FIVE REASONS WHY I LIKE STORYTELLING

By Don Herald of Peterborough Storytellers

REASON 1: STORYTELLING EXPANDS MY COMFORT ZONE

Five years ago when I first began attending Peterborough Storytellers, I was no stranger to telling stories. I did it as part of my job. I did it with family and friends. And occasionally I would try out a quick story idea with the nice, but bored lady at my local Tim’s drive-through window. If you asked, my wife and kids would say that I rarely met a crowd or audience that I didn’t like and if you handed me a live microphone, well it was performance time!

At my first ever gathering of storytellers, I went along as the interested but curious guest of a relative. It was held in the auditorium of the local library and about ten or twelve other people were already there. Chairs were arranged in a semi-circle around another chair that was facing the circle. On a colourful swatch of fabric spread out in front of the chair was a ‘talking stick’. Tradition in storytelling circles is that the teller of the moment holds the stick as a symbol that they have been given the authority by the listeners to talk without interruption.

That evening several of the more experienced members of the group told tales they had adapted or taken directly from myths, folk lore or legends. I was impressed with how each of these women crafted their story, performing it with much energy and enthusiasm. Everyone, myself included, was drawn into the stories in powerful and often unexpected ways. I just had to be part of this night, so unexpectedly I found myself picking up the talking stick and sharing a personal story from my time as a social worker. I was hooked. From then until now, I have held the stick at just about every gathering.

My local tellers perform their stories not only with words but drum, flute, harp, song, masks and amazing character voices. I realized that if I was going to do well at this new activity, I had to get far more disciplined about my preparation and delivery. I had to invite both helpful and critical comments from my more experience group members. I should take a storytelling course or two. I must plan to attend other telling events with fresh tellers that I didn’t spend time with on a regular basis. Instead of reading only what my wife somewhat sarcastically calls ‘Who Shot The President’ type books, I must make room for books, articles and videos on the art of storytelling by some of the best author-tellers in the US and here in Canada. It was all going to be a new and I admit, strange and unfamiliar type of oral storytelling for me.

I have been at it now for five years. I’m a reasonably good teller but I know I could become even better with more focused learning and practice. Yes, I sometimes feel awkward within my new storytelling comfort zone, but I think that’s as it should be.

REASON 2: STORYTELLERS ARE INTERESTING PEOPLE

People have always fascinated me. Everyone has a story to tell and over the years as a social worker and consultant I’ve heard many. All the way from the totally weird, gross and disgusting to exhilarating, marvelous and inspiring tales from folks I don’t really know at all to the intimate sharing with my family and friends.

I think that being a collector of stories about the human condition is one of the reasons I became a counsellor, educator and consultant. I worked hard at it for over forty-three years. When my kids were teenagers, they often warned their friends who would meet me for the first time, “Watch out when you meet my Dad. The next thing you know, you’ll be telling him stuff that you’d never tell anyone else!”  

Being a good listener, someone who listens with both head and heart, just seems to come naturally for me. I treasure many of the personal life stories that were freely shared with me over the years. It’s from that vast storehouse of shared stories that I create most of the ones that I now tell at storytelling gatherings.

As a listener and a teller, attending these events has introduced me to many others who share a passionate interest in the art of storytelling. Through the shared experience of listening to a well told story by a person I have never met before, I’m openly invited into their private world of experiences, thoughts and opinions. Tragic stuff. Totally funny stuff. Odd stuff. Deeply felt experiences that are often unfamiliar to me personally. But through what they choose to share in the story, I begin to gain a new appreciation or helpful understanding that I would likely have never had if not for this special moment with them.

In my limited but growing experience, the men and women who enjoy telling tales in front of public audiences, equally enjoy talking about their own journeys of self-discovery through telling and listening. While each story is unique, they all share the qualities of passion and excitement, sometimes wonder and often a burning desire to have meaningful, unspoken conversations with those that listen to their stories.

Several summers ago, I spent a leisurely afternoon in the cool shade of an aging barn, sharing favourite tales with tellers from slightly afar, most of whom I had never met before. As often happens, each teller preceded his or her story with an interesting anecdote about the story’s origins and usually what this story means to them personally. During dinner, I moved from person to person, asking about their story or telling them how their tale had connected with me. Even though I was the most inexperienced of the dozen or so tellers at this gathering, some enthusiastically offered encouragement and helpful insights about my stories and performance.

In October of 2012, I spent three days immersing myself in the many varied telling events at the 40th anniversary celebration of the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Unbelievably, twelve thousand enthusiastic storytelling fans made their annual pilgrimage from all over the continent to listen to well told tales from all genres performed by some of North America’s best and beloved tellers.

But it was the listeners from whom I leaned the most. Before or after presentations, spontaneous conversations would begin among strangers. Usually it started with an opinion about the story, the performance or the artist but then quickly moved into the sharing of personal experiences of telling and listening.

I remember talking with a recently retired locomotive driver who had been a cop before that. He had stopped me in the street outside a performance tent about an experience he had as a cop in the mid-west. In a personal story that I had told in a Slam competition earlier, a cop character triggered a memory he wanted to share with me. 

With noticeable emotion, he told me of growing up in a Home for Boys from an early age. But since retiring a year ago, he was now avidly pursuing storytelling as a retirement activity that he hoped someday to turn into his third career. He shared some incredible stories of the men and women with whom he worked on the railroad and a few of the perils facing crews. I think he will make a compelling and passionate teller.

Or how about my conversation with an elderly woman sitting behind me in a huge tent where two thousand fans had gathered for a performance? Like me, she was waiting for the next performance to begin. She was in a flamboyant, granola-girl meets Bette Midler style dress with striking jewelry accessories.

We struck up a conversation and I quickly learned that she herself had been a teller at the Festival for many years but now she came just as a listener. She appeared to be in precarious health and so I cautiously asked her if she was still telling stories. “Why, my oh yes, young man. In fact next month I am doing a one woman show that I wrote to celebrate my time as a teller and growing up as a woman in the mountains.” 

With these words, her entire presence seemed to take on a glow of energy.  She sat taller and her blue eyes sparkled with the pleasure and anticipation of it all. A snippet of a marvellous life story only hinted there in a tent. And it had all started with a casual encounter!

Looking at me intently, she asked how long I had been coming to Jonesborough. I replied that this was my first time and in fact I was telling a story in the Slam competition later in the day. With this news, she smiled and offered me helpful words of encouragement while wishing me well in future storytelling projects. Her kind, supportive words made me feel as if now I was really part of a much larger community of storytellers that reached well beyond my local group in Ontario. We shook hands warmly just as the performance began. It was only months later that I learned this woman was one of the true legends of oral storytelling in all of America. I regret that I didn’t talk with her more.

So, the next time you attend a storytelling event, look around you. Find someone who you would like to know more about. Then go over, introduce yourself and ask. I guarantee that you will indeed meet an interesting person. And better still, you will both be richer for the conversation.

REASON 3: STORYTELLING AWAKENS MY CREATIVE SIDE

The stories that I like to tell are not usually from myths, legends or folk tales. I prefer stories about the human condition that are drawn from my personal and work experiences. As a social worker for many years, I have been privy to situations that often show people at their very worst, in periods of great emotional stress, living with the consequences of decisions that usually have not worked out too well for them. At the other end of the scale, I been privileged to witness instances of great joy, triumph and love which provided me with reassuring evidence of the strength of the human heart, spirit and intellect.  

All of these experiences provide what master teller and author Jay O’Callahan calls ‘nuggets of pure gold’. It’s these very nuggets that through my stories, I try to hold up for the examination and personal reflection by my listeners.

As I said earlier, I always enjoy telling stories. My stories have made people laugh, cry, gasp in surprise, nod their heads in recognition, pause and reflect. Oftentimes they would say to me,  “You know that reminds me of a story…”. While I also like to write about such things, most of the time I am more comfortable telling than writing about it. But over the years I never thought of myself as a true ‘teller of tales’.

Until I discovered Peterborough Storytellers. Ever since my very first, unrehearsed, spontaneously told anecdote, awkwardly holding the talking stick, my relationship to stories told and listened to has changed forever.

Now I find myself listening much more carefully in conversations with family, friends and co-workers. I catch myself trying to listen in on the chatter going on around me in restaurants, the movie theatre, gym, barber shop, service centre rest room or on the street. I am always hunting for an interesting anecdote or fragment of whispered gossip, a unique phrase or word, a voice tone or body gesture that I can turn into a story. Some days I fear that I am becoming a tidbit junkie, deliberately hanging out in places where I just might get my ultimate fix for a potentially great told or written story.

Since I retired several years ago, I have more time now to examine my ‘story collection’. I can decide what anecdote goes on display to the public through my telling or writing or what will remain hidden away on either my computer’s hard drive or in my memory. But my recent experience with storytellers is that some of the hidden tales will be re-discovered later, polished up and brought out front for everyone to experience in their own way.

Performing and telling stories that are based in real life events has forced me to start writing them down before I tell them. I write short stories several times a week about life events that I think others would enjoy reading about. So far, almost a hundred tales have made it onto a personal story blog that I created several years ago. I enjoyed writing these tales so much that I volunteered to curate a Tales and Tips blog for the Peterborough Storytellers where most likely you are now reading this essay. The more I write, re-write and then tweak a story just one more time, the more I am learning how to be a better craftsman of structure, situation, character and story lines. I know this would never have happened if I had not discovered storytelling.

Taking a written story and re-shaping it into a version suitable for telling has given me more focus and discipline as a teller. Watching and learning from a live audience reacting to my stories has led to unexpected insights into elements of the plot that listeners are connecting with which in turn sends me back to the written version to tweak it some more. Once done, I bring it back again to another audience and the shaping process starts again.

For me, another benefit of storytelling is that the very act of telling feeds the hidden actor in my nature. Many years ago, impulsively acting on a whim, I auditioned for a part in a community theatre production. To my surprise, I got a good part in the play. But I significantly under estimated how hard it would be for me to learn the lines exactly as the author wrote them. I was truly terrible at learning lines! It was three months of maximum stress. I am certain my obvious struggling gave the Director and his crew many sleepless nights! It all worked out well in the end but I took a solemn vow after our last show that I would never again go on the stage.

But now with storytelling, I find myself back on a stage of sorts. Skilled tellers are also performers, assuming the roles and personalities, voice and gestures of their story’s characters. Watching and listening to them, gives me an aspirational goal to work toward. My creative side is getting a work out and once again I am back on the stage. That’s a cool thing for me.

Most everyone has their special, creative moments that sustain them from week to week, month to month, year to year. Right now, it’s the art of storytelling and listening that does it for me. What about you? What about giving storytelling a try to set free your creative Self?

REASON 4: STORYTELLING IS A LOT OF FUN

Can you imagine two thousand fans sitting under a big top tent listening to a professional storyteller sharing imaginative stories of turning his old Jeep into a sailboat cruising down the highway or three boys at Halloween scaring themselves silly while lost in a cornfield maze? All of this delivered in a down home, ‘aw shucks’ country style delivery while wearing a baseball cap at a jaunty angle, looking just like your neighbour or the fellah you buy apples from at his farmyard stand every fall!

I was in the tent that morning and joined in the rolling waves of laughter that went on and on for a full hour. When it was all over, there was a standing ovation that lasted as long as your average tv commercial. I haven’t had so much fun at a storytelling gathering in a long time.

Later the same day, two professional tellers, reunited after many years as solo performers, tell a wonderful collection of their own stories and others they have adapted from folk lore, a children’s book and real tales told to them by strangers and friends. Many years ago, these two women pooled their life savings, bought a beat up, old yellow Datsun camper and hit the road for many years, stopping in small towns all across America telling their stories, sharpening their craft and in the process collecting material for future stories from folks they met along the way.

In their reunion performance, it was magical to see the story characters taking shape before our eyes, each with a unique voice sharing their stories of life, love won and lost, domestic abuse, difficult parents and a child’s primal fear of the monster under his bed. Once again, it was an audience of many hundreds of fans held spellbound by the women’s stories and performances. Each of us connected in some unique way with the poignant moments being shared on the stage while marveling at the chemistry that still exists many years later between these two tellers. A different kind of telling to be sure but just as much fun to be engaged in as it was with the fellow in the ball cap.

A local woman enjoys a folk tale so much, she decides to make a Coyote mask out of paper mache, cloth and yarn. She learns the story and then sits down in mask and performs a story so absorbing in content and theatre, you find yourself imagining trotting alongside Coyote and sharing in his adventures. Thirty minutes later, when she removes the mask, it takes several racing heartbeats to shake yourself free from Coyote, return to the telling circle and realize you have just experienced a master teller at her best. If your definition of having fun is being caught up in the power of a story well told and performed, you realize you have just experienced it at its finest.

Or how about the time that I was telling a real life story of an elderly man, recently widowed and grieving mightily, who turns to what has always given him deep pleasure and calms his troubled spirit… re-building a rock wall, stone by stone, day after day, dawn until dark. His teenage grandson, drawn to the aura of loneliness, silently joins the old man on the wall and they work quietly together. Hushed conversation sometimes passes between them and it is obvious to the distant observer that each is getting from the other as much as what each is giving to the other.

When I tell that story, I can see and feel that the listeners are connecting with it. Some smile at the images the story is painting while others turn inward, perhaps to revive a personal memory long buried but now re-awakened. Many wonder who the elderly man and his grandson really are. Are they only a creation of my imagination? The unspoken question remains unanswered as I set the talking stick back into its waiting place and quietly move back to my chair in the circle. My fun is  that magical moment of sharing a poignant moment in the lives of two individuals while experiencing my listeners hearing and seeing the story unfold so movingly in their imagination.

Moments like these four vignettes are many in storytelling. At the end of such performances I find myself thinking that this is what storytelling at its best is all about. Fun can wear many faces it seems.

REASON 5: STORYTELLING IGNITES MY IMAGINATION

Writing this essay has helped focus my thoughts about what, for me, are the key elements that combine to make storytelling and listening such an exciting and challenging hobby. Without much effort, I teased out and wrote about the first four reasons. But number five was not coming easily. I decided to just let everything slosh around unorganized in my consciousness for a few weeks. From previous experience, I knew that a valuable insight that I could share would eventually float to the surface.

In March 2012, I facilitated an ‘Awakening Our Imagination’ mini-workshop at Peterborough Storytellers. As part of the program, I projected randomly themed photographs onto a large screen that I hoped most members of the audience could relate to in some way. With each picture I asked this simple question: What’s the story you would tell about this picture?

The responses were immediate as folks excitedly volunteered their perceived ‘story’ as they imagined it being represented in the picture. Every photo elicited several quite different story lines. There was a high octane flow of creative energy let loose in our group that was enjoyable and stimulating. We were all having a good time, telling spontaneous stories filled with humour, sensitivity and best of all, the products of very rich and even, some would say, ‘overactive’ imaginations!

Recalling that evening, I knew what my fifth reason just had to be. Imagination. Not just the plain old, every day, garden variety kind of imagination but imagination that is ignited in our souls and burns hot with energy, brilliance and creativity. Fostered by the nudging of the slide images, I not only saw imagination bursting forth but I felt it deeply too. So many of us that night were emotionally moved at the demonstrated power of individual and collective imagination ignited by both the visual and told stories.

Told stories don’t usually come with a You Tube video playing silently in the background. Yes, sometimes there is music and movement, changing voices and moods in the story, but for the most part, it’s just a told story performed well with just enough detail of plot, location, character and take away messages, that our imagination gets a full workout. Imagination has a wonderful way of filling in the details unbidden.

I was listening to a well told story recently. Unexpectedly, I had a mental image that all the teller was really doing was just putting random dots on a blank page for me and encouraging me to connect them in any way that I felt made sense to me. And just for fun, the teller would sneak in a few more dots on the page when I wasn’t looking, creating even more possibilities for the story picture I was drawing in my mind!

Often popular told stories are about cultures, characters, countries, traditions and beliefs that I am unfamiliar with. My imagination adds the details, the colour and the subtle meanings into the story line whenever my mind sees the message ‘insert imagination here’.

What I love about telling stories is that I get the opportunity each and every time to set my imagination free and put my own vocal brush strokes of colour, form and feelings to it. As I said before, my imagination gets ignited by telling stories and I experience great delight in it all.

What I love about listening to told stories, is discovering how my unfettered imagination always enriches a story, sharpens the performance, and flirts with my gut reaction to the total experience.

On August 7, 2012, I posted a short reflection about Imagination on our Tales and Tips blog. I’d like to end this essay with some lines from it because they still sum up my continuing relationship with imagination through storytelling.

‘Imagination is part of the software that is always running in the back of our daily lives. Without it, our lives would be mostly black and white images. Our dreams are playgrounds for our imagination.’

December 6, 2014

This essay is a revised version of a series of posts to Tales And Tips in November of 2012.

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MAGIC REALISM

MAGIC REALISM – HOW WRITING FICTION HAS ALLOWED ME TO SPEAK IN THE MAGIC REALITY OF THE OLD STORIES

By Rita Grimaldi

In the spring of 2014, after living in my country house for 21 years, I decided to move to town so I needed to sell my house. In April, the house was listed and I was required to be out of the house during the real estate visits.

One day, sitting in my car waiting for a real estate visit to be over, I began to invent a story. It was based on the truth of needing to sell my house. It had a fictional heroine and being fiction, my story was able to freely slide into magic realms. Here is the story.

ANNIE’S TROUBLES

Broom had a role to play. It was sold at the hardware store under the advertising slogan:

SWEEP AWAY YOUR TROUBLES, USE THE EASY BROOM

Annie stood looking at the slogan. She was thinking about her troubles. She needed to sell her house. And after that she needed to be strong enough to pack up all her stuff and move. How could Easy Broom help her to do that? But the cost was only $19.95. She decided to risk the investment.  So she bought the broom, put it into her car and began to drive home. In the car, Annie could feel Easy Broom’s presence.

“This is silly”, she thought, “Brooms don’t have a presence.”

At home, Annie stood Easy Broom in the corner of the kitchen. It was late, so after watching some TV, Annie had her bath and went to bed.

       

In the night Easy Broom awoke. It began to sweep the house. It found corners seldom seen and cleaned them. It swept between the floors. It swept above the roof and under the basement. Then near dawn, Easy Broom came into the living room. There on top of an old box, on top of an old table, it saw a wind up bird music box. As Easy Broom watched, the bird slowly began to rotate. As the bird turned, the spring in the music box wound CLICK, CLICK, CLICK. Then the bird began to turn back and to sing the song of its heart.

“Love look at the two of us,

Love look at the two of us.”

Easy Broom listened.

Easy Broom understood.

It understood that that was how Annie’s house would be sold. A buyer would sing this song about the land and the house on it. A buyer would hold this place in his or her heart.

Now it was morning and Easy Broom had done what it could. It went back to its corner.

       

Annie awoke. She went downstairs to the kitchen. She saw Easy Broom. She thought, “ Well that broom cannot sweep my troubles away. There goes $19.95.” She picked up Easy Broom and put it in the closet with the other cleaning stuff. Then she went into the living room. She sat in a chair to look out the big window at the grass and trees.

After a bit, she turned her head back into the room. Her eyes fell on the wind up bird music box. It was on top of the old box on top of the old table. She walked over to the bird and rotated it to wind its spring. The spring sounded CLICK, CLICK, CLICK. Then Annie released the bird and it began to turn back and to sing the song of its heart.

“Love look at the two of us,

Love look at the two of us.”

Annie listened.

Annie understood.

She understood that that was how her house would be sold. A buyer would sing this song about the land and the house on it. A buyer would hold this house and this land in his of her heart. “Yes such a buyer would be found”, Annie said to herself.

Then she dressed, ate her breakfast and drove to town. She had a 9AM meeting with her real estate agent. The agent had an offer for her to look at. The agent had told her that the man in the couple making the offer really liked the land.

“If not this man then some other would come along,” thought Annie.

The land was beautiful. The house was beautiful. Someone would sing about his or her bond of love with it and then part of her troubles will be swept away.

 

**************************************************

Now, even though I have moved to town, I continue to write Annie stories. I have six of them now.

I want to tell them at storytelling but somehow I don’t know how to tell them. Perhaps this is because in some way they are not totally my stories. They half belong to some other place and to some other person – Annie. In the rational part of me, I realize that this is not true but still it feels true. Even so the stories give me wisdom and comfort. They are leading me someplace and at present I am content to follow them to their destination.

Nov 17, 2014

ANNIE AND THE HALLOWEEN STORYTELLING NIGHT 2014

By Rita Grimaldi

Preface

Annie is a fictional character. She explores truth by way of fiction. The Peterborough Storytellers’ October storytelling gathering did happen just as Annie describes it.

The Story

In the early morning, Annie woke up. Uke her cat had jumped onto her bed and was purring. Uke always started her day this way. Always purring in the morning. Annie began to think about the storytelling meeting the night before.

Robert had done the program. He had advertised it as a night of ‘creepy scary stories’. After a tiny introduction, he began to tell stories. His first two stories where not like the usual fairy and folk tales in which the hero always triumphs. These stories both ended badly for the hero.

First, Robert told a Roald Dahl story called ‘Pig’. This story ended with the hero being slaughtered like a pig himself. Then he told a Dickens’ story in which the hero is chopped into pieces and ends up being put into a meat pie and eaten.

Annie thought about the other stories told last night. In fact, many of these stories ended badly for the heroes. In the Duppy tale – Rita’s story – the little boy hero explodes at the end of the story. In Peter’s story, the woman heroine is forced into a coffin with the ancient Egyptian king.

Annie was thinking about the audience which consisted of twenty people including one child about ten years old. It seemed to Annie that the audience felt the ends of these stories deep in their guts. They felt the unpleasant demise of the heroes in a personal way – with shock and maybe even loathing. But also in some way, the audience as a group, as one being, accepted the creepy horror of these stories.

Betty introduced her story by reporting a child’s comment when she told it at the children’s storytelling session at the library last year. After telling her story, she asked the children if the story had been too scary. One child answered “No, because we know it’s only a story.” 

Nowadays, the world has horrible endings for some heroes. Heroes are decapitated and cut into pieces. The pictures end up on the evening news. These are not only stories. They are true happenings.

Still, Annie felt that the creepy scary stories help us to cope with the horrible, true happenings on the nightly news. The audience’s feelings of fear, surprise, discomfort and loathing gave the deep and perhaps unconscious gift of truth.

And that truth was that in life here on this planet the hero sometimes loses.

Creepy scary things sometime happen to a hero and when they do, all of us feel creepy scary and loathing about these things. We feel this way together.

Maybe that is what Halloween storytelling is all about. Looking into the window of this truth.

INSIGHTS INTO CHOOSING AND TELLING A PERSONAL STORY

By Don Herald

PART ONE

At the April, 2014 meeting of Peterborough Storytellers, I facilitated a workshop discussion on one aspect of personal storytelling. To help guide the discussion, I provided the twenty-two participants with a list of fourteen key elements that appear to be important in choosing, preparing and telling a personal story. I put this list together after doing some research on-line, from storytelling publications I have in my library and my own experience in telling personal stories in a variety of tell-around settings.

Below is my list of the key elements.

A GOOD PERSONAL STORY…

·         Is one that you really love and so you love to tell it to others.

·         Is not so personal that it’s embarrassing to you or to identifiable others.

·         Is perfect for your audience’s interest while appealing to individual curiousity.

·         Conveys a strong sense of truth, sincerity and authenticity to the listener.

·         Has a clear beginning, middle and end.

·         Has ‘good bones’: a strong skeletal structure, plot direction and purpose.

·         Has well-defined character(s) that can be human, animal or machine.

·         Has some kind of trouble or conflict that is encountered by the main character(s).

·         Has an understandable resolution to the conflict.

·         Has a ‘hook’ at the beginning that grabs the listener’s attention.

·         Encourages a relationship between the characters and the listener.

·         Has an ‘ah ha’ moment or opportunity for personal growth or  change.

·         Creates vivid, memorable images in the mind of the listener.

·         Moves the listener in some way during the telling. Or stimulates thinking about the story afterward.

I asked each participant to think about their own experience in telling or listening to personal stories and choose four of the above elements that they felt were the most important to them as a teller of and/or listener to personal stories. Each person recorded their selections on a chart and the following five elements were the most selected.

• ·         Moves the listener in some way during the telling. Or stimulates thinking about the story afterward.
• ·         Creates vivid, memorable images in the mind of the listener.
• ·         Has a clear beginning, middle and end.
• ·         Conveys a strong sense of truth, sincerity and authenticity in the listener.
• ·         Has some kind of trouble or conflict that is encountered by the main character(s).

I provided a short, personal commentary for each of the most important key elements that the group had selected and then invited comments. And what a rich, insightful and lively discussion it was! It seems that everyone has opinions and ideas about the telling of personal stories, whether they enjoy just listening to the stories or telling them.

In Part Two, I will share some of the ideas that came out of our discussion of the five key elements and a couple of additional topics that also stimulated interest about the choosing and telling of personal stories.

Don can be contacted at peterboroughstorytellers@cogeco.ca

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FEEDBACK FROM A STORYTELLING WORKSHOP

By Betty Bennett

In late February, I attended a storytelling workshop in Kitchener-Waterloo with one of the other Peterborough storytellers.  The workshop was led by Gail Fricker, in partnership with the Baden Storytellers Guild.  It was an excellent workshop with a great deal of useful information and skill-building presented in a well-planned format.

 

Gail came to storytelling from a theatrical background, and went on to pursue a Master’s degree in storytelling arts, so her perspective is very interesting and insightful, especially on the interface between acting and storytelling.

  

The morning started with a brief mixer exercise, and then Gail told the story of “The Lion’s Three Whiskers” in the first person, using gesture, song, and a suggestion of accent to set the scene and establish the narrative character.  When she finished, there was discussion about what we had observed and about the point at which storytelling slips across the line into theatre.

 

Before the break, Gail told fragments of two other stories, again in the first person.   Once more, she used a specific gesture to help set the story in its context – not too much, and not too little.  She also discussed the use of props and how to avoid stepping over the line from storytelling into theatre when using them.

After the break, we divided into groups of two or three to work on the beginning of a story that we had brought with us, the idea being that we would transpose it into the first person from the third to make it more immediate.  Of course, we had already absorbed several useful lessons from Gail, but the learning didn’t stop there.

I found it very helpful to have input from other storytellers who had never heard me tell before.  When we meet in our own local group, we become accustomed to each others’ style of telling, and sometimes we overlook subtle ways in which we could make our storytelling even better.

 

It was also very interesting to hear the types of stories being shaped and shared.  One teller was working on an oral narrative to commemorate a significant anniversary of her church.  Another was developing an oral storytelling performance around several events in local history.  The specific story was about the demise of the local cinema/ playhouse from the perspective of the last owners.  A third teller was shifting the perspective of a Welsh legend from the third to the first person in preparation for World Storytelling Day.  I learned almost as much from the other workshop participants, as I did from Gail.  It was a most worthwhile morning.

 

In the last half hour of the workshop, we re-gathered and some of us told the beginning of the story we were working on.  Again, the feedback was very helpful.  For instance, I learned that too many gestures can be quite distracting, while no gestures at all can flatten the telling.  As a chronic hand-flapper, I found that insight very useful – make the gesture serve a purpose.

On the morning of June 7, 2014, the Peterborough Storytellers will be hosting our first storytelling workshop, Our History is in Our Stories with guest facilitator, Jim Blake from nearby Haliburton, Ontario.

Jim writes, “One of the best ways to make history come alive is through the telling of stories. We can list facts, rhyme off dates, look at artefacts and identify the locations where things happened; but it is the stories about the people and the events that really capture our interest. Since we usually don’t have a record of what people said or what they were thinking it takes a creative mind to make these stories come alive.”

Jim continues. “This workshop focuses on how we can use bits and pieces from the past and, with some research and imagination, turn them into compelling stories about our local history. Sometimes these stories are best told in the first person and other times in the third person. We will also look at these and other aspects of historically-based storytelling.”

The interesting thing to me is that many of the skills involved in telling local history apply just as much to telling personal stories and family history.  And once again, shifting the point of view can make a well-known folktale or fairy tale, fresh and newly-engaging. 

What I have learned from the workshops that I have attended is that there is always something new to learn, and often a different direction to take the skills already acquired, and, of course, there is no substitute for exchanging ideas with other storytellers.

You can contact Betty at peterboroughstorytellers@cogeco.ca

WHY STORYTELLERS TALK TO THEMSELVES

By Dan Yashinsky

Don’t be alarmed. In the months leading up to the annual Toronto Storytelling Festival, you may see more than the usual number of your fellow citizens walking around Toronto talking to themselves. This isn’t a sign of the spread of handless phone technology, or a phenomenon with public health implications. More likely, these are storytellers rehearsing for an upcoming session.

This tendency to talk to ourselves is one of the job hazards of storytelling. I do it all the time, sometimes on long walks through my neighbourhood ravines, sometimes riding my bike to work, and sometimes – although I always feel I should be especially discreet in public places – on the busiest sidewalks. A high collar on my parka helps, or a scarf I can mutter into without attracting attention. I also rehearse in my car, and have often seen alarmed drivers give me a particularly wide berth as they pass me on the 401 (or, if I’m working on an exciting passage, as I pass them).

It can get embarrassing. I was once trying to learn “The Princess and the Pea”. It’s short, but the devil to memorize. As I was walking by the Brunswick Tavern in a heavy fog one night, I yelled out, “But she must be a real princess!” A surprised woman walked by, shaking her head at my outburst and wondering what kind of princess-loving idiot had just gotten stewed at the Brunnie.

I also get in trouble when I’m going over my lines for “The Miller’s Tale,” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Many years ago, in a burst of literary enthusiasm (and inspired by the greatest Chaucer teacher in the world) I memorized the whole  thing, all six hundred lines of rhyming Middle English couplets.

 I’ve recited it many times since, usually to an audience of one: myself. My ride to work usually covers about a hundred lines – say from when Absolon kisses Alisoun’s behind (“Abak he sterte, and thought it was amyss, for wel he wiste a woman hath no berd; he felt a thying al rough, and longe yherd…”) to the part when Nicholas, her lover, sticks his tush out the window in the dead of night and blows one directly into the hapless Absolon’s face. 

It’s fun for me but strange for the bystanders who hear a guy on a bike chanting Middle English lyrics such as: “This Nicholas let flee a far as grete as it had been a thonderdent, that with the strook he (i.e., Absolon, the fartee) was almost yblent (blinded).”

Students don’t seem to learn poetry by heart any more, let alone folk tales and fairy tales. I think that’s a shame, not because I think they should be forced to declaim verse in public, but because it’s an eminently useful thing to know poetry and stories in your head.

For one thing, you always have to have a quote ready for any occasion. My friend, Belfast-raised Canadian storyteller Alice Kane, knew thousands of poems, hymns, plays, and stories. Whenever she saw me, she chanted a verse from a Presbyterian hymn: “Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone, Dare to have purpose firm, and Dare to make it known!” And whenever I, more than forty years younger, kvetched about my life, she’d always come out with her favourite Irish saying: ‘Tis a poor heart that never rejoices’.

A community needs word keepers, people who can keep stories and poems from being forgotten.

We’ve been called many things over the centuries: bards, troubadours, Irish shanachies, African griots, tradition-bearers, First Nation elders, yarnspinners, myth tellers, purveyors of bull manure, or just plain storytellers.

Our purpose has always been to keep alive the words, ephemeral and powerful at the same time, that can be so easily lost in the rush and distraction of everyday life. Especially our everyday lives, here in the early years of the twenty-first century, when we can hoard massive quantities of data but forget our ancestral tales, and when we’re only now discovering that we can’t double-click on wisdom.

So if you see someone walk by muttering and gesticulating, they just might be rehearsing a story, or, if it’s me, revelling in Chaucer’s magnificent, medieval, irresistible words.

“Why Storytellers Talk To Themselves” is published on-line with the author's permission. Copyright © 2013 by Dan Yashinsky and Insomnia Books.  

Dan’s website is www.tellery.com .

THE CONNECTEDNESS OF ALL THINGS: A REFLECTION ON RITA'S INTEGRATION OF MOTHER BEAR AND FOREST SPIRIT

By Deanie LaChance

Above left: Forest Spirit mask   Above right: Bear Mother mask

Can we, as humans, really know what it is to be a Mother Bear or a Forest Spirit?

After reading Rita’s final blog posting about her experience of telling ‘The Boy Who Lived with Bears’ in the Mother Bear mask and the Forest Spirit mask, this is the question that comes to mind for me. And her answer, of course, is a resounding “Yes”.  

Rita describes how the experience “… obliterated the cognitive function of my mind” and how she experienced “… a real tangible presence, inside my body, of the spirit reality of nature” and that “… once I accepted the power of the bear into me it swept over my body like a wave of strength”. But how?  How can a human, any human, know what it is to be a creature other than herself? We are often taught about empathy by being asked to walk a mile in another’s shoes; to see what they see and to feel what they feel.

But can a human empathize with an animal or even more obscure, a forest spirit?

I would like to draw on three schools of thought that believe that we are all connected. First, the Hindu tradition of the Jewel Net of Indra in which an infinite fishing net envelopes the world and, where each line of the net is knotted, a jewel is placed such that it reflects back every other reflection from every other jewel. In this way, everything we see and experience can be seen and experienced by another.

Second, the Zen Buddhists in Japan talk about “nothingness” in the sense that everything begins as an energetic formlessness that takes form in the world then returns to formlessness at the end of its time. Each and everything: people, bears and forests are created from this formless “stuff” that then returns to the formless nothingness to be formed again. In this way, we are all connected by being made from the same “stuff of creation”.

And finally, Carl Jung’s concept of the “collective unconscious” in which, beneath our unconscious, there exists a pool of archetypes, pre-existent forms that can potentially be accessed by everyone and, in this way, connects us all to each other.

Rita has spent decades relating to her characters through her use of storytelling in mask. It seems to me at this telling, she was able to suspend her intellectual filter and to access, for a prolonged length of time, her deep self where we are all connected. She let fall away her ego-self, and let rise to the surface “…overwhelming feelings of different forms of identity…”

If the connectedness of all things really means “all things”, including a Mother Bear and a Forest Spirit, then I have no difficulty understanding how an artist like Rita, after years of practice and discipline, could experience the emergence of these archetypes from her collective unconscious. I can understand that her form accessed the deep formlessness of the creation of all things, and that she was able to reflect to herself and through her art, the experiences of others.

And finally, I can understand that she experienced them as reality and was able to integrate characteristics of them into herself long after the telling was over.