ABSTRACT
Qualitative researchers are storytellers. There are many ways to tell a story. Biographers, autobiographers, autoethnographers, life historians, and oral historians all engage in the process of storytelling through life writing. Our opening premise for this book is that storytelling matters; it matters to individuals, it matters to cultures and subcultures, and it matters to our individual and collective beings as we engage our imagination about past, present, and future human experiences. Critical approaches to all of these forms of life writing require certain preconditions for storytelling; namely, that the storyteller be mindful of the powerful agency vested in the meaning-making storyteller, who must also understand that they are a story-creator first before they are a storyteller. The motivations qualitative researchers have for creating stories, the tools life writers use, and the various containers and vessels they shape to hold and transport these stories are worthy of continued examination.
