“I have spent decades finding the most effective and efficient ways to teach storytelling – so that you will succeed as quickly and easily as possible.”
~Doug Lipman, Storydynamics.com
Doug Lipman
12-23-1946 to 12-26-2025
Doug Lipman, a notable storyteller who touched countless lives over his 79 years, passed away on December 26, 2025. His passing has sparked an outpouring of love and grief from storytellers worldwide. Doug’s impact on my life is profound. I vividly remember attending a workshop with him in the early 2000s. Years later, he returned to ETSU to teach an extraordinary summer institute on his unique approach to coaching. Additionally, I used Doug’s practical and effective text, Improving Your Storytelling. in my graduate-level Foundations of Storytelling course for several years. His influence has undoubtedly shaped my journey as a teacher and storyteller.
Before his remarkable career as a storyteller, Doug was a folksinger. His path to storytelling was serendipitous, mirroring the journey of many storytellers during the early days of the storytelling revival. As documented in Joseph Sobol’s book, The Storytellers’ Journey: An American Revival, Doug was teaching in a private school where the children who were bused in arrived early. One morning, when the assistant principal was absent and the teachers were unsure of how to keep the kids occupied until classes began, Doug had an idea. Since the assistant principal was known for his storytelling, Doug decided to take on the same role.
He recounted a Jack tale he heard Ray Hicks tell on a recording the previous night. The children were captivated by his storytelling. Shortly after that, Doug made a bold decision to bill himself as a storyteller who sings songs, rather than a singer who tells stories. His career took off, and he continued to inspire and entertain audiences for years to come.
Doug Lipman’s life and contributions to the storytelling community are truly unforgettable. His stories, spanning Hasidic traditions and other folk traditions, have touched many people. His respectful , teller-centered coaching techniques have transformed lives. Through his books, Storytelling Tips, newsletters, website, and recordings, he shared his expertise with the world. Doug was instrumental in shaping NAPPS, which is now known as NSN. He served on the board, actively participated in conferences and supported the online auction by generously donating his time as a coach. In 2017, Doug Lipman was awarded the NSN ORACLE Lifetime Achievement Award, a well-deserved recognition for a life well-lived and a career that will continue to have a lasting impact on our community for years to come.
By: Delanna Reed, Past NSN Chair
Jay O’Callahan
Thoughts on Doug…
Doug and I were friends for about fifty years. We worked on scores of stories. We ran workshops. We traveled to Venice together. He was a great help when I had a theatre run in Boston.
During one period of working together I would drive from Marshfield up to Doug’s office in Medford arriving at 7am to avoid the traffic. Our mornings started walking along the railroad tracks to have breakfast at SoundBites. I felt like we were Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Just going to breakfast was an adventure. Once our breakfast was ordered Doug would ask me for a New and Good. He wanted to know about something new in my life but also something positive. That got us
off to a good start.
New and Good would lift our spirits. That was a lively and positive
way to begin every time we met in person or on zoom. He had a
wonderful sense of humor and brought that out in me and others. New and Good was opening an invisible door. A chance to look at what had been happening. I will miss that.
When I was working on new long stories, Doug’s comments helped the story grow. “Do you want just what is working? Do you want to hear suggestions?” I wanted both but needed the positive comments first to give me confidence that there was a story there. This always led to a discovery. “That is the perfect word.” If he said that, that word stayed. He would talk about character, place and time. These are the essentials to makes a story.
For all our years together, I had a brilliant friend who was interested in what made stories come alive. His sense of the structure of a story was better than anyone I ever met. The two of us were wrestling for fifty years to help each story come alive. And it all worked because we loved and trusted one another.
An incredible gift.
Joseph Sobol
Remembering Doug…
In 1983, I attended my first National Storytelling Festival. I heard Jackie Torrence tell a story that I immediately went back home and told the next weekend, as one did in those innocent, pre-etiquette days. I heard Jay O’Callahan do his bravura one-man play “The Herring Shed;” had my first life-shaping experience of Ray Hicks telling Jack tales; witnessed Laura Simms bringing her lightning-flash timing to fairy tales; saw Connie and Barbara’s adorable cousin routines.
But the telling that moved me most of all that weekend was Doug Lipman’s version of “Two Souls” from Meyer Levin’s collection of Hasidic tales. It was so emotionally transparent and spiritually imminent that the end left me bathed in tears of forgiveness and reunion. It was exactly the story I needed to hear. Tents were small in those days, and I was able to stand in the receiving line afterwards, to take Doug’s hand and look into his eyes with my own overflowing. He gave me a look that I saw often as the years went by—a paradoxical gaze of total conviction mingled with wide-eyed incredulity at the miracle of what he had to share.
That paradox of belief and astonishment suffused his storytelling masterpiece, “The Soul of Hope,” a hugely ambitious extended work that wove the legendary biography of the founder of the Hasidic movement, the Baal Shem Tov, into a mythic theogony of storytelling itself. Doug was a great storyteller in my view, but one whose esoteric interests put him a little aslant to the popular storytelling frame. Which made him an ideal outsider insider for me—whenever I needed clear insight and a clear narrative of what had happened and was happening in the storytelling world, whether artistically, critically, or politically, Doug was my first and most trusted call.
He found his most consistent success as a storytelling coach, helping clients to articulate and actualize their own goals and self-direction. In that line, his influence on his own and the next generation of storytelling performers and practitioners who had the privilege of working with him was enormous. But his authority as a coach came from his sheer talent as a teller, one who was willing to sacrifice the spotlight in order to provide that light to others.
I’ve been feeling the imminence of his departure a lot these past few days, with a mixture of sadness and surrender to the transitions taking place in the web of the world. The other night I woke from a dream in which Doug was telling a story directly to me, in answer to my persistent dismay and confusion about the state of things—telling me a story that was exactly what I needed to hear, and telling it with that same characteristic look of paradoxical conviction and incredulity at the miracle of creation, sustaining that expression even on the verge of his own departure from this plane.
Be borne on wings of wonder, my friend. Thanks for the miracles.
Doug’s Videos – Books
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