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 th
ink 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.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply