Heads or Tales

Storytelling At Church

A few weeks ago, I was invited to talk about storytelling to a great group of Sunday school teachers at Vineyard Church up in Sunbury, Ohio. We did talk about storytelling and the tools every storyteller needs, and we even learned a story to tell, but I forgot to tell them about a great resource. It’s called the Helping Books Program. This program was started when I began telling stories full time. It’s run through the State Library of Ohio and "is a collection of children’s literature titles, both fiction and nonfiction, covering topics that focus on ethical and personal issues relevant to young people." What a great resource to use when building a Sunday lesson or school lesson or discussion at home.

You can access their webpage by going to www.helpingbooks.org. Click on the Literature Database link and you will be taken to a page that allows you to search for a particular book, author or review. Click on the Subject Search and you can see all the books plus their reviews for such topics as: empathy, honesty, respect, loyalty, courage, bullies….to just name a few. I bet there are 40 topics containing a variety of books to use as supplements to your storytelling or to tell orally.

Take a look on their home page and you can even volunteer to be a reviewer. I have done some of the reviews for this database. The books came to my house, and I got to keep them as payment for the reviews I submitted. Even if you aren’t thinking about being a reviewer, click on guidelines. The guidelines provided for reviewing are a great reminder of what makes a good book, and may help you in your search for good books to share or tell.

Ballad Singing

Last night was the first Speak Easy for 2008. Speak Easy is an open mic night for storytelling held down in the basement, called the Rathskeller, of the Maennerchor, an old German restaurant here in Columbus. The small stage is located right near the bar, so people can order dinner and have drinks while they’re listening. Speak Easy operates on the third Wednesday from January through May. We charge $5. After we pay the featured teller, Columbus Story Adventures gets to keep the rest to spend on books for the kids we visit, and last night we had a bumper crowd. Granny Sue, from West Virginia, was our visiting teller. She came last year and sung one ballad after she told stories from the mountains. This year she sung three old ballads accappela, and, in between, she told stories. I must admit that as much as I liked the sorties, once she started on those haunting old songs, full of murder and lost love, I just smiled and couldn’t help it. They were so beautiful and haunting. One was the story of the murder of Pretty Polly. The second I do forget, and the last came from Ireland. It was the story of two fourteen year olds who fell in love. The mother of the young man killed him rather than have him marry his beloved. I think what I liked best was that she sang them without another musical instrument. I felt pushed back in time to some cabin in the mountains, with those lonely songs coming out into the darkness.

Ensemble Storytelling

Next month I’m going to be in a primary classroom working for five days with a group of students on storytelling. Originally, I said I would bring by a stack of stories from which the children could choose, and we would work towards presenting the stories at the end of my stay. The teacher, however, told me that the class is spending a year on Africa and could I make all the stories African. Collecting and rewriting twenty African tales for the children to learn was appealing on one hand, because I would then have a varied collection for future use, but I got to thinking of a conversation I had recently with Kevin Cordi, the co author of Raising Voices: Creating Youth Storytelling Groups and Troops. Kevin lives in Columbus now; he just finished his PhD. in Process Drama as OSU. He said he likes to work with a whole group on one story. When he said that, I had a light bulb moment. So….. using the story called the Cow Tail Switch, the primary students and I will all be working together.

Right now, I have the story mapped across my office floor using objects. My plan, and Kevin’s suggestion, was that after the children hear the story, I can introduce the objects and they can tell just their part of the story. We can switch as children try telling different parts of the story until a favorite part is chosen. I’m excited about telling one big story because we can do some drama activities that will allow us to understand the story better. Those kinds of activities can become fragmented if everyone is working on a different story. Also, I think each child can tell their part as a member of the larger group, which, I am hoping, will encourage even the shyest members to let themselves go to the experience.

Storytelling, Reading and TV

I just finished an article in the New Yorker Magazine (Dec. 24 and 31, 2007) by Caleb Crain called Twilight of the Books. The article is an examination of the declining population of book readers and ever growing population of TV viewers. Book readers, says the author, quoting Maryanne Wolf’s book about the neurobiology of the brain called Proust And The Squid, over time develop specialized paths in their brains as they become fluent readers. Reading, at first, is an unnatural activity for the brain, but the brain does adapt and creates streamlined routes leaving space for the reader to think and react to what is being read. TV viewers, who greatly outnumber readers, according to the article, don’t get the added brain benefits.
Here a few of the things the author lists about TV viewing and reading

• Readers are better able to think abstractly. TV viewing encourages, as it did in early oral cultures, people to think in images.

• TV is a solitary medium, which is controlled by the viewer. The viewer is likely to watch only that which supports his point of view. That means that questioning is diminished.

• Because the images are fleeting on TV and because it’s hard to revisit what was seen, it is hard to do comparisons of varying opinions. Viewers are likely to fall back on what they intuit or experience as a basis for opinions.

• Proficient readers are more likely to engage in the world around them than their TV counterparts. “Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence,” says Mr. Crain. He goes on to say, “such a habit might be quite dangerous for a democracy to lose.”

I wonder about oral storytelling in relation to the two mediums. Storytelling is not reading. It feeds on the natural brain paths already laid down from the beginning of human communication. Storytelling, as in TV viewing, does make good use of images. When I learn a story, I often make a map of the images in a story so that I can remember what I what to say. I can only remember the story through its images. Storytelling, like TV, deals in stereotypes – that’s what all folk and fairytales are about. Storytelling, however, is told from living person to living person. It is not a solitary activity. No channels can be switched and listeners are exposed to many experiences. Because storytelling is done in a group, it is possible to go back and share reactions and understandings. Storytelling relies, like reading and unlike TV, where everything is exposed, on imagination. With imagination, comes the same active participation a reader must use to understand and be involved with the text. Possibly, imagination is reading and storytelling’s closest and most important connection.

The audience of storytellers is small compared to that of readers and miniscule compared to that of TV viewers. I have performed in a good number of venues where people have expected me to read from a book, but what, I wonder, would happen if there was a steady diet of storytelling and reading. What if every night people spent the three to four hours they use to watch TV, listening and telling stories and reading books? What would our brains look like? What would our towns and cities look like? How would our work day and self image change? How would our country change?