How a Different Type of Imagination Was Born

by Julie Pasqual

         

Julie P performs at a NJ Storytelling Festival

 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. 

          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.

            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?”

         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”.

        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!

        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.

         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.     

Beautiful Garments: The Magic Fabric of Story

by Luray Gross

  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.

   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.

  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.

   “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. 

   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. 

   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.  

   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. 

   “The people, it’s as wonderful as the falls,” I said to our son.

    “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.

Choosing Stories

By Julie Della Torre and Paula Davidoff

illustration by Arthur Rackham

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. 

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 Rapunzel and Old Rinkrank, both Grimms.

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.

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.

Here are some of the girls’ responses to our request:

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. 

Ican 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.

Sometimes I feel trapped in my own mind. 

Rapunzel and Old Rinkrank 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.

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 Tayzanne (Wolkstein) and Tom Tit Tot (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.

“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...

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. 

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?

Are you reserved? Are you courageous or are you afraid? Let me become the person I’m meant to be. Sincerely, Your Soul.

We noticed that a lot of the writing was about self-image, perception of physical self, so we chose to tell Tatterhood (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. 

In her “mirror” piece from the week before, Angel had introduced the idea of her free-spirited younger self confronting her insecure present self. 

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. 

And she said, “What else is wrong about me, Angel?” 

I stay quiet, looking at her. 

“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. 

“Nothing is wrong with you. You look perfect just the way you are.” I tell her with a sad look in my eyes. 

“So I’m the same person, why not look at me the same way? I’m you but younger, aren’t 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.” 

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, Baba Yaga’s Black Geese (Russian) and Seven Ravens (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.

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 Molly Whuppie (Jacobs) and 12 Dancing Princesses(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:

Inspired by Twelve Dancing Princesses

(Many important things have happened in the span of 2 years.)

Princess

(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? 

Old Lady

Whatever it is that happened to you couldn’t have been that bad! 

Princess

Does that mean that you can’t advise me, huh?

Old Lady

That’s not what I said. Just share with me what has happened so I can help you.

Princess

Forget it!

(Goes home and writes for her future self.)

Princess

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 didn’t work out, either. Maybe that was not enough, but hopefully you’ve got things figured out by now.

Inspired by Rapunzel / Old Rinkrank

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

.

We ended this project telling The Magic Orange Tree (Wolkstein) and Persephone (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 Orange Treecould 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.

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. 

Discovering A Key

by Paula Davidoff and Julie Della Torre

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, Seven Ravens, from the Grimm collection.

Julie, Paula. and the Oasis teen girls

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. 

In fact, we believe that the stories we told them  arethe 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. 

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 Rapunzel; the other told Old Rinkrank, 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, Rapunzel Explains the Tower, by Jeanine Hall Gailey and asked the girls to write – about themselves, the stories, the poem, or whatever was on their mind.

 Some of the girls, like Lisa (we aren’t using the girls’ real names), used a line from the poem to begin. 

“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.

Others, acknowledging the metaphor of Rapunzel’s tower and the glass mountain in Old Rinkrank, wrote about feeling trapped. Angel wrote:

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.

And Yvonne:

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.

Candace found her own truth:

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.

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 Seven Ravens, 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. 

The girls’ first words about the story were about the little girl’s sacrifice. 

“She actually cut off her finger?” they exclaimed, “Why?”

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. 

Until Angel said, “She was the key.” 

We gave a collective sigh of recognition and appreciation. Then it was six o’clock and time to pack up and go home. 

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.

Discovering a Brave Old World

by Paula Davidoff

A few days ago, my husband and I were discussing the meaning of the word “brave.” 

“It can’t simply mean courageous,” he said. And, to clarify, he quoted Miranda’s famous line from The Tempest,“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. 

Hunting Scene from the Shahnameh

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. 

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^thgrade students. In these classes, I learned with the students. Here is the story.

In one of our early planning workshops this year, Kathleen told me that she had decided to add The Kite Runner, the novel by Khaled Hosseini, to all of her 10^th 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 The Kite Runner so, as soon as I got home that day, I downloaded it onto my Kindle and began a storytelling adventure. 

Most of The Kite Runner 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 Shahnameh, “The Book of Kings”, an epic written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi in the 10^thcentury C.E. In the novel, the boys sit in the branches of a pomegranate tree where Amir reads stories  from the Shahnameh to the illiterate Hassan. Their favorite tale is that of Rostam and Sohrab, a tragedy in which a father unwittingly kills his son. 

When I finished reading The Kite Runner, my first idea for connecting it to oral story was to learn to tell “Rostam and Sohrab” so I began to read the Shahnameh. 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.) 

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 Shahnameh, 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 Shahnameh 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 The Kite Runner. 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 Shahnameh and, as in The Kite Runner, the upper-class characters often lack the nobility and moral strength displayed by their servants. 

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 The Kite Runner 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. 

One definite parallel between The Kite Runner and the Shahnameh, 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 Shahnameh 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. 

But the Shahameh, like The Kite Runner, 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. 

Those Faces

by Luray Gross

In a Station of the Metro

                                    The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

                                    Petals on a wet, black bough.

-Ezra Pound

“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.

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 Itaking 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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

            

Rhythm and Rhyme, Part II

by Maria LoBiondo

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.

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.

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:

“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!”

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).

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.

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.

Mary Ann Paterniti (front left), Maria LoBiondo (front right) and the Princeton Storytelling Circle