The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Once upon a time there was a young girl who wandered in search of a very specific story. She looked in bookstores and couldn't find it. She walked through library stacks but never found it. Finally, she went to the storyteller himself. He was sitting in a park, waiting for her. He seemed eager to help. But when she asked, he said he had never heard such a story.

"But you wrote it!" said the girl. "It had a grandfather and a granddaughter who were fishing on a lake in a blue boat."

"That doesn't sound like any of the stories I've ever written," the storyteller said.

So the storyteller ruffled through a stack of his hundreds of stories. As he flipped through, pictures of pink and orange and blue and red people streamed by. Some looked like monsters. Others grimaced like mad clowns. But they all — every one of them — looked like they were having a fine time indeed.

"Stop! That's it!" the girl yelled. "That's the one."

It was her story all right. But there was no grandfather, no granddaughter. There was no lake, no fishing, and no blue boat. The storyteller and the girl laughed at the strangeness of it — but really, these things aren't all that uncommon, are they?

At least that's how the storyteller tells it. Brian Andreas remembers this scene occurring one summer at an arts festival in Baltimore over a decade ago, but many people who visit the workshop of the storyteller and artist in Decorah, Iowa have this same kind of encounter. They are fans looking for a specific story that has touched them. But they get their facts wrong. The details are all off. What they have done is imprint their own lives on his stories.

In 1993, Andreas created a collaborative art company in Decorah, Iowa to produce a line of contemporary craft products based on these highly adaptable stories. He called it the Story People. The heart of his business remains the stories themselves, which have been published in six slim, paperback volumes, but the Story People produces a multi-million-dollar line of art products that includes furniture, sculpture, and prints populated by strange and otherworldly creatures that are rearing their heads at almost two dozen galleries across Minnesota.

Stories are everywhere. Increasingly, they flood consumer culture in the form of advertisements presented in narrative form. Corporations and organizations are tapping into the power of story to transform lives, or at least to embed themselves in your mind. And though he knows he has as much to gain as anyone else from the entrepreneurial use of story, Brian Andreas finds something wrong with the way corporations harness the elements of story to sell us more stuff.

"It's like the sorcerer's apprentice," Andreas said. "They don't really know what they are playing with."

But that is exactly what Andreas has done. He sells these stories in the form of prints, or stamped on sculptures made of recycled barn wood, to a growing base of collectors of American craft art, and to a cult-like following of fans who appreciate his view of life as a string of funny and odd moments. Others gravitate to the illustrations, which seem not a rendering of the stories, but an extension of them.

"Brian has this way of writing that connects to the soul of people," said Matthew Johnson, an artist and friend of Andreas who has worked in the Story People sculpture studio for 14 years. "His stories are open enough to touch anyone who reads them."

At its basest, what Brian Andreas does is the same feat of alchemical wordsmithing that card companies have been trying to accomplish for decades. He taps into what ties us to each other in fewer words than it takes to introduce two friends. But the product that emerges from that connection is infinitely less cheesy.

Technically speaking, what Andreas writes are not stories, at least not in the classical sense. They rarely feature conflicts — unless you consider trying to get an old man off a couch major drama. At roughly 30 words or less, they are too short to be a short story, or even flash fiction or nanofiction. They present anecdotes from Andreas's life cast in the warm glow of his writing voice, which is wise and conversational, like an old friend passing time on a front porch swing. If they are anything to be pinned down, they are prose poems — slightly irreverent, deceptively wise, and impish at their core.

The Trickster Tale

Andreas and his family no longer live in Decorah. After a series of cross-country moves where they traded the comfort and safety of a small town in the Midwest with the far less frozen climes of California, they have now settled in Santa Barbara. But he returns often to the business he founded in 1993 to bounce ideas off his collaborators — 23 employees in all — many of whom have stuck with him since the company's earliest days, More recently, he has come back to launch the international gallery expansion of the Story People.

He sleeps in a converted loft above the graphics studio when he is in town. The space is huge, with unfinished wooden steps, steep, leading to the top. A sleigh bed and a giant white sofa sit at the front of the apartment, facing Water Street, Decorah's main thoroughfare. Lots of artwork from around the world, some from a little closer, some originals of his own, line the walls.

Sitting at the kitchen's island, Andreas pulls out his iPhone and starts pinching away at pictures of his new, pre-fab eco-home designed by hot West Coast green designer and architect Michelle Kaufmann. The family was featured on the first episode of Green Home on HGTV in early December, 2007.

"People are finally coming around to going green not being a marketing strategy — it's necessary to live on the planet."

The Story People is not the only art Andreas creates — but it is the one thing he does that hits the mainstream. He sees the Story People in part as a means to fuel his other artistic work, which currently includes video work and artist collaboration with the Santa Barbara-based Fishbone Collective. From the look of his digs in Decorah and Santa Barbara, the story business is booming.

"With the Story People, I think, this accessible, this makes sense," Andreas says. "In the theater, if an actor doesn't connect with his audience, he can walk away. I don't know why people don't expect that from the visual arts."

Andreas is slim with a medium build. In black clothing and with a neatly trimmed grey moustache, he is stylish, but with an air of benevolence, like the European jet set's Captain Kangeroo. He says his highest goal for the Story People has always been getting the stories out in the world, and that's a mantra his employees echo. Though many of the works produced at the Story People workshops bear the phrase "Enter the World of Brian Andreas and the Story People," he insists the whole project isn't about him, but the power of story as a means to transform lives.

The story he has chose for his own life is that of the trickster tale. In Native American mythology, the trickster tale introduced us to a meek, unassuming character who calls upon his wits and bravery to defeat a larger, more powerful enemy. Often, it becomes impossible to take anything Andreas says seriously, for he can say pretty outlandish things. He feels no need to be seen as serious, credible or even intelligent. That has never driven him. But there is a logic to his zaniness — one that is wrapped up in how he sees his personality interacting with the world.

"I am committed the way you make a choice to commit to a character on stage," Andreas said. "I'm totally committed to whatever I am saying at the moment, but do I believe it? Andreas asks. "I believed it when I said it."

That can make for a frustrating business culture.

"At the Story People, every single thing is up for discussion every day," says Annette Laitenen, who handles sales and has worked in the sculpture studio.

Consider the case of the commissioned Brian Andreas story. Andreas used to take commissions fairly often, but hasn't done such a story for two years — since the last time a client mistook his storytelling impetus for ad copy. He took on a commission to write a story and delivered one that he said was gorgeous, one that struck all the right notes: wry humor, moving sentiment, and a story circling into itself. But the client wanted a bowl of keys in the story. Couldn't he just put a bowl of keys in the story? Since that would make the story more specific to us, the client said.

"The Story was perfect as it was," Andreas said. "If I'm in that mode now, I'll do commissioned work, but if I'm writing love stories to [his wife] Ellen, I'm writing love stories to Ellen."

What he will do is donates already completed stories to causes or give them to humanitarian organizations. His commitment to using his work to commemorate the tragedies of the past decade — 9/11, the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina — has made him a go-to guy for charitable art commissions. If he writes a story that fits with a cause, he'll donate it, without reservation.

But he doesn't take requests.

Lost in Translation

This year, the Story People added around 100 international galleries to its roster of 400 U.S. galleries that sell the whole line of Story People products. The global expansion also involved the translation of scores of Andreas's stories into Swedish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese.

Andreas knows the sticky work of translation well. He is fluent in Italian and can read the Romance languages. He even penned a story that gets at the baffling inconsistencies between languages and thus, between people: "There are some days when no matter what I say it feels like I'm far away in another country & whoever is doing the translating has had far too much to drink."

The project opened up maddening translation issues. Case in point: there is no word in Swedish that captures the subtleties of "imagination" — no word that evokes the active reverie of imagining that the English word has.

"It won't be the same story when we translate it," Andreas said. "It will be the perfect story for that language, a thing in itself."

Andreas worked individually with the translators and hired them based on whether they "got it" — what the stories are meant to do. But he did butt heads with some of the translators. The Spanish translator wanted to make the stories more formal, more literary for to write in the vernacular would be considered scandalous. It tends to devalue the writer, she said. He kept returning them to her, telling her, write as people speak. Exasperated, she finally threw the finished translations on the table in a huff, disgusted.

"We had to capture what it's like to be human — not what it's like to be a prize-winning author," Andreas said.

Something similar had happened once with the Story People blacksmith, who worked in the sculpture studio for several years creating handles for the company's line of furniture. He would come in with these beautiful hand-forged handles, they were so perfect they looked like they were made by a machine.

"I said Andrew, these need to look more beaten up," Andreas said.
And he kept coming back. And they kept not being beat up enough. Finally the blacksmith came in, disgusted, and threw them on the table.
"They were wretched, with hammer markings and everything," Andreas said. "They were perfect."

There was even more at stake in entering a new market than language — the simplest questions of how people live, such as what size artwork Europeans put on their walls. Some Americanisms — Jello, for example — just didn't translate. But going global seems the only possible step for the company, which regularly turns down new galleries so as not to create competition for established ones. It would be easy to read something larger into the expansion — a message of good will emanating from the heart of America.

"What I really want is world domination," Andreas said, lifting an eyebrow as if in a challenge.

The Story People Story

The Story People welcome interruption at the company's three studios in Decorah, a town of 8,000 in the northeastern bluff region of Iowa, just over the Minnesota border. The sculpture studio sits on Water Street across from the historic Hotel Winneshiek, on a street lined with mom and pop shops, a food co-op, a stand-alone J.C. Penney, old timey drugstores, and tourist shops hawking Norwegian arts and crafts. Decorah's a town where the creative class kept its Main Street free from most chain stores.

Inside the sculpture studio, it looks like a child's paint set exploded. Four people sit at work spaces and toil at various stages of the sculptures. Lori Lechtenberg — the studio facilitator and Story People artist for 13 years — copies stories on sculptures with a rubber stamp. Some visitors wander through the doors, see people working, and turn back, embarrassed. Others simply walk up to the desks and strike up conversations with the artists. Sometimes, they come asking for a story.

The studios present themselves as a free creative space where artist spend their days enacting Andreas's vision. But the air changes when the artist returns to Decorah. He's zany, but his will is absolute.
"Brian is very particular about the faces on the sculptures," says Annette Laitenen, referring to the spooky black and white faces that grace many of the sculptures. "He'll come back to the studios and do a face-painting workshop with the artists if they're not perfect."

"The faces are very important," Andreas said, his voice getting tense. When he was a child growing up in Chicago, Andreas used to walk past a neighborhood White Castle and look at the people eating inside. The foggy windows obscured the peoples' faces, but he could still discern their expressions.

"The faces are about the moment when a human face becomes recognizable as a face," Andreas said.

The Stories

Brian Andreas's most popular story by far — on all continents where Story People now have a presence — is a 24-word story called "Kindred Spirits." It's like a love note left on the kitchen table.

"You're the strangest person I ever met, she said, & I said you too & we decided we'd know each other a long time." The Story People's top 20 stories are all so warm and fuzzy.

"I actually prefer the arch stories," Andreas said, speaking about the other kind of story he writes, such as the one in which he envisions peace as a smelly modern dance performed by animals watching where they put their feet. Or the one where a plumber digging around in some muck finds the soul of a former tenant.

But what Andreas's marketing team calls the "sentimental stories" are the ones that really sell.

"There is an opening up to them," Andreas said. "I don't think there is a word on this planet for what they really do."

Story People stories, Andreas says, attract people whose minds make connections that their mouths never articulate.

"People are making these kinds of leaps all the time. If you get them, you already think that way."

The Story People website has become a sounding board for all of these people to meet and respond to the stories. They are people who spent their college years learning about the world, only to find themselves stuck in offices all day. They are women who left their controlling husbands after four decades of marriage. They are parents dumbfounded by the universal boy trait of making engine noises. They come to philosophize, laugh, cry. The most extreme of them type in all capital letters.

And that's what accounts for the large presence of the Story People in Minneapolis and St. Paul, where over a dozen galleries carry the work, and elsewhere. The stories masquerade as lighthearted, but they are like mantras, philosophy in action. The word "whimsical" gets thrown around the Story People studios and shops where the pieces are sold. That word masks a misunderstanding of what Andreas is doing - the tendency of people to write off anything uplifting and curious to whimsy, a throw-away for the children's bedroom. Andreas prefers to see them as "resonant," as that word better describes the way the stories tap into how people think and which articulate the things that never get said.

"I always think, isn't it funny you guys! — look how weird the mind is," Andreas said.