Stops Along the Way

by Paula Davidoff

In a castle by the sea, there lived an old lord who had no wife or children living, only one granddaughter whose face he had sworn he would never look at for as long as he lived because on the day she was born, his favorite daughter had died.

Illustration by John D. Batten

That is the beginning of Tattercoats, a persecuted heroine-type tale collected by Joseph Jacobs in More English Fairytales. I love to use this story when I’m teaching because that first sentence implies three generations of family history and, therefore, leads to many questions. When did the Old Lord’s wife die? How many children did she leave behind? What happened to those who weren’t the father’s favorite? Who was the granddaughter’s father? Was he the husband of the favorite? If so, why isn’t he mentioned; if not, what is the story of the child’s conception?

The list of questions becomes longer as the story goes on to introduce an “Old Nurse” (Did she also nurse the Old Lord’s children? What happened to her children?), a gooseboy who plays a magic flute (Is he really a boy or does that title simply establish his role as a servant? If he is a man, could he be the father of the heroine? a child of the Old Nurse?), and geese who, eventually, turn into page boys (Were they always enchanted boys? Or, in their boy form, are they enchanted geese? In either case, who is responsible for the enchantment?).

Everyone with whom I discuss this story, from fourth graders to people old enough to be the great-grandparents of fourth graders, talks about the hidden stories they infer from the text as if they were talking about real people, people they know and care about. And, of course, on some level they are, because the characters in folktales represent us and the people in our lives, and serious conversation about these characters helps us understand ourselves and guide our behavior.

In the story, when the Old Lord learns of his favorite daughter’s death, presumably, from childbirth,

He vowed never to set eyes upon his granddaughter for as long as he lived. Then he sat down in a chair by a window overlooking the sea and began to cry great tears for the daughter he had lost. He sat there crying for so long that his tears wore through the stone window sill and ran down in a little channel to the sea, and his hair and beard grew long, into his lap and over his knees, until it wrapped around the rungs of the chair and grew into the chinks in the floor.

It was this description of grief that made me decide to learn to tell Tattercoats. The old man’s anger and despair wrung my heart, and the fanciful description of his hair and his tears, metaphors for his emotions, bound me to the tale as firmly as the grieving father was bound to his chair.

Long ago I learned that there are moments in every story that cause some listener to think, Wait, what just happened? That makes no sense. These moments are usually not the ones that we think of as demanding suspension of disbelief; they are not about flying carpets or talking animals or singing bones. They are about the listener and they are the story’s way of saying, Yes, look here; here there is something for you.

One of the first times I recognized this phenomenon was early in my storytelling career when, during a workshop for teenage mothers, we were discussing the Grimm tale, Fitcher’s Bird. The women had listened closely, punctuating the telling with gestures and remarks: shakes of the head, groans when the first sister decides to peek into the forbidden chamber, gasps at her fate, and so on. By the end of the story, dead girls had been brought back to life, the heroine had evaded capture by dressing herself in honey and feathers, and the sorcerer had unwittingly carried his captives back to their home in a basket on his back, but the first question I got from my audience was,

Wait a minute. I don’t get it. Didn’t that room full of dead bodies stink?

The question floored me. I didn’t articulate the first thought that came to mind: This is a story, not a scientific treatise. In fact, I didn’t offer any answer. Instead, I fell back on that old teacher trick for gaining time to think and asked, Anyone have an idea about that? Answers varied from It’s just a story, to The chamber was magic, to Maybe the room was refrigerated or the door was airtight, while I wondered, Why did that detail break this woman’s suspension of disbelief?

I didn’t get an answer, although, in the weeks that followed, as I got to know the women, I was able to speculate on possibilities that helped lead me to the conviction I stated above, namely that when something in a story breaks one’s ability to stay in the tale, it’s the story’s way of saying, You need to look closely at this moment.

When I first read Tattercoats, I recognized the Old Lord’s reaction to the latest chapter of his family tragedy, but I think that what stopped me at that moment was the, as yet unconscious, realization that the image held a lesson I needed to learn. At the time, my own family happiness and security was being challenged by events out of our control, and there were many days that I wavered between anger at the fates who had visited us with misfortune and despair at my inability to change the course of events. As I worked in the story, telling and retelling, writing and thinking about its characters, visualizing places and events, my feelings shifted. The change was subtle and influenced by life events that had nothing to do with my story work, but I think that the story was also there, beneath the surface, working its spell.

Years later, when I revisited Tattercoats, it surprised me. The moment that had originally captured my attention no longer seemed central. This time it was the heroine’s story. My focus was on her ability to find her way aided only by the joy she found in the gooseboy’s music. And that’s how story works. The answers are there, but they shift with time and changing circumstance. We often don’t hear them if we don’t need them, sailing through a tale from Once upon a time to happily ever after without a pause. It’s when we stumble that we need to stop and examine the path.

Paula Davidoff

Fitting the Story to the Audience

  by Julie Pasqual     

   Here’s a riddle: What do stories, warm muscles, taffy, and rubber bands have in common?  Answer: They stretch!

Julie Pasqual during her recent China storytelling tour.

          While that has always been my experience with the marvelous things known as folktales, never have I found that more true than on my recent storytelling tour in China, where I found myself telling tales to children as young as 3 and as old as 17, with various degrees of English language skills.

          Being as this is my third tour of a foreign country, I have come to know, a little bit at least, what to expect.  At the international and bilingual schools I visit, the academic standards are SKY HIGH, the teachers EXTREMEMLY committed, and the kids sweet, excited, and very receptive.  For the most part the language level is almost always like the same as a native speaker – what I tell to a six year old here, I can tell to a six year old there.  But, from time to time there are groups, or parts of groups, where the language level is not so high, when, for instance, a group of 12 year olds have English skills that are more like a 7 year olds (which, I have to say is better than ANY skills I have in any language – including, on MANY days, my own mother tongue!!).  It’s times like these where the elasticity of stories comes into play.

          In a situation like that, the challenge is: how does one tell, in simple language, a story that wouldn’t talk down to a 12 year old – and age when it is all about proving you are no longer a “little kid”?  That’s where the elasticity of the folktale comes into play.   Because stories don’t belong to ANYONE, they belong to EVERYONE, so characters that might have a sweet innocent personality when telling for a 7 year old, can become sassy and “over it” for a tween ager.  Instead of describing, say a princess as being “lovely and fair”, I might say, “She looked like a movie star!”, and strut about a bit, so they could see, rather than just hear what I meant.  Working in moments to give them a chance to choose something in the story is a great tool as well, because it puts them in the driver’s seat a little bit – like in the story I tell of Juan Bobo.  I take a few moments for them to help me decide what color dress Juan should put on the pig – it’s silly, fun, they understand the question, and have the vocabulary to answer the question, all the while it’s something kids that age all around the world are into – FASHION!!

          Working in things I see on their tee shirts, or backpacks into the story always elicits smiles and engagement, as they begin to see, whether they understand every word out of my mouth or not, that storytelling is about us both – teller and listener together – we’re both in this together, stretching this story to include the actual plot, who they are, and their level of comprehension. 

          Really “taking it to the audience”, so to speak, is ALWAYS one of my favorite techniques with younger audiences, and when they don’t understand many words, what they do understand are facial expression and tone.  “Reading” what my emotions are, and what my body gestures “say” – is learning to read as well, and as these youngest children make a connection between the sounds coming out of my mouth, and the way my body is moving, they are learning language.  Maybe the story didn’t have the prefect beginning, middle, and end – but it was a “telling”, a narrative of the smallest kind.

          Stories stretch – better than a yogi in a heated room – they can expand to take in what is actually happening in that moment, in that place.  That is what allows storytellers to be able to reach audiences of all ages, in all countries, and can make each telling a custom made fit for the listeners at hand!

"Storytelling is about us both -- teller and listener together"

The Meaning of Human Existence

 by Jack McKeon  

illustration by Arthur Rackham

A couple of months ago, I read a book by biologist Edward O. Wilson modestly titled “The Meaning of Human Existence”.  In it, Wilson makes the case that we are a “eusocial” species – one that cooperatively raises its young across multiple generations and which divides labor so that members must sacrifice some personal reproductive success for the success of the group.  There are, he says, about 23 such species, primarily insects (bees, ants, termites), a couple of African mole rats, and us.  We’ve attained this status by the adaptation of our ancestors to meat eating, which favored a more stable form of life than our previous wandering.  The “nest” or campsite developed, becoming the focus of social life.  Work became divided and complex and the community cared for the children.

    Aiding this eusocial development was a genetic disposition to be insatiably curious about ourselves and each other. This developed our sensitivity to the non-verbal messages put out by others, enabling us to interpret situations and anticipate the future. This function was further aided by the development of spoken, then written, language and the creative arts in general.

… the creative arts… are… in an important way just the

same old story, with the same themes, the same archetypes, the same emotions.

….

The function of anthrocentricity – fascination about ourselves – is the sharpening of social intelligence, a skill in which human beings are the geniuses among all the earth’s species…a state of intense, even obsessive concentration on others has always enhanced survival of individuals and groups. We are devoted to stories because that is how the mind works –

a never ending wandering through past scenarios and through alternative scenarios of the future.

It struck me that what we do is at the center of this process, not only in the actual act of telling stories but in the content of what we tell.  One of the consequences of our eusocial standing is a conflict between the individual’s drive for personal genetic success and the opposing need of the success of the group.  This is a conflict that has plagued us throughout our history and is playing out now in our own politics.

    Our stories, more often than not, deal with just this conflict. Take the Grimms’

“The Golden Bird”, which I recently told at the Morris County Juvenile Facilities.  This is a story with the typical three brother conflict.  The older two brothers, faced with the task of first identifying and then locating the bird, indulge their desire for sleep when they should be watching, and then, trusting to their “cleverness”, ignore the good advice of the fox that would have deprived them of some personal satisfaction.  So they get stuck living for pleasure and abandoning all responsibility towards a greater good.  Eventually they end up on the gallows – an interesting response of group control over the excessive individual – and are rescued by the more other-oriented youngest brother, only to resume their selfish, disastrous, behavior.

    This youngest brother, on the other hand, as is usual in these cases, assumes the responsibility of watching through the night and heeds the advice of the fox to avoid the snares of the Inn of pleasure and assume the humility of the dark, quiet inn.  In this way he attains the invaluable assistance of the fox. He pays attention for the good of all, at some discomfort to himself, at least this time.  (Other third sons gain helpful assistance by engaging in generous, socially conscious sharing of food or information.)

    The youngest brother is not without flaws, however, mainly an inability, shared with his brothers, to accept the humble when the grand is available.  He is still trapped by a desire for “show” that each time arouses the community and lands him in prison.  Each time he is given a reprieve by the various kings – the social authority – if he can only bring something further that might be useful for the community.  Even his final task, accomplished by the fox, of removing a hill blocking the king’s window is to enable the king to see further, an increase in power rather than wealth.  By the end, the youngest brother has obtained the animal power and energy of the horse, the spirituality of the bird and the life asserting force of the anima/princess.  However, they are usurped for personal gain by the older brothers and ultimately do not function in a positive way.  Only by approaching them with humility, as the youngest does in the guise of a beggar, can they be persuaded to sing, eat and be joyful. The youngest son then becomes heir to the throne, the new social condition..  The individual has integrated in himself all that can make him whole in such a way that he blesses and unifies the kingdom at large.  The apparent conflict between individual and society is resolved and everybody wins.  Except the elder brothers who are put to death.  While this doesn’t actually address the biological imperative of the individual to reproduce personal DNA at all costs, one can imagine that prince and princess will have lots of children in a manner sanctioned by society.

    It’s nice to see us storytellers on the front lines of this eons old and ongoing battle for civilization.  I think of last year’s workshops with the 6^th grade at Frelinghuysen in which we told stories and ran exercises about the benefits of community.  Our stories work towards a socialization that traditional societies accomplished more forcefully and sometimes brutally.

    What about the fox?

Our stories about animals require human like emotions and behavior understandable with well worn guidebooks of human nature.  We use endearing animal caricatures including those of even tigers and other ferocious predators to teach children about other people.

    I think there’s more to what we find in the animals in tales, particularly the helpful creatures like the fox.  Part of this fascination is our intuitive connection with animals which we lose as we become civilized.  Our houses are filled with animals, not, I think, just for companionship but because we need that connection, however domesticated.  It’s fascinating to watch my Aussie do her best to herd and control my two cats, or to listen to the guttural noises the cats make as they watch the birds out the window. We need to be close to them to be reminded of who and what we are.  The animals in story speak with that inner voice that resides deep in our brain.  They are us.  We are at our best when we can listen to these foxes, who, perhaps ironically, always put us onto the difficult and uncomfortable road towards civilization.  But if we listen we can experience, as at the end of “The Golden Bird”, the transformation of animal to civilized being.

illustration by Jamie Mitchell

Stories that Resonate Deeply

Illustration by H.J. Ford

I love stories – who doesn’t? It’s why I became a storyteller. And with told stories, I love the time-out-of-time feeling that happens when teller and listeners make the story come alive together. Stories on a page are fine words, but a different magic happens when we make the story appear in our minds’ eyes, when we conjure together what the youngest son looks like, how the smile beams from the kindest daughter, imagine the threatening leer of the monster, and feel the comfort of the old woman who gives advice.

I think of myself as a medium. The old folk tales come through me to share with others. It’s important to me that they are remembered and told; they are the wisdom of many generations before us distilled in a form we can understand, regardless of what age we are when he first hear them. We can hear a story over and over and it still resonates deeply for us because our life experience adds meaning to the story. It enriches our understanding and feelings about life.

Let me give an example. In about the sixth grade I became fascinated with the myths of ancient Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia. I couldn’t say why these stories hooked me, only that they seemed to hold secrets I wanted to understand.

In high school I latched on to a particular myth, “Cupid and Psyche.” You may remember it: Psyche is married to a mysterious husband who comes to her only at night and warns her not to try and look at him. Her jealous sisters urge her to kill what they say is surely a monster, and Psyche determines to see the truth for herself. But the lamp spills oil, burning her husband’s shoulder, as she gazes upon Cupid, the god of love. Cupid flees because love cannot live without trust. In her grief, Psyche searches for her husband and prostrates herself before Cupid’s mother, Venus. Angry Venus gives Psyche seemingly impossible tasks to ruin her, but, with help from surprising sources, Psyche (Greek for “soul”) ultimately is reunited with Love.

This heroine’s journey spoke to the teenage me because I wanted to find love and be worthy of meeting seemingly impossible tasks. 

H.J. Ford, Blue Fairy Book, Andrew Lang, editor

Years later I chose as my first folk tale to learn the Scandinavian classic “East of the Sun and West of the Moon.” As I delved into the characters I recognized the similarities between Psyche and the Scandinavian lass who agrees to go with a Great White Bear to help her family. The lass sees the bear only by day but at night senses a presence with her who disappears by dawn. She begs to visit her family and, although warned by the bear that to listen to her mother could bring doom, on her return she follows her mother’s urging to investigate the night presence—to disastrous effect. Love cannot live without trust, and the enchanted bear, really a prince, must now marry a troll. After a long, arduous search the lass proves her faithfulness and love and trust are restored.

By then I was married with a son and another child on the way. “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” was a favorite of my son, who sat on my lap to listen as I practiced telling it. His favorite stuffed animal was a white bear—for him, the bear turning into a prince was wonderful. For me, the tale of losing and gaining trust spoke volumes about relationships.

You may be thinking that not every story carries such a deep meaning, and you are right. But what I have learned over the years is that it’s not for me to say which stories will resonate deeply with listeners who, with me, make a story come alive.

A few weeks ago, my husband came home from a cigar shop he likes to visit. He was talking with the young man behind the counter, who, it turns out, vividly remembered my telling of a Japanese tale, “The Stonecutter,’’ to his class when he was in elementary school. Now in his 20s, he retold it to my husband: how a poor man cutting stone blocks from a mountain one day wishes to be greater than he is; how the mountain’s spirit transforms him, first into a samurai warrior, then into an emperor, into the sun, a raincloud, and then the mountain itself; how he finally realizes that as a man he had a power he had not understood. And so he once again becomes a stonecutter.

The story had spoken to him—you could say it had spoken to his soul—and he remembered it still.

written by Maria LoBiondo

Telling and Listening to Stories: Being Human Together

written by Julie Pasqual

     

  I hope I am not the only one who loves it when someone you admire, and think is talented, smart, deep, and inspiring says something that you yourself have thought?  Something that you have felt to be “deeply true”, but you were never quite sure if that idea, or concept, would make sense to anyone other than you?  That moment when your mouth drops open, and you bleat out, “That’s what I ALWAYS thought!!”

           If it hasn’t happened to you, let me be the first to tell you that it is an AWESOME feeling, it’s like having the kid that teased you in junior high march up to you and say, “Sorry, I stuffed you into that locker, you’re actually pretty cool.”  It has a sense of immense validation, a giant “I told you so” to the world, and it leaves me thinking that maybe, just maybe, I am not as crazy as I look!!

            And that is how I felt the other day, when I opened up my most favorite author – Anne LaMott’s, newest book “Small Victories” If you are unfamiliar with her books – READ THEM, if you know her work – READ THEM AGAIN.  Here is a woman who lives a REAL life – that is messy, joyful, funny, and tragic – and so when she speaks in her poetic yet earthy voice, she is more than worth listening to.  And, so I – a storyteller, who, through the marvelous opportunities that Storytelling Arts has allowed me, tells stories in prisons - was delighted to see that one of her essays was about her experience going to San Quentin with a storyteller friend of hers.

          She speaks of her fear that the prisoners will not respond to her friend’s stories, and stands ready to save the situation – but then, as I have seen it do over and over in the Morristown Youth Detention Center,  the magic of storytelling, to quote Ms. LaMott “steals the show right from under her”.  She writes of how this group of hardened career criminals listened to the stories, mesmerized, and when they did, she writes “they looked like family.”  And why?  Because, her friend, the storyteller, Neshama had shown them that “I’m human, you’re human, let me greet your humanness.  Let’s be people together for a while.”  And that “they had thought Neshama was going to teach them a lesson, and she instead sung them a song.”

          YES!!  BINGO!!!  THAT’S ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!!!!!  ENOUGH SAID!!!  NAILED IT!!!

               I have witnessed first hand, this “song” of storytelling, and I have experienced over and over, the power a story has to create not just a relationship and bond between teller and audience, but, also, between one listener and another – one human being to another.  Too often, these incarcerated young men and women have had their essences whittled down to the mistake they made that put them in that facility.  But they, like all of us, are complex, multi-faceted beings.  Their lives have, and will, twist, turn, then twist again – just like those of the characters in the folktales we bring to them.  And because to tell a story one must listen, REALLY listen to their audience by looking at their faces, feeling their energies, feeling out the way to the tell the story at that moment, for just those people, we are given a chance to, as Ms. LaMott beautifully states – greet them at their humanness. 

          There is such a beauty in that – reminding someone that their transgressions do not define them, and that life is not simple, streamlined, or linear. It is big, messy, individual, and to a great extent a mystery.  Stories remind of us that – with their sometimes incredible series of events, larger than not just life, but the universe’s characters, and their truths – things that resound in all of us, that sound off an alarm of AHA!! somewhere inside those that hear them, and that make us turn to the person next to us and, even if just for a second connect!

    

         

       

                   

Teaching By Ear

Written by Luray Gross

“This one,” Sam says, pointing, and I begin:

            Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall….

Rhyme by rhyme, tiny story by tiny story, we proceed through the book Sam has chosen.  A few weeks ago, discomfitted by my 3-year old grandson’s pre-school-induced interest in superheroes, and bored with the wooden prose in the two Super Friend books he owns, I pulled the collection of nursery rhymes from his shelf and began reading, though “reading” is not exactly what I was doing.  Many of the rhymes I sang; in giving voice those I did not sing, I emphasized their rhythm and rhyme.  Of course more than vocal play is involved.  We marched in place for “The Noble Duke of York,” popping up and down as his “ten thousand men” march to the top of the hill, crouching for “when you’re only half-way up, you’re neither up nor down.”

Since then, each time I’ve come, Sam – who decided to be Flash Kid for Halloween ­– has brought me the book and settled in for the entire ride, Humpty Dumpty to the sleep-time poems on the last pages.  

I thought of that last week, as my colleagues Helen and Gerry and I worked on plans for an upcoming residency at Stokes Early Childhood Learning Center in Trenton, NJ.  Our discussion ranged from scheduling complexities to the stories we want to bring to these preschoolers and their teachers.  Stories that involve movement and song are a necessity, for even in adulthood, we humans learn through our bodies.  We often forget how vital physicality is for all learners.

 When I am not telling stories, I visit schools as the resident poet.  In these projects, my aim is to immerse the students in creative expression, both through experiencing poems of others and making their own new poems.  One of my favorite activities is to write out a poem on the board and invite the students (third graders onward), to copy it.  I explain that when you write the poem out with your own hand, it gets into you more deeply than when you read it.  I often teach younger children a short poem “by ear” adding gestures for each line.  These brief poems become part of our shared culture, much in the way that certain texts and songs are part of what binds a group together, be it a Girl Scout troop or a congregation at worship.

Storytellers who have a sustained relationship with a school will tell you how there are certain tales they tell each year, some much more often because the students demand them.  Both teller and listener delight in the “superior” position of knowing how the story goes.  Both are comforted by the familiar music of the story,  that of certain words and phrases, as well as the dependable the shape of the story itself.  The only thing better than hearing a new story is hearing a story again.

I think the reassurance of the familiar is part of what makes the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, Bobby Shaftoe, and Wee Willie Winkie appeal to Sam over and over.   No matter what has happened in Sam’s life that day, the old woman will always put her many children to bed, Bobby Shaftoe will come home to marry the girl and little Jack Horner will pull that plum out of the Christmas pie exclaiming, “What a good boy am I!”