by Burt Berlowe

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The epiphany came to me 40 years ago amidst the flashing neon, echoing chants, and quiet drizzle of a historic Times Square afternoon. In that powerful moment, as I marched with people from around the country who had come together to walk their antiwar talk, I moved from interested spectator to active participant in the peace movement.

In the days that followed, that transformative moment became story. I put on paper what I had observed, experienced, and felt, and imagined what might be the stories of the others who rode on the bus, camped in the church, and marched through downtown New York in an awesome display of commitment and purpose. Thousands of compelling stories were unfolding that day, and I wished I could somehow know them all and tell them to a larger world. Although I didn’t label it as such at the time, I was yearning to be a story carrier.

As a longtime journalist my mission has always been to find people’s stories and, through the written word, carry them from private places in the human soul into the public domain. The stories have been many and varied—but the message has always been the same: stories are anywhere and everywhere, waiting to be discovered and set free.

As I increasingly focused on writing about political, community, and social activism, I realized more and more that stories can and do change the world. They can motivate both the teller and the listener (or reader) to move from thought and concern to action—to leave the sidelines and get into the game.

It wasn’t until the turn of this century that all these revelations about storytelling came together with my coauthorship of The Compassionate Rebel Revolution: Energized by Anger, Motivated by Love, a creative nonfiction book that contains 50 stories of everyday heroes. With the publication of that book, the authors coined the term “story carrier” to describe how we were carrying the previously private stories to the public stage. The recently published second book in this series, The Compassionate Rebel Revolution: Ordinary People Changing the World, features 58 additional stories.

The stories our featured compassionate rebels tell are dramatic, riveting, and inspiring. They place intimate personal biography within the context of critical and timely political and/or social issue and the larger compassionate rebel movement. They are provocative examples of overcoming adversity, resisting the status quo, and finding ways to have a positive impact on society.

For instance, Jodie Evans, a well-known peace movement pioneer and founder of the insurgent women’s group Code Pink, barely survived being born. Lynn Hoelzel overcame a lifelong battle with mental illness by discovering an ability to make people laugh. Muriel Simmons, plagued by medical ailments and family dysfunction, led efforts to turn around a crime-infested neighborhood with the help of a snow cone machine. Sami Rasouli gave up a prosperous business in Minneapolis to promote peacemaking in his war-torn home country of Iraq. Diane Knobel spent months delivering needed supplies to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The list goes on.

As we have interviewed people for our books, conducted storytelling sessions, and interacted with people in our community, we have come to believe that everyone has a compassionate rebel story waiting to be released and that those stories can empower and transform us individually and communally.

Uncovering someone’s personal story requires the patience to listen and probe, the ability to find the tastiest nuggets in the smorgasbord of experiences, and the skill to edit and condense them into final form. It also means accepting the awesome, potentially precarious responsibility that someone, often a stranger, has placed his or her life’s journey in your hands and entrusted you to treat it with the utmost care. At the same time, the rewards of doing this work are enormous. You will have the satisfaction of becoming intimately acquainted with fascinating people and knowing that you helped them tell the story they have been yearning to tell. You will also open new vistas in your own life, reconnecting with your epiphany moment and finding ways to turn it into action.

Within the next few months, coauthor Rebecca Janke and I plan to expand our role as story carriers by embarking on a storytelling tour that will take us to faith communities, schools, community centers, and other venues, sometimes hand in hand with our featured compassionate rebels.

Along the way, we hope to jog a few memories, find some new stories, and change the world—one person, one story at a time.

Burt Berlowe is an award-winning author and journalist specializing in writing the stories of ordinary people involved in social change. He has published seven books, including two in the Compassionate Rebel series. To get your copy of one or both Compassionate Rebel books, to schedule a storytelling session, or for other information on this project, contact Burt Berlowe at 612-722-1504, bberlowe@comcast.net or Rebecca Janke at 651-214-8282, peace@umn.edu, or go to humanrightsandpeacestore.org.