I began as a child fibber but soon realized that I was less interested in telling lies than I was in improving the truth...
Storytelling is my life’s work. From the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota to the Great Wall of China, from Belfast, Northern Ireland, to PS 122 in NYC, and at Fringe Festivals across America, I’ve explored the power of narrative and the beauty of poetry to illuminate what it is to be human and why it matters.
I told my first formal story in First Grade to the disapproval of Sister Mary Margaret and have been at it more or less nonstop since then. For the last 45 years I have been an innovative professional storyteller creating, collecting, coaching, directing, performing, producing, teaching and writing about stories - traditional and personal, funny, scary, erotic or poetic - to audiences of all ages in urban and rural settings. I tell the life I live frequently, artfully, and truthfully.
I am a published author of six books including the critically acclaimed, "Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories" (co-authored with Elizabeth Ellis) on the value and necessity of stories that are hard to hear and harder to tell, a poetic memoir “A Breviary for the Lost” and “What Haunts Us” winner of the 2020 Midwest Book Award for “Sci-Fi, Fantasy Horror and Paranormal Fiction.
I was a 1998 Bush Foundation Leadership Fellow, the recipient of a 2016 National Storytelling Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2020, founded the American School of Storytelling.
“To those of us with both feet firmly planted within the storytelling world, Loren is seen as both a hugely gifted storyteller and also one of the performance art form's master teachers.”
—Howard Lieberman,
Performance Artist
Mitterand's Last Meal,
a story I told in Red Oak, California in 2011