all of our podcasts on itunes by Dec.

At $7,000, we will cut all of the podcasted shows down into individual stories. That way you can listen to the full show, or just your favorite story. We will also finish work on one animated short.

At $8,000, we will work aggressively on remixing the stories from 2012.
Because we publish all our work under a creative commons license, all of it's free to use in new and interesting ways. We have over 24hrs of stories that people can take, re-shape, and remix. This is an underutilized community resource. We will trumpet the call to take the stories and run with them, and we will provide money, time, and extra resources for people to collaborate on using the podcasted stories in new and creative ways. Films, audio mixes, special shows.

Can't get enough storytelling? Check out these other great shows!

[credits: Stefan Saito did our great backer images, Kim Dearnley shot our video, and Podington Bear provided the music.]