Carly Davis is a storytelling instructor — she teaches at South Mountain Community College, working with people who want to tell true, autobiographical stories in public. Some do it for performance purposes, others in business environments, but they all have one thing in common: a desire to share their truth.
But now, Davis is putting a twist on the medium. For a new show called "Liar Liar" at Royale Kitchen Wednesday night, Davis and her co-producers will present an evening of live, personal stories — and one of them will be an outright lie.
Davis joined The Show to talk about the power of personal storytelling — both true and false.
Full conversation
CARLY DAVIS: When I'm coaching a new person who is nervous, I acknowledge that public speaking is usually people's number one fear after sharks, and then I can guarantee that there's no sharks involved.
SAM DINGMAN: For some people, I bet it's before sharks.
DAVIS: But I sincerely think that we all have many, many stories and that desire to want to share them and to connect with folks in the audience is really strong, and that's something that they probably all have in common.
DINGMAN: Can you think of any personal experiences in your own journey as a storyteller where it felt particularly revelatory for you, to be in front of people telling a story from your own life?
DAVIS: Well, actually, the first story that I told in a public or professional setting, people came up to me afterwards and wanted to share their version of my experience and all different ages, and that was such a lovely feeling that people could come out of the woodwork in that way and want to talk.
DINGMAN: There's something so fundamentally powerful about the idea of an event where the proposition to people is: your experiences matter and they matter simply because they happened.
One of the reasons I'm interested in talking to you about this is because I think something that many people who have not been to a storytelling show before don't think about as much with this particular medium is that it really is storytelling, and this is just my opinion, so tell me if you disagree. It really is storytelling more than truth telling. It is true experiences, of course.
DINGMAN: But the imperative is to turn it into a compelling narrative, right? How do you think about that balance?
DAVIS: That has come up with a couple different folks that I have worked with. Journalists in particular, actually, they have been trained to remove “I” from their reporting and from their stories. And so, the inclination is to tell the story and keep it at arm's length, where you are just narrating a series of events. And that's not inviting your listener in. That's not doing all those things that storytelling should do about building connection when we keep it at arm's length. And so, my mentor, Megan Finnerty always opens with that acknowledgement that that storytelling is a visit.
DINGMAN: Oh, that’s beautiful.
DAVIS: I believe there are three equal parts to a storytelling experience. There's the teller, of course, and there is the audience and there's also the story itself. And they all rely on each other and they all are different every time. It's responsive.
DINGMAN: Right, right. The way that you perform the story to the room of people that you're in, it is not going to be a good performance if the performance doesn't acknowledge that room and those people.
DAVIS: Absolutely. And people have such a fine, a finely tuned instrument for authenticity.
DINGMAN: Well, that's the experience you had, right? That you were sharing was that you told a story early on.
Would you be comfortable saying what that story was about?
DAVIS: The theme for that show was “Schools Out," and I happened to change schools growing up every year in middle school. Which on itself is a lot, but on top of that, every year when I got to a new school, that was the year that school was doing sex ed. So I got it four times.
DINGMAN: Oh my gosh.
DAVIS: I mean, that's a great equalizer. We've all been humiliated middle schoolers.
DINGMAN: See, that's such a wonderful example, Carly, because that's the kind of thing that you laying out those specifics. It feels, I'm sure in your experience, like so unique and yet. You had all these people come up to you afterwards and say something like that happened to me once.
DAVIS: Absolutely. And my school experiences, they were all terrible in different ways. Which also kind of throws open the door for other people to connect with the story actually, some of it was in a church school setting, some of it was in a very large public school. All of it was in the South. So, that throws open the doors for people to see themselves reflected in my story.
DINGMAN: And I have to imagine that, I mean, oftentimes we're telling stories like this from a place where in the moment that this thing was happening, you're like, “I feel like I am alone,” and that's terrible when it's happening. But then when you tell the story, you get to have this experience of, “I'm not alone because all these other people.”
DAVIS: Yeah, and it’s laugh with not at. I think part of that transformation with feeling not alone also happens in the crafting because we know this on a neurological level, actually, that stories live in the creative right side of our brain that is generative, creative, emotional. But the act of crafting a story moves it to the left side of the brain, which is analytical. Which is where we make choices about structure and what word to use and how to put the story together.
I look at that as really a physical transformation as well as something for the storyteller, because especially with a story that involves some kind of a trauma or a hardship. Transferring it to a story, crafting it into a story makes it something manageable.
DINGMAN: That's a very beautiful idea, this idea that in turning an experience into a story. You are, as you just laid out, literally moving it around in your body and making it so that it doesn't feel stuck. One of the reasons that I'm interested in experiences like that is because you are about to do this show where part of the premise is that at least one person on the stage is just going to be straight up lying.
DAVIS: Well, that is my privilege that once you know the rules, you can flip them, right? And so what would make a lie story land is the same things that would make a true story land. It's pictures, it's emotions, it's connecting. It's looking for the universal in the story. And so, that's why this was such a fun concept to kind of flip what we all take for granted.
We are coaching all of the storytellers ahead of the performance so that they know that their story is going to land, their jokes will make sense and we know how the audience might receive it. And so we want them to walk out and feel like a million bucks and know that it's going to work. I thought everyone would want to tell the lie story, but once we got into it a little bit, they realized. Oh, it's work.
DINGMAN: Isn't that interesting? It's harder to tell a lie well.
DAVIS: And that's my fallback when I'm working with storytellers to reassure them and say, “Hey, look, your story is true and you were there. You're not going to forget it. It's going to take care of itself, right?” And so when you take away both of those elements, then it is harder.
DINGMAN: The way you're talking about this, it almost feels like a sort of subversive way of reminding people how important true storytelling is by kind of putting into relief how deceptive a well told lie could be. Is that fair to say?
DAVIS: It is and that's been something I've really been thinking about the last few weeks as we've pulled this together that, because also there's an element where the audience is participating, in that they are voting on who they think the liar is. And so there's prizes for the storyteller and for the audience for guessing right. But what that also does though is it makes them get into a space of active listening.
DINGMAN: And it strikes me that it is contiguous with this idea of a visit.
DAVIS: Absolutely.
DINGMAN: If you think of it more like a visit with the truth, this is entirely coherent within that framing.
DAVIS: I do love that tension.
DINGMAN: All right, well, Carley Davis is the co-producer of “Liar Liar," which will be at Royale Kitchen, Feb. 26 at 7 p.m. And Carly is also half of the Arizona Story Lab. Carly, thank you so much.
DAVIS: Thank you.
