Get Started

My Story

Threading the moments of our lives

Good storytelling begins with listening.

Good storytelling begins with listening.

Good storytelling begins with listening.

My name is Beth McNichol.

My family used to say that I was born a writer. I wasn’t, of course.

I was born a listener.

I was quiet, and my relatives were witty. So, I listened. Their words were hard one minute, soft the next, and I listened. Their clever turns-of-phrase were spun from the mountains we called home, deep from their hardships and joys, cackling and crying and sighing and singing.

Inflection and dialogue, pauses and pivots, speed and rhythm, subtle emotions … I learned the heartbeat of storytelling before I learned how to write. Without that pulse, words are just loose beads scattered on a surface. With it, they slide and groove on a thread of movement and joy, growth and poignancy. They mean something.

I’ve been a fact-checker, a copy editor, a news reporter and a magazine editor. I’ve interviewed hall-of-fame sports figures, Army generals, members of Congress, scientists, CEOs, schoolteachers and statisticians. I’ve published poetry and essays and works of memoir. I’ve written for big organizations and local news and small nonprofits. Along the way, these stories have received multiple honors from writing and editing peers.

But the constant string in my career, from sports writing to magazine writing to creative writing, has been the desire to listen, to better understand and appreciate what it means to be human.

I believe in storytelling because I believe in us.

All of us.

Most of us are never asked—really asked—about our lives, about what matters to us and why. About the failures that shaped us and the loves that made us and the struggles that could not break us no matter their persistence. About our leaps of faith and distance and ambition. Most of us are never invited to reflect. Often, we believe that we have nothing interesting to say.

I have never once found this to be true.

We are endlessly fascinating, terribly complicated, beautifully flawed, radiantly messy people who climb out of bed every day looking for meaning and trusting we'll find it.

I began Voice & Vellum because listening to people from all walks of life share what they know—these tales of perspective and growth and worlds of wonder that appear like fireflies around them, decoding the depths of human experience—is what has helped give my life meaning, through good times and bad. It's what I trust.

I began it because I want everyone to trust that their stories matter, to share them for themselves, their families, and future generations.

I have never once found this to be true.

We are endlessly fascinating, terribly complicated, beautifully flawed, radiantly messy people who climb out of bed every day looking for meaning and trusting we'll find it.

I began it because I want everyone to trust that their stories matter, to share them for themselves, their families, and future generations.

This is what I believe: If you’ve lived a life on this planet—if you’ve loved or labored, grown or gained, lost your way only to discover a better way—you have a story inside you worth telling.

The story of you as a couple, the stories of your parents, the story of your career … all the stories you want to suspend in amber deserve to be told with care, by someone who believes in them as much as you do.

They deserve to be told like this.