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 40 years I have been an innovative professional storyteller creating, collecting, coaching, directing, performing and teaching 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 the award winning "The New Book of Plots" on the use of narratives in oral and written forms and the co-author with Elizabeth Ellis of the critically acclaimed, "Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories" on the value and necessity of stories that are hard to hear and harder to tell.
I was a 1998 Bush Foundation Leadership Fellow and the recipient of a 2016 National Storytelling Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
“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