About
The Story Oracle
Narrative Resonance, Intelligence, and Repair
Co-Founder & CEO, Saved By Story Publishing
Increasing connection. Maximizing meaning. Accelerating results.
Amanda Johnson...
…has spent almost three decades answering one question: How does one help an individual develop the sight and skills to illuminate, challenge, explore, process, repair, and eventually share a story that will transform anyone who hears, reads, or watches it?
The classic books program set the stage: Story shapes identity, culture, and civilization.
The high school history classroom illuminated the need: disconnection, depression, and disempowerment compounded by addiction loops inside and broken systems (and hopeless humans) outside.
The social-emotional literacy rooms for teens offered a glimpse of how narratives get repaired in communal storytelling spaces.
The manuscripts of high-performing authors crackled with unprocessed pain and unfulfilled purpose.
The immersive writing retreats provided the platform for her to refine her understanding, skills, and approach.
The day all three of the pillars — Narrative Resonance, Narrative Intelligence, and Narrative Repair — were included and optimized, her clients’ eyes sparkled with a knowing: This was a faster, simpler, and WAY MORE ENJOYABLE path to Narrative Resilience AND achieving their goals.
Books were written in half the time, but with more power.
Marriages and relationships with children mended.
Careers and relationships that held the old narratives in place were shed.
True identities and missions were exposed and embraced.
Dormant dreams were activated and accelerated.
Today, she is the co-founder and CEO of Saved By Story Publishing, where she helps other experts and storytellers uncover, organize, and transmute their own “elixir” into books, signature talks, and curricula that carry their message into the world, and repair their stories in the process.
She is also the author of Upside-Down Mommy and Upside-Down Messenger, and co-author of You Can’t Make This St*ry Up (2022) and Raised by Story (2025).
This Oracle doesn’t arrive with prescribed outcomes or one-size-fits-all formulas. She brings almost three decades of seeing and skill-building and creates a narrative adventure, activating the dormant storytelling superpowers in participants, giving them a glimpse of what they could do with their one great and precious story.
Hi, I'm Amanda...
The first story I ever consciously saw myself in was The Matrix: “Ouch, I’m also waking up from a matrix, and it hurts like hell to see the truth.”
The next was The Lord of the Rings — the first time I remember inviting a friend into a question with me, right there in the theater: why do I feel this way?
I didn’t have a name for what I’d just experienced, but I do now.
It’s called Narrative Resonance — looking at a story, any story, and wondering what it’s showing you about your own.
Story became a path of personal growth, inviting me to develop the social-emotional literacy that the adults in my life didn’t have or know how to communicate.
And good thing.
By the time my son was born, my personal narrative was paralyzing my body and making it impossible for me to do much more with him than watch and discuss movies and cartoons.
Story shifted from a path of personal growth to my sneaky superpower as a parent. Mindfully walking millions of miles in characters’ shoes cultivated his critical thinking and moral character, and it gave me the simplest and most fun way to stay connected to my introverted son’s internal world and help him navigate the external one.
About the same time I realized asking him to write a short story could reveal even more content that would help me support him, I was also beginning to help aspiring authors and it became impossible to ignore the fact that developing storytelling skills gave individuals of all ages access to more truth than they could see and articulate out loud, and then enabled them to process traumas and tragedies that had shaped their identities.
I didn’t have the term Narrative Intelligence yet, but it was accelerating insight, growth, and healing for myself and everyone around me.
I know the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and even financial costs of not understanding the story you’re living — I’ve done it — and I know what it’s like to play a vital character in everyone else’s story and wonder if you’ve lost the thread of your own.
I also have suffered the hard culture, productivity, and revenue costs of not using these storytelling skills with team members, vendors, and clients.
But learning to view real and fictional stories, characters, and plot twists through the eyes of a storyteller has developed the type of inner and outer resilience I didn’t believe was possible thirty years ago.
The same skills I now share are what helped me heal my own narrative, restore my marriage and physical health, and raise a high-performing and happy son.
And when I began to incorporate them organizationally, I witnessed Narrative Repair at a whole new and necessary level.
I’m married to my high-school soulmate. I’m in business with my son, Aaron — my favorite fellow storylover, co-author of Raised by Story, and business partner at Saved By Story Publishing — and my youngest sister, who’s been part of this story since before I had language for any of it.
All of it is more meaningful, even when it’s messy, because story is my first language, my favorite medicine, and always the most powerful invitation to a deeper connection with myself, the people I love and lead, and my life’s mission.
That moment in the movie theater eventually became three practices I still work from today:
- Narrative Resonance — wondering what every story reveals and informs about your own
- Narrative Intelligence — the page as the place where seeing your story turns into changing it
- Narrative Repair — because real repair happens in relationship, and building the rooms where it can happen in community turned out to be as important as any of the tools themselves
All of this is alive and well at Saved By Story Publishing, where I work with my team to help other experts and storytellers discover what I did: that the story you’re most afraid to look at is usually the one that holds all the power for real transformation, for you and for whoever eventually reads, hears, or watches it.
And now, through The Story Oracle, these concepts and experiences are being infused into other domains that need renewal: education, mental health, etc.
My Journey
Mapped with More Details
I believe every story — the ones around you and the one you’re living — is worth a deeper look, and that most people (yes, you and the people you love and lead) are one honest question away from noticing they’re holding a pen they didn’t know they had.
