Why You Should listen to the StoryPirates’ Podcasts!

The picture Emery submitted to Story Pirates for "Trash Day"

If you’ve read more than one of my blog posts, then you know I spend a lot of time criticizing Emery for not being motivated to do the things I think he should be motivated to do. And, I think I’ve mentioned his approach (or lack thereof) to writing. Well, the truth is, when Emery’s motivated to write, he works really hard at it (I’ll do a post later on what Emery is motivated to write). This is a story of one of those times and the role the StoryPirates played in getting Emery to write.

I’m a huge fan of SiriusSM radio (I’ve listened to Seth Rudetsky for years, even when he was on XM and he’s the primary reason I continue to subscribe to satellite radio), but our second favorite station is Kids Place Live. We often listen to the Absolutely Mindy Show in the afternoons and especially love the Story Pirates. The Story Pirates is a performance/ educational group of storytellers who, among other things, take children’s stories and turn them into skits for the radio. And their performances are creative, hilarious, and professional.

One day there was an advertisement for listeners to submit original stories about their own made-up holidays. Emery started talking about how he would create trash day. Of course, I had to hold myself back from offering my advice as he sat down at the table that weekend and wrote a draft of his story. I then let him sit down at the computer and type it in (again, I didn’t change a thing, even though I didn’t quite get the humor) and scanned in his picture of a group of trash bags, one of which had a red dot in the middle of it and a note from Emery that read “Rudapf’s nose”).   

Here’s the story Emery submitted

"Trash day

Today, I’m going to tell you how trash day came into our lifes. For those of you who don’t know about trash day, I will tell you all about it. Trash Day is every Tuesday. The garbeg man flys on his magical trash bad and you throw all of your trash at him and he laughs like this “He, He, He!” Then he brings it back to the South Pole at his Giant dump.

Now, I can tell you how it all began. Everybody back in 1100 AD people would put out there trash in a trash can and no one came to get it. So all the trash bags over flowed. The one man named Garbage though we need a kind of Giant dump to place the trash. So, Garbage wrote a letter to Santa for a Giant place to store trash and a flying trash bag. Santa wrote back, “No way bub, that’s too expensive!” Then Garbage stole money from the bank to make a Giant dump. He also stole one of Santa’s raindeer, and stuffed it          in a garbage bag so it could fly. And that’s how Trash Day was born."

We submitted the story and the picture and a few days after the deadline found out that his story had been chosen. It was amazing; they sent him a consent form (I hope I didn’t violate it by reposting his story here on my blog) that we now consider his first “contract.” It was very exciting but not as exciting as their adaptation of his story that you can listen to here.

Needless to say, we are so impressed with the way they handled Emery’s story—we laughed so hard and still quote lines like, (He, he, he) and “Probably not” and “no way, that’s too expensive, bub.”

The Story Pirates are currently creating podcasts of their favorite stories and including interviews with the authors (I love that they admit that they like “twisted” stories and weren’t put off by Emery’s outlandishness). Emery's is awesome. You can check out their website or subscribe to them through itunes.

Emery’s comment: i was really hoping she would say more about our first day in New York or my comic books but this is motive enough.

VICTOR: I hate to say it, but I’m the same as Emery. Really, really motivated when it’s something I want to write.  Phone it in when it’s something that gets in the way of watching football … like this blog post.