The desert wind blows, the palms sway as Loren Niemi tells a “choose your adventure” story of the Baker, the Contessa, the Mapmaker, and the Widow, in search of their destiny with four starting points (the audience must choose from) to an improbable destination, Fata Morgana, and four, maybe five, possible endings to a “magic realist” story.
Loren Niemi has spent forty-three years as a professional storyteller, creating, collecting, performing, teaching, and writing about what it means to be human with audiences of all ages in urban and rural settings. He is the co-author, with Elizabeth Ellis, of the critically acclaimed Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories on the value and necessity of the stories that are hard to hear and harder to tell and the author of two books on crafting stories: The New Book of Plots, on the uses of narratives in oral and written stories, and Point of View and the Emotional Arc of Stories (co-authored with Nancy Donoval). His collection of non-traditional “ghost” stories, What Haunts Us, won a 2020 Midwest Book Award for “Sci-Fi/ Horror/ Fantasy/ Paranormal” fiction. In 2016, Loren was the recipient of NSN’s Lifetime Achievement award.