Welcome to Tell Their Stories: The healing power of story
Welcome to Tell Their Stories. Read an introduction to this Substack, my background as a writer, and why I care about telling the stories of others
I often like to tell people I grew up in an NHS family.
My Dad, an orthopaedic surgeon who specialises in hands, would take me on his Saturday morning ward rounds in Birmingham when I was young, in between ferrying me to ballet and gymnastic classes.
I would sit swinging my legs from the reception swivel chairs while he went from bed to bed speaking to his patients after their operations. Sometimes, I’d sneak out from where the nursing staff were watching me and pad along slowly behind my Dad, nodding and listening to his quiet inquiries.
As I grew older, my first experiences of work were in NHS hospitals; sitting opposite Dad while he did paper work in a cramped shared office, or being taken by Dad, beaming with a cheeky grin, for a slap-up full English breakfast at 4 p.m. in the afternoon in the hospital staff canteen.
But my favourite memory of these exposures to Dad’s work were when I got to sit quietly in a corner of the room during his afternoon ‘clinic’.
Clinics were held every week for patients to discuss impending operations or follow up on them. Each week, a broad range of people with hand injuries came into the room. A worried-looking lady covered in jewellery and smelling of rose water, an earthy builder in khaki pants, an elite sportsperson; Dad would treat them all with the same attention and listening ear.
He would sit quietly, with an expression that exuded wisdom, leaning forward with open hands to imply he was looking and listening. They would bring a host of other ailments beyond their initial injury to the conversation, often seemingly unrelated to main cause. Dad would nod and, in his gentle way, reassure them of their life’s immense value and his duty of care to them. I saw each person leave visibly calmed, thankful and incredibly indebted to my Dad. He made such a difference to them in those 15 minutes. In the medical profession, they call this good ‘bedside manner.’ But, for Dad, it was the foundation to his care.
Dad recently retired from the NHS after more than 30 years’ service. He wrote a memoir of sorts to young hand surgeons starting their own careers. It’s a mix of technical insight and wise quips from years of both surgery and working within a complicated system. Some have been lucky enough to learn from him in person during his years teaching young registrars.
In one of the short chapters he talks about this listening process being integral to a “holistic approach to surgical care.” He writes:
People start to heal the moment they feel heard
I wasn’t interested in science at school (sorry Dad!). I loved literature, languages and media. I picked up a knack for documenting and storytelling, and would stowaway his beloved ’90s Kodak camcorder to make short day-in-the-life video documentaries with my friends and record fantastical radio shows on my hifi stereo. This passion formed my profession, and I went on to study journalism after my degree in English literature and philosophy.
It was during my postgraduate course in newspaper journalism that I realised there was a tangible point of difference between me and my j-student peers. While they pined after future gigs as foreign correspondents and name-in-lights columnists, I wasn’t at all interested in seeing my byline in print.
I had discovered—with immense excitement—Twitter, blogging, video sharing and the insatiable connectedness of the internet. I’d already become a tech nerd, called an ‘early adopter’ by teachers, and sent on advanced courses for talented pupils in English. So perhaps this was no surprise.
But at journalism school, while my friends worried about the validity of their latest court report, writing the most succinct prose, or getting the biggest scoop, I was busy tweeting my favourite reporters at the Guardian and experimenting with social media as a journalistic tool. I didn’t see it as a distraction: I saw a value in bringing others into the storytelling process with me and elevating what they had to say.
I invested in portable chargers and started creating video vox pops to upload to YouTube. I stared at my laptop screen into the early hours to learning html to code my blog. I attempted to live-tweet Alan Bennett theatre performances and write 140-character dance reviews while brazenly calling out poor interview techniques I saw on BBC Breakfast.
Through blogging and social media, I felt the world beyond my student bedroom open up. I was a devout Twitter follower of the Guardian’s tech reporter Jemima Kiss, my favourite journalist at the time, and emailed her my attempts to use the platform in new ways. A month later, I video-interviewed her as a student reporter at a conference and secured a work experience stint on the data and tech desks at the Guardian. The Guardian later became my employer, and Jemima a friend.
As the Guardian’s ‘beatblogger’ for Cardiff, cycling around the city to get stories about local council decisions, residents’ association meetings or community event openings, I put into practice the principles I’d learnt from Dad in his clinics.
Everyone I interviewed—from a ferret owner in Riverside, to the Assembly Member for Cardiff North Julie Morgan—I tried to listen to, to make them feel heard and then give them pretty much all the same airtime — space for their 500-word story on the Guardian website.
Through these instrumental months in my cub-reporter years, as one of the youngest journalists at the time at the Guardian, I learned about the power of connecting people and building community through telling their stories.
Later, after I was absorbed into the Guardian’s main newsroom in London, doing the same community-based reporting, but at scale (for the 2012 Olympics, the government’s welfare reforms, or alternative Royal news).
I teamed up with friends Ed Walker and Marc Thomas to write an ebook for Guardian Shorts on the subject: Connected: The Power of Modern Community. It is led by stories and interviews of community-powered campaigns—from the founder of Mumsnet to the Obama Yes Campaign—and concludes with a practical chapter on the basics of community management. It offered the views of three young journalists at a time when little was written about the nuts and bolts of creating online communities, before a shift to our highly visual culture today.
Finding the most community-first company in the world
Shortly after the Short came out, I decided I wanted to work for the most community-first company in the world. At the time, this was Instagram. In 2013, Instagram was still gaining traction in the UK and my friends and family thought I was mad to leave a forward-thinking established national newspaper like the Guardian to join a fledgling start-up based out of Silicon Valley. But at Instagram, I felt like I found my people: fast-talking tech nerds like me, all with a passion for social media and the power it has to unlock people’s stories and connect them together. I was the 76th employee at Instagram, the first international hire and saw the little-known app transform the world during the high-growth years I worked at its centre.
For three years, I helped grow Instagram’s global community through telling their stories. Along with four team members, I ran editorial and wrote stories for @instagram, the most followed Instagram account in the world with 190m global audience at the time, now reaching 585m. Every story I brought to life, which I personally hit ‘publish’ on this platform and later the six in-language accounts and teams I helped create, will stick with me for my lifetime. From Jon Neill, an American giant-pumpkin carver, to Michael Zee, a Hackney-based symmetrical breakfast chef, to Anais Gallagher, the daughter of the iconic British pop artist: I tried to treat all my interviewees with the same respect, curiosity and interest.
After each story was published, the featured community member would often swell with gratitude, expressing unending thanks—not just to me, but to Instagram—the platform that offered space for them to share a small window into their lives.
Whenever I have met one of my interviewees face-to-face, they would tell me how telling their story changed their lives.
Not only because it gave them access to a wider community and powerful microphone, but through doing so it made them feel heard, represented, validated. I believe it was also because it allows them to make connections all over the world with others who appreciated who they were, and with whom their message resonated. An extreme knitter in Australia would connect with other extreme knitters all over the world; a teenage ballet dancer with Scoliosis would find other performance artists with bendy spines; the photographer who saw the world through tunnel vision found a huge appreciation for her unique viewpoint.
Since Instagram, I have worked with freelance clients to help them unlock the power of story to engage their audiences: the BBC, Akram Khan dance company, the Tate, Netflix, femtech startups and individual artists around the world. I was able to help each client gain a deeper understanding of how online communities interact with brands and each other, and, through editorial, help create spaces communities could gather.
I also went back to traditional media, trying to help an industry on its knees figure out how to reconnect. As a launch member for Vogue International, I worked with Vogue editors all over the world (25 of them at the time) to understand who their online communities were and how they could better connect with them through stories.
I plan to share the nuts and bolts of one of my favourite passion projects from this time right here, in a future post. And how a simple takeover project created connections between Vogue and a younger generation of artists and designers they were losing traction with.
Time and time again, community members have told me they love feeling represented, are so thankful to be heard, to be listened to and be featured and editorially chaperoned to share with others what they feel is important to them.
Each story is treated with the care of a rare gem being cut into something beautiful.
In March 2022, I joined the community team at Substack. And was able to rekindle my love for community storytelling in its truest form, away from the trappings of ordered distribution systems (read = algorithms), vertical video, and like-bait. Discovering new and emerging writers on Substack, and helping shine a spotlight on their amazing work and communities through Substack’s flagship publications On Substack and Substack Reads, is my absolute joy and daily endeavour. I feel insanely lucky to be part of a company which champions and invests in writers, allowing them to independently do the work they love. Plus I get to read ALL the things. Of which there is so. much. great. work.
It’s a quirk of fate I joined Substack as a team member just as I was due to launch (and migrate) my own newsletter on the platform. I put my own Substack on hold while I got a foothold in my new job and fine-tuned my awareness to others. Now I’m more ready than ever to start sharing my own experimentations and adventures in storytelling here. I’ve outlined how I plan to do that below.
It’s 2023, I am often asked the same question I was 10 years ago in 2013: “how do I grow my followers?” I tell people: I may answer this question, but perhaps not in the way you expect. I invite you to suspend your judgement, briefly, and allow a new idea and conception of community-first storytelling to take hold. Whether you’re an artist, a yoga teacher, a founder, an extreme knitter, a ferret owner, or a baker. If you are creating content but struggle to know who your community is or how to find your voice… Tell Their Stories is for you.
Since the publication of Connected, there have been huge changes in technology and how storytelling has adapted to ride those changes. In a post-fixed screen era, the way we tell and share stories is going through another huge transformation. What remains consistent? People want to tell and share their stories. The platforms and formats may change.
Stories can exist beyond the physical realm and inspire ideas. We all want to feel represented and need to see more than just celebrity and success, we want all the nuances of stories that diversity and variety can provide.
Being able to tell and share the stories of other people enables them to feel heard, to feel seen and have their existence acknowledged. In a world which is increasingly disconnected and fragmented, stories bring hope, healing and change.
I often wonder what my life would have been like if I’d followed my Dad’s footsteps into the world of medicine—a place of physical healing and life-preserving care. Occasionally, I crave the immediate response from in-person listening and hands-on care.
But I’ve come to realise that there is a huge depth of meaning to the idea of sharing someone’s story, which has it’s own life-preserving power. If doctors can save a life, then perhaps telling their stories can savour them. I see my work as making the lives of the people more noticed, more validated, and I hope through coming to understand how you can share someone’s story, you will too.
How Tell Their Stories came to Substack
In 2019, Tell Their Stories was a non-fiction book on the brink of being agented with a view to being published in hardback. But on a cold Christmas weekday, the proposal fell through. Thankfully, I was too busy to be heartbroken: a new pregnancy and a new fiction novel were well underway, and had a new job. I decided to put Tell Their Stories on pause and keep testing the theories within it.
I figured there would be zero harm in gaining more experience in the field, and then corroborating it back with the method I had developed in workshops, knowing for sure that it all works. So I put the book proposal, with all its interviews and framework, aside to focus on growing a baby, growing a community from scratch for a startup, and writing my fiction novel.
Fast forward two more years, raising one rambunctious toddler through multiple lockdowns, completing a second novel, and Tell Their Stories didn’t go away.
Two more years didn’t disprove any of the theories I have about community-first storytelling, but only enhanced and backed them up. Now, armed with more examples, and a beautiful new platform to share them on in the form of Substack, Tell Their Stories will finally see the light.
In this newsletter, I will share my learnings for telling other people’s stories with you, and why I think this builds deeper, stronger and healthier online communities.
I want to see more and more people opening up their platforms to others. So I plan to share my research, learnings, interviews and method for free via this Substack as a way to get it out into the world, without the hardback price tag. I consider this a sequel to Connected, the Guardian Short ebook. But I’m also excited to see it take on a new life in as as real-time community of practitioners too.
At the moment the payment model to receive Tell Their Stories is freemium. If you subscribe, you’ll get the meatiest bits. However, some additional perks including some audio and threads will be paywalled, I’ve set out the content plan and subscription levels below. And this will probably be the longest post ever. Thanks for getting this far!
Substack is a beautiful platform for us to engage around what community-first storytelling actually means. And I’m so excited to properly get started on this journey together.
Join the Tell Their Stories community
FREE SUBSCRIBERS GET
SHELF LIFE—my monthly free newsletter containing a rapid-fire analysis of a new storytelling trend or method du jour (“Best Before”), plus reading and listening recommendations and writing news.
PAID SUBSCRIBERS GET
TELL THEIR STORIES—an essay, idea, monthly Q&A interview or case study on a community storytelling project.
SUBSCRIBER CHAT—with interviewees from Tell Their Stories and mail-bag questions answered and threads with me.
FOUNDING MEMBERS
Substack offers a founding member option, as a way to support this work by giving it the oomph and welly it needs to get going. I have a lot of friends who support my ideation and creative inspiration in many ways (thank you dear friends!), but this founding tier option is for those who are able to pre-pay for a year ahead’s worth of content, making sure I’m able to carve out the time needed to making Tell Their Stories a worthwhile endeavour. I now also offer a one-hour chat for new founding members if you want it, to say hi and AMA.
GROUP DISCOUNTS
Some of you have told me you’ve signed up for you work in community building, or have passed the newsletter onto all your team members. Now, if you subscribe as a group of 2 or more people, you get a 10% discount.
If you need some help
In the UK, the cost of living crisis may be preventative of you enjoying the paid perks of this newsletter, but its something I want to make accessible for all. Please drop me an email for comps and discounts.
Join me! Choose your option. Let’s get going!
A final thank you: thanks to those who have backed my work and ideas from the beginning. And to Dad, who healed so many people, through listening.
Very much enjoyed reading your story Hannah and looking forward to the others in the pipeline! I think you summed up why I love stories so much - they’re one of our most ancient forms of connection, and both sharing them and listening to them helps us all to feel heard, seen and alive. It’s why I’m a writer and a trainee therapist - our stories are central to our lives and the perfect way to connect and heal!
I love everything about this Hannah. And your Dad was spot on 🤗