Posts Tagged Canadian Storytellers

Literacy the Old Fashioned Way with Joy…

or Teaching Without Pressuring the Teacher to Teach or the Child to Learn

Maxtells

Stories and songs are natural teachers and create natural paths to literacy.
Stir a child’s imagination with stories, songs, and poems, and you feed the roots of learning. Once memorized, a single sentence from a piece of prose, a song, or a poem, creates a model for many hundreds of sentences to come.

The linguistic significance of these models looks deceptively simple, but every sentence or stanza, no matter how short, is packed with grammatical and syntactic models. Let’s take a closer look at one simple stanza from my song, Bug in My Hand:

There’s a bug in my hand,

and it climbed on my nose,

and it played a bass drum,

bum, bum, bum, bum.

Here are a few of the grammatical (syntactic) structures in this one short stanza. Read the rest of this entry »

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Ben Nind – Storytelling is Essential to Community Health and Life.


Press Play to hear Ben Nind speaking on how Storytelling is Essential to Community Health and Life on the Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolf.

Press Play to hear Ben Nind speaking on how Storytelling is Essential to Community Health and Life on the Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolf.

Ben Nind - Storytelling and Art Organizer

Storytelling Is Essential to Community Health and Life.

Do we really have to justify why this is so? Are we so removed from ourselves as purveyors of stories that we actually need to rationalize, in some manner or form – why storytelling is essential? This is an odd question because it means that I have to somehow divorce story from the human experience and that is an impossible task.

The glue that holds all of the pieces together is story past, present and future.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Anne Glover on Finding Your Authentic Voice in Storytelling


Press Play to hear Anne Glover speak about Finding Your Authentic Voice in Storytelling on the Art of Storytelling.

Press Play to hear Anne Glover speak about Finding Your Authentic Voice in Storytelling on the Art of Storytelling.

Anne Glover storyteller and string lover

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Finding your Authentic Storytelling Voice.

Anne Glover writes….

Here are two things I feel passionately about in storytelling: authentic voice, and connection to the audience. They are closely intertwined. Some people think “authentic voice” means “no character voices.” If you’ve heard my dialogues with the character “Monkey,” you know that I use character voices, particularly for comedic episodes, as Eric learned when he interviewed me. (Have you recovered yet, Eric?) But when I use those other voices, I make a clear distinction in my voice, my brain, and my body between the character and my narrator.

As both a performer and a listener, I prefer a natural voice for the narrator persona. Sometimes as tellers, we think we need to be doing “more.” We alter our voice, add more breath, and drop to a different register, as if “storytelling” required something other than our true selves. It doesn’t. In fact, it demands that each of us bring our true self to the fore, without letting our ego get in the way of the story. This requires that we constantly watch ourselves and our deep intentions, with ferocious honesty.

Sometimes we get so wrapped in the notion that storytelling requires a special voice, that we get in the way of the story. Some people want to know how to “find” their authentic voice. Here’s a technique I like. I might say, for instance, Read the rest of this entry »

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Dale Gilbert Jarvis – How to collect true scary stories for Halloween.

Fill out the form and press play to hear Dale Gilbert Jarvis speak on how to collect true scary stories for Halloween on the Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolf.

Dale Jarvis storyteller in costume in the Catacombs. width=
Dale Jarvis in the Flesh.

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Dale Gilbert Jarvis

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How to collect true scary stories for Halloween.

Dale Jarvis Writes
Near to where I live is a small lake with the delightfully ghoulish
name of Deadman’s Pond. According to local legend, the pond is bottomless, and I’m sure many people know of similar stories for lakes near where they live. These lakes and ponds offer us tantalizing doorways to another realm. Peering into the reflective surface of a still body of water and wondering what lies beneath provides us with a link to the unexplained. Perhaps this is why they fascinate us. It is not so much that we think they actually are bottomless, but that part of us wishes that they might be.

So too with ghost stories. I’ve told ghost stories to literally thousands of people over the past 13 years, and they continue to be Read the rest of this entry »

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Jan Andrews and Jennifer Cayley with The Power of Folk Tales in Children’s Lives…

Jan Andrews and Jennifer Cayley on the Power of Folk Tales in Children's Lives on the Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolf Podcast

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Interview #052 Jan Andrews & Jennifer Cayley
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The Power of Folk Tales in children’s lives.

Folktales bring us the wisdom of the ages. They have been honed and shaped over centuries. They are there for everyone, functioning on the one hand as entertainment and on the other through offering so many layers of meaning that they are accessible to all. Adults may proclaim that Jack and Ti-Jean, Cinderella and Red Riding Hood (and all those other lesser-known heroes and heroines of the stories we ought to be telling more often) are archetypes. Children simply recognize in these long-lived characters various aspects of their own being. Folktales become then one of the Read the rest of this entry »

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