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!”  

Teaching Aeschylus in 8th Grade

One my projects this fall has been a collaboration with 8^th grade social studies teacher, Darcel Deodato. Darcel is one of the teachers who participated in the long-term teacher education program that Julie Della Torre and I wrote about last spring. We are both back at the school, but this year we are each working intensively with only two teachers.

Eighth grade students in New Jersey study Civics. They learn about forms of government and, specifically, the organization of the United States government. When Darcel and I discussed how to embed storytelling into this curriculum, we decided to focus on stories that would help students think about why people need laws and how government serves society. Over the summer, I thought about a lot of stories: stories about justice being served, stories about the miscarriage of justice, and stories about people taking justice into their own hands. In the end, I decided to begin the year by telling the students the ancient Greek story of the trial of Orestes in Athens.

As I was preparing my lessons, I spent quite a bit of time trying to craft the myth into a tellable tale. This is always an issue when you’re working with a long and complex story, but with this particular story, I began my work with the goal of making it less graphically disturbing. The story of Orestes comes near the end of the Legend of the House of Atreus, a cursed family whose generations were blighted by murder, cannibalism, and incest. The horror begins when a first ancestor, Tantalus, cooks his son and serves him to the gods. It ends, five generations later, with Orestes in the court of Athens, on trial for matricide.

Orestes was the son of Agamemnon, the king who led the armies of Greece against Troy. The story of Agamemnon and his immediate family is beyond tragic. Not only was his sister-in-law, Helen, the cause of that bloody, drawn-out war, but he, himself, felt obligated to kill his oldest daughter, as a sacrifice to Artemis, before his armies even left Greece. While he was at war, his wife, Clytemnestra (Helen’s sister), took a lover (who was Agamemnon’s cousin) and plotted revenge for her daughter’s death. Upon his return from Troy, Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon and, in turn, their son, Orestes, killed her to avenge his father. 

The murders of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra are the subject of a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus. In the last play, Orestes, haunted by his mother’s ghost and tormented by her Furies, the Erinyes, seeks the help of the goddess, Athena. When Orestes arrives in Athens, instead of passing judgment, herself, Athena asks the help of the citizens of Athens to end the cycle of blood-for-blood revenge. She creates a jury to decide the case of Erinyes vs. Orestes.

At first, I thought I would follow Aeschylus and cut the pre-Agamemnon generations out of my story, but as I worked, I realized how important the stories of the early ancestors are to one of the most significant results of Orestes’s trial: Athena’s persuasion of the Erinyes, chthonic goddess of retribution and guardians of family bonds, to remain in her city. I began to think that a listener needs to hear about the horrible crimes of Tantalus and his descendants to understand why society needs the presence of these goddesses and, while Aeschylus’s audiences would have known the family history, my audience would not. Ultimately, I decided to tell the story from the beginning. 

The unit took five class periods. The story worked in the social studies curriculum. Not only did it introduce the idea of a judicial system based on trial by a jury of peers, it was also relevant to the lives of the students who live in a city where neighborhoods are torn apart by retaliatory gang killings.  As the story unfolded, we stopped to allow time for students to discuss the moral issues involved. For example, students debated Agamemnon’s choices at Aulis. Should he kill his child so that the Greek Armada could sail to Troy? This discussion raised important questions: Is it ever justifiable to take a human life to further a cause or ideal? What about if taking one life might save others? We also talked about ‘laws’ that seem basic to our human instincts, like those against murder and incest. Students spoke passionately about these questions.

Near the end of the story, before I told the outcome of the trial,  Darcel divided the class into prosecution and defense teams who presented arguments for each side based on the story and our related discussions. During the debate, six students sat as jurors. The outcome of the 8^th grade trial differed from that of the original. The jury felt strongly that Orestes should be punished for his deed. The next day, students did a dramatic reading of the trial scene from Aeschylus’s play (We used Peter Meineck’s translation which is easy to read and lends itself to performance.) and discussed its outcome. Much of this discussion focused on Athena’s appeasement of the Erinyes and why it was important for her to persuade them to become guardians of the city.

Annual Board & Storyteller Meeting

A few weeks ago SAI held the annual Board Members/ Storytellers meeting. It was a huge success. This is a day for Board Members and Storytellers to meet and discuss storytelling, our mission, what we storytellers have been doing in the schools and ways we can help one another. This meeting helps all of us clarify goals and strengthens the bonds of the organization.

The last couple of years we have met at an idyllic historic house near Princeton. Though we don’t have time to hike around, we do have a glorious fall view surrounding us. The morning is spent in separate groups. The Board Members meet in one room to discuss the things Board Members discuss and we Storytellers have a luxurious few hours of professional development provided for us. We don’t discuss our work, we play, dance, write and otherwise get creative with our stories. I feel honored and appreciated that Karen (Executive Director) and the Board Members realize how important it is to spend time and money on such an activity. Like all professionals, we storytellers need to grow and get reenergized. The afternoon is spent in a pot-luck lunch and combined gathering. Some stories are told. We Storytellers present the work we’ve been doing and answer questions. Board Members tell us what they’ve been working on... But, what I want to tell you about is the morning workshop.

This year the workshop was presented by Carolyn Hunt a Playback Theatre Director. After a brief introduction to Playback Theatre we dove right in moving, growling, stomping and interpreting. Carolyn is an amazing workshop leader. She led us through general Playback exercises but she listened to our questions and observed our explorations and immediately adapted the exercises she had planned to our work. The more she saw us working with parts of our stories, places in our stories, questions we’ve always had about certain motivations, the deeper she pushed us; still using the exercises she had planned. At times the work became uncomfortably intense due to issues the story was revealing. Then we stopped to talk about how these tensions could be balanced in a classroom. I could go on and on but the post would be too long. Thank you Carolyn for a terrific workshop. I have already used fluid sculptures a couple of times in a school. Thank you Board Members and Karen for offering this workshop. Thank you fellow storytellers for playing with me.