Specialty: Family History Tales & Folktales
Marilyn McPhie is a professional storyteller, speaker, and teaching artist, creating, performing and teaching stories of all kinds — personal, literary, traditional and more — for audiences of all ages and levels of storytelling experience. She has coached storytellers from school students to professionals preparing important presentations. She has performed nationally and internationally, and has been seen in venues as diverse as the Exchange Place of the National Storytelling Festival and the TEDx stage. She is the president of Storytellers of San Diego and the Pacific Region Director for the National Storytelling Network. She describes herself as “a very amateur genealogist,” and remembers convincing her father to pencil in the burial place of a French king after reading a book about Joan of Arc at age eight. She tells stories about ancestors in Dover, England, Salem, Massachusetts, Jamestown, Virginia, Aalborg, Denmark, Dinkelsbuhl, Germany – and has done presentations for both storytellers and genealogists on how to find and craft stories from your genealogy that don’t make people’s eyes glaze over.