Patrick R. Dunn
Founder of Vianarra, a hospitality storytelling practice for wineries, boutique hotels, and independent restaurants.
It started with a group of strangers and forty seconds
An interpretive ranger learns early that the talk is not the job. The job is the forty seconds before it, when you read the people standing in front of you and work out what they came for. A family with tired children needs a different walk than four retired geologists. Same trail, same rock, different story, and the ranger who runs the same script either way loses the room by the second stop.
I did that for more than a decade across six National Park Service sites, and it is still the thing I teach.
A tasting room at four o'clock on a Saturday is a group of strangers and forty seconds. Most staff are handed a script instead of a way to read the room.
The craft came before the uniform. I studied narrative at the University of Maine, where a story was treated as work with standards rather than a marketing device. I took fiction with Stephen King and folklore with Edward “Sandy” Ives, who became a mentor.
Thirty years of holding a standard under pressure
Between the parks and the wine came three decades running global business continuity and operational resilience teams for Broadridge, One Call, Donyati, NNIT and Gilead Sciences, and Cognizant. Crisis rooms across four continents, through 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Sandy.
The work was unglamorous and specific. Triage. Redundancy. The 3 a.m. decision made with incomplete information and no room to take it back. What that teaches is what happens to a standard when the pressure comes on, and which parts of a system quietly stop working when nobody is watching.
A busy tasting room is a smaller version of the same problem. The standard holds on a quiet Tuesday. The question is whether it holds at four o'clock on a Saturday in October.
Wine
WSET Level 3 certified.
Parks
More than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger across six sites.
Crisis
Thirty years leading global operational resilience through 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Sandy.
Narrative
Training under Stephen King and Sandy Ives at the University of Maine. Author of Stop Leading on Empty.
Three-time NCAA Division I All-American. First-generation college graduate from West Gardiner, Maine. Son of a WWII veteran who survived the Battle of the Bulge as a prisoner of war. Lifetime Rotarian. Based in Sparks, Nevada.
Speaking
Conference sessions and association programs on hospitality storytelling, interpretation, and what holds up under pressure. Hospitality and wine trade conferences, tourism bureaus, hospitality associations, and parks and recreation.
Reading the Room Before You Speak to It
The interpretive method taken out of the parks and put in front of a hospitality audience. How to read a group before speaking to it, when to step in, when to leave a table alone, and why a memorized script fails exactly when the room gets busy. The room itself is the working example.
Who Rescues the Rescuer
Thirty years of crisis work, and what happens to the people who run toward it. Drawn from Stop Leading on Empty. Booked for the Ohio Parks and Recreation Association's MPRA session, February 9, 2027.
Both adapt to a program's theme. Half-day and full-day formats where a program wants members working rather than listening. Fee depends on format, audience, and travel. Travel is reimbursed. A signed agreement is standard.
Stop Leading on Empty
Stop Leading on Empty was published by Archway, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in April 2026. It is a book about leading when the energy is gone and the expectations have not moved, drawn from the crisis years rather than from theory.
Pour Story is in development.
Start with a conversation
Thirty minutes on your property's story and where the gap seems to be.
patrick@vianarra.com · +1 (650) 418-0507