Your five minutes of fame

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This article was published 13/01/2025 (594 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A 100-year-old war vet and a gym teacher walk into the Royal Albert Arms.

One tells a moving story about landing on Juno Beach on D-Day. The other about strange things she’s confiscated from her students.

Guess which story turns out to be more NSFW?

Both are participants in the Winnipeg Story Slam, a new monthly-ish competition organized by professional MC, consultant and reporter Nicole Dubé, who is perhaps most recognizable to Winnipeggers for her 10-year tenure as a CTV anchor.

Storytellers at the Winnipeg Story Slam get five minutes onstage to share their response to each event’s thematic story prompt. The presentations are judged by volunteers from the audience and the winner receives a cash prize. The series began in October and the next instalment takes place Tuesday Jan. 14, the theme of which is “blank slate.”

“It’s friendly competition because how do you pit someone’s death story against someone’s drinking of raw chicken juice story?” says Dubé.

“So, the scores are always friendly and super high, but there’s something to be said for someone who really takes time to craft a five-minute story.”

Dubé hopes her events will provide a fun and enriching counterpoint to our polarized, media-oversaturated moment — where face-to-face storytelling between diverse strangers happens less frequently.

“In a world of so much division, what a beautiful thing to remember that when you’re in-person and you meet someone, you know nothing else about them but one story,” she says.

“We’ve had several newcomers to Canada from Ukraine and war-torn areas who got onstage and shared. It doesn’t matter what our backgrounds are. They’ve lived through something and I can understand what it is to have heartache.”

The Winnipeg Story Slam is a new chapter in Dubé’s career. She landed her first job at the Hamilton Spectator when she was 18 and went on to work newsrooms at Global News, TSN and Sun News before joining CTV about a decade ago.

Over this time, she interviewed everyone from prime ministers to Hollywood celebrities. From 2016 to 2023, she was one of the first people Winnipeggers saw every morning as host of CTV Morning Live.

In the late spring of 2023, after about 20 years working in newsrooms, Dubé left CTV to launch Dubé Media, which specializes in media training, public relations and consulting.

She describes the Winnipeg Story Slam as a passion project, but believes it has legs.

Dubé draws inspiration from The Moth, which hosts storytelling slams and open mic shows all over the United States. Recordings of some of these events are curated into podcasts, radio episodes and YouTube clips. They tend to feel like shorter, more personal (and less corporate) TED Talks.

In a similar vein, Dubé hopes that one day soon Story Slam stories may be recorded and shared online as podcasts or shorts — as something more substantial and personable than most Instagram reels and TikToks.

She’s also been in talks with story slams organized elsewhere in Canada, such as in Vancouver and Edmonton, about possible future collaborations.

However the project evolves, Dubé says the series is inspired by the same passions that got her into journalism.

“I think there’s something that’s innate in us that wants to do storytelling,” she says.

“We truly are more alike than we are different and oral storytelling is just one way that we can connect.”

You can learn more about this event series through @winnipegstoryslam on Instagram.

conrad.sweatman@freepress.mb.ca