tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39173182074233595962024-03-04T20:58:42.775-08:00Storytelling Arts Inc. SpotUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger122125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-44867322982610025462020-04-15T08:19:00.001-07:002020-04-15T08:19:15.564-07:00Small But Boldby Julie Della Torre<br />
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Feeling small and vulnerable? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Not so the tiny virus that is changing the way we live.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Not so the tiny mosses of the world who hang on and adapt in diversity… and thrive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Not so the tiny characters of our folk and fairy tales who can show us how to live in the world and who, though small, can change the course of a story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">I have been reading <i>Gathering Moss</i> by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The book is a mix of science and personal reflection. Kimmerer explains the biology of these tiniest of plants and at the same time considers what they might teach us. It is a beautifully written book and it has prompted me to carry my magnifying glass on daily walks around the neighborhood to explore tree trunks and rock walls. Kimmerer examines mosses in our environment, how they grow, reproduce, adapt, compete, soak up water and the myriad of ways they help keep the climate healthy. As I learned the attributes and characteristics of these amazing plants I began to think about stories. I couldn’t find any stories of moss but started mulling over all the small characters in folk literature. What can we learn from them? Paula has been thinking and writing about metaphor and as I began connecting stories to qualities of mosses, I realized that this is yet another example of metaphor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">There are many small characters found in stories throughout the world. Think of the Tom Thumb tales (Tale Type 700 and 327B), the elves, some fairies, pixies, narnucks, and dwarves. There are mice, ants, hummingbirds, frogs, toads and gnats. There are even youngest brothers and sisters. Some are helpful, some mischievous, many need to be appeased in some way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">We all start out tiny and helpless, dependent on adults, and remain so for a long time. As adults we may at times feel small and helpless in the larger world. We may feel small and afraid facing big obstacles, facing death. Let’s look to small things and see how they survive and flourish and come out on top.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">One characteristic of mosses is how cleverly they adapt and evolve. The one thing moss needs to survive is water. Another is a bit of light, but water is crucial. Besides helping to make food, water is central in reproduction. Mosses can’t move. They cling to rocks, cliffs, tree bark and sidewalks. “Evolution favors specialization avoiding competition and thus increasing the survival of the species.” (p.34) Mosses are very low to the surface and are not mobile. How can they keep water from evaporating? How can they keep water to live? How can they keep water to help sperm move to the female? In some species the male is shorter, closer to the surface where there is less evaporation which means more water. Mosses always live in colonies, their stems and leaves twisting and growing together to keep water longer and to help it move from one to another. They form a tiny aqueduct.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Our little heroes also have a hard time moving about. But they are clever. Many figure out ways to hitch a ride. Some ride in horse’s ears, or on tails. Look at many versions of Tom Thumb as well as ‘How the Brazilian Beetle Got its Beautiful Colors’ (Brazil). Thumbelina (HCA) is carried on the back of a sparrow and on a net pulled by butterflies. Thumbling (Germany)travels in a cow and in a fox. It’s good to be small and light and clever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">In some of the stories the small may look so much alike that they can trick bigger foes. The family (community) of toads tricks Horse in Horse and Toad. (Haiti) The same trick is played on Bear by Turtle and his clan. (Iroquois) The wicked prince is brought down by a swarm of gnats in Andersen’s The Wicked Prince. And, Thumbelina needs her friends to save her from the dark places and bring her into the light. Being small, it is good to live in a community or family where you can rely on help.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Mosses are patient and they persevere. “They have a covenant with change. When the dew dries, or the rain is infrequent mosses play the waiting game.” (p. 37) Mosses just stop growing. Dried moss can be kept for years and revived by soaking in water and start growing again. Many of our small heroes persevere and are patient, waiting until the right age to set forth on their adventures. Some are mocked and ridiculed for years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Some are impudent and sassy such as The Valiant Little Tailor (Germany), Hop ‘O My Thumb (England), and Hasan, Heroic Little Mouse Child (Turkey).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">And some just never give up. Thumbling, swallowed by a horse and then a cow, “never lost courage.” The Brave Little Parrot (India) puts out a fire drop by drop. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">As previously noted, mosses live on the boundary area. They live in cracks of the sidewalk. They fill in the areas between big plants. They thrive on surfaces often overlooked. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Some of our characters live in the boundary areas as well. Think of all the Rumplestiltskins. (Tale Type 500) And the mouse brides (Tale Type 402) even the small dolls such as in Vasalisa (Russia) and The Doll in the Grass. (Norway)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Being small makes it easy to hide, easy to overhear things. Hop ‘o My Thumb hides under the stool and overhears his parents plan to get rid of the children. Thumbling is so small he can hide in a mousehole or in a snail shell to escape danger.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Mosses are so important to our climate and habitats. They help keep the air clean and help cool the earth. When the land is destroyed mosses are the first plants to reappear. Many of our smallest characters show this helpfulness. Here I think of Mouse Woman (Haida) and all the times she comes to the aid of young women by using her wily cleverness. I think of The Elves and the Shoemaker (Germany) and all the ‘mouse brides.’ I think of the many Lille Thumbs who save their siblings and/or bring back treasures to the family.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Cheers to all our clever, persistent, brave and helpful small ones around the world. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">For more exploration look at the SurLaLune website (http://www.surlalunefairytales.com) and The Oryx Multicultural Folktale Series, Tom Thumb by Margaret Read MacDonald.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-54788015844052313762020-04-10T15:07:00.000-07:002020-04-10T15:07:50.383-07:00Riddle Stories With Momby Julie Pasqual<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Julie Pasqual</td></tr>
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As a daughter – I have A LOT to make up for!</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">While I was not a kid who did drugs, or landed up in jail, or any of that kind of thing – I was, and guess still am, the family rebel.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">While my five siblings chose the road my parents laid out for them – Catholic High School; College; Grad School; steady, reliable jobs.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I went the opposite way</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">- public arts high school, no college, left the nest and started performing (with all the uncertainty that entails) at seventeen.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">To say that my parents – my Mom in particular, were not concerned about my wellbeing at best, and furious at my choices at worst would be a HUGE understatement.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">There were many battles, and times of tension between us, and many immature words to them, that I wish I could take back.</span> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> But time, and maturity, has a way of bringing back together what would appear to be torn apart, and so I find myself so much in love with my Mom, that it fills my eyes with tears even to write this. During this time of Covid-19 – my focus has been quite singular – keep my husband and my mother safe – it is behind every wash of my hands, and every squirt of Purell. Perhaps it is because I lost time being a brat, that now I do not want this invisible poison to take the mother I have once again found.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> Mom is obviously elderly, so the lock down for her, really is DO NOT LEAVE YOUR HOME!! And this is hard – Mom has a schedule most twenty year olds could not keep up with – there is church, bible study, her beloved craft club – and she can’t do any of it. Her back isn’t great, and her eyes are weak, but my Mom’s mind is as sharp as the proverbial tack – something she prides herself on, and something – although she never outright says this – she fears losing. Every time she speaks of a friend who isn’t quite remembering as well as they used to – I can hear the nervousness in her voice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> So, I began to think – what can I do? My elder siblings have the getting of food to Mom, and the paying of bills, and delivery of medicines well in hand – what could I offer. Stories!! The first night of what I call the “Great Hunker Down” – I picked up the phone, and announced, “Mom, every night, I am going to read you a riddle story – and we’ll try to get the answer together.” Mom gave a little “Hmph!” – a thing I have heard many times in my life – it says, “This is my crazy kid – but she means well!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> “While Standing on One Foot” – is a wonderful book of Jewish riddle tales – and I took that as my source. And here is the thing about my Mom – she is COMPETITIVE!!! She was not one to let us kids win at a game! I remember distinctly the first time one of us - it was my brother Michael, actually beat Mom in Scrabble – we sat, withheld breath, until the last letter was down and erupted in joy!!! He did it! Mom smiled, too, she was glad he had won fair and square – but you can believe she beat him the next time! So, having something to figure out, was right up her alley. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> The first few nights, I would just call, and she would almost forget about the riddle de jour – but then after catching up with the craziness of this new world, Mom would say, “Okay – what’s my riddle?” I love laying down the question, and then listening for her pause – thinking, and then her response – she is almost always right, or if not, she comes up with something better. I laugh hard, and smile, and thank God that I have this time with her.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">There is no telling how long this “Hunker Down” will last, and I can only pray that my Mom remains untouched by this killer of virus, but no matter what happens these riddle story times will be moments I will treasure for the rest of my life.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-61237218653278518772020-04-07T10:21:00.000-07:002020-04-07T10:21:09.893-07:00Channeling Our Inner Foolby Paula Davidoff<br />
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">Since we began our separate quarantines, my grandchildren and I have spent some hours telling and listening to stories in a virtual setting. Last week, I told them <i>The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, </i>a Russian folktale that begins like a three brothers tale, but gets rid of the two older, cleverer brothers very near the beginning of the story. After that, the tale follows the eponymous Fool as he acquires his flying ship and collects a series of helpers on his way toward his goal of winning the Tsar’s daughter to wife. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">When the story ended, Emma, who recently celebrated her tenth birthday, said, “I don’t get it. The fool doesn’t really seem foolish.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">Children are brilliant. You tell them a long, complicated story and they hit at the crux as soon as it ends. My response to Emma’s remark wasn’t great. Socratic-aspiring grandmother that I am, I didn’t want to fill her up with my thoughts about her idea, so I just told her that her question was very insightful and that she should think about it some more. Not to be outdone by her older cousin, five-year-old Magnolia chimed in, “Next time you should tell us the story about Dummling.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">Are everyone’s grandchildren as smart as mine?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">Emma and Magnolia got me thinking about the archetype of The Fool, and I hope the thoughts that follow will open a conversation about the character. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">Before I told my grandkids <i>The Fool of the World</i>, I showed them The Fool in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck which portrays the character as a young traveler who seems about to step blithely off the edge of a cliff. In the picture, the Fool is looking skyward, and he seems either unaware or unconcerned that his next step will send him hurtling into a dangerous-looking unknown. The card (as long as it turns up right-side-up) is usually interpreted in a reading as lucky and, I think, it’s a good representation of the Fool in folktales. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">As his story unfolds, we come to see that the Fool of the World is not, as Emma wisely noted, foolish. He’s different and he approaches life with a kind of innocence. He doesn’t complain when his mother sends him on his quest dressed in rags with a meal of dry bread for his journey. Instead, he sings “because the trees were green and there was a blue sky overhead.” He might represent the poet misunderstood by his community or the Grasshopper to society’s Ants. People don’t understand him, so they think he’s useless. But he has some skill or inner strength that enables him to obtain his goal. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">The character can’t, however, simply represent the poet because, as students of folktales know, the archetypes have universal appeal. And everyone, politicians as well as poets, Ants as well as Grasshoppers, should be able to identify with Fool. In reality, we are all at the edge of a precipice and have little power to control where life’s next step will land us. So, what can Fool teach us?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">The Dummling story Magnolia referred to is Grimms’ <i>The Three Feathers</i>. In this story, a king sets tasks for his three sons in order to determine which of them deserves to inherit the kingdom. To set them on their way, the king steps outside the castle door and blows three feathers into the air. Two of the feathers fly off in different directions, but the third simply blows straight up and floats back down to the ground. The two clever brothers run off after the feathers that are going somewhere, leaving Dummling standing right where he started, staring down at the feather which landed at his feet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">Then, looking down, he discovers a door. The door has always been there. He and his brothers must have trod countless times upon it as they came and went from the castle, but only now, as he is forced to look down, does Dummling see it. The door leads to an underground chamber, so Dummling must not only closely examine the surface of the familiar, he must enter it, go down deep to find the aspects of his nature that will make him a worthy king.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">In the story of <i>The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship</i>, God only knows how the Fool acquires the ship which is the Tsar’s bride price for his daughter, but once he is on board, he goes about collecting travelers who end up helping him attain his goal. Because one method of story analysis involves seeing every character as an aspect of the main character, I think these travelers offer some insight into the kinds of strengths we fools may find if we, like Dummling, stop and look deeply inside. The Fool’s traveling companions are: a man who can hear every sound in the world by putting his ear to the ground, a man who can traverse the earth in split seconds, a man who can shoot things that are hundreds of miles away, a man who can eat huge amounts of food, another who can drink huge amounts, and two more men, each with magical objects. The first of these has a bundle of wood that, when scattered, will spring up into armies of soldiers; the second has a bundle of straw that, when spread around, makes hot things cold. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">My first thought about these travelers is that, except for the last two, their skills are just exaggerations of things most people can do naturally: hear, walk, see, eat, and drink. The fact that they are magnified may mean that, to use them to our best advantage, we need to consider them more carefully, that is, not take them for granted. Intransigent fools look without seeing, hear without listening, and walk, eat, and drink with no intention. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">The objects carried by the sixth and seventh travelers – wood and straw, respectively – are also natural objects, but they’ve been arranged, tied into bundles, through artifice. Bundling makes weak objects stronger; it’s harder to break a bundle than a single stick. Fool needs to collect his strengths and use them together if he is to succeed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">According to Steven Olderr’s dictionary of symbolic meanings, a bundle of wood symbolizes strength and authority. To reveal his true nature and establish that he is not as dim he seems to the general public, Fool has to assert some authority. In <i>Three Feathers</i>, Dummling accomplishes this through the superiority of the objects he brings his father. The Fool of the World conjures armies to the same purpose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">The bundle of straw is more mysterious to me. One straw is a symbol of weakness, but a bundle can be a sign of danger. The bundle of straw, picked up <i>before</i> the flying ship enters the Tsar’s compound, may serve as a warning of things to come. At one point in the story, when the Tsar attempts to kill Fool, his life is saved by the magical straw. Also, straw, though useful for many things, is the inferior part of the stalk, the chaff without the grain. So, the straw could be a warning about the fate of a Fool who doesn’t seek to understand himself. That Fool will remain a fool, a husk devoid of human spirit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">The Fool of the Tarot is poised to fall. I think his attitude reflects neither unawareness nor lack of concern about the future. Like the Fool of the World, he is enjoying the world around him, looking up toward the trees and the sky. In his right hand, he carries his worldly belongings vagabond-style, a bundle wrapped in a cloth hung loosely from a stick. In his left hand, he holds a rose (completeness, beauty, heart). He holds both items carelessly. He may lose them at any moment, but he understands that grasping them won’t change his fate. Fool knows he can’t control where his next step will land, so he looks to the sky and, perhaps, controls the only thing he can – his thoughts.</span></div>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-49927073350884570462020-04-03T08:53:00.001-07:002020-04-03T08:53:25.998-07:00Stories From a Stoneby Maria LoBiondo<br />
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">“In the beginning, there were no stories.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">That’s how I begin the “Storytelling Stone,” the Native American origin tale of how people began to tell stories. An orphan named Gah-ka, ridiculed by his tribe, goes off on his own and makes camp by a huge stone that looks like a human face. Leaning against the stone, he is startled by the question, “Do you want to hear a story?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Of course he does, even though he doesn’t know what a story is. But he listens well and becomes the first storyteller, revered by a new tribe he comes to know and with whom he shares this new thing called “story” that he has heard from the Storytelling Stone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">The Stone speaks only in the winter, when there are no crops to care for and the nights are long. We are in a psychological winter during this coronavirus crisis, even if there are daffodils blooming outside the door. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">If there are positives to be found in this new normal, one may be slowing us down from our normally hectic paces. Stories slow us down, too, take us to a time out of time, absorb us in a different reality for the space of the telling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Within that time we accept the impossible – that stones can speak, for example. And when we slow down we may find that in fact stones can speak, if we listen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Stones were the theme of the February evening Luray and I spent with about 20 students from kindergarten through high school with Joys, Hopes, and Dreams at the Arts Council of Princeton, a program associated with HomeFront. The inspiration that night came from “Stone,” a Charles Simic poem Luray recites as a story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">We told several stone stories, a Nasruddin story of pushing a great stone; Skunny Wundy outsmarting the Stone Giant in a skipping stone contest, and the Storytelling Stone, in which Gah-ka has a pouch with objects to represent the different stories he has learned from the Stone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">These led up to the Simic poem. As Luray spoke it, we all listened intently, and then she repeated the beginning of the lines and – with only one hearing and no copy of the words to refer to – individuals, unprompted, called out the remaining words, just as Gah-ka listened so deeply to the Storytelling Stone that he was able to repeat all he heard.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">Then Luray laid out stones she had collected and asked each participant to choose one and listen to what the stone said to him or her, just as Gah-ka had objects from his pouch to remind him of stories. From these stones, and “pouches” drawn on paper, new stories were formed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">One youngster drew a memory of rolling down a hill with a friend. Another drew the dog she wished someday to own. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">At the conclusion of the Native American tale, the Stone tells Gah-ka that the stories will no longer be kept in the stones but will live in the people. And the stories do, and will, as long as we share them. They can be triggered by an heirloom piece of jewelry, a photograph or letter, a favorite recipe, a remembrance of a special event. <i>The humblest of materials — even a stone — can inspire a story .</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 21.33333396911621px;">Primary resource for the Storytelling Stone: a Seneca tale </span><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: 21.33333396911621px;">retold by Joseph Bruchac in <i>Return of the Sun: Native American Tales from the Northeast Woodlands.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 16pt;">Stone, by Charles Simic:</span><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 16pt;"> </span><a href="https://t54poets.weebly.com/blog/stone-by-charles-simic" style="color: purple; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 16pt;">https://t54poets.weebly.com/blog/stone-by-charles-simic</a></div>
Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-42795773164332285712020-03-18T07:09:00.000-07:002020-03-18T07:25:41.251-07:00Why Tell Stories? Oasis Teen Girls Respondby Julie Della Torre and Paula Davidoff<br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">After eight weeks of telling stories to the teen girls at Oasis (though for some this was a second year of story listening), we were interested in their thoughts about storytelling. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;">As a group, we read the poem, "Why We Tell Stories" by Liesel Mueller <a href="https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/lisel-mueller/why-we-tell-stories/" target="_blank">https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/lisel-mueller/why-we-tell-stories/</a>. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;">Then we asked the girls to respond to the poem and to their own experiences with storytelling to answer the question, why do we tell stories?</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">Here are their responses:<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<b>Yadary:</b> I think storytelling helps me escape reality. Reality can be so stressing and tiring. But when I hear stories, it makes me forget about it all. Hearing stories of women with powers or who are smarter gives me inspiration. It makes me think: if they can fool someone and escape before they get killed, then I can escape a test before it starts. I was just joking (my mom would kill me), but their intelligence inspires me and makes me believe that I could be like them. The men’s courage to climb up a glass castle while knowing their fate, it’s like riding your bike for the first time. You want to ride it – like wanting to reach the top of the glass mountain – to feel that feeling of accomplishment, but you know you’re going to scrape your knee once, twice, maybe even three times. But it’s all about taking a risk to get what you want. </div>
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<b>Claudia: </b>Why do people tell stories? They listen to stories to imagine a world unlike their own. To escape a reality they will eventually have to return to. So that they can experience their dreams even if it’s only for a little while. Or maybe to go through drama that will make them feel a part of something bigger than themselves. People of all ages have all kinds of reasons to listen to stories, whether they know it or not. </div>
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<b>Yokary: </b>I like to listen to stories or poems because when I listen to it, instead of reading it, it kind of makes me feel like relaxed or calmed, even though sometimes I get sleepy. When someone tells a story, they put like tone and show actions. I think it is more interesting because you actually put more attention to it, or even memorize it and like keep telling it. Also, so you can develop your imagination.</div>
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<b>Erica:</b> Why do people tell stories? Most people tell stories to get kids to sleep or to entertain children, but in my opinion, I think some people tell stories so that children, when they get older, will have a big imagination and that would possibly allow them to be more positive and they won’t grow up being negative a lot. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Ajeyne: </b>I think people like listening to stories because, while they’re listening, they feel like they’re in the story and enjoy the feeling. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Guadalupe: </b>Whey we listen to stories. We listen to stories to wish upon a star. To dream of the happy endings and to believe in the never-ending love. We listen to stories to get lost in our imaginations. To fantasize the unexpected. We listen to stories to make our own stories. When our lives are boring and black and white, we listen to stories. The best thing about listening to stories is that nobody can stop our minds from wandering abroad. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Ava:</b> We tell stories to pass down previous experiences we had, whether they were chaotic or mind-blowing. Also, stories are entertaining, and they are shared so our peers can share the same experience with us and live in the moment. I listen to stories because I want to hear what people go though in their daily lives, how they lived and ate. I listen to stories so I can be aware of what happened in that time frame and how they overcame it, whether it was funny or serous. Stories teach us life lessons and encourage us to be great and try new things / invent new things like they did. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Laney </b>(director of the Oasis teen girls group): <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Why I feel good listening to stories</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p> </o:p>(you = stories from my childhood)</div>
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Because when I’m feeling blue, you act like a color wheel and allow me to feel shade on a hot summer’s day.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Because you remind me of a simpler time, when I “never” felt sick and didn’t feel alone. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Because sometimes I need an escape, whether I’m leaving work to fight a fire-breathing dragon, or dress pretty for the ball.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Because when I hear your voice, I feel soothed. Because you are told by my mother. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-26561007059683956502020-03-01T06:40:00.002-08:002020-03-01T06:40:30.009-08:00Learning through Metaphorby Paula Davidoff<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ3tGdvlSQIDcvGyRAk_otLtr7-gfehJnKvCCkPSKvP1zv4oTerkATxSqAschcdOkWuwksQpkJtct8WLE8ldlu7s_kg7Qm2jEH1BDLTsTmSzUQJZoqpOb34tlUakptGrda1z-6QRsQp-g/s1600/Grimm1917-00218.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="297" data-original-width="220" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ3tGdvlSQIDcvGyRAk_otLtr7-gfehJnKvCCkPSKvP1zv4oTerkATxSqAschcdOkWuwksQpkJtct8WLE8ldlu7s_kg7Qm2jEH1BDLTsTmSzUQJZoqpOb34tlUakptGrda1z-6QRsQp-g/s320/Grimm1917-00218.png" width="237" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fitcher's Bird illustration by A. Rackham</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">I have been realizing that one of the most important things the storytellers of SAI do for our student audiences is to teach them the importance of thinking and speaking metaphorically. We visit classrooms, from pre-school to high school, in daycare centers and youth detention centers, where, week after week, we offer metaphors for the real-life events our students witness and experience. </span>Metaphor is critical to understanding abstract concepts. It helps people build conceptual bridges between schemata and it aids understanding by creating an image that helps explicate an unfamiliar concept or idea. Mastery of metaphor is essential to both linguistic and conceptual development. <span style="font-family: Times;">The metaphors in folk and fairy tales give students a way to view their personal experiences in terms of the broader human condition. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">Since the beginning of the year, Julie Della Torre and I have continued to work with teen girls at Oasis. We’ve been telling traditional tales and encouraging the girls to write original poems and stories suggested by characters and themes in the ones we tell. Because the girls expressed frustration at the heroine’s lack of autonomy in two of the Red Riding Hood stories we told on our first day with them, we have been choosing to tell stories with strong heroines. In one workshop, I told the Grimm Brothers’ <i>Fitcher’s Bird</i>. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">The story is a Bluebeard-type tale in which the villain, a sorcerer who enchants and abducts young women, takes three sisters, one at a time, to his home “deep in a dark forest.” After some time during which he treats his captive kindly, the sorcerer goes away, leaving the girl alone with the keys to the house, and telling her that she may have access to every room except one. He also gives her an egg to watch over. The first two girls enter the forbidden chamber out of curiosity. In the process, each drops her egg into a basin of blood that is just inside the door. When the sorcerer returns, he discovers the girl’s trespass because her egg is stained with blood, and he kills her, chopping her body into pieces. When the third sister is left alone with the keys and the egg, she puts her egg in a safe place and enters the forbidden room purposefully, looking for clues to the disappearance of her sisters. She finds their body parts and reassembles them, miraculously bringing the sisters back to life. Then, because her egg remains spotless, the sorcerer loses his power over her and she is able to save herself and her sisters. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">In the post-story discussion, some of the girls indicated that they were familiar with the character of Bluebeard, the villain of the eponymous Perrault tale, although they were vague about the plot of the story, itself. One difference between Perrault’s maiden-killer story and the Grimms’ <i>Fitcher’s Bird</i> is that, in the Grimm tale, the maiden saves herself and her sisters. (This difference is recognized in the Aarne-Thompson classification system. The tale of <i>Bluebeard</i> is type 312; <i>Fitcher’s Bird</i> is type 311.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">When they began talking about the story, some girls condemned the youngest sister for allowing herself to be seduced by the sorcerer because, they said, she should have been suspicious of strange men after the loss of her two sisters. At this point, I became more pedantic than either Julie or I like to be in our discussions of story and suggested to the girls a way of analyzing the tale in which the three sisters represented three experiences of the same girl. In this explanation, the reassembly of the first sisters becomes a metaphor for surviving and learning from mistakes, for “getting yourself (or your life) back together.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">To expand the story metaphor, one can see the egg as a symbol for the girl’s potential. An egg contains the potential for new life and, in this case, her handling of the egg could represent the girl’s failure or success in realizing her potential as a mature woman. Blood symbolizes life, but when it is spilled, life is lost; the blood-stained eggs of the first two sisters indicated that their potential won’t be realized. The third sister has, in fact, learned from the experiences of the first two. She safeguards the egg before searching for the knowledge that will free her from the sorcerer’s spell. At the end of the story, the third sister escapes from the sorcerer’s home disguised as a great white bird, the Fitcher’s Bird of the story’s title, as if she has hatched her new self from the egg she so wisely guarded. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">The Oasis girls were impressed by our analysis of the story symbols. I think it reinforced for them the idea that the stories we tell have deep meaning. I hope that it will serve as a reminder that mistakes can be learning experiences, not failures. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Every human experience is a composite of sensory perception, movement, situation, and emotion. We don’t experience things in discreet pieces. Instead, we flow from one state to another so smoothly that we are often not aware of the transition. Because the edges of distinct experiences tend to be fuzzy, words do not have distinct, sharply delineated meanings. Instead, they are subject to connotation and open to interpretation. The continuity of our experience and the variability in the meaning of the words we use to describe it makes metaphor a necessity of linguistic communication. Metaphor allows people to communicate without having to verbalize the minutiae of experience. By giving our students access to the metaphors in folk and fairy tales, we give them an essential tool for understanding the world and communicating their ideas about it to others. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-61757659105717802302020-02-03T13:45:00.000-08:002020-02-03T13:51:28.246-08:00Remembering Helen Wiseby Julie Pasqual<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Helen with students</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.399999618530273px;">One of the reasons I love storytelling is that there is such a respect for the past – for the stories that our forefathers told around fires to explain, entertain, and build community. And also for the tellers of these tales. Storytelling is one profession where elders are not pushed aside – there is a respect for those who have come before us, a knowledge that we are, as they say, standing on the shoulders of those who have come before us. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.399999618530273px;"> When I first came to Storytelling Arts, I was a new teller. I had been a professional performer from the age of 17, so I knew how to stand before an audience and tell a tale, but what I didn’t know was how to make a story less about my “performance”, and more about the shared experience that storytelling is. And I certainly had no idea how to tell stories to children as young as 3 or 4. But luckily I had some wonderful shoulders to stand upon. One of those people that helped me find my way passed away today – her name was Helen Wise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.399999618530273px;"> I remember the first time I saw Helen tell – I will be honest here, as someone coming from musical theatre and clown – I was all about big, loud – and as the song says, “Give them the old razzle dazzle!” So, Helen’s slow, gentle, intimate style left me skeptical. “The kids are not going to like this!”, my inside voice my screamed. But soon, I saw the wisdom in her work. Instead of my instinct to “go after the children’s attention” – I watched as they came to her – they pulled closer – feeling safe in her presence, filling in the words that she masterfully left space for. There was no separation between performer and audience – it was a joint effort, a communion, if you will.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.399999618530273px;"> While I don’t tell anything like Helen, really, what I learned from her was that storytelling, especially for the littlest listeners was not about trying to control them, but to ride their wave. Throw the bait out to them, see what they take, encourage them, empower them to be participants in the story, and make it about them, as opposed to me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.399999618530273px;"> I am forever grateful to Helen, and to all the wonderful tellers upon whose shoulders I place my size 7 wides on every time I tell a tale, and peak into the magic that storytelling can be. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-29574621646586683722020-01-27T06:00:00.000-08:002020-02-03T13:52:26.968-08:00Hey There, Little Red Riding Hood!<i>by Paula Davidoff</i><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;">Julie Della Torre and I resumed our work with teen girls at Oasis this month. We worked there with a teen girl group for six weeks last winter and it was a blast. This year we have funding for an eight-week program. In the group are some girls who participated last year, others whom we met when we worked with them as sixth graders two or three years ago, and still others who are completely new to storytelling. We meet on Friday afternoons for two hours after school. The girls, between 14 and 18 years old, are open-minded, enthusiastic learners. They listen to us and to each other. They engage in deep discussion about issues raised by our stories, issues which they can often relate to their own life experiences. They also write in every workshop and share their writing with the group. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000; text-indent: 0.25in;">Because Julie and I want the content of our workshops to be as relevant as possible to the girls, we let them choose the direction of post-story discussions. We open talk with a question and allow the girls to take it where they will. Then, we make story choices for the next week based on the topics the girls were most interested in discussing and writing about. This year we began our program by telling three variants of </span><i style="color: #990000; text-indent: 0.25in;">Little Red Riding Hood</i><span style="color: #990000; text-indent: 0.25in;">: a 17</span><sup style="color: #990000; text-indent: 0.25in;">th</sup><span style="color: #990000; text-indent: 0.25in;"> Century French folktale, and the Perrault and Grimm versions of the story. Before telling any of these variants, we asked the girls to tell us the story of Little Red as they knew it. There were sixteen girls in the group that afternoon and most of them had heard some version of the story. They enjoyed starting, stopping, and contradicting each other. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">“Wait, what happened to the grandmother?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">“The wolf ate her.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">“No, I think the grandmother hid in the closet!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">“The way I heard it, she gets eaten.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">“And Little Red Riding Hood got eaten, too.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">“I thought she was rescued by a hunter or something.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">And so it went. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">Then the girls listened to our stories. We gave them the opportunity to talk in between each tale. We also gave them some social and historical context for each variant. At first, conversation focused on the “lessons” they found in the stories: Don’t talk to strangers, Don’t let your daughters go walking alone in the woods… But as the discussion continued, the girls began to question some of the story motifs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">“He (Perrault) makes it seem like it’s the girl’s fault that she got killed.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">“Why does Little Red Cap have to be rescued by a man? Girls always need a man to rescue them in fairy tales.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">“But in the first story, the girl got herself away from the wolf.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">“And in the second part of the last (Grimm) story, she learned from experience that wolves can be dangerous.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">In the end, their conversation focused on two main themes: Little Red’s naivety and consequent helplessness in the face of danger, and the wolf’s indifference to the girl’s suffering in the face of his own desire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">As, Tiffany wrote: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">All I wanna know is, in what world are those wolves raised in where they’re just out her trynna eat up little girls? Like what had to happen in this wolf’s life where he’s at the point where he could see a li’l girl minding her business and automatically think, “ Damnnn, y’all, wha that? That look like lunch to me.”<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">To further explore the wolf’s motivation, Jayceleen, Ashley, and Catherine rewrote the story from his point of view. Here is part of Catherine’s story:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">So, I was in the woods with my homies and all of a sudden a girl dressed all in red with thick curves, curly hair, pale pink skin I don’t know why, but I felt the need to hook up with this girl. <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">So I go up to her and I’m like, “Ayy yo, Shortface. You looking real fine and nice. Where you think you going.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">She responds to me, “I’m headed to my Grandma’s house… why?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">I said to her, “Cause I wanna get to know you.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">I’m guessing that made her sort of like me cause the next thing you know she out here communicating telling all about her Grandma and where she live.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">And in Yadary’s version, Little Red’s mother recognizes her daughter’s inability to survive alone in the woods and rushes out to protect her. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">“Mom, what are you doin here?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">“I forgot to give you the soup for your granny.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">“So you make me walk through all that… just for you to end up going, too?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">“Don’t whine!”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">We finally made it to grandma’s house. But the door was open. Oh Heck hah! This is a sign from God telling me to get out of here. “Mom, let’s get out of here. Let’s call dad to check this out. I don’t think it’s safe.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">“No. We ain’t need no man.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times";"><span style="color: #990000;">Mom literally went in and I trailed behind her.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDtN_14Dp2ucObj_n47o3Py24h2NwVZiUE5HCGwXEKACp6OXjW6O3RZ3M4B6rrLW1p-LLvdQKnPUHXKVqi_BjW4PvEBlrTHzxgcUt2NfqjlL8LO31s_uzgUTZSsyhNueuQCwiZnFd2eMY/s1600/IMG_1709.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDtN_14Dp2ucObj_n47o3Py24h2NwVZiUE5HCGwXEKACp6OXjW6O3RZ3M4B6rrLW1p-LLvdQKnPUHXKVqi_BjW4PvEBlrTHzxgcUt2NfqjlL8LO31s_uzgUTZSsyhNueuQCwiZnFd2eMY/s320/IMG_1709.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oasis teen girls creating a story tableaux</td></tr>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Every girl wrote something inspired by the stories or their discussion of the stories. Afterwards, they all shared their writing with the group. As Julie and I packed up to leave at the end of the session, the girls were still talking about Little Red. I think it’s going to be another good year at Oasis. </span></div>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-31862855251166457282019-12-14T11:50:00.002-08:002019-12-14T11:56:53.038-08:00STEM to STEAM<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;">by Gerald First</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #b45f06;">Steve Jobs said, “I didn’t invent anything. I looked and saw what was there that no one else could see.” As I work in schools, I have noticed that the difference between elite 21st century educational curricula and run of the mill 21st Century educational curricula is not STEM, but STEAM - Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics. In order to be a creator and innovator, in order to use the tools of problem solving, in order to gather and evaluate evidence to make sense of information and make decisions, one must think like an artist, not just analytically, but also synectically, creatively joining disparate pieces of information to discover what is there that no one else can see.</span><span style="color: #990000;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjOZH1oQgvntn2oMRvxHPp6H_au5Hoc2zr27LKM-kDIquZEG_DNaIsPfNQjJFChnzX7BwOPkDJSrjcYbEFdza2Fb4une83Wc_-w1EQgKACZhlOVXye_iKlENQ8iLG0QiwJhhrZpkUcZbo/s1600/IMG_3341.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjOZH1oQgvntn2oMRvxHPp6H_au5Hoc2zr27LKM-kDIquZEG_DNaIsPfNQjJFChnzX7BwOPkDJSrjcYbEFdza2Fb4une83Wc_-w1EQgKACZhlOVXye_iKlENQ8iLG0QiwJhhrZpkUcZbo/s320/IMG_3341.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A Glenfield Middle School student at work in the STEAM lab.</td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #b45f06;">At Glenfield School in Montclair, NJ, I am collaborating with Delia Malloy-Furer, the STEAM teacher to incorporate storytelling into her 6th, 7th, and 8th grade classes. Stories of UFO’s, the Jersey Devil, and Buried Treasure, became the trigger for discussions of astrophysics, ecology, evolution, and geology. An updated performance version of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” triggered a lesson on biology and brain activity. Drawing, performing and writing follow ups, reinforced the academic information and led to further discussions of philosophy and ethics as the students considered the difference between, truth, legend, and propaganda, as well as the legal and moral definitions of life and death.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #b45f06;">I am also collaborating with Ms. Malloy-Furer on a project in the seventy-eight seat Sky Scan Planetarium that is housed in the school. Based on my book <u>Imagine the Moon</u>, the show’s script combines a storytelling performance of myth, music, astroscience, and history, with astronomical displays and digital art as well as rod and shadow puppets designed by Terry Burnett.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #b45f06;">The role of the teaching artist is often misunderstood. Too often it is characterized as entertainment. We are asked to perform at an assembly, create a performance, give the students an experience, and “Oh yes, you can visit a classroom,” but the real reason to have artists working with teachers is to inspire both student and teacher to look further than the test, consider more than the right answers. Artists inspire, as in the Latin “to breathe.” When an artist works in a school, learning becomes a common breath, a communal connection that has a physical and psychological reality. We become as one and draw upon and appreciate the depth of humanity’s multiple intelligences. Recently, while working with a STEAM concept, in a special-needs classroom, the students wrote this poem that expresses their feeling about coming to school to work with a teaching artist.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Frozen in time, Stuck in traffic,</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Creeping to school along the same week-day path,</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Emerging from the vehicle as if it were a cocoon</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Woven from a caterpillar, </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">We, ready to change, with</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Fluttering wings of chaotic laughter, </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Make greetings of good morning </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">As we drag our feet.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Hundreds of stairs rise up.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Our wings once curled are ready to open.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">With a slow steady pace we march</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Down the hall and into our room,</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Where our wings, now dry, emerge </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">To show our bright colors.</span></i><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #b45f06;">One could not ask for a better recommendation to have teaching artist in the schools.</span></span><span style="color: #990000; font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-83347962348997496112019-11-10T06:35:00.002-08:002019-11-10T06:35:42.350-08:00Kids Say the Darndest Thingsby Maria LoBiondo<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Luray Gross at Princeton Arts Council summer camp</td></tr>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;">Paula Davidoff stood before our mixed-age audience sizing up whether the youngsters could handle the story she wanted to tell. Paula, Luray Gross, and I were deep into the recent Storytelling Arts event at the Arts Council of Princeton, and Paula had a classic — but potentially scary — story in mind to share. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="color: #990000;">“Do you know what happened when there were too many mouths to feed in the old days, what happened to children?” </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="color: #990000;">A boy of about 10 piped up, “They killed them?” </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;">“With a comment like that, I guess this story won’t be too scary to tell,” Paula said, and launched into “Molly Whuppie,” in which the heroine saves her sisters at the expense of a cannibal giant’s own daughters. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;">I was too young to catch Art Linkletter’s show “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” Linkletter interviewed youngsters whose honest, innocent answers brought shock or peals of laughter from adults. But I’ve nonetheless had a few occasions like the one at the Arts Council when a response caught me by utter surprise. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;">One instance occurred, also at the Arts Council, this summer at a camp Luray and I taught to 10- to 12-year-olds. The underlying theme we played with was developing characters. On the second day Luray and I set out different animals, stuffed or plastic, and asked our campers to choose one that “spoke” to them. Then we took time to have that animal character “tell” the camper its name and something about itself. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;">V.’s bear “Gris” said he had been “kicked out of the house”; L.’s walrus could “look into another's soul”; N. held “Piglet” whose “dumb sisters” left her computer open so that she was drawn into “a portal” and had to escape. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;">Later in the week, Luray shared a Korean poem by Song Sam-mun and “If the Owl Calls Again” by John Haines, then asked the campers to consider what they would transform into if they had the chance. One striking offering was A.’s poem about becoming money and giving herself to the poor. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;">My sessions with younger children also have led to surprising moments. In a class of 4-year-olds, we were dramatizing a story that we had shared together several times before, the Mende story from Liberia, “Kanji-jo and the Nestlings” (found in Margaret Read MacDonald’s <i>Look Back and See</i>). In the tale, a group of baby birds go looking for their mother, encountering several other mama birds along the way who do not sing their mama’s distinctive lullaby. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;">As a volunteer, K. came forward to be a Mama Robin. When it came time for the Mama Robin to sing, instead of the expected “Chirp, Chirp,” K. belted out “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;">The opposite surprise came in a session with another group of similar age in a version of “The Singing Turtle” (also from Read MacDonald’s <i>Look Back and See</i>). </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;">Most times when I’ve shared this story the children suggest the turtle “sing” farm and zoo animal sounds with lots of dog and cat woofs and meows in-between. But in a recent session we had a string of stumpers: giraffe, rabbit, zebra, fish, unicorn! We finally settled on dinosaur and all gave a tremendous roar. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="color: #990000;">As storytellers, we’ve learned to expect the unexpected — and lively imaginative responses during story times. </span></span><o:p></o:p></div>
Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-23655680644119015532019-10-16T09:15:00.000-07:002019-10-16T09:15:14.929-07:00The Goddess in Bulgaria<h3>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’m back from Bulgaria. Here is some of what I learned.</span></h3>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">We all know that storks bring babies. This is one reason why when storks return to their nesting places in Bulgaria in the spring, it is a sign of renewed fertility and growth. The beginning of March used to be the beginning of the year in old Bulgaria, a somewhat more sensible seasonal event than beginning the year in the snows of January.</span></span></h4>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There is a Bulgarian folk tale about Baba Marta, Granny March, and her two older brothers, January, Big Chill, and February, Little Chill. During the summer they all provide a barrel of wine for themselves. The two older brothers consume theirs and when they pursue their wintry functions and develop a thirst, they slake it with their little sister’s wine. When Baba Marta finally has her turn, and finds her barrels empty, and her brothers possibly drunk, she alternatively smiles and rails, giving us the changing March weather, sunshine and cold showers. There is also a story about how, as part of her spring cleaning, she shakes up her feather bed, releasing a flurry of feathers upon the earth, the last of the winter snows. </span></span></h4>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">This is very similar to what Frau Holle does in the Grimms’ tale of the same name, and like Frau Holle, Baba Marta is a folk manifestation of the ancient fertility mother goddess.</span></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7oMQG9yMdEgxvhxjRc6lnM-RPOCYqclr7gMOFrGWtqIrSFvT_icmSdZCz5qyg4yEMlCsK12GPz-6aoWGQl078_P461Xg00bfkPcB-ADYfGuc04a4USNjig0FHiyxapOVdpvQDzLqXoRM/s1600/JackBlog.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="398" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7oMQG9yMdEgxvhxjRc6lnM-RPOCYqclr7gMOFrGWtqIrSFvT_icmSdZCz5qyg4yEMlCsK12GPz-6aoWGQl078_P461Xg00bfkPcB-ADYfGuc04a4USNjig0FHiyxapOVdpvQDzLqXoRM/s320/JackBlog.jpeg" width="199" /></span></a><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In celebration of Baba Marta, even today, it is traditional for people to tie white and red ribbons, martenitsa, around their wrists, present white and red ribbon gifts to each other or tie these ribbons around trees. The colors have different explanations, but seem to represent red for female, blood and life, and white for male, spirit. The ideal of renewed life is a face of pale white skin with red cheeks. (The red and white have an interesting association with the blood dripping on snow that initiates the desire of the mother in “The Juniper Tree”, another story of fertility and renewal, for a child of similar colors). The mother goddess, and her relationship with male figures and heroes, has a long, long history in Bulgaria, going back at least to neolithic times in the 5th millennium BCE. Marija Gimbutas in <i>The Living Goddesses </i>references the Balkans and Bulgaria in particular as a rich source of ceramic goddess figurines. The city of Varna on the Black Sea coast (where I waded in the water) was once the site of the earliest culture in Europe, 1500 years before the pyramids in Egypt, and a source of the earliest gold work ever discovered, 1000 years before any similar discovery. The pieces were found in burial sites along with ceramic masks that Gimbutas claims are Medusa-like snake figures or images of the fierce aspect of the goddess. In any case, she declares, they indicate rituals of regeneration.</span></span></h4>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Around the second millennium BCE, Indo-European nomadic tribes invaded Bulgaria and, eventually, collectively, became known as the Thracians. They were patriarchal and horse herding people (they sided with Troy in the Trojan War). One of the most consistent images to appear in their art is of a horseman defending the tree of life and its protective serpent from an attack of a wild boar, apparently protecting life and regeneration. However, the goddess was still strong and appears in many guises, some as huntress protector of animals like Artemis or as the Earth Mother Cybele. Mythologist Ivan Marazov suggests that the Hero on horseback plays the role of son of the goddess and her, or her daughter’s, lover, ensuring the successful revival of the cycle of life. The goddess and her dying and resurrected son and consort is a common motif in goddess worship (“The Juniper Tree”, again, maybe).</span></span></h4>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-weight: normal; white-space: pre;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">The Thracians were also devotees of the cult of Dionysus who is at one level a vegetative god who descends to the underworld to rescue his mother Semele and rises with her again, renewing life.</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">He is also, obviously, the god of wine and intoxication.</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">The Thracians were noted for their intoxication and scorned by the Greeks because they did not water their wine.</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Bulgarian wine is delicious and plentiful.</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">We passed acres of vineyards and drank glasses of wine.</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nearly every house, big or small, has its own grape arbor.</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Bulgarian wine is not easy to find in this country because, as one of our guides suggested, “we drink it all.”</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Baba Marta’s anger at her drunken brothers seems to reflect a long history.</span></h4>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Orpheus was born in Bulgaria and became an important Thracian religious figure. He, also, at one level can be seen as a vegetation deity. Like Dionysus, he was torn limb from limb (Dionysus by the Titans, Orpheus by Dionysus’ followers, the Maenads), and the earth remained barren until his head was found and buried. Orpheus lived in The Rhodope Mountains in southwestern Bulgaria. We didn’t get there, but came close at the Rila Monastery in the Rila Mountains just to the west. We did cross the river Maritsa in Plovdiv, known as the Hebros in ancient times, which flows south into the Rhodope mountains and then out to sea. It was into this river that the head of Orpheus was thrown, carried to the sea and to the island of Lesbos. (There is a story about a Thracian king, Haemus, son of the North wind Boreas, and his wife Rhodope - rose-faced - daughter of the river god Hebros. In their pride and arrogance, they compared themselves to Zeus and Hera, earning the wrath of those deities. As punishment they were transformed into two mountain ranges in Bulgaria, the Rhodope mountains in the south and the Balkan range in the north.) It was suggested by Marazov that it was Orpheus who introduced Dionysus to the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, making him part of the seasonal cycle those two goddesses represent, before he abandoned the earth-centered cult for the sun worship of Apollo.</span></span></h4>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Ares was originally a Thracian god, of war since the Thracians were a war-like people. Robert Graves, in <i>The Greek Myths</i>, talks about a peculiar ritual. In March when the ivy (chewing ivy leaves intoxicates the Maenads) begins to grow, if the stem is punctured it releases “a gummy liquid which, when mixed with urine and boiled, turns a blood color…red dye was used to color the faces of male fertility images…In Rome this custom survived in the reddening of the triumphant general’s face. The general represents the god Mars, who was a Spring-Dionysus before he specialized as the Roman god of war.” So we are using the sap from the Maenads’ ivy to redden, perhaps for reasons of life and fertility, the cheeks of the representative of Mars who gives his name to March, the month of Baba Marta and the martenitsa. Minor details, but with head-scratching associations.</span></span></h4>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>During subsequent domination by the Hellenistic culture and by the Romans, the names may change but the influence of the gods and goddesses remain the same. The incursions of the Old Bulgars in the 7th century CE, brought pagan nature deities, though perhaps no goddess, and the conversion of the Bulgars to Christianity in the 9th century would seem to have brought all this to an end. In the Eastern Orthodox churches we visited, however, the ubiquitous presence of icons and frescoes of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus, attest, as it does in Western Europe, to the popularity and lasting power of The Mother. In any case, it is clear from present-day custom, that the earth mother, the female figure of fertility and life, still has its place in popular culture.</span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></h4>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Last year when I visited Russia, I searched almost in vain for signs of folklore and fairy tale. They appeared, at best, in commercialized versions of popular figures like Baba Yaga. Bulgaria is a different story altogether. It unfolds in layer upon layer of history, art and mythology going back to the earliest paleolithic evidence of human habitation. Indeed, it may be true that when homo sapiens made its way out of Africa, the route it took towards the North ran across the Bulgarian plains. Bulgarian culture is deep and rich, like its soil.</span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Great trip.</span></span></h4>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-4572535631531692672019-09-22T17:16:00.001-07:002019-09-22T17:16:46.182-07:00Why Andersen Tales<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 15.693333625793457px; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">by Julie Della Torre<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Why tell the tales of Andersen? Are they relevant today?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">HCA</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">I love telling some of Andersen stories and do so frequently in classrooms. I’m able to show many illustrated versions demonstrating the popularity of the tales. Vibrant discussions follow many of the stories. There is always laughter and delight and often some quiet reflection.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">The first reason to tell Andersen stories is the man himself and the genre of the fairy tale. Many, including Andersen, have called him ‘The Father of the Fairytale.’ The Grimm’s brothers and others before HCA gathered folktales and the folklore of cultures. In France, Beaumont, Perrault, and others told and wrote courtly, satirical romances. But Andersen invented stories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Diana and Jeffrey Frank write in the introduction of their anthology (*)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">“He had appropriated a traditional form but seemed simultaneously to invent a new one that accommodated itself to flights of fancy and humor, social attire, and literary revenge.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Another reason to tell these tales is for the language. He was the first to write in colloquial Danish. Andersen wanted to write as people spoke. He wrote as a storyteller. It was shocking to reviewers, but the common people loved it. Marc Brown describes it perfectly in his 1990 article in Horn Book (‘The Artist at Work: The Importance of Humor’),<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">“A sentence from one of Hans Andersen’s <i>Tales</i> is utterly different from a sentence by anyone else. Perrault or Grimm would have written, “The children got into the coach and drove off,” but Hans Andersen wrote, “Up they go on the coach. Goodbye Mum. Goodbye Dad. Crack went the whip, whick, whack and away they dashed. Gee up! Gee up!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">It was talking. This language makes it difficult for translators. Many editions of the tales are dry and lack humor, for most translations go through the German first. The Franks’ translation is a rare example of the tales being directly translated from Danish into English. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja36pYUnbcs82pOsBaZJKwpgj09UWN_No6SzAyFjwtdsOspFYunf3cFHFiyflPCW6RNTdHUIy6zu3fgxt0VSVgSQr4fKZRBEQ7eaIUcm2w7wBthyjPz-q8TxJadZ95JkTp3qkhLrWM-2o/s1600/61sZ8JNYdrL._SX411_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="413" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja36pYUnbcs82pOsBaZJKwpgj09UWN_No6SzAyFjwtdsOspFYunf3cFHFiyflPCW6RNTdHUIy6zu3fgxt0VSVgSQr4fKZRBEQ7eaIUcm2w7wBthyjPz-q8TxJadZ95JkTp3qkhLrWM-2o/s320/61sZ8JNYdrL._SX411_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="264" /></a></div>
<o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Then there are the themes and subjects of Andersen’s tales. He was the first to have talking toys, darning needles and tin soldiers, and Moroccan leather balls falling in love with tops. He wrote of humanity in all its joys and disappointments, betrayals, silliness, pomposity, greed, and heartbreaks. He wrote of truth and falseness, of beauty and artifice. Hans Andersen experienced all of these emotions and painful experiences in his own life and struggled greatly.<span> </span>He put these feelings and struggles into the mouths and actions of common everyday objects allowing us all to see ourselves in these stories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Hans Christian Andersen published 156 tales, enough to find every emotion and foible experienced by humankind. Because of this the stories resonate to this day. I’ve been asking people, “Do you think it’s still important to tell Hans Christian Andersen stories?” My favorite response came from my husband who just rolled his eyes and without hesitation responded, “Really? With the world today? <i>The Emperor’s New Clothes</i> says it all. What other story do you need?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">The influence of Hans Andersen is vast. Authors such as Yolen, Philip, Rowling, and many more have taken the fairy tale form and made it their own. Illustrators over the years have been inspired to bring these tales to life visually. Storytellers have been inspired to bring the language, the characters and stories to life through the oral art form.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Go find a translation you like, read through some of the tales and start telling Andersen. Enjoy!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;">*</span>The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen translated by Dianna and Jeffery Frank. Houghton Mifflin. 2003.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-12685495871671493962019-09-04T14:40:00.000-07:002019-09-04T14:40:55.585-07:00Learning to Tell at the Feet of Andersenby Julie Della Torre<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgilnFSy05PS4Q_criYqbCYUQC4h5sAAOrylB4efzU25jL7C6A4gqahDUDaeFhZyJq9Pt5kcSmABOCEpN_eyMqkWQfQUyPKhq47x29Y5FuotJATV6WggDHD6JHXHemF8AgQaxKussRUE1M/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="188" data-original-width="268" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgilnFSy05PS4Q_criYqbCYUQC4h5sAAOrylB4efzU25jL7C6A4gqahDUDaeFhZyJq9Pt5kcSmABOCEpN_eyMqkWQfQUyPKhq47x29Y5FuotJATV6WggDHD6JHXHemF8AgQaxKussRUE1M/s400/Unknown.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">HCA Statue in Central Park</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">June 1, opening day of the 2019 season of storytelling at the Hans Christian Andersen Statue in Central Park. It was a beautiful day and the storytelling was superb.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Sheila Arnold told ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ by Andersen and Laura Simms told ‘The Nightingale’ also by HCA. Salieu Suso accompanied Laura on the kora and Valentina Ortiz, from Mexico, kept us all safe and comfortable as monitor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Sheila Arnold, an African American from Virginia, had such fun telling Andersen. True to the story she delighted in language such as ‘rouges and scallywags.’ Though the story is Danish, the way she told it, you could just see people from her community populating the story. Andersen coming alive in Virginia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Laura Simms is an internationally known storyteller and current Artistic Director of the Hans Christian Andersen Storytelling Center’s summer series. She tells ‘The Nightingale’ frequently and, on this day, she told it without elaboration. The words, the language, her voice, intensity and focus brought magic to the space as well as the story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">It was clear that Hans Christian Andersen tales withstand diversity of place and of time. The stories were so fresh and fun.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Storytelling has been ongoing at the Statue every summer for over 60 years. Every Saturday morning, from the beginning of June through September, crowds gather at the feet of Andersen for an hour of free storytelling. Storytellers from all over the world are scheduled and often there are surprises when a storyteller visiting NYC shows up and shares a story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">I have been going to the Statue for over 20 years. For several years, I was monitor and attended storytelling every Saturday. I’ve been privileged to tell stories with wonderful tellers. I consider this time at the Statue my prime education in learning to tell stories. What a beautiful outdoor classroom in which to learn.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">And what have I learned? First and foremost, to be my own storyteller. I believe the main way we learn is by observation and I have been able to observe many of the storytellers I’ve read about and many more. Laura Simms and Diane Wolkstein before her, have scheduled friends and colleagues they have known through their years of storytelling. These are professional storytellers who have honed their craft. The first thing I noticed was how different every teller is. Some tellers move around a lot, some are still. Some use funny voices to great effect, others do not. Some tellers are boisterous, some more restrained. But all are inspiring as they bring their tales to life. There are so many storytellers, so many artistic styles, so many types of stories. Often beginning tellers will mimic an established teller, taking on her or his persona. Observing and talking to a wide variety of tellers was liberating. <span> </span>It gave me the freedom and confidence to develop my own style.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">But in this outdoor classroom I also learned many mundane, yet important, skills: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">how to use a microphone <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">how to project in the open air<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;"><span> </span>stage presence<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">audience control <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">how to handle disruptions <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">how to engage the audience<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">how to pause for a laugh<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">how to put a program together<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">I also observed techniques I wanted to add to my storytelling:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">how to invite the audience to join in<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">how to ask the audience for suggestions and then incorporate them into the story<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">how to bring the audience up on stage to help tell the story<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">how to play and have fun with a story<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">I have had a number of mentors and a few real teachers, but almost everything I have learned about storytelling has been in Central Park at the feet of Hans Christian Andersen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Storytelling throughout September.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">Click </span><a href="http://hcastorycenter.org/"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">http://hcastorycenter.org/</span></a><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 19.97333335876465px;">for schedule<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-74828971899583030242019-08-03T08:15:00.000-07:002019-08-03T08:15:02.825-07:00Traveling Far to Find What Is Near<div style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<i>by Maria LoBiondo</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Maria and her husband with fellow seekers</td></tr>
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My call to the hero’s journey began with a quest for the rarest pasta in the world.<o:p></o:p></div>
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My husband and I celebrated a milestone anniversary by going to Sardinia, intrigued by the prospect of a strenuous 20-mile pilgrimage in the country’s rugged outback. At the end, hikers are rewarded with a bowl of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>su filindeu.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>Only three women alive know how to make the pasta known as “the threads of God,” served in mutton broth enriched with pecorino romano cheese.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But as the adventure unfolded, I realized we were tracing the steps of a familiar plot line: the hero’s journey. Popularized anew since the first “Star Wars” movie and the writings of mythologist Joseph Campbell — and a favorite folktale and fairy tale motif — the hero’s journey can be synthesized into recognizable steps. These include the call to a quest, followed by seemingly impossible challenges and help from surprising sources, a climactic test, and, if successful, the journey’s reward.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The 20-mile pilgrimage certainly seemed impossible when we started to plan, as daunting as finding berries in winter, as in “The Twelve Months” (found in Parker Filmore’s “The Shoemaker’s Apron and Other Czechoslovak Fairy Tales and Folk Tales”). We trained at the gym and on the Delaware and Raritan canal path; I bought new hiking boots and a rain slicker. Did I mention the walk started at midnight and continued until dawn? Or that we knew there was a strong possibility that none of our fellow walkers would speak English?<o:p></o:p></div>
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When we began to encounter helpers, seemingly by chance, I began to connect our efforts with the hero’s journey. There was a friend of my youngest brother who found an Italian hiker’s blog that detailed the walk’s terrain. The Sardo wine bar owner who verified the correct starting point. And, folktale come to life, the proverbial wise woman appeared as we needed before the stroke of midnight.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I knew we had lucked out when, waiting in the piazza for the walk to begin, we met Franca. A petite grandmother who had come with her family to support neighbors making the trek, Franca reminded me of the wise woman I imagined as I learned my first tale, the Norwegian story, “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” (a version can be found in “Best-Loved Folktales of the World” selected by Joanna Cole). She introduced us to Giovanni, a skilled hiker. “Stay with Giovanni,” Franca advised.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">with Giovanni</td></tr>
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It wasn’t so much that we stayed with Giovanni as that Giovanni, a faithful guide, stayed with us. He tolerated my meager Italian and made sure we didn’t lose the way as we trudged on rocky shepherd trails through the Sardinian hills. He was armed with snacks, extra batteries for our headlamps, and bandages for blisters — none of which we needed, thankfully — reminiscent of the resourceful servant who saves “The Thoughtless Abbot” (from Thomas Crane’s “Italian Popular Tales”).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Our climactic test came before dawn. Having climbed a particularly steep, grueling track to a bonfire rest point, we learned we had six more miles to go. At that point the prospect seemed as daunting as Hansel and Gretel finding their way out of the woods (also included in Cole’s book and numerous collections of the Brothers Grimm). Giovanni calmly suggested frequent rests as we walked and watched a glorious sunrise with a blood red moon rising above the sea. He even made sure we had a ride back to our hotel after — yes — our prize, a restorative bowl of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>su filindeu</i>.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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We see ourselves in the characters of folk and fairy tales as they are told to us, and travel with them through the story in our imaginations, but my Sardinian pilgrimage showed me the reverse. As I reflected on actually preparing for the journey and trekking the route, I recognized tales I know and tell in the lived experience.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Now in recounting our Sardinian adventure, what surfaces is “The Treasure,” a Hasidic parable I first encountered in a picture book by Uri Shulevitz. A man follows a dream that tells him to dig for treasure under a bridge in a far-away city. Once there, he learns that the treasure is back under his own floor. He trudges home and digs it out, using the money to enjoy a huge meal with his loved ones and also to build a house of prayer with these words inscribed over the door: “Sometimes one must travel far to find what is near.”<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The prize: <i>su filindeu</i></td></tr>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-57430644571754550542019-06-03T04:36:00.002-07:002019-06-03T14:57:35.200-07:00How a Different Type of Imagination Was Born<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
by Julie Pasqual</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Julie P performs at a NJ Storytelling Festival</td></tr>
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The workshop participants were well travelled - having lived in several countries in just the last few years - spoke multiple languages, were passionate about theatre, and made friends easily. They were also between the ages of 11-14. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> In the last few years I have had the marvelous opportunity to travel abroad, and work with international school theatre students who are skilled at creating their own theatre pieces – no scripts, no literal interpretations – fully student devised creations based on an inspiration point they have been assigned. My job is to help them go from strangers, to a fully functioning ensemble, and help them get a 5-10 minute piece of theatre on stage in three days – WHEW! During those whirlwind weekends, I have also been asked to give workshops in other forms of theatre to expose the students to different theatrical genres. Most times I have been asked to present a workshop on clown, but this time it was on storytelling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> I was delighted to share the art of storytelling with this special group of students – I only had an hour and fifteen minutes, so I chose a type of story that I ADORE to work with – the Porquoi Tale. How I love the ingenuity of our forefathers and foremothers who looked at the world around them and asked, “Why???” And from the depths of their imagination, created answers that are beautiful, enchanting – and, for my money, a lot more interesting than the scientific answer to such queries as “Why Bear Sleeps All Winter Long?” or “Why Doesn’t Frog Have a Tail?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> I thought that it would be almost embarrassingly easy to get these beyond bright, and articulate young adults to take to both this type of folktale, and create a story of their own. Boy, was I wrong!!!! While these students could create a waterfall with their bodies, write, direct, and star in a commercial in which a pissed off Mother Nature socks it to her listening audience – they simply could not get away from the science that they had been taught. “Why do leaves turn colors?” was met not with an imaginative offering, but a reach for Wikipedia or Google. “It could be anything!” I urged them, even telling them my favorite Porquoi Tale, and giving examples of others, but their highly educated minds stalled in the realm of “reality”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> I went to, what I think is the friend to all creative expression – play. As some British storyteller said once (I read it in a National Storytelling Network magazine years ago, and can’t remember the author) “Play makes risky things safe – and simple things exciting!” I had them move about the space doing some body isolations – this is something I knew they were familiar with – it is a very typical theatre game – but then I brought in the woman who was the first person to really tell me a story – my grandmother!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> Well, actually, sadly, my Nanny has been gone from this planet for a long time now, but I embody her to tell one of my favorite stories – and I used her to push these kids to play. Donning a scarf, and my REALLY bad West Indian accent, I walked up to the kids as they moved about the space doing body isolations, and with my Grandmother’s pursed lips, and sassy style (this is a woman whom one of my first boyfriends said had nice legs!) demanded to know why they were moving so strangely. Nanny did not take “I don’t know,” as an answer, and she prodded them to give her a reason why! Soon the kids were breaking into groups, coaching their friends on what to tell Nanny as to why they were moving in that manner. Working together the kids began to construct outlandish reasons for why their butts were sticking out, or their arms were swinging wildly. And, only when they had made some kind of narrative – the wilder the better, did Nanny let them off the hot seat.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> From there the creation of a Porquoi Story in groups became easy – soon the moon was conversing with a magic hat, turtles and lions were friends, and snakes were actually pretty nice critters. It was just another reminder for me about just how important working the muscle of imagination is – and how easily it can be lost, or shoved aside for more “logical” ways of thinking and doing. And while logic, obviously has its place (I for one need to cultivate a lot more of it) – it can possibly leave out the fantastical, the amazing, and unique complexity of folktales like the Porquoi Story. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-27170555053617907982019-05-15T05:32:00.000-07:002019-05-15T05:32:06.536-07:00Beautiful Garments: The Magic Fabric of Storyby Luray Gross<br />
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"> In my “other” life I make poems, which New Jersey’s own William Carlos Williams once described as “small (or large) machines made of words,” a not inelegant definition, when one considers that a machine is something devised by human beings to do some work, often work vital to our survival.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"> As a poet, it is my work and responsibility to choose words and the arrangements of them, how they accumulate and dance, how they proclaim or hint –making them into something that has a form – whether it be free and open or formal and rule-governed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"> That responsibility can feel heavy at times, and that is one reason why taking up the art of storytelling was such a gift, a relief, for me. The stories I tell are those from the oral tradition: folk tales, myths, fairy tales, legends. They’ve been part of the human experience for centuries, sometimes for millennia. My work is simply to become acquainted with them, or to use another metaphor – to put a story on, like a beautiful garment I’ve been lucky enough to find at the second-hand store, one that has been loved and worn into pliability and comfort, but which, being made of a magic fabric, will never wear out. It welcomes each new body, each new voice, wants again to spin in a dance, to till in a field, to walk down a street nodding at strangers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"> “Old things become new with the passage of time,” I copied down in the little notebook I keep in my purse. A quote from Nicostratus, painted in lovely script on one wall of a Greek tavern in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Yes, I thought, that is one of the gifts of story – each time a story is told, it becomes new, new through the telling in just that particular place and time, but new even more fully, through the quality of the listening in the room, or under the tree, or at the table, or on a bus. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"> Listeners draw the story forth, and this is another blessed way that, at least for me, telling a story is a reprieve from working on the creating of my own poems (something I actually do love doing, at least after I have a first draft). I am not at all fully responsible for how well, how completely, a tale is realized. The eyes and the shoulders or those who listen, their laughter, their sighs, their interruptions to ask a question that just can not be held in – all of these contribute to the texture of the story, sometimes even taking it to new directions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"> Whenever I think of stepping away from the work I do with storytelling, I remind myself of these experiences, these ways of strengthening human bonds, of keeping alive direct human connection. We have been given so much. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"> It was our grown-up, out-in-the-world son who took us to Niagara Falls during our recent visit to his new home in Toronto. As we strolled along the walkway above the falls, we were mesmerized by the force of the water, the frothing cascades, and the river’s hue in the roiling path just before the drop: a deep dark aquamarine frosted with white. It was a humbling force, nature not to be questioned. But the people: they were another wonder: all hues, all ages, many languages, many styles of apparel, much delight and awe. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"> “The people, it’s as wonderful as the falls,” I said to our son.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"> “Yes, he said. “It gives one hope.” As do stories, as does their longevity, their persistence, their ancient ever-newness in our ears and voices.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-14375773947320042392019-03-21T05:24:00.000-07:002019-03-21T05:24:51.926-07:00Choosing Stories<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: 14pt;">By Julie Della Torre and Paula Davidoff<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin3UwgcRtzzU77SkU3z3uAJSDiSS0zpRU1ciAt1e9MlMiJ73hgEAzV1p-7jS-tjzeoiumxH7S__D3Q27DluR9YkylHrYo6VNGxohbLs84NelJ6fEYK-jm146fdLg02V52Aeal1FYNuR-M/s1600/rackham_fairy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="681" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin3UwgcRtzzU77SkU3z3uAJSDiSS0zpRU1ciAt1e9MlMiJ73hgEAzV1p-7jS-tjzeoiumxH7S__D3Q27DluR9YkylHrYo6VNGxohbLs84NelJ6fEYK-jm146fdLg02V52Aeal1FYNuR-M/s320/rackham_fairy.jpg" width="281" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">illustration by Arthur Rackham</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">The Oasis project we wrote about in our previous post was successful, in great part, because of the girls: their deep, active listening, their thoughtful discussion and their eagerness to write and share with each other. The staff was also a big part of the success of the project. They always participated, listening and contributing to the conversation. We believe the success of the project was also, in part, due to the stories we chose and the order we presented them. Choosing stories can be a tricky business. There are so many stories to choose from. What follows is a list of the stories we chose to tell the Oasis teen girls and the reasoning behind the choices. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">These girls had never heard a storyteller before, and we wanted to give them stories that would speak to the issues they might be working through. We decided to start with stories of being imprisoned in some way, locked up, not free. Our first stories were <i>Rapunzel </i>and <i>Old Rinkrank</i>, both Grimms.</span><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">The girls understood the prison metaphors in the stories and, right away, started talking about how they can be imprisoned in more ways than just physical. Some felt trapped in a body which didn’t please them. Others felt trapped by their family or trapped in the routine of school.</span><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">The poem, “Rapunzel Explains the Tower” by Gailey, opened even more discussion and thoughts were being bandied about as the girls eagerly started writing. We simply asked for reflection, maybe writing about ways they might feel trapped.</span><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Here are some of the girls’ responses to our request:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>One time I felt trapped was when I was at my family’s house for the first time and I didn’t know anyone there. Everyone was talking and I was lonely. </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I</span></i><i>can feel trapped sometimes buy only really at school since I can’t leave. I always have something to worry about, like if I did good on the test or if I have anything that’s due. I also have to worry about my grades and that really traps me since, if I don’t keep them up, my mom will take away my phone and will say no to any fun activities so that makes me feel even more trapped since my phone is how I escape. So school is kinda like a prison for me, but I know it’s for my own good.</i><i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"></span></i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Sometimes I feel trapped in my own mind. </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Rapunzel </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">and <i>Old Rinkrank </i>were good stories but, in retrospect, we would rethink using a story that has been inspiration for a Disney movie. The girls had a hard time getting the movie out of their heads. The poem helped dispelled those visions and this was not a recurring issue.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">As we transcribed their writing and began to plan for the next workshop, we noticed recurring themes. We decided to tell stories of being trapped emotionally or spiritually. We told <i>Tayzanne </i>(Wolkstein) and <i>Tom Tit Tot </i>(Jacobs). Great discussion of being trapped by parents’ expectations and prejudices followed. After a poem, “Mirror Mirror” by Wendy A. Bartko, we invited the girls to write a mirror piece, maybe a dialogue between the girl they see and the girl they “long 2 B.” We didn’t get any dialogues, but “mirror” prompted revealing reflections.</span><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>“Let me become the person I long 2 b.” I really relate to this quote because I really don’t like my body right now. I’m a little overweight and I just want to be skinny because I want to be happy with my body... I also don’t let it get to me. But sometimes when I look in the mirror I don’t like what I see, and I want to improve. I feel that I would be more outgoing with a body I feel happy in...</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Sometimes I look in the mirror and I don’t like who I see at all. Sometimes I’m so insecure about myself, I don’t want to be myself. </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Dear me, who are you when there’s no one around? Are you just a façade with multiple personalities to mask your true self, to hide the pain, to put up a wall, to see who’d tear it down. Strange to think that you are a different version in everyone’s head. Are you loud?</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Are you reserved? Are you courageous or are you afraid? Let me become the person I’m meant to be. Sincerely, Your Soul.</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">We noticed that a lot of the writing was about self-image, perception of physical self, so we chose to tell <i>Tatterhood </i>(Norwegian), a story with an unconventional heroine who is confident in herself and whose confidence forces others to see beyond her unconventional appearance. We told the story in tandem and, though there was deep discussion, the girls were disappointed there was only one story. Again, we asked the girls to write a dialogue, script-like, and, although this time we provided them with a model of the form, the writing was still hard for them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">In her “mirror” piece from the week before, Angel had introduced the idea of her free-spirited younger self confronting her insecure present self. </span><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>I stand in front of the mirror looking at myself every morning, and I say “Why does my hair look so puffy? I wish it was straight…and why do my eyebrows look so bushy, and my face ugly? I continue to bring myself down saying every flaw that I could find in my body. And so suddenly I see a younger me, staring at me with tears down her eyes. </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>And she said, “What else is wrong about me, Angel?” </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>I stay quiet, looking at her. </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>“You said my hair is too puffy, my eyebrows too bushy, my body has many flaws, so tell me, what else is wrong about me?” she continued. </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>“Nothing is wrong with you. You look perfect just the way you are.” I tell her with a sad look in my eyes. </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>“So I’m the same person, why not look at me the same way? I’m you but younger, aren’t I?”</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>“Yes,” I tell her. “But the world could be cruel and mess up the meaning of beauty. But let me tell you something; don’t doubt yourself, you’re beautiful in your ways and don’t let anyone change that opinion.” </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">In our fourth workshop, we re-read Angel’s piece and built on this idea of two girls in dialogue, one younger than the other. We noticed the girls writing and talking about how when they were little they felt so confident and pretty and joyous. We chose two stories with strong, young heroines, <i>Baba Yaga’s Black Geese </i>(Russian) and <i>Seven Ravens </i>(Grimm) We asked them to think about how the heroine’s deeds when young would help her in her later years. This led to more dialogue writing of younger self to older self, and this time the girls seemed comfortable with the playwriting format.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">The girls really took to remembering their younger selves. Being tellers of folk and fairy tales, we wanted to explore the possibility of having the girls write in a fairy-tale style. We both read many short stories, poems and novels based on fairy tales. This form allows personal stories to be framed in the metaphorical language of folklore. We told <i>Molly Whuppie </i>(Jacobs) and <i>12 Dancing Princesses</i>(Grimm) to prompt this writing. We continued the discussion of how deeds performed when younger can influence later life. Here are a couple responses to our prompt:</span><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Inspired by <i>Twelve Dancing Princesses</i></span></b><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><i>(</i></b><i>Many important things have happened in the span of 2 years.)</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Princess</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>(to the lady) I have been through a lot and I only wish to find peace within myself and be genuinely happy. What would you advise me to do in order to find happiness? </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Old Lady</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Whatever it is that happened to you couldn’t have been that bad! </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Princess</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Does that mean that you can’t advise me, huh?</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Old Lady</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>That’s not what I said. Just share with me what has happened so I can help you.</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Princess</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Forget it!</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>(Goes home and writes for her future self.)</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Princess</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Hi, as you know things have happened… I only hope for you to be in a better place by now. I tried to help myself, but that didn’t work out. I tried to ask someone else for help and that </i>didn’t <i>work out, either. Maybe that was not enough, but hopefully you’ve got things figured out by now.</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Inspired by <i>Rapunzel / Old Rinkrank</i></span></b><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>There was a princess once. She was stuck in a tower where no one but her family could find her. She didn’t have long hair, she wasn’t taken away from her parents, and no prince could come to her rescue. She was stuck there because of the tower that her head made up. She was stuck within her own emotions, that she could not escape. It wasn’t her fault. Mental illness is not a choice, it just chooses its victims on its own.</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>She would lock herself in her room, crying herself to sleep… not being able to escape the voices inside her head or the figures that would appear in the room. Sometimes, she would tell herself, “it’s magic”, just to be less scared. But inside her mind that was crowded with demons, she knew it wasn’t. Something was wrong with her.</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>She would try to tell her mother something was wrong with her, but no one would listen. It was like she was invisible to everyone but the figures that seemed to follow her around.</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>“Who are you?” she would ask… sometimes… but they never answered back. They always just stared at her with sorrow and fear in their eyes.</i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>For the first time in her life, she wanted to be alone. She wanted her mother to stop being the Queen and to just pay attention to her, to talk to her. But she was alone while having these monsters by her side. </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>While she slept, they would come on to her bed with her, whispering in her ears how horrible her life was and point out all her flaws, driving her deeper into those feelings that kept her in that tower. </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>At the end of the day, all she wanted to do was end all the pain and get rid of the demons once and for all. No one would care, anyways. </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>But she didn’t. She kept fighting with the monsters until they were gone… until they no longer kept her inside the tower trapped. She was able to escape her emotion, all just because she didn’t give up. </i><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">We ended this project telling <i>The Magic Orange Tree </i>(Wolkstein) and <i>Persephone </i>(Greek). We selected these stories for our last workshop because we wanted to leave the girls with metaphors for how our experiences can shape the course of our future. The stepmother in <i>Orange Tree</i>could symbolize any painful experience or obstacle in the girls’ lives. And Persephone’s endless, ongoing future was determined by the consumption of a few seeds.</span><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">At the end of this, our final, workshop, we asked the girls to write about their experience in the Storytelling program. We’ll post some of their responses next week. </span><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-28193794485927723352019-03-13T13:57:00.001-07:002019-03-13T13:57:21.962-07:00Discovering A Key<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">by Paula Davidoff and Julie Della Torre</span><br />
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The workshop was nearly over when we began to tell the last story. For almost two hours, fourteen teen girls had talked about the first folktale of the evening, shared and discussed writing from the previous week, and done some more writing. Now they had reassembled, back in the circle we created to begin every workshop, to listen to one more story, <i>Seven Ravens</i>, from the Grimm collection.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Julie, Paula. and the Oasis teen girls</td></tr>
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The setting was Oasis, A Haven for Women and Children in Paterson, NJ. We met there with a group of girls, ages 14 to 18, for six weeks in January and February. On Fridays from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. The last class on the last day of the school week. We met to talk and write about old stories – folk and fairy tales – and to learn how they relate to the stories of our lives. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In fact, we believe that the stories we told them <i>are</i>the stories of their lives. Through metaphor and symbolic language, the old tales make concrete the abstract truths of human existence, and at the center of our work as teachers and storytellers is the core belief that hearing, writing about, and discussing folk and fairy tales help students understand and organize their responses to life experiences. <o:p></o:p></div>
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On the first week, the girls were a little shy. They didn’t know what to expect and most of them hadn’t ever heard a professional storyteller. We formed our circle of chairs and asked everyone to tell her name and something about herself. We gave a quick description of our workshop plan and then we told stories. One of us told <i>Rapunzel</i>; the other told <i>Old Rinkrank</i>, both tales from the Brothers Grimm. The girls were mesmerized. They listened with great focus and, afterwards, were eager to discuss the stories. We followed the story discussion with a poem, <i>Rapunzel Explains the Tower</i>, by Jeanine Hall Gailey and asked the girls to write – about themselves, the stories, the poem, or whatever was on their mind.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Some of the girls, like Lisa (we aren’t using the girls’ real names), used a line from the poem to begin. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">So she came at me with scissors and turned me out into the world. It was blinding. In the desert, I heard her words, that no prince would be my rescue.” When I read this part, it reminds me of the time when my dad left. He told me he was going to Mexico 3 years ago and just like that he turned me out into the world. And it was definitely blinding.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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Others, acknowledging the metaphor of Rapunzel’s tower and the glass mountain in <i>Old Rinkrank</i>, wrote about feeling trapped. Angel wrote:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I have a fairy tale story also, though this time it doesn’t have a happy ending. I’m like Rapunzel trapped in a tower. My wicked witch is the emotions I carry within, and this time there is no prince who is willing to end it all.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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And Yvonne:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Sometimes I feel trapped in my own mind. As in with feelings. Like you’re not able to express yourself or how you feel because you’re scared on how people will treat you or you’re just scared in general. Sometimes you feel like you can’t show how yourself or express your point of view or opinion to someone cause you can’t know how they might take it.</span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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Candace found her own truth:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">First, I like to start off by saying I don’t want to compare myself to the characters or heroines. I just wanna be me. Besides, there is only one me in this world. Sometimes I stare at the wall wondering what life was like on the other side of it. I believe that we humans live by what we were told or what our brains think to do. Not me. Nooo way. I live by what I believe, no matter what.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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As the weeks went by, the girls greeted us enthusiastically each day when we arrived. Their eagerness for stories and talk and sharing ideas electrified us. We began to think of those Friday afternoon workshops as the jewel that crowned our busy work-weeks. On the evening described at the opening of this piece, the girls listened intently to <i>Seven Ravens, </i>the story of a little girl who goes in search of her lost brothers. The boys had been turned into ravens on the day their little sister was born, and she felt, somehow, responsible for their fate. The girl travels impossible distances in her search. At last, she is set on the right direction and given a key to the glass mountain that has become her brothers’ prison. When she finally arrives at the mountain, however, she finds that the key has been lost, that she has made her long, hard journey to no avail. In a flash of insight, she realizes that her finger might be a substitute for the key but, to use it, she must cut it from her hand. She makes the sacrifice, the prison is opened, and her brothers are released from their curse. At the end of the story, all eight children return home together. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The girls’ first words about the story were about the little girl’s sacrifice. <o:p></o:p></div>
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“She actually cut off her finger?” they exclaimed, “Why?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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We reminded them that objects and events in fairy tales are often metaphorical and turned the question back to the group. The girls began to talk, some of them looking for meaning in the girl’s actions; others still puzzled by the idea. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Until Angel said, “She was the key.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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We gave a collective sigh of recognition and appreciation. Then it was six o’clock and time to pack up and go home. <o:p></o:p></div>
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When we were back in the car, Julie said, “’She was the key’. Why have we never thought of that?” We shrugged and laughed, amazed and delighted that, at this late phase of our careers, we are still meeting students who provide us with a key to the stories we thought we knew by heart.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-65167377930057170202018-12-31T05:57:00.000-08:002018-12-31T05:57:53.049-08:00Discovering a Brave Old Worldby Paula Davidoff<br />
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A few days ago, my husband and I were discussing the meaning of the word “brave.” </div>
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“It can’t simply mean courageous,” he said. And, to clarify, he quoted Miranda’s famous line from <i>The Tempest,</i>“O brave new world that has such people in’t.” In this context, the word means something like “magnificent,” “splendid,” or “impressive.” Used in this way, it’s a good description of a story I’ve been immersed in for the past month. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hunting Scene from the <i>Shahnameh</i></td></tr>
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This year I’m in the middle of a three-year project in which Gerry Fierst and I are collaborating with a group of ELA teachers at Passaic Valley Regional High School in Little Falls, NJ. It is an exciting project, the ultimate goal of which is to create a storytelling culture in the school. The six teachers with whom we’re working are learning to embed storytelling and storytelling-centered activities in their ELA curricula. Professional development for these teachers takes place both in and outside of the classroom. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In September of 2017, Gerry and I began telling stories and implementing follow-up activities to model how we use story to enhance curriculum. As the first year of the project developed, teachers began to take on responsibility for planning activities and some of them began telling stories, themselves. This year, my teachers continue to take on more responsibility for planning and teaching storytelling-based lessons and, although I’m still telling in some classes, I’ve become mostly a resource for tales. One exception to this routine was the lessons I taught in December to Kathleen Dellanno’s 10<sup>th</sup>grade students. In these classes, I learned with the students. Here is the story.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In one of our early planning workshops this year, Kathleen told me that she had decided to add <i>The Kite Runner</i>, the novel by Khaled Hosseini, to all of her 10<sup>th </sup>grade reading lists. She said that it had been summer reading for her Honors students and those students were so moved and excited by the book that she wanted to give all of her classes the opportunity to read it. “We’ll be able to find connections to storytelling,” she said. “Stories are an important part of the book.” I had not yet read <i>The Kite Runner </i>so, as soon as I got home that day, I downloaded it onto my Kindle and began a storytelling adventure. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Most of <i>The Kite Runner</i> is set in Kabul, Afghanistan and tells the story of two boys: Amir, a wealthy Pashtun, and Hassan, his Hazara servant, who come of age at the time of the fall of the Afghan monarchy and the subsequent Soviet intervention. The boys’ relationship is complicated by many things, among which are class differences and their relationships with their fathers and father-figures. One of the pleasures of their young lives is sharing stories from the <i>Shahnameh, </i>“The Book of Kings”, an epic written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi in the 10<sup>th</sup>century C.E. In the novel, the boys sit in the branches of a pomegranate tree where Amir reads stories from the <i>Shahnameh </i>to the illiterate Hassan. Their favorite tale is that of Rostam and Sohrab, a tragedy in which a father unwittingly kills his son. <o:p></o:p></div>
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When I finished reading <i>The Kite Runner, </i>my first idea for connecting it to oral story was to learn to tell “Rostam and Sohrab” so I began to read the <i>Shahnameh</i>. After sampling three translations, I chose to read the Penguin edition translated by Dick Davis. It is the most recent translation and Davis has rendered most of the text in prose narrative with sprinklings of verse. (The original is all rhymed couplets.) <o:p></o:p></div>
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The story of Rostam begins about a quarter of the way through this massive tale, so I became engrossed in, what for me was, a completely new world of myth, legend, and history before I began reading the story I initially planned to tell. Almost from the beginning of my journey through the <i>Shahnameh</i>, I realized that, although the story of Rostam and Sohrab may be most central to Hosseini’s novel, other themes of the epic reverberate through the story of Amir and Hassan. Because the <i>Shahnameh </i>is about the rise and fall of royal dynasties, there are many stories about fathers and sons, each with their own unique complications. Some of these reminded me of conflicts in <i>The Kite Runner. </i>For example, the hero Sam initially rejects his son, Zal, because he sees in him no similarity to himself. In the novel, Amir’s father, Baba, expresses the same thought when describing his feelings about Amir. There are also issues of class distinctions in the <i>Shahnameh </i>and, as in <i>The Kite Runner</i>, the upper-class characters often lack the nobility and moral strength displayed by their servants. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It may be that the reason I was able to make these connections between the novel and the poem is because these themes are universal and, if I had followed my reading of <i>The Kite Runner </i>with a body of story from another culture, I would have found similar connections to the novel. In fact, the stories of the Persian kings and heroes share motifs with the stories of the Hebrew Bible, the epics of Homer, the Mahabharata, and other “big” stories from various cultures. <o:p></o:p></div>
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One definite parallel between <i>The Kite Runner </i>and the <i>Shahnameh, </i>however, is the setting. Early on in our study of the novel, Kathleen said, “Hosseini has made Afghanistan a character in this book.” I think that’s true. The events in the novel make the reader feel the country’s suffering, as well as the suffering of the characters. Reading it allowed me to empathize with the people of modern-day Afghanistan in a way that news articles and, even, photographs had not. In a similar way, the <i>Shahnameh </i>is about the long history of struggle in the same region and reading it often gave me a feeling of déjà vu – the wars for territory, conflicts over differences of belief, struggles within families, blatant destruction of cities and monuments could be descriptions of current events. And, like the novel, the poem made all of these acts more real for me. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But the <i>Shahameh, </i>like <i>The Kite Runner</i>, also paints a picture of an exquisitely beautiful place, - a land of gardens, fountains, and palaces – peopled with gorgeous characters, and containing wealth beyond comprehension. A truely brave world. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-34724020223262037162018-12-03T16:37:00.000-08:002018-12-03T16:37:35.069-08:00Those Facesby Luray Gross<br />
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<b>In a Station of the Metro<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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The apparition of these faces in the crowd;<o:p></o:p></div>
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Petals on a wet, black bough.<o:p></o:p></div>
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-Ezra Pound<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Look me in the eye.” I suspect that this is an imperative often difficult for many of us to obey. Ask me about someone’s teeth and I can tell you. But did I look that person in the eyes, did I take in their mood, their soul? Did I even register their eye color? Often the answer is no. Perhaps I glanced at their eyes and looked away, my self-consciousness engaged.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But last Wednesday morning, launching “The Frog King” for my husband’s continuing ed class of psychotherapists, Hilary’s eyes, Julie’s, Lauren’s, Pat’s, Alicia’s, Melanie’s– all spoke to me, and I was hungry for those windows, those measures and indications that the story was finding each listener. It was not <i>I</i>taking them in, as much as it was the tale: the golden ball lazily tossed into the air and caught, the ball again lofting and slipping through the spoiled girl’s hands. The listeners’ eyes searched deep in the well as the ball disappeared, and accompanied the frog as it plip-plopped up the marble stairs of the castle to demand that the princess keep her promises. The listeners were engaged, not with me, but with the girl and the frog, as the princess scooped up the amphibian and slammed it against the wall.<o:p></o:p></div>
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All this to speak of one way that both storytelling and story-listening can nurture community as they provide an oasis from focus on the self. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Most of the storytelling I am invited to do is for children and the adults nominally in charge of them: teachers, parents, camp counselors. Even in these settings, I’m alert to the eyes of the grown-ups, for when their eyes tell me they have been released from their daily concerns, I know the story is working for all of us; it is coming alive for them and, of course then, it becomes even more alive for the children and for me.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And so to Ezra Pound: Like stories, poems can be touchstones – sensations and learnings that can be re-experienced when the poem, or often just a few lines of a poem, arise from the past. I think I first encountered Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” when I was in high school. I have not forgotten the feeling of recognition I sensed when I first read it. I remember taking black construction paper and writing the poem out with the white ink my mother used to label snapshots in photo albums. I could see those faces each one transformed into blossom. In that guise, they were approachable, reachable.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I believe that we all need small as well as great sources of insight. Sometimes the experience of a story can provide that; sometimes a poem. Each tells us: you are not alone. You are part of the human community, as fraught and beautiful, cowardly and courageous as it is.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-69254919426912183472018-10-24T05:34:00.000-07:002018-10-24T05:34:02.031-07:00Rhythm and Rhyme, Part II<div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
by Maria LoBiondo</div>
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Thinking more about ways to engage the youngest listeners, I asked my good friend, preschool teacher and storyteller MaryAnn Paterniti, for her best advice. “Make it memorable,” she said.</div>
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I remember MaryAnn chanting with a group of preschoolers at the Storytelling Festival held at the County College of Morris as different youngsters “dressed” a felt board wolf with boots, pants, jacket, and more in a tale in which the children, rather than the Three Little Pigs, called for the wolf to come out and play. And she plays tricks like stamping leprechaun “footprints” in washable ink all over her classroom as a prelude to St. Patrick’s Day stories.</div>
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MaryAnn also brings her djembe on occasion so her preschoolers can pound and dance to some of her stories. I don’t play the djembe, but I do like to use a gourd shaker to initiate story times with a call and response chant I made up:</div>
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“Story! Story!/I have a story! I have a story!/You have a story! You have a story!/Let’s have a story! Let’s have a story!/Now! Now!”</div>
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If you are musically challenged like I am, consider simulating sounds for objects to add special effects that young listeners can repeat. For the story of The Tailor, we have great fun cutting the fabric with our scissors (kkuk, kkuk, kkuk), pushing the pieces under the sewing machine needle (whirr, whirr, whirr) as we pump the pedal with our feet, and finishing off the coat, jacket, vest, cap, and button, with a needle and thread (thwip, thwip, thwip).</div>
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At the Lititz Storytelling Festival, Charlotte Blake Alston used a simple shaker, as did teller Lyn Ford, to accent their stage performances. It’s a subtle but effective way to enhance or dramatize a dramatic moment.</div>
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While not appropriate for every story, I plan doing the same for stories in my repertoire where I can, adding a shaker sound for a hissing snake, clomping along a dusty road, or to make a cooking pot sizzle.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mary Ann Paterniti (front left), Maria LoBiondo (front right) and the Princeton Storytelling Circle</td></tr>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-19758818005498345712018-10-07T10:25:00.000-07:002018-10-07T10:25:34.761-07:00Rhythm and Rhyme Makes a Lively Storytelling Timeby Maria Lo Biondo<br />
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For the past few years I’ve made a pilgrimage to Lititz, Pennsylvania, for an annual storytelling festival, an opportunity to hear nationally and internationally recognized tellers in a congenial setting. This year, the seventh gathering, Charlotte Blake Alston from Philadelphia was among the featured tellers.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charlotte Blake Alston</td></tr>
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Charlotte is a former preschool, kindergarten, and second grade teacher who tunes in to language for this age group in a lively way. She also is in her 25<sup>th</sup> season as host and storyteller of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s preschool concert series, Sound All Around. Her repertoire of African and African American stories has been heard in venues as varied as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Women of the World Festival in Cape Town, South Africa.</div>
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Her workshop on Telling Stories to Our Youngest Listeners underscored the importance of employing rhythm and rhyme with preschoolers, not only as a way of developing language but also — especially when mixed with music — engaging body and mind together. Added bonus: the repetition of words teaches children to anticipate the rhyme, and in doing so, is a first step in helping them to make predictions.</div>
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This may sound elementary, but as you might expect, it is the way Charlotte engaged story, sound, and movement that inspired. The well-worn but beloved Three Billy Goats Gruff transformed in her telling, with the “trip trap” of the goats marching over the bridge into a chant that played with the sounds: “Ba Bupup, Ba Bupup, Ba Oom, Trip, Trap.” She signaled with facial expression and motion when to come in with the chant, inviting participation. Can’t you just see preschoolers bopping along as they sing this? It was hard for those of us in her workshop not to tap and clap.</div>
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While I enjoy using song and movement when telling to young audiences, Charlotte’s workshop had me thinking about where to add more rhythm and rhyme to invigorate and refresh familiar tales. What came immediately to mind is a chant and introductory exercise Luray Gross taught me — and she learned from storyteller Ellen Musikant — that works for all ages.</div>
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We’ve opened storytelling sessions for children ranging from ages 5 to 15 at Home Front, for middle school girls at a summer arts camp, and in a Burlington County Community Action professional development workshop with preschool teachers, all to delightful effect.</div>
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The chant goes like this: “My mama told me/for me to tell you/to do my name/the way I do.”</div>
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The instruction is simple. Everyone stands in a circle, all repeat the chant, followed by each person taking a turn saying his or her name and a motion to go with it. Then everyone around the circle mirrors the name in the same way and the action in response.</div>
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What has tickles me is watching children and adults enjoy the rhythm of their name and play with an improvised action to go with it, as if discovering something new about the sound and power their name can make. They can punch up a syllable or whisper, sing their name or shout it. The motions add a kinesthetic kick.</div>
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In her workshop handout, Charlotte wrote: “Singing, rhyming, and storytelling are part of every culture. By singing and rhyming to children, parents and caregivers are not only keeping traditions alive, they are teaching children to articulate words, practice the pitch, volume, and rhythm of their native language, and develop the listening and concentration skills essential for brain development and memory.”</div>
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Let’s add that the delight in these practices doesn’t end in preschool, but continues for all ages.</div>
Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-75931217359558311072018-09-26T06:56:00.001-07:002018-09-26T06:56:52.725-07:00BACK TO GRIMMS: PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
by Julie Della Torre</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hansel and Gretel by Otto Ligner (1857-1917)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Jack, Paula and I have been telling stories at a program in Paterson that helps women and children with food, shelter, education and anything else they may need. We tell stories to students on Friday afternoons, presently to fifth graders. It seems as if it would be a struggle, horrible time, end of week, end of day, but the kids are enthusiastic and engaged. They fizzle out before 6:00, but they love the stories and the activities we do.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">This week Jack and I told ‘Hansel and Gretel’ in tandem. Together we discussed different images in the story and certain symbolism. At one point we focused on the body of water and the duck at the end. He had told ‘Water of Life’ previously and we noticed that the heroes often have to travel over water on the way home from an adventure. When did this body of water enter the story of ‘Hansel and Gretel’? Looking in <i>New Tales For Old </i>(De Vos, 1999) we learned it was added in the second addition. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Our activity following the telling of the tale was illustration. Many articles contemplate the idea of illustrations informing the text of the story. Bottiehiemer notes a letter that Wilhelm Grimm wrote to his bother Ludwig who was illustrating their famous collection of stories. Ludwig had portrayed Gretel proudly pushing the old witch into the oven and releasing her brother from the cage. Wilhelm was not happy. He wanted Ludwig to instead show Gretel helplessly weeping near Hansel. Here is yet another example of Jacob and Wilhelm manipulating the tales.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> We brought in multiple copies of numerous illustrated versions of ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ After telling the story we listed the images the students hoped to see in the books. The students worked in small groups examining the illustrations of the tale. We had to start them off, giving examples of differences to look for, but once they got the idea we didn’t need to do a thing except exclaim over the discoveries they made. They traded books, went from one table to another to share their examples. As an aside, I was amazed that the bread/candy house was fourth or fifth down their list of images. First and foremost they wanted to see the children abandoned in the dark forest by the fire. The second image they all asked for was the mother and father fighting in the bed. Third was the witch herself... was she the mother? They spent much more time than I would have imagined poring over these pictures, examining all of the details. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">5th grade tableau of H&G lost in the forest</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">We passed out paper and crayons and they didn’t need any urging to start drawing. Showing so many different types of illustrations freed the students to create their own images.<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">All of the reading and reflecting I’ve been immersed in this month has truly informed my telling and my look at illustrations of fairy tales. I believe it has enthused the work I am doing with colleagues and students.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-53142721487940364522018-09-20T04:25:00.000-07:002018-09-20T04:26:55.610-07:00COLLECTING FOLKTALES<div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin: 0in 0in 9.75pt;">
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<span style="color: #393939; font-family: "&quot" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">It is often said that the late 18th and early 19th centuries was the ‘Golden Age’ of collecting folk and fairy tales. As seen in the previous post, the Grimm brothers popularized the gathering of oral folk literature, and the immediacy of this type of collecting continued and the study of folklore and society became a part of academia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #393939; font-family: "&quot" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Harold Courlander, a noted collector of folktales from the world, worked in the following era. I happened on a biography of Courlander written by Nina Jaffe, <i>A Voice for the People: The Life and Work of Harold Courlander,</i>1997. It was extremely interesting to discover the similarities and the differences between the stories, the collecting and the rational for preserving stories between Courlander and the Grimms. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #393939; font-family: "&quot" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Jaffe is a prominent storyteller and compiler of folklore. Her works include, <i>Patakin: World Tales of Drums and Drummers </i>and <i>The Cow of No Color. </i><i>A Voice for the People </i>was gleaned from Courlander’s writings and interviews Jaffe held with the man himself. Because the book is written for children, the writing is not as smooth as Paradiz (see previous post). The language is sometimes stilted and the ‘lessons’ Jaffe wants us to leave us with can be blatant. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #393939; font-family: "&quot" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Both Courlander and the Grimms were influenced by the country and the times in which they lived. But, where the Grimms wanted to build and preserve German nationality, language and cultural identity, Courlander had a different view. He never romanticized the past or the stories. He grew up in Detroit between WW I and WW II. He was surrounded by immigrants speaking different languages, eating different foods and telling different stories. Detroit was a destination during the Great Migration of African Americans from the South. All the adults worked together and the children went to school together. To Courlander this diversity was America and was to be celebrated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #393939; font-family: "&quot" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Right after college Courlander went to Haiti. He lived among the people there and began to gather songs, rhythms and musical instruments. With these came stories. Folk music was his first work, just as it was for the Grimm brothers. By this time a number of developments changed the way of collecting folklore. For one, technology made it possible to audio record musical and storytelling sessions. Another was the many fields of academic study that became interested. Anthropology, ethnography, philology, musicology, all had criteria for collecting from social settings in cultures. Courlander was curios, a good listener, and patient. He learned to ask questions to better understand the setting of the story/song, the teller/singer, the occasion for the story or song. He noted all of this and these notes can be found in his collections of stories and his collections of folk music. (He worked for Folkway Records and has many recordings on Ethnic Folkways Library.) One area of interest for Courlander was the similarity of stories and the idea that stories from the Afro-American culture might have direct roots to those stories of Africa. Like the Grimm brothers, he edited the folktales for language and ease of understanding for modern readers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #393939; font-family: "&quot" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Like many of you, I rely on Courlander’s many books. I trust his scholarly research, though he never worked at a university. His <i>Treasury of African Folklore: The Oral Literature, Traditions, Myths, Legends, Epics, Recollections, Wisdom Sayings, and Humor of Africa. (1995.) </i>and <i>Treasury of Afro-American Folklore: The Oral Literature, Traditions, Reflections, Legends, Tales, Songs, Religious Beliefs, Customs, Sayings and Humor of Peo0ple of African Descent in the Americas</i>. (1995) have been fundamental in helping me put programs together and to tell these stories with a deeper understanding. His list of books is too long to include here, but other well-known titles include: <i>The Cow Tail Switch, The Piece of Fire Terrapin’s Pot of Sense </i>and <i>People of the Short Blue Corn</i>. He spent years traveling; gaining the trust of people in the society he was studying and learning the ways and culture of that community.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #393939; font-family: "&quot" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Uncomfortable issues can arise while reading biographies. Just as issues of German nationalism and the lack of attribution to the female sources brought up in Paradiz’s book, so too, thoughts came to mind while reading this biography. Harold Courlander was a white man collecting stories in African countries, in African American communities of the Caribbean and the Deep South and on Hopi reservations. Unlike the Grimms, he credits all of the help he received in each of these communities, in background knowledge, stories and songs. However, it was noticeable how Jaffe goes out of her way to frequently mention and quote letters from prominent black writers and scholars who were Courlander’s contemporaries, friends and admirers. Henry Louis Gates Jr. , in his new book, <i>The Annotated African American Folktales, </i>(2018) notes that The Folklore Society of America had begun in the late 1800s and had already established a branch to gather African American folklore and explore the connection of these tales to those of countries in Africa. Nora Zeale Hurston was collecting stories and she and Courlander met in Haiti. Though I do believe that Courlander was able to gain the trust of the musicians and storytellers in these diverse cultures, I wonder how different it would have been had he been an American black scholar.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #393939; font-family: "&quot" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Another issue that arose for me was the fact that Courlander was male. Of course, the whole time I was reading this book I was thinking of Diane Wolkstein. She also went to Haiti with a tape recorder to gather stories. She also went to the storytelling sessions on site, recorded, took notes and published her work. (<i>The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales</i>. 978). Somewhere there is an interview Wolkstein did with Courlander. How interesting that would be to hear two scholars talk about their work and the stories they heard. I have no answers, and I’m sure it wasn’t discussed in their conversation, but I wonder how different it is for a white woman to be traveling, living and learning about a black culture and where, when and how stories are told. Would a woman collector be included or excluded in different kinds of ceremonies? Would women in the culture have different obligations and tell different stories? Would a female collector ask different questions, be interested in different aspects of society, in different stories? How did such life work impact the families of the male/female collectors?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #393939; font-family: "&quot" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Due to new technologies, few cultures or societies have not been touched by modernity. New collections of world folktales are being published every day. Are these compilations of previously printed tales or stories newly collected? Personally, I will pay more attention to who compiled/collected the tales and how and even why these new collections came to be.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917318207423359596.post-90331971083347688512018-09-05T12:55:00.000-07:002018-09-05T12:55:10.750-07:00Clever Maids<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">by Julie Della Torre<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I came across a pile of books I have always meant to read and have moved from one spot to another for years. This summer I decided to start at the top and work my way down. The first book I picked up was <i>Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales </i>by Valerie Pradiz, 2004. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Reading the title closely, I should have known what the book was a bout, but, I opened the book expecting an analysis of Grimm’s stories featuring clever maids. Not this book! This was more of a biography of the Grimm’s brothers and their world of collecting. The clever maids referred to in the title are the clever young women from whom they collected their stories. The book also paints a historical and social picture of the Germanic world at this time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">AUTHOR</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Valerie Paradiz is a German feminist, activist and author. Her scholarly research of the historical and social culture of the time and her analysis of the tales allows for some interesting connections between the life lived by the Grimm brothers and the tales they collected.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">FAMILY<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The Grimm’s family (5 boys and one girl) lived a good, middle-class life until the father died, the children still quite young. The mother suffered from what was called melancholia, became dependent on her father and then on offerings from her own siblings. Paradiz portrays the dire straits for women of the time, both monetarily and socially. She sites tales that feature such women setting the collecting into the social climate and women’s place in it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">HISTORY<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The Grimm brothers lived a significant part of their lives during the Napoleonic Wars. Germany had never known a nationalistic unity like France and England due to the many nation states that made up Germany. The brothers chaffed under the rule of the French in their city and never lost their zeal for furthering the German language, literature, cultural identity and national pride.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">COLLECTING<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">It was the beginning of the Romantic period. In philosophy and literature there was longing for simplicity, of nature and natural feelings. The brothers yearned for a simpler time, a time of their young childhood in the German countryside. They built the romantic illusion that they collected these old fairy tales from peasant women throughout the German countryside. Nothing could be further from the truth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The brothers fondly remembered their aunt telling them stories when they were young, but they began their collecting by compiling and cataloguing folk songs for their benefactor/mentor, Brentano. This collecting grew dissatisfying, for it entailed gathering from written sources. It wasn’t long before the brothers began collecting stories in a new and different way. Their sister, Lotte befriended a family in the neighborhood, a family of six sisters. The Wild family was a middle class family and the girls well educated. The girls knew many stories and delighted each other in the telling of them. Soon weekly gatherings occurred in which stories were told round; the brothers jotting down the stories as they were told. Soon they began soliciting these stories. The girls would write them down and send them to Jacob and Wilhelm. Some of the stories the girls had heard, some they made up and some were a combination of the two. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The brothers collected from these girls for many years. When the girls married and moved off Wilhelm discovered a new source of stories, the girls in the Hassenphlug family. Like the first, this family consisted of well educated, middle class girls who delighted in stories, were well-read and had leisure time. The Brothers Grimm found a number of such families, gathering and soliciting from these young women. Many of these women went on to become the first well-known German female authors. Later the two brothers happened on their ‘ideal’ source. Dorothy Viehamann, an older, illiterate German woman <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The Grimm brothers offered only one story from their childhood for their collected edition <i>Children’s and Household Fairy Tales</i>. All of the other stories came from these ‘clever maids’. The brothers collected the stories, selected the ones they liked, chose and consolidated the most salient parts of similar stories and edited them all. The Brothers Grimm were surrounded by and influenced by women all their lives. The women who lived their stories and the clever maids who told them were never given any credit by the two brothers. This book strives to right that wrong. </span></div>
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<o:p></o:p>Paulahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10117710109069705323noreply@blogger.com1