Stories From a Stone

by Maria LoBiondo

“In the beginning, there were no stories.”

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?”

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One youngster drew a memory of rolling down a hill with a friend. Another drew the dog she wished someday to own. 

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. The humblest of materials — even a stone — can inspire a story .

Primary resource for the Storytelling Stone: a Seneca tale retold by Joseph Bruchac in Return of the Sun: Native American Tales from the Northeast Woodlands.

Stone, by Charles Simic: https://t54poets.weebly.com/blog/stone-by-charles-simic

Why Tell Stories? Oasis Teen Girls Respond

by Julie Della Torre and Paula Davidoff

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. 

As a group, we read the poem, "Why We Tell Stories" by Liesel Mueller https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/lisel-mueller/why-we-tell-stories/. 

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?

Here are their responses:

Guadalupe's prose poem

Yadary: 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. 

Claudia: 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. 

Yokary: 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.

Erica: 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. 

Ajeyne: I think people like listening to stories because, while they’re listening, they feel like they’re in the story and enjoy the feeling. 

Guadalupe: 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. 

Ava: 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. 

Laney (director of the Oasis teen girls group): 

Why I feel good listening to stories

 (you = stories from my childhood)

Because when I’m feeling blue, you act like a color wheel and allow me to feel shade on a hot summer’s day.

Because you remind me of a simpler time, when I “never” felt sick and didn’t feel alone. 

Because sometimes I need an escape, whether I’m leaving work to fight a fire-breathing dragon, or dress pretty for the ball.

Because when I hear your voice, I feel soothed. Because you are told by my mother. 

Learning through Metaphor

by Paula Davidoff

Fitcher's Bird illustration by A. Rackham

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. 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. The metaphors in folk and fairy tales give students a way to view their personal experiences in terms of the broader human condition. 

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’ Fitcher’s Bird. 

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. 

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’ Fitcher’s Bird 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 Bluebeard is type 312; Fitcher’s Bird is type 311.) 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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. 

Remembering Helen Wise

by Julie Pasqual

Helen with students

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. 

         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.

         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.

      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.

          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.   

Hey There, Little Red Riding Hood!

by Paula Davidoff

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. 

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 Little Red Riding Hood: a 17^th 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. 

“Wait, what happened to the grandmother?”

“The wolf ate her.”

“No, I think the grandmother hid in the closet!”

“The way I heard it, she gets eaten.”

“And Little Red Riding Hood got eaten, too.” 

“I thought she was rescued by a hunter or something.”

And so it went. 

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.

“He (Perrault) makes it seem like it’s the girl’s fault that she got killed.”

“Why does Little Red Cap have to be rescued by a man? Girls always need a man to rescue them in fairy tales.” 

“But in the first story, the girl got herself away from the wolf.” 

“And in the second part of the last (Grimm) story, she learned from experience that wolves can be dangerous.”

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.

As, Tiffany wrote: 

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.”

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:

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. 

So I go up to her and I’m like, “Ayy yo, Shortface. You looking real fine and nice. Where you think you going.”

She responds to me, “I’m headed to my Grandma’s house… why?”

I said to her, “Cause I wanna get to know you.”  

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.

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. 

“Mom, what are you doin here?”

“I forgot to give you the soup for your granny.”

“So you make me walk through all that… just for you to end up going, too?”

“Don’t whine!”

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.”

“No. We ain’t need no man.”

Mom literally went in and I trailed behind her.

Oasis teen girls creating a story tableaux

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. 

STEM to STEAM

by Gerald First

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.

A Glenfield Middle School student at work in the STEAM lab.

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.

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 Imagine the Moon, 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.

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.

Frozen in time, Stuck in traffic,

Creeping to school along the same week-day path,

Emerging from the vehicle as if it were a cocoon

Woven from a caterpillar, 

We, ready to change, with

Fluttering wings of chaotic laughter, 

Make greetings of good morning 

As we drag our feet.

Hundreds of stairs rise up.

Our wings once curled are ready to open.

With a slow steady pace we march

Down the hall and into our room,

Where our wings, now dry, emerge 

To show our bright colors. 

One could not ask for a better recommendation to have teaching artist in the schools.

  

Kids Say the Darndest Things

by Maria LoBiondo

Luray Gross at Princeton Arts Council summer camp

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. 

“Do you know what happened when there were too many mouths to feed in the old days, what happened to children?” 

A boy of about 10 piped up, “They killed them?” 

“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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 Look Back and See). 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. 

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.” 

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 Look Back and See). 

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. 

As storytellers, we’ve learned to expect the unexpected — and lively imaginative responses during story times.