When History Gets Personal

February 19th, 2013

Dolores Hydock
dolores@storypower.org
www.storypower.org

Hydock Pub PhotoIt started out as a story about gardening.  A local church was planning a benefit concert to raise money for a move to a new location. The organizers invited me to tell a story to lead off the evening’s entertainment, and needed a title for my part of the program. Though I wasn’t sure yet what story I would tell, I suggested “Putting Down New Roots.” That seemed like an appropriate theme, and I was confident that I had some stories about growing, transplanting, and flourishing that would fit the occasion.

Soon after submitting that title, I logged onto my laptop, went to my database of story fragments and ideas-to-be-worked-out-later, and found my file called “Gardening Bits.” Just as I was about to click it open, I noticed another file, two entries up, called “Ellis Island.” I’m not sure why, but I clicked on that file instead, and found three pages I’d written when I came back from a trip to New York City in late December 1999.

The words told of my search for the spirit of my grandfather – my mother’s father – who came to Ellis Island in 1912 as a seventeen-year-old boy. There were also tidbits of stories I’d heard from my mother about her Depression-era childhood in Reading, Pennsylvania: stories about the grocery store that her family ran during the 1930s, about a younger brother who died of diphtheria, about characters like crazy Mrs. Pawnicki and superstitious Mrs. Mahoska who lived in their “United Nations” neighborhood on Canal Street ― stories about the ingenious ways people survived in a hoped-for, but sometimes harsh new world.

After reading that file, I had a new idea for my story for the church fundraiser. It would still be about putting down new roots, but it would be about people, not plants, being transplanted into strange soil and creating a life with the help of family and friends.

I called my mother that afternoon and asked her to tell me more about the Canal Street store. An hour and a half later, I had four pages on a yellow legal pad full of odd names and anecdotes, and over the next few weeks, we talked often to fill in the blanks in the stories.

The date arrived for the church’s event, and I told a version – the first version – of the story. But my mother wasn’t finished remembering. She loved being reminded of the people and places of her life, and enjoyed finding out what she couldn’t recall. She asked a 92-year-old neighbor about the gambling rackets that thrived in Reading in the ’30s. A reference librarian helped her locate books about the local bootleggers and breweries that flourished during Prohibition. She interviewed the women at her Senior Center about the games they played as kids. (“We’d hold the skinniest kid by the ankles and lower him down the storm sewer to retrieve the ball that got away from the kid playing the fire hydrant that was second base.”) And long after that first “Canal Street” phone conversation, the “transplanting” story is still growing.

I was lucky. My mother was only as far away as a telephone call. Her memory was sharp, but forgiving, too, so that talking about old times and telling the old stories didn’t leave her regretful or sad. She was a walking, talking reference library of a particular moment of history and what it was like to live in that moment of history. But she and other walking, talking libraries from my life – relatives, neighbors, teachers – have gone silent. I can no longer call and say, tell me what it was like when you worked in the cotton mill, tell me how you made those cinnamon pastries you used to give us neighborhood kids, tell me what it was like to teach a first-grade classroom with 52 children in it. Those libraries are gone, and now I wish I’d been more curious, more willing to ask and listen for the history they contained.
I treasure the serendipity that turned my gardening story into a personal story that turned into a history story. It reminds me that history isn’t just something that happened hundreds of years ago, or in faraway worlds, or to people only found in archives and libraries. Sometimes history gets personal, and just waits patiently for someone to ask about it.

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MAYNARD MOOSE: THE TURTLE AND THE BUNNY

January 29th, 2013

Told by Willy Claflin
Claflin@willyclaflin.com

willy_maynardresizedWhen I was a little boy, living in the woods in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, my father would tell me stories every night. I can vividly remember lying there in the darkness, watching the story unfold like a three-dimensional movie all around me.

When I was eleven, we got our first television. I remember how flat and boring it seemed to me, after those cinematic tales my father told.

I grew up. I got married. I had a son. And like my father, I told my boy stories every night. One day a neighbor of mine came over.

“I understand you tell your boy Brian stories every night,” he said. “My wife and I found this here moose puppet at a craft fair. We thought maybe you could use it to tell your boy stories.” And he handed me a lumpy, friendly and somewhat confused-looking moose.

We named the moose Maynard, and he sat in a little chair by the fireplace. But he didn’t say anything. I couldn’t figure out how I could use a puppet to tell stories. Until one day Brian came home from kindergarten; he was upset, and I asked him what the matter was.

“Well, there’s this kid in my class,” he said , “and he said something really mean about mooses. He said they were really stupid. I thought that would hurt Maynard’s feelings.”

Without thinking, I picked Maynard up, put him on, and sat him in my lap.

“That’s not nice,” he said. “I ain’t stupid. I am distreemely intelligible. Because I have got my education. I go to the Mother Moose Preschool, and we have learned the amphlebep!”

Maynard could talk! We were all delighted, and a family game began. Every day Brian would come home from school and tell us what happened: maybe there was a new kid in school, or maybe he was in a new book group, or maybe they had learned a new song. And then he would ask, “What did Maynard do in Mother Moose Preschool?” And Maynard would get up out of his chair and tell us.

It turned out that for Maynard, story time was the best part of school. And he would tell us the stories he had learned. This turned out to be quite entertaining, because it seemed that moose stories were very much like our own stories in some ways, but very different in others. For instance, here (complete with moose vocabulary and syntax) is the first story I remember Maynard telling:

TURTLE AND BUNNY
Once upon a time, there was a turtle that go real slow: blump…blump…blump.

And a hyperactivated bunny that go real fast: Boing! Boing! Boing!

And the bunny make fun of the turtle: “I’m fast and you’re slow! Ha-ha-ha-ha Ha-Ha!”

That make the turtle so mad, steam come out of his ears. “Oh yeah! You think you’re so special, do you? Well, I challenge you to a race!” “Fine, swell,” say the bunny; “I’ll race you!”

So the very next morning at the starting line in their northern forest habitat, with the skink and the skunk and the vole and the mole, and the porcupine and the white tailed deer, the noble moose said: “On your mark, get set…GO!”

And off go the turtle: blump…blump…blump. And off go the bunny: Boing! Boing! Boing!

And the bunny ran so fast, he won the race before the turtle had gone three feet!

And the moral of the story is: The fastest person wins the race!

When he was done, we said, “Um…Maynard, we have a similar story called The Tortoise and the Hare. But in our story, the tortoise wins.” Maynard said, “That’s silly! You ever watch the Olympics? Guess who comes in first? The fastest person! Or line up and have a race across the playground. Know who comes in first? The fastest person. Know who comes in last? The slowest person! That’s why fast means fast and slow means slow. Don’t let anyone tell you the slowest person wins the race—no; that will just scrumble up your mind! Learn to run fast—it’s good for your body and it’s good for your brain!”

That was a long time ago. We’ve learned a lot of Moose Wisdom from Maynard over the years, and I’m glad to have him as a beloved companion. And I’m so glad I was lucky enough to have a father who remembered to tell me stories every night, so that when I grew up I would remember to tell my son stories every night, and so that a Moose would one day come along and tell us his stories as well.

One single tale told in the dark holds more magic than in all the flat screens flashing in the world.

Thank you, Dad.

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Do Stories Make Us Human?

December 27th, 2012

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Written by Barbara McBride-Smith
Barbara@barbaramcbridesmith.com

Last spring I pre-ordered a brand new book, sight-unseen, just because I loved the title: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. I had never heard of the author, Jonathan Gottschall, but it turns out that this college English professor gets it! He understands that story is not the icing, it’s the cake! I would have liked to see one more chapter in the book — one about storytelling as a live performance art, but Gottschall never ventures into that territory. He does a masterful job, however, of showing how and why we, as a species, need and crave stories. It’s a fascinating look at how our brain circuits force narrative structure on the chaos of our lives. Humans are, the author says, addicted to STORY.

Then, in early October, I had an experience that confirmed for me that Gottschall is right: story is a profoundly powerful tool that can turn Homo sapiens into humans. I was on my way to Jonesborough, Tennessee, for the National Storytelling Festival. I arrived at the airport in Tulsa with plenty of time to spare. For some reason, the relatively short line through security was moving at a snail’s pace. When I finally got my possessions onto the X-ray conveyer belt, I discovered the problem. The local airport security workers were being scrutinized by a team from TSA’s upper management. Everything was being checked and double-checked according to strict standards. Every single bag had to be hand-inspected. The woman just ahead of me, it turned out, was trying to carry aboard a liter of saline solution for her contact lens. She claimed that she had never heard of the 3-1-1 rule. I presumed this woman had been living in a cave for the past decade. The inspection, disposal, and tongue-lashing regarding her contraband took 25 agonizing minutes.

Finally, my turn came, and I was sure I would pass inspection with an A+ since I am a seasoned traveler who always carries aboard my one perfectly packed bag. My tiny bottles of liquids were neatly zipped inside a quart-size clear plastic bag. I had no musical instruments that might be converted into weapons of mass destruction. I don’t even carry a nail file. But, after looking at my bag’s X-ray, the weary inspection woman said to me: “There appears to be a dangerous item in your luggage.” Like what? Waxed dental floss, a flatiron, a tube of lipstick??

“Ma’am,” she continued, ignoring the obvious fact that I had been living in a cave for the past decade. “I believe there is a knife in your bag.” A what!? She opened my bag and, sure enough, there it was: an antique Case penknife that had once belonged to my Dad. And, of course, I remembered exactly how it had ended up in my suitcase. A last minute decision late the night before had caused me to overlook logic, and I had tossed the knife into my bag, thinking only about what a wonderful gift it would make for my only-begotten son who would be meeting me in Jonesborough.

I apologized for my mistake and asked what I could do to make everything all better. The inspector said I had two choices: 1. throw the knife away, or 2. step out of line, go back into the terminal, mail the knife to myself, and come back through the security line again. By this time, the abundant time I’d allowed to catch my flight had been squeezed to a narrow margin. If I had to do the security process all over again, I would most certainly miss the plane. But, my heart was breaking at the thought of throwing my Dad’s knife away. It was one of his few personal possessions I had kept after his death in 1987. I looked at the agent, tears starting to trickle down my face. Taking a deep breath and a big chance, I said to her: “I know how hard you are working, and I appreciate it. You look tired. If you can take a short break right now, I would like to tell you a 5-minute story. Please?”

The agent gave me a quizzical look, and then a slight smile crossed her face. She spoke to me in a quiet voice: “I can’t take a break right now, but tell me the story and I’ll listen.” While she continued to search through my bag, I told her the story of my Dad’s knife — how he had rescued it, kept it in a cigar box for years, and then passed it on to me when he learned that he had inoperable cancer. I explained that I would be telling a longer version of that story at a big festival in Tennessee over the weekend, and that I had planned to surprise my son by giving him the knife, a small memory of his Grandpa, when I stepped off the stage. My hope was that my Dad’s knife would be passed down for many generations, as would the memory of Daddy’s life on this good Earth.

It was a quick telling, lacking all its glorious details, but HALLELUJAH, the power of story prevailed! The kind security agent said to me, “Oh, hon, you can’t lose your Daddy’s precious knife. Give me your address and I’ll personally mail it to you. Now, quick, let’s get this bag closed up so you can run for your plane! I’ll send a message to the gate that you’re on your way.”

No, I didn’t get to surprise my son with his grandpa’s heirloom knife in Jonesborough, Tennessee. But yes, the following week that old Case penknife arrived in my home mailbox and I thanked my lucky stars that we humans are, indeed, addicted to stories.

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Why Do We Share Stories

November 5th, 2012

Written by Addie Hirschten
fantasticfables@gmail.com

There is a little kid inside me that always wants to ask the question, “why?” Never is this voice so loud as when I am considering the purpose behind something I love as much as the art of storytelling.

Why do we share stories? Whether it be classic folktales that appeal to generation after generation or personal tales, what is the universal human drive to tell stories? Perhaps the answer to this question is as varied as the stories we tell but I will attempt it here.

Art is a means of communication between the artist and the listener. When the listener hears a story and it reflects something from their own experience. There is a magical moment of empathy between the listener and the storyteller. An echo is sounded in the souls of the two individuals and a sacred dialogue has occurred. Some folks would contend that the purpose behind storytelling is to communicate moral lessons to children. While a cautionary message might be a nice bonus to a good story I think it is not the reason children ask to hear the classics again and again. A good story contains a message, not on how NOT to act, but on how to deal with experiences. This message is not something that we would say to a child while reprimanding them and shaking our finger, but it is a message of comfort. Doug Lipman in his book, “Improving Your Storytelling,” calls this deeper meaning behind a story the “Most Important Thing.” He defines this main meaning to be the drive behind a story that gives it purpose and a message to impart to the listener. For example the moral lesson to “Little Red Riding Hood” might be “don’t talk to strangers” but the root meaning that gives this tale universal appeal might be “everyone makes mistakes, but there is always room for redemption.”

In conclusion, we share stories to pass on comfort. Yes, we are all unique individuals but we are more alike than our differences. It is those similarities that are reflected between the storyteller and the listeners. Like Echo, the character from Greek mythology, we express what others have said and it rebounds back to ourselves. We all yearn to express the pain and joy of human experience, to have our voice be heard over the hum-drum of daily life. The prolific storyteller, Margaret Read MacDonald wrote that, “most importantly, story offers the power to bind us together and heal our wound.” This is why storytelling has such universal appeal. This is why we continue sharing this art form.

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Gathering Coal for the Lord

October 3rd, 2012

Lou Ann Homan
locketoftime@aol.com

The Fort Wayne History Center is my morning destination. I pull into a spot that says “Museum Parking Only,” pick up my satchel of work, and walk on in. I am wondering when I was here last. I think I took a group of Hamilton students to see the Festival of Gingerbread Houses years ago; yes that was the last time.

I check in with the girl at the front desk. I am expected as I have an appointment with the director. She tells me I can take the elevator or the Grand Staircase. Is there even a choice? The staircase is spectacular and circular. This building used to be the old City Hall. It was almost torn down, but saved by a group of folks in Fort Wayne. Maybe the same group that saved the Embassy Theater.

Randy is waiting for me upstairs with a table all set up in the hallway full of research material he has pulled. We chat a little about the museum and then about my project. I am researching a storytelling piece about my dad, “Gathering Coal for the Lord.” This storytelling work is sponsored by Storytelling Arts of Indiana and will premiere in Indianapolis on November 3, 2012 at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center.

He leaves me to my work and I begin the delicate task of researching. I want to start taking notes, but I can’t seem to pick up a pencil yet. Learning by immersion is my best style, at least at the beginning. There are books and newspapers and photographs. I read the stories of factories and hardships and learn what I didn’t know before.
All too soon, my first few hours are over. Reluctantly I leave my table. Randy promises to keep everything just as I leave it for the next few weeks as my story begins to take shape.

I gather up my satchel and jacket and meander back down the Grand Staircase. It is warm and sunny outside and I blink at the daylight.

My next stop is The Gas House to meet my sister Jessie for her birthday lunch. Jessie is next in line in the long list of Saylor children. She is waiting for me in the parking lot. Jessie is always dressed to the nines, as they say. We are different in so many ways, yet we can both sing all the Broadway songs and will burst into song at any given moment. One night we had a Broadway sing-a-long dinner at her house which lasted for hours, and we still weren’t finished singing.

We go into The Gas House and I am followed by the echo of our long-ago patent leather shoes on the mosaic floor. When we were little, we always had our birthday lunches here. Actually our high school graduations and her wedding reception were held here as well.

This is the first time we have ever had lunch at The Gas House without our parents. We sit in the corner booth and order a glass of wine. We never did that before when we were young either! Our conversation turns to my project and our dad. In some ways it feels as if we are whispering as we share stories one at a time. There are some I don’t know and others she doesn’t know as well. My dad was a great storyteller, now here we are piecing together his childhood in Fort Wayne during the Depression. We wish he were with us, but then again he would go off telling stories about our great uncle who was the star of silent movies!

We eat our lunches knowing that half will go home in boxes as we must save room for the birthday German chocolate cake with a sparkler, compliments of the house. We forget we are here as these stories and memories of our Dad gently rain down upon us. We thought we knew them all, but we don’t. What stories did our Dad take with him when he left us? We pause for a moment with our own thoughts, I can see him gesturing and laughing at his own tales.
Someone comes for our money and we realize that no one else is there. Time did not move for us as we laughed and remembered and celebrate.

As for my dad, I will be visiting him every week at the History Center!

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Reflections on Creating a Family History Story

September 5th, 2012

Liza Hyatt
lizahyatt@sbcglobal.net

At the beginning of 2012, I decided to create a story drawing from family history. This is a new direction for me as a storyteller and my progress is slow-going. I began with a typewritten document compiled by one of my father’s cousins about my Irish immigrant great-great grandparents. I soon found myself wanting to know more about my great-great grandmother whose story is condensed in a few short lines in this document.

Canal Boat bringing history to life at the Wabash and Eerie Canal Interpretive Center

In this brief account, I learned her name – Catherine Meehan. I learned that she was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1826. In 1833, at age 7, she moved, with her parents, to Fort Wayne, Indiana where work building the Wabash and Eerie Canal had just begun. Ten years later, in 1843, when she was 17 years old, she married Daniel Heffernan, another canal building Irish immigrant from County Tipperary.

Between the years 1845 and 1873, she gave birth to 12 children. From 1851 until the year she died, 1902, her life was spent mothering and farming on an 80 acre homestead in Davies County.

There is one more interesting story about Catherine contained in the typewritten family document. This story says that shortly after she was married, Catherine read and responded to a letter from Ireland written by a priest for Daniel’s brother, Michael. In the letter, Michael gave an account of the potato famine in Ireland and reminded his brother that he had promised, when he first left for America, to send money as soon as possible for Michael’s passage to join him.

“When Catherine heard of Daniel’s promise to his brother,” the cousin who compiled this family history writes, “she was infuriated and immediately wrote to Michael and enclosed the money necessary for his passage without Daniel’s knowledge. The priest read the letter to Michael and they had a ‘tea party’ to celebrate the occasion and Michael sailed for America, and Lafayette, IN. One afternoon on the narrow streets of Lafayette, a funny little man strolled down the middle of the street speaking to everyone he met. No one knew him. But arriving at the gate of the Heffernan home, he saw Catherine, and said “Would you be Katie?” inquiring with a shy grin. She realized that this must be her brother-in-law. What a sight he was. He wore an old straw hat with the top out and his fine mop of hair stood out the top. He began work with Daniel on canal building. “

This amusing anecdote, the only remaining detailed story of actions Catherine took in a long, hard life of immigration and the physical labors of canal building, child birth, and farming, reveals clues to her character and her mind. I realize from it that she is educated because on her own she read the letter from Ireland and wrote a response. And, in her swift response to Michael’s plea, she shows a strength of character and independence which makes me, her female descendant, want to know more about how she dealt with other conflicts and problems in her life.

And wanting to know more about this great-great-grandmother has awakened a new creative process for me. To know about her, I have begun learning more about Irish and Indiana history during the 1800’s, piecing together historical details of the world she lived in, seeing her as the protagonist in the story I am creating, a protagonist who arrives in Fort Wayne of 1833 when it was a frontier outpost newly incorporated into a town with a population of around 300 people and who grows into womanhood amidst the hard life of the canal workers who lived in shanties built along the work sites where whisky was abundant and there were far fewer women and children than men in these shantytowns.

To know about her, I also sift through genealogy. And this record of names and dates of birth and death makes me keenly feel time as a web of forgotten stories. When I study the family tree leading back to her, I find a pattern of woman, man, woman, man, woman woven between us. Catherine William Margaret Paul Liza. I am the daughter of the son of the daughter of her son. She surely held her son William’s daughter Margaret after she was born. My grandmother, Margaret, surely held me after I was born. I will be the same kind of physical link to Margaret when I hold, someday, in a decade or two, my future grandchild (to whom Margaret will feel as distant and mysterious as Catherine does to me). I find myself thinking of this passing on of simple physical touch, as if somehow I can find in the long distant physical memory of being held by my grandmother who had been held by my great-great-grandmother a residual trace of that great-great grandmother’s existence.

And as I begin to piece together these historical and genealogical details, I feel a deep longing to imagine Catherine, as a real figure, living out the actual human struggles of her time period. My imagination brims with more questions than answers:

How poor were Catherine’s parents when they left Ireland? What was their life like in Ireland? Was she the only child who came to American with her parents, or did she have brothers and sisters? How did they afford the passage to America? Who did they leave behind? What was life amidst the rough canal building shantytowns like for Catherine and her mother? Who were Catherine’s playmates? What childhood games and imaginings did Catherine play? How did she and her family avoid cholera and dysentery and malaria?

And when she became a woman, what were the reasons she loved Daniel Heffernan? Did she call him Danny? And what were the details of her wedding day?

And what were the things he did that made her angry or broke her heart? And what are the ways she came to forgive? What did they say to each other when they woke in the morning? What songs did she sing to her children? And what were her favorite recipes? And what stories did she tell her children about Ireland, about her own life? What color were her eyes? What color was her hair? What were the questions she never answered? What were her regrets? What were her prayers?

Two generations of Catherine Meehan’s descendants ride the canal boat

Many of these questions can be answered only by more efforts of imagination. I will need to imagine a woman living in the years between 1826 and 1902 in the Ireland and Indiana that I also must imagine in order to illuminate historical facts. Her story will come alive through the creative effort of fiction which takes the bare bone record of her birth, marriage, and children’s names that have been passed on to me and embodies them with carefully woven, lovingly imagined story.

I feel like I can almost touch Catherine Meehan’s life but I will have to gather it up like the quickly fading details of a dream.

 

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This Too Shall Pass

July 30th, 2012

Jennie Kiffmeyer
kiffmje@earlham.edu
http://rivertowndispatch.com/

The first year college student dropped by my office one Friday afternoon unannounced. He needed to talk. Now. Despite my own weariness at the end of a busy week, I offered him a chair and closed the door. “Tell me about your week,” I said. He was feeling worn out with trying to navigate the ups and downs of college life. Subjects he thought he had mastered in high school were suddenly unfamiliar or more challenging. I nodded. His was an experience not uncommon to students who have been successful in high school and expect a smooth transition to college. “Do you have any advice for me?” he asked. “You mean beyond making sure you are eating right and getting enough sleep?” I said. “Yeah.” “Well, I don’t have advice, but I do have a story.” And so I told him “This Too Shall Pass,” a Jewish legend whose title comes in answer to a riddle posed by King Solomon: What makes a happy person sad and a sad person happy?

When I finished, we sat in silence. The student suddenly looked taller in his chair and more of his wonderful, smart-alecky spark was back. I don’t remember what we said to one another afterwards, but I do remember the hug he gave me. Strong and confident and warm.

Why did I tell my advisee this story? I don’t know. I just had a hunch he would hear something in the story that would speak to him as it spoke to me.

When I tell a traditional tale, I try my best to be a conduit. These days, I choose most of the stories I want to learn by asking myself, is this a story I need to hear? With luck, there will be others in the audience who need to hear the story as much as I do.

Sometimes within the storytelling community, we get caught up with the celebrity of a particular teller. During last month’s National Storytelling Conference, we kicked off our time together by calling out the names of beloved storytellers followed with a joyous “We remember.” We did not shout out the names of their stories that have moved us. Why?

I first heard “This Too Shall Pass” during a time of great transition in my own life. It was 1999, and I recently been bitten by the storytelling bug. I had driven two hours from Illinois to hear Heather Forest perform in Broad Ripple for Storytelling Arts of Indiana. I was one month away from finishing grad school, getting married and moving to suburban Washington, D.C. Three months away from my first professional job as a librarian. As I heard Heather tell this wondrous wisdom tale, I was entranced. I have retold it a number of times since, always recalling the magic of that night.

Eventually her name and the names of others who have told this story with such grace will pass. It is this knowledge that can make a happy person sad. And yet, it is precisely the stories we tell that live on. So while I didn’t give any explicit advice that Friday afternoon, I will now to all of us who love stories and the people who tell them: whatever your reality, this too shall pass. But may the love encompassed in the story stay with you always.

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Story Play: Building Language and Literacy One Story at a Time

June 25th, 2012

Mary Jo Huff
maryjo@storytellin.com

Light a fire in a child’s imagination………tell them a story! Stories never get old, but they do change their flavor as they are told and retold. The new flavors you and the children bring to the stories will promote communication and language development across the curriculum. Stories develop specific literacy skills and present character, setting, plot and resolution in a way that makes all of it relevant to a child.
   
Experiences with oral and written language provide a solid foundation for early literacy. “During the first years and months of life, a child’s experiences with language and literacy begin to form a basis for their later reading success. Research consistently demonstrates that the more children know about language and literacy before they arrive at school, the better equipped they are to succeed in reading”(Starting Out Right: A Guide to Promoting Reading Success, National Research Council, 1999)

Working with storytelling and young children helps to develop children’s Imagination:
           
1.   Oral communication skills
2.   Auditory discrimination
3.   Listening and pre-reading skills
4.   Creativity
5.   Fine motor skills
6.   Visual discrimination
7.   Critical thinking skills
8.   Sequencing skills
    
Storytelling helps children develop a love of books, writing, and eventually reading. Keep a record of your favorite stories and connect them to your curriculum being mindful of the Core Curriculum and State Standards and Early Childhood Foundations. When a story comes to “The End,” it may be the end of the story, but it should be the beginning of an expanded conversation: a continuation of the storytelling experience.

Collect strategies to help find the storyteller within yourself. By enriching your storytelling in creative and imaginative new ways, you will guide children to discover the magic and enchantment of hearing a story and the joy of creating new stories. You will also find yourself enjoying the stories more as the children learn how to tell stories, singing stories, and playing with stories.

Storytelling can be educational brain food. Storytelling in the pre-school classroom might best be described as providing educational food for the brain.
Storytelling:
1.   Creates an intimate connection between the teller and the listener.
2.   Offers room for spontaneity and feeling as the storyteller adds her/his own personality to the story.
3.   Provides opportunities for children, as listeners, to improve their comprehension skills and to use their imaginations to form the stories in their own minds.
4.   Enhances literacy skills such as vocabulary development and phonemic awareness as children consistently hear and learn to recognize new words.
5.   Exposes children to new ideas as they hear stories they have never heard before.
6.   They set out on a new adventure every time they are engaged in a storytelling experience.
7.   Connects reading, writing, and speaking as children realize that what they have heard can be written, and what has been written can be read and heard. Reading improves writing and writing improves reading and they both lead to great storytellers.
                   
Play with your stories and your audience will play along!

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The Art of Storytelling

May 29th, 2012

Khabir Shareef
griotdrum@att.net
www.storytellersdrum.com

We’re all storytellers, you know? Some of us are more verbal than others and some of us have to work at it a little harder to get our listener to envision what we want them to see in our story. We’ve all met those folk who are natural storytellers. They seem to revel in telling their story, employing facial expressions, body language, voice dynamics and more to capture and hold our imaginations. I really admire those people who can tell a story with such seemingly natural ease. I think practically everyone likes to hear a good story too and to tell a good story is definitely an art.
   
When I met my first professional storyteller, I had recently joined a living history theatrical group. I was enjoying the experience of learning interesting and little known information about local African-American history. I was also learning theatre techniques to enhance my speech delivery. Our artistic director, at the time, says “with a little work, I think you could become a good storyteller.” I recall responding “what’s a storyteller?” My first impression was of someone sitting in a rocking chair or something “reading” stories to children. “No, no,” she responded, “a story-teller!”
      
I was invited to actually see, and experience, a “storyteller” at work a few weeks later. The event was at a college campus near-by. I recall sitting in the back of the auditorium to not only see the storyteller, but to observe the audience also. The theatre director, who invited me, was the storyteller. After she was formally introduced, she walked casually, but deliberately, to center stage; culturally-attired, no storybook, props or backdrops, just a mike on a stand.
                   
Displaying a broad smile, she began to speak; in hardly anytime at all, everyone in the audience was smiling along with her.
      
She began her tale … I, and the audience, became mesmerized as we were carried away to another place & time – riding only upon the waves of our imaginations. Oh, that was wonderful! I “wanna” be able to do that too, I thought to myself.
     
I remember the folktale she told to this day; that was nearly twenty-five years ago! Since then, I have learned the secret to the great art of storytelling. Telling a good story should be as pleasurable as hearing one. And this is the end of this story.

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The Greatest Reward

March 26th, 2012

Syd Lieberman
slieberman9@gmail.com

Many of my stories are about myself and my family. Often people will tell me, “I feel as if I know you.” Once, at a National Festival, someone said to my daughter Sarah, “So you’re The Sarah.”
                      
Listeners are sometimes surprised by my candor, but to me telling stories about my life seems perfectly natural. Maybe it’s because my mother could go to the grocery store and turn it into an opera. She’d use voices and motions to turn a simple trip for groceries into an epic journey. She made everyday life important.
        
Growing up, my two favorite writers were William Saroyan and e.e.cummings. Both saw the importance of everyday life. Saroyan wrote, “In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.”
                     
Saroyan advised young writers to “Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
                      
Cummings echoed these sentiments. In an introduction to one of his volumes of poems, he wrote, “We are human beings; for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing: which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life, for eternal us, is now and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything…”
                        
Many of his poems celebrate that “now.” Here’s the start of one of my favorites:

i thank You God for most this amazing day:
for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;
and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes

My work follows in the steps of my two heroes. My stories celebrate life in all its joy and sadness, in its wisdom and folly. It’s a great treat to create and tell these stories. I have a scrapbook filled with the stories of my life. I’m sure that many of these moments would have disappeared had I not captured them in a story.

It’s an even greater treat to hear my audiences laugh or cry. This happens when a story transcends the personal and touches a universal. When people say they recognize the truth in one of my stories, it’s as if they’re saying, Yes, I’ve been there, too. “ And that recognition is the greatest reward I can receive as a storyteller.

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