Mother Lode: Digging For Meaning in Life Stories

By Jackie Plimmer Bayer

One of the hardest concepts to get across to my students in the Life Stories class I taught this past winter, was the distinction between an anecdote and a story.

An anecdote is a tale we tell people we don’t know very well. It stays at the surface and focuses on the who, what, where and when, like a newspaper report of something that happened to us.

A story, on the other hand, contains all the elements of an anecdote, but it goes deeper into the meaning and i...