Archives for category: Storytellers

The youngest storytellers

June 15, 2011 //

Start them young. Fill their heads with stories, and children will have the guideposts they need to find their way through life’s labyrinth. I remember meeting a young storyteller when I was touring American military schools in Germany. Her family was housing me during my stay in the community. I’m sure the six-year-old girl expected a magical being to get off the train. Instead, what she saw was a middle-aged, quite ordinary woman. Her face fell.

The two mothers who met me, along with the disappointed six-year-old, found a café in the city’s central square. We ordered lunch and sat talking about the storytelling performances I would be doing next day. The child was silent, watching me speculatively.

Lunch came, and I could see the little girl was shivering. I offered her some of my hot soup. That seemed to thaw things between us. She blurted out, “Would you like to hear a story?”

Encouraged by my enthusiastic reply, she began to tell a folktale with complete absorption and consummate skill. Thrilled with the responses of three admiring adults, she told another and then another. After several stories, her mother asked her where she had learned the stories.

Turned out her babysitter read folktales to her, and the girl learned them by heart. Her mother was astonished, as the child had never told her the stories. I was astonished because she was the most accomplished young storyteller I had ever met.

The two children in the videos were considerably younger when these stories were recorded. The little guy in the first video is off to a strong start. Hats off to his mother, who’s nurturing her child’s natural love of words, ideas, and stories. (You can check out her videos on WillowWeathers’s YouTube Channel.)

The second is young Capucine, the French storyteller who became something of a YouTube sensation with her charming storytelling. This video version takes the original story and turns it into a production, with Capucine’s storytelling woven through it.

Tags child storytellers, children as storytellers

Categories Storytellers, Storytelling in schools, The art of storytelling

Engraved on my heart

December 30, 2010 //

Sometimes a casual remark is a boulder in our river. Our lives bump up against it and are rerouted. If we’re lucky, it sends us off in a good direction instead of a dead end. I have Jay O’Callahan to thank for five words that helped set me firmly on a new Story Route. I carried those five words in my heart and pulled them out whenever I needed a boost.

At the time, I was still pretty new to storytelling. I’d stumbled into it in Rochester, New York, while trying to figure out how to survive as an elementary school librarian. A five-year-old had taught me how entrancing storytelling could be.

Then I discovered there was a local storytelling guild. Ann Gibson, who worked for the Rochester Public Library, invited me to join. I think the others were a bit leery at first since they were a group with serious intent, and I was a newbie. But my enthusiasm overcame their understandable initial uncertainty.

They introduced me to a magical world. I caught the storytelling bug so badly that when Rafe Martin told me he was going to be offering storytelling performances in his book store, I blurted out, “I’m a storyteller. Can I tell stories here?”

I don’t kid myself. The only thing Rafe had to judge my storytelling by was my penchant for buying armloads of books. Hard to turn down a good customer. So I joined the storytelling scene at his book store and loved every minute of it.

When my husband decided to accept a job at the University of Washington, I began weighing my options. I wanted to throw myself into storytelling full time, but I was afraid.

The storytelling guild held a farewell gathering, and I picked a new story to be my pièce de résistance, the tale no one would forget. It bombed (or so I thought), but I was still burning with a desire to launch myself into what felt like a calling.

Between the end of school and the big cross-country move, I traveled to the beating heart of American storytelling, Jonesborough, Tennessee. The annual storytelling conference was being held at Washington College Academy, seven miles west of Jonesborough.

Some of the stars in the burgeoning storytelling movement were scheduled to be instructors at the conference. The one whose work I was most drawn to was Jay O’Callahan. I was determined to learn everything he was willing to share.

Photo of Linda and Jay O'Callahan, taken in Marshfield, Massachussetts in 1988

I participated in every workshop he gave and signed up for any critique session he was offering. Looking back, I’m sure I was the eager puppy, following him around with my tail wagging, desperate for a pat on the head.

He gave me more than that. Jay’s the sort who listens with the kind of attention that opens people like flowers. Toward the end of the conference, we sat chatting about storytelling. I told him of my upcoming move. He asked what my plans were.

I was afraid to tell him I was burning with the desire to be a storyteller – a real storyteller, performing and giving workshops and making a difference through stories. I remember stumbling uncertainly, muttering something about maybe doing some writing, about not being sure.

That’s when he gave me the five-word gift I carried like a shining star. “You can always tell stories,” he said.

He’d heard me tell four or five stories, not enough to offer the endorsement I heard. But I took that sentence and turned it into a talisman. I moved to Seattle, announced to the world I was A Storyteller, became an active part of the Seattle Storytellers Guild, and threw myself into the work of my dreams.

Lord Mayor of Belfast, Nigel Dodds, on the left, Northern Ireland storyteller Liz Weir on the right, Cathryn in the middle - taken during a 1988 storytelling tour set up by Liz

I had no idea just how interesting that work was going to be nor in what unexpected directions it would take me. I’d have followed that dream whether or not I’d met Jay. But he gave me a talisman for the journey, and that made an enormous difference.

We all carry words in our souls. The best ones to keep are those that give us a boost. For years now I’ve had a file of them on my computer. My “nice words” folder holds the particularly encouraging or complimentary things people have written to and about me. They’re for times when I’m judging myself far more harshly than anyone else ever has.

“You can always tell stories” isn’t in the folder. It doesn’t have to be. It’s engraved on my heart.

Tags International Storytelling Center, Jay O'Callahan, NAPPS National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling

Categories Healing power of stories, Memoir, Storytellers, The importance of storytelling

Remembering Spencer Shaw

June 21, 2010 //

News came today, via another of storytelling’s greats, Margaret Read MacDonald, that Spencer Shaw has gone to the big storytelling circle in the sky.

I quickly turned to YouTube to see if anyone had posted a video of this consummate gentleman and talented storyteller and found a two-part interview from the University of Washington.

It was in a UW classroom that I first met Spencer Shaw. He was teaching a children’s literature class. I was studying to become a school librarian.

He was the first person to introduce me to storytelling as a modern craft and as one of the best tools in the kit bag of any school librarian. With whatever starting words he began a story—”once upon a time”…”once there was…”—Spencer was transformed. His eyes sparkled. His always stately speech became conspiratorial, inviting us into the fun.

During one of my visits to Seattle, during my brief stint as an elementary school librarian, I asked him why children wanted to hear the same story again and again.

His answer is still the best I’ve heard. “It’s because the children know what’s coming, but the characters don’t.”

A tribute to Professor Emeritus Spencer Shaw can be found on the UW’s Information School Web site.

Part 2 of the interview:

Tags Storytellers

Categories Memoir, Storytellers

Remembering Doc McConnell

June 16, 2010 //

When Doc McConnell died on August 16, 2008, part of the beating heart of storytelling grew still. Only a week before, he had taken the stage at the National Storytelling Conference to the cheers and applause of a standing ovation. Though he had been ill, as soon as he began to spin the first tale, all weariness and sickness fell away.

And then he was gone. The stories that had rolled off his tongue in an unbroken stream, the Old Medicine Show he had performed for over thirty years, all died with him. Others will tell the stories, but none will be Doc.

I first met Doc when I attended my first National Storytelling Festival. I had been newly elected to the Advisory Committee of NAPPS (the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling, which morphed into the National Storytelling Association). But I had never attended the organization’s premier event, the annual festival.

Featured storytellers were met at the airport in Johnson City, Tennessee. Everyone else made her own way. But neither I nor the inexperienced teller I had met at the airport knew the rules. So when we saw a sign that read, “Storytellers”, we aimed for it.

Doc didn’t have the heart to tell us we were on our own. So he and a friend loaded us into his car and drove us the festival grounds in Jonesborough. They knew storytelling innocents when they saw them and spun stories for their open-mouthed audience during the entire drive from Johnson City.

Doc was dumbstruck when he learned I was on the board but had never been to a festival, but he recovered quickly. And neither he nor his comrade made the slightest hint they were making an extra round trip, just to accommodate two newbies.

No one has ever made me feel more welcome than he did that day. Some of his signature stories, such as the “Snake-Bit Hoe Handle”, still stick with me. But nothing sticks with me more than the memory of the southern gentleman who was so kind to this newly minted storyteller.

A video can’t capture the warmth and humour of Doc McConnell, but this telling of Mr. Fox and the Bumblebee at least gives some of his down-home style.