STORY WEEK 2025: 11-26 October

Story Week – Grow Deeper

Where are the stories we share? Around the dinner table? The backyard cook-up? The long drive back from holiday? Over a hot drink? 

How can we celebrate this aspect of human connection? It’s people, not necessarily writers, that share stories. Writers create a document that reflects, collects and complicates the stories we tell each other. The art of writing is to build on and replicate the nightly hearth, food and drink tales.

Writing has evolved from its ancient purposes: enslavement and accounting. Through its early uses as poetic inscriptions on jugs. Through black impressions tapped on thin white wood. To addictive tomes spread on plastic glass rectangles mimicking cuneiform tablets. What’s next?

With the loss of incidental gatherings - the water cooler and the commute - we are now sharing encapsulated pockets of detail in meetings on a screen. In-person only happens with people in our personal world.

Is this enough?

Story Week asks what stories are we telling now, how, why, when and where?  We meet people where they are. Simply asking people during one week a year to host spaces for stories and make this your community’s focus. Share stories with friends, family, neighbours, neighbourhoods. Do it in person. No devices or documents. We do it every day in anecdotes. Story Week asks you to gather consciously, purposely with a shared activity. Host or join a story sharing circle. Interpret “circle” as a space for any tale you can imagine.

The only online bit is after. Tell us what happened in your spot. And, if you wish, capture your experience on camera. Share with Word Travels. We’ll showcase your videos and select some of you as storytellers in Story Week Sydney 2026.

– Miles Merrill, Word Travels Creative Director