Vision Statement & Other Thoughts
The Artist in the Community
Artists, in general, create beauty, challenge ideas and conventional thinking and reflect the culture back to itself in both its beauty and horror through their work.
I would like to believe that storytellers in addition to all this, have the power to transmit and reinforce a society’s culture and values through stories.
Storytellers also bind the community together through the story and reinforce positive growth and change in our societies through our stories. I believe it is important that storytellers encourage others to tell their stories within the family and community.
For the professional storyteller there is one more very important role: to entertain while doing all of this.
Why I Tell Stories
For nearly 30 years, as a counselor, I helped people face their pain, visited with them in their darkest places, traveled with them through their sorrows, and helped them cope with their deepest troubles and confusion. I educated and taught how to navigate life’s difficulties. As I learned about story and storytelling, I sometimes used stories as a tool to do that.
Now that I am retired from that work, I use storytelling to help people take a short break from all that. When we “enter the story,” we are somewhere else for a little while. The storyteller is with her listeners, all of them together, in the story. They are not alone; it is a communal experience. We can trust the storyteller to bring us safely home at the end of the story. This is what I do for my listeners.
Walt Disney is supposed to have said, “I would rather entertain a child and hope they learn something than teach a child and hope they were entertained.” School counselors and teachers don’t have that luxury. Storytellers do. I don’t want to change the world, one story at a time. I don’t want to being world peace. I want to brighten someone’s day. Bring a little laughter with a trickster story, or make them jump with a jump tale, or give the pleasant thrill of a roller coaster with a scary story. I want to entertain.
A storyteller friend of mine went to Serbia to tell stories to women who had suffered in the war there in the 1990s. She told amusing stories and then moved into more serious, “healing” stories. After a few of these, the women stopped her. They asked her for the more entertaining stories. Nothing could take away the horrible things they had experienced and they were learning to live with it. What they really wanted was to be taken out of that reality for a little while in a healthy way and laugh together. My friend’s stories did that for them.
When we laugh together, we come together in a community. Differences are forgotten. We know that almost magical things happen when a group of people listen to a story together. (Hassan) Wonderful, magical things happen with laughter, too. (Harvard Mayo) We are so besieged with changing the world, saving the environment, staying safe. Sometimes we need a place to just let all that go and take some time to laugh at all of it and most of all, to laugh at ourselves. We can do that through a well-told story, and especially, through those old folk tales. These old stories know us better than we sometimes know ourselves.
I want to have fun telling stories and want my listeners to have fun hearing them. I want to enter into the rapport and connection with my listeners when we are all together in the story. I want to be able to experience that for a long time.
What kind of stories do I tell?
I love folk tales. When I was a child, I read folktales. As an adult, before I knew about storytelling, I read world folktales and ballads. As Elizabeth Ellis says, they aren’t good because they are old. They are old because they are good.”
I am playing with interweaving traditional tales and personal story, using each to illuminate and illustrate the other. I am experimenting with finding those bits of my own experience and amplifying them into something that will bring a traditional tale to life for listeners.
I worry that a lot of personal storytelling is becoming just so much “verbal diarrhea” for many storytellers. Unless we can find the kernel of commonality with our listeners or that hint of the mythic in our own story, we are merely babbling on about ourselves; we are being narcissistic. Worse, we are using the audience as our therapist. Too much of personal storytelling has become about “me, me, me.” Storytelling should be “us, us, us.” That’s why I like the traditional tales. I believe they have a power that is so often overlooked. I found that even a simple telling of a folktale was compelling to my students. I’m not talking about 8 or 9 year olds. 13, 15, even 16 and 17 year old kids hang on these old tales. Why? Because a well-told folktale is a personal story.
Who Is My Audience?
I like telling stories to primary students all the way up to adults. I really enjoy helping secondary students discover the joy in listening to stories. These kids often think they are too old to listen to stories but that’s often because they haven’t heard the right kind of stories.
I’ve found living in Germany to make storytelling a bit difficult. Most people here have an excellent understanding of English but my German is not up to storytelling standards. I am always willing to tell stories in English or bilingually using German.
One of my goals is to provide storytelling residencies at secondary schools. In addition to teaching storytelling, they would also address English speaking and listening skills, and workshops for teachers and parents.
Artists, in general, create beauty, challenge ideas and conventional thinking and reflect the culture back to itself in both its beauty and horror through their work.
I would like to believe that storytellers in addition to all this, have the power to transmit and reinforce a society’s culture and values through stories.
Storytellers also bind the community together through the story and reinforce positive growth and change in our societies through our stories. I believe it is important that storytellers encourage others to tell their stories within the family and community.
For the professional storyteller there is one more very important role: to entertain while doing all of this.
Why I Tell Stories
For nearly 30 years, as a counselor, I helped people face their pain, visited with them in their darkest places, traveled with them through their sorrows, and helped them cope with their deepest troubles and confusion. I educated and taught how to navigate life’s difficulties. As I learned about story and storytelling, I sometimes used stories as a tool to do that.
Now that I am retired from that work, I use storytelling to help people take a short break from all that. When we “enter the story,” we are somewhere else for a little while. The storyteller is with her listeners, all of them together, in the story. They are not alone; it is a communal experience. We can trust the storyteller to bring us safely home at the end of the story. This is what I do for my listeners.
Walt Disney is supposed to have said, “I would rather entertain a child and hope they learn something than teach a child and hope they were entertained.” School counselors and teachers don’t have that luxury. Storytellers do. I don’t want to change the world, one story at a time. I don’t want to being world peace. I want to brighten someone’s day. Bring a little laughter with a trickster story, or make them jump with a jump tale, or give the pleasant thrill of a roller coaster with a scary story. I want to entertain.
A storyteller friend of mine went to Serbia to tell stories to women who had suffered in the war there in the 1990s. She told amusing stories and then moved into more serious, “healing” stories. After a few of these, the women stopped her. They asked her for the more entertaining stories. Nothing could take away the horrible things they had experienced and they were learning to live with it. What they really wanted was to be taken out of that reality for a little while in a healthy way and laugh together. My friend’s stories did that for them.
When we laugh together, we come together in a community. Differences are forgotten. We know that almost magical things happen when a group of people listen to a story together. (Hassan) Wonderful, magical things happen with laughter, too. (Harvard Mayo) We are so besieged with changing the world, saving the environment, staying safe. Sometimes we need a place to just let all that go and take some time to laugh at all of it and most of all, to laugh at ourselves. We can do that through a well-told story, and especially, through those old folk tales. These old stories know us better than we sometimes know ourselves.
I want to have fun telling stories and want my listeners to have fun hearing them. I want to enter into the rapport and connection with my listeners when we are all together in the story. I want to be able to experience that for a long time.
What kind of stories do I tell?
I love folk tales. When I was a child, I read folktales. As an adult, before I knew about storytelling, I read world folktales and ballads. As Elizabeth Ellis says, they aren’t good because they are old. They are old because they are good.”
I am playing with interweaving traditional tales and personal story, using each to illuminate and illustrate the other. I am experimenting with finding those bits of my own experience and amplifying them into something that will bring a traditional tale to life for listeners.
I worry that a lot of personal storytelling is becoming just so much “verbal diarrhea” for many storytellers. Unless we can find the kernel of commonality with our listeners or that hint of the mythic in our own story, we are merely babbling on about ourselves; we are being narcissistic. Worse, we are using the audience as our therapist. Too much of personal storytelling has become about “me, me, me.” Storytelling should be “us, us, us.” That’s why I like the traditional tales. I believe they have a power that is so often overlooked. I found that even a simple telling of a folktale was compelling to my students. I’m not talking about 8 or 9 year olds. 13, 15, even 16 and 17 year old kids hang on these old tales. Why? Because a well-told folktale is a personal story.
Who Is My Audience?
I like telling stories to primary students all the way up to adults. I really enjoy helping secondary students discover the joy in listening to stories. These kids often think they are too old to listen to stories but that’s often because they haven’t heard the right kind of stories.
I’ve found living in Germany to make storytelling a bit difficult. Most people here have an excellent understanding of English but my German is not up to storytelling standards. I am always willing to tell stories in English or bilingually using German.
One of my goals is to provide storytelling residencies at secondary schools. In addition to teaching storytelling, they would also address English speaking and listening skills, and workshops for teachers and parents.