Storytelling is Back in Lockport

Storytelling was last seen in Lockport in March 2020, but now has returned. Stories R Us, formerly Inspired! live lit, is making its debut at Nik and Ivy Brewing Co., State Street in Lockport on Wednesday, October 19th. Music begins at 6:30 with Harold McCay followed with stories at 7:00 p.m. McCay is a Professor Emeritus of Lewis University where he taught in the Theatre Department and was responsible for designing and building his fabulous sets. Five storytellers, Amy Curtis, Barbara Eberhard, Meredith Morris, Nancy Mullen, and Denise Baran-Unland will share their tales. There is no admission fee for this event.

Stories R Us will be held at Nik and Ivy Brewing, 1026 South State Street, Lockport, the third Wednesday of every month. Barbara Eberhard is producer and host of Stories R Us. Before the pandemic she produced INSPIRED! live lit. She believes every person has a story to tell. Barbara is also an artist and founder of the artist group, artitude. You can view her work at barbaraeberhard.com

Amy Curtis was an early participant in the Inspired Live Lit Storytelling classes and told her first story in 2019. She believes stories express our common humanity and connect us to one another. Amy paints, feeds her backyard birds, is curious about almost everything and enjoys a good book and a good cup of coffee above most all other things. She is a local real estate agent and a Lockport resident.

Worse than ‘Abraham Lincoln slept here,” Meredith has lived in Chicago and its suburbs in all directions before landing in Lockport for nuptial reasons in 2018. She holds a master’s degree in journalism and has a professional background in communications for mostly non-profit organizations, including The Morton Arboretum. Changing careers, she owned a company focused on helping older people downsize and deal with their lifelong accumulations of stuff. She now works in the senior living industry and lives as minimally as she can with her husband and cat.

Nancy Mullen is the executive director of Youth Outlook, the first not-for-profit organization serving lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and non-binary youth in Illinois. Nancy is in her 25th year with Youth Outlook, coming to the agency when it was only six months old. A transplant to the Midwest, Nancy holds a Master of Social Work degree from Syracuse University, where she focused on family mental health. Away from the world of social work, Nancy is 10 credits away from her pastry chef degree and published her first book, Urban Tidepool, in 2020, and has a second book in progress. She got hooked on storytelling her freshman year of college when a storyteller and author Jackie Torrence visited her campus and talked about the art of live storytelling, and in the last few years Nancy has been able to tell for OUTSpoken, VoiceBox, and Outwords Journey.

Denise M. Baran-Unland is the author of the phantasmic BryonySeries, which includes the “drop of blood” vampire trilogy for young and new adults, a Gothic prequel for adults, the Limbo trilogy, a standalone werewolf novel, the Adventures of Cornell Dyer mystery series for grade and middle school students, the Girls of the BryonySeries series for tween girls, and the Bertrand the Mouse series for young children. She has six adult children, three adult stepchildren, seventeen total grandchildren, six godchildren, and four cats. She is the co-founder of WriteOn Joliet and has published several anthologies for the group. She previously taught features writing for a homeschool co-op, with the students' work published in the co-op magazine and The Herald-News in Joliet. Denise blogs daily and is currently the features editor at The Herald-News. To read her feature stories, visit theherald-news.com. For more information about Denise's writings and to follow her on social media, visit bryonyseries.com and dmbaranunland.com.

Mark your calendar to attend Stories R Us on Wednesday October 19th. For more information please visit the website storiesrus.fun