JOPRO is proud to support The Honest Majority and Plot Twisters as they launch their first-ever Storytelling Challenge.
The Honest Majority believes in the power of honesty for building better relationships, communities, and futures. In partnership with Plot Twisters, a game design collective dedicated to personal storytelling and positive self-reflection, we invite you to participate in The Honest Storytelling Challenge — a storytelling contest for reflecting on and writing about honesty from your perspective.
Please share and submit your entries to the Contest Homepage. Three specific categories of Humor, Surprise, and Insight, will be used to determine winners, alongside one Grand Prize winner.
For more background on the contest, and its imagery within the promotional flyer above:
At a glance, the illustrations depict kintsugi, 金継ぎ, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with powdered gold lacquer to symbolize how brokenness doesn’t inevitably mean hopelessness or worthlessness that can only be tossed out or shamefully covered up; with delicate care and a little creativity, it’s possible to mend the pieces back together in order to create something far more beautiful than mere, impossible “perfection.”
What “the something far more beautiful” is, well, that’s up to you to decide: transformation? Art? Meaning? Acceptance of yourself? Of reality? THSC is here to prompt critical thinking, introspection, and reflection: the rest is left as a challenge to the reader. While there is a high chance of winning a prize, this is not a competition against others as much as a challenge for each entrant to try to be better than who you were before and to tell the story for others to hear. Truly look inside yourself, every forgotten, dusty, or hidden corner. Honestly ask: who am I? What do I value? Why? What is my evidence? What factors made it so difficult for me to know this before? (Add in your own questions here.) This is an opportunity for you to explore your relationship to critical thought, truth, and understanding. We encourage you to dig deeply and share your observations by telling a story that challenges all of us.
Continue reading THM’s Contest introduction, and other updates, at:
UPDATE 2023-01-23
JOPRO Director Jesse Parent on being a Honest Storytelling Challenge judge:
It’s been inspiring, hands-down. The act of creating story-artifacts, these objects in the world that offer others to have points of interface, out of our inner experiences and thoughts - it always feels good to be able to celebrate such. If you have community around the process, and establish that it’s OK to talk about the harder things; this feels deeply human. I hope the Storytelling Contest has created a specific call-to-action in writing these artistic generations, but even more so, is one more breeze of encouragement that we can make spaces for everyone’s stories to be heard. Writing stories, sharing and celebrating the meaning of our thoughts and experiences — that has to be a super power that we have, which we have the fortune of cultivating, with and for each other.
Stay tuned, as winners should be announced this week!
www.thehonestmajority.org