Press Play to hear Nothando Zulu speaking on participation on the Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolf.

Nothando Zulu writes..
Participation, Participation, Participation...

I began telling stories as a member of an acting ensemble in 1976, presenting storytelling as a major part of our repertoire. We worked primarily in park and recreation centers and schools. As members moved away or went into other fields, we evolved into‐ and I cofounded ‐ the Black Storytellers Alliance (BSA) in direct response to the demand for storytelling to deliver the inspirational and cultural lessons embodied in our stories.

Early on I encouraged members of the audience to share the storytelling space by becoming a part of the story and one of the characters in the story. On many occasions, I was unable to use all the audience members who wanted to participate! It was wonderful to have so many trying to join in the storytelling process and reinforces oral storytelling as a powerful medium. Therefore, I decided to use a kind of birthday system for who I would choose:

• I start with participatory stories in mind
• I ask the audience who had a birthday in the prior month
• Depending of the number of positive responses, I decide on the story to
present.

One example is Ananse and His Six Children. If I receive more than six positive responses, I make some twins or triplets and sometimes quadruplets! I may use the age of the participant to determine the specific role of each participant. In the story Ananse and The Moss Covered Rock, Little Miss Bush Deer has to be at least a third grader, to understand and answer “No” to each of the questions asked by the Ananse character. When the participant is younger, (s)he may miss the concept and answer in the affirmative.

Audience participation is fun and most effective when the storyteller has extensive experience with audience inclusion.

Breif Bio
Nothando Zulu is a Master storyteller who has been sharing stories with audiences for over 30 years. She shares stories that entertain, educate, motivate and inspire. She has performed at many venues locally, nationally and internationally. She draws from an extensive resource of colorful, often funny characters whose antics and follies leave audiences pondering their own life’s lessons. As Director of Black Storytellers Alliance, she and her husband with the help of the Board of Directors has produced a three-day storytelling festival celebrating the art of Black storytelling called, “Signifyin’ & Testifyin’” (now in the 17th year). Nothando is also a wife, mother, grandmother, community and political activist who believes in the power of stories.

Read more about Nothando Zulu on her website http://www.yourfavoritestorytellers.org/nothando-zulu.htm
and on the Black Storytellers Alliance Website http://www.blackstorytellers.com/

Scary stories and ghost stories have been used for thousand of years to gather interest in young people towards learning a new subject. Eric Wolf says “From ghost stories to strangers giving your child candy; scary stories have been used to help young people identify danger in the world.” Useful scary stories and ghost stories are based on truth, teach valuable skills and leave the audience feeling empowered against the villain or evil of the story.

Eric Wolf host and producer of the Art of Storytelling Show with over 100,000 downloads to date is the longest running, most successful show ever produced dedicated solely to perfecting the art of storytelling.

For more information: http://www.artofstorytellingshow.com/category/scary-storytelling/

Sunday, October 25, 2009
For Immediate Release
Contact: Eric James Wolf
Phone: (937) 767-8696

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

Tired of the tin sound? Purchase a HQ Mp3 File of Interview #089 Anne Glover for $2.23 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, “Bob, tell me what your story is about. Don’t tell the story. Just tell me what it”s about.” And Bob says, “Well, it’s about this guy who (blah blah blah)…” So far, Bob is using a normal conversational voice. Then he gets caught up in the story and he starts telling it: he gives more detail, and –most significantly- his voice changes. All of a sudden, he’s using a “special” voice, extra breath in his speech, and maybe he’s changed to a different register and volume.

What I want is for storytellers to find that conversational, relaxed voice, and develop a working relationship with it. I’m not saying it’s all we should use. But it should be part of our repertoire. I want storytellers to be comfortable being themselves, using their own voice, along with whatever else they use. Think about what our voice carries, along with the story. It carries, in invisible code, a message of how much we trust ourselves (and therefore the audience) with our true self.

Connection with the audience is essential to storytelling, and it’s alarmingly easy to lose. There will be surprises and concerns: “I thought there would be 300 high school kids – what are all these pre-schoolers doing here?? And why isn’t my mic working and is my fly zipped?” Dealing with all this is an art in itself. But knowing our authentic voice and being comfortable with it will keep us real and connected to this audience (as opposed to the audience we thought we’d have, or the audience we had last time, or the audience we wish we had). If we have that authentic connection, we can reach our audience.

©2009 Creative Commons A Glover and Brother Wolf Storytelling (Nonderivative Noncommercial use only)

More about Anne…
Anne Glover is an entertainer and consultant based in Victoria, BC. She has spent years enchanting audiences with her stories and string games and inspiring educators with her innovative approaches to education. Anne has appeared at countless schools, festivals, and conferences across the continent, and has performed her original stories on CBC radio, in both English and French. She is a polished, engaging entertainer with a humorous wisdom and an infectious enthusiasm for life in any language. Anne Glover’s Website.

I will not share or give away your email address.

And don’t forget to subscribe by iTunes or your browser to The Art of Storytelling Podcast so you can get bi-weekly inspirations from Bother Wolf direct to your desktop. Read the info on the right to find out how. It’s free and it’s super simple.

Press Play to hear Jackson Gillman speak on refining your performance using outside critique on the Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolf.

Jackson Gillman Bio.
"Stand-Up Chameleon" Jackson Gillman magically transforms himself into a wide array of eccentric characters through his many talents as mime, actor, songsmith and storyteller. As adept with children as he is with adults, his interactive performances are seasoned with skillful dialect, song, dance, mime and sign language. Shining through Jackson's wit and extraordinary versatility is his bemused, warm-hearted honesty. Jackson's humor evolves from finding that which is funny in human beings trying to be human and often tripping over their own being in the attempt.

Jackson has thrice been a featured performer at the National Storytelling in Tennessee, and has performed at festivals and schools throughout the country. For twenty years Jackson hosted a summer concert series of comedy, music and New Vaudeville on Mount Desert Island. Presenting a new thematic program each year, he set up comedy/music shop every summer and toured the rest of the year. Year-round he now brings his unique brand of one-man theater to diverse audiences across the nation. Whether performing on concert stages, at colleges, business functions, festivals, school assemblies or libraries, Jackson Gillman delights his audiences with his inventions while touching them with his personal warmth.

A Little Bit of Background please...

My theatrical career began unexpectedly, taking me far afield from my agricultural pursuits and my various migratory New England jobs as a maple sugarer, cider maker, and landscaper/arborist. After graduating in 1978 from the College of the Atlantic with a degree in Human Ecology -- very useful for a theatrical performer, by the way -- I decided to do something completely different for one summer.

What started as a lark -- spending a summer at the Deck House Cabaret as a singing waiter -- grew into devotion as I discovered the ease and joy I found in performing. In subsequent summers, I returned to the Deck House Cabaret, and I soon took a leading role in the musical ensemble's choreography and direction. I also developed a solo act that became a nightly feature. I went on to study many forms of dance and music, take workshops with mime mentors Tony Montanara and Benny Reehl, toured with a children's theatre company, and I established a solo performing career.

My original environmental background finds its way into some of my shows, and my repertoire has expanded to more than twenty different programs, with topics ranging from health and substance abuse awareness, to a variety of thematic musical reviews. Some of my show titles include: Disorderly Conduct, A Dad's Eye View, The Perfect High, A Fool For Love, and Newagelessness. About half of my programs are family oriented, including: Riot in the Garden, BUGS!, Autumn Wonders, and The Magic of Rudyard Kipling. While I'm generally known for my comedy and interactive performances, a more serious side is reflected in programs such as Hard Knocks and The Man who Planted Hope.

What perhaps distinguishes me most from other storytellers is my use of movement in telling. My background in mime and dance is apparent in most of my work, especially Levity in Motion and The Dancing Man. One of my many workshops, Storyscaping, has been very helpful to other professional storytellers in the effective use of movement, space, and visual composition.

Another dimension is added to my work in the four full-length programs that I perform with sign language interpretation. Playing the male lead opposite a deaf actress in Children of a Lesser God (voted Best Theatre in Maine, 1986), reinforced my love of signing. The exposure to that visual language significantly benefits all of my storytelling. Whether I actually am sign-interpreting or not, I approach my craft with what I feel is the core of good storytelling -- to assist the creation and transfer of clear images and emotions.

While most of my work is solo, I regularly welcome the opportunity to collaborate, with musical partners, and with my favorite storytelling colleagues. I believe that when I am fortunate enough to share the
stage with friends such as Michael Parent and Judith Black, the audience reaps the benefit of our synergy. But even when I am performing solo, the stage is peopled with many surprise guests. Many altered egos find outlet in my assortment of eccentric stage personae.

I'm a twenty-five year veteran of the New England Touring Artists Program and also served on the theatre advisory panel for the Maine Arts Commission. I have been a keynote presenter at many conferences and festivals, and featured at the National Storytelling Festival. I hosted a summer concert series for fifteen years on Mt. Desert Island. In some ways, I am a migrant worker, packing up my old kit bag to perform at schools, libraries, conferences, and festivals throughout the country.

And I really do believe that humor can enliven and enlighten any group, meeting, or gathering, and mine is based on a foundation of beneficence, hope, and a belief in the enduring power of the human spirit. Talk with me, and together we can develop a performance program that will be perfect for your next conference, meeting, banquet, or special event.
for more info Check out http://www.jacksongillman.com

Press Play to hear Jay O’Callahan speak about learning about Stories by telling to my Children on the Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolf.

Jay O'Callahan writes...

I'm at work right now on a story commissioned by NASA, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration to celebrate its 50th anniversary. As I create the NASA story I'm aware I'm using all of the knowledge I gained telling stories to my own children. As I told stories to my children I began using repetition, rhythm, changing my voice, using a gesture here and there and inventing situations that involved struggle or risk, When my son Ted was about nine months old I'd make up little songs and rhythms to make him smile. Just making my voice go up high and then suddenly come down delighted him.
One night Ted was sitting in a soapy bath and I read him some of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. He laughed at the sounds.

When Ted got older I read books to him like The Gingerbread Man and discovered that he loved the repetition running through the story.

Run, run fast as you can
You can't catch me I'm the Gingerbread Man.

I began reading one of Richard Scary's book in which there was a character called Pierre the Paris Policeman. The line was, "Pierre the Paris Policeman was directing traffic one day." I would sing that line with a French accent and lift up my hand to stop an imaginary car. The voice and accent brought the character alive. That was an important discovery. And if I read it in any other way it wasn't Pierre and Ted would say, "Say it right."

After my daughter Laura Elizabeth was born I told both my children "hand stories." I'd take one of their hands, look at the palm of the hand and let a line, a bump or a curve in the hand suggest an image and I'd begin the story. It might go like this. "Once upon a time Ted saw a pink cloud resting by a tree. The cloud looked sad so Ted went over to cheer it up." I was dreaming aloud and characters and images would spring to mind. I imaged that's always happened to storytellers. I liked telling the hand stories because they were quiet and personal and my children liked being the hero and heroine. Some of those hand stories eventually turned into the Artana stories which take place in a mysterious land where two children, Edward and Elizabeth are the hero and heroine.

As I was telling to my children I learned the importance of a listener, particularly a listener with the sense of wonder and delight. My children listened me into being a storyteller.

Now as I work on this complicated story about NASA I use the knowledge I gained from my children. I ask myself this question: What is wondrous about NASA? And I'm on the alert for compelling characters and the risks they take and the struggles of their lives. I try to incorporate rhythm and repetition; I use a voice to become a character and find that a gesture helps bring the character alive.

As I shape the story and as it grows, I'm using the listeners. The listeners draw out mysteries in the story that I would have missed without them. Here I am back to the beginning.

Biography

Jay O'Callahan grew up in a section of Brookline, Massachusetts which was called “Pill Hill” because so many doctors lived there. The 32-room house and landscaped grounds were a magical atmosphere for a child’s imagination to blossom. When Jay was fourteen, he started making up stories to tell to his little brother and sister to entertain them.

After graduating from Holy Cross College, a tour in the Navy took Jay to the Pacific. Returning to Massachusetts, he taught and eventually became Dean at the Wyndham School in Boston, which his parents had founded. "In the summers I’d go off to Vermont or Ireland to write. I also did a lot of acting in amateur theatre, and that’s where I met a beautiful woman (Linda McManus) who later became my wife. When we had our first child, I left teaching and became the caretaker of the YWCA in Marshfield, a big old barn on a salt-water marsh. That gave me time to write and to tell stories to my children. When I decided to call myself a storyteller, it was like getting on a rocket." Within three years, Jay was telling stories in hundreds of schools and in addition he was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra to create and perform Peer Gynt with the orchestra. His stories were broadcast on National Public Radio's “The Spider's Web," which brought Jay national attention.

Jay was now publicly telling stories he had created for his children. His stories were filled with rhythms, songs and characters as diverse as Herman the Worm, Petrukian, a medieval blacksmith, and the Little Dragon. Orange Cheeks, inspired by a time Jay got in trouble as a little boy, was the first of his personal stories.

One of his most popular stories, Raspberries was born when Jay's son Teddy was four. Teddy banged his shin outside their cottage and was weeping, "I broke my leg." Jay told a story full of rhythms to cheer Teddy up.

Jay was also beginning to tell stories to adults. In 1980, while on vacation in Nova Scotia, he sat on and off for a month in the kitchen of an old man and a blind woman. Out of that kitchen came the story of The Herring Shed. “I realized then that part of my gift was to sit down with ordinary people where they were comfortable, listen, and later weave a story together so that others could enjoy it. The process still amazes me: one year I'm in a kitchen in Nova Scotia and a few years later, I’m performing The Herring Shed to a thousand people at Lincoln Center." Time Magazine called The Herring Shed "genius."After the Herring Shed came Jay's Pill Hill stories for which is was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. The Pill Hill stories are loosely based on his boyhood.

Storytelling has brought Jay around the earth. “The storyteller of old got on a horse. I get on a plane, parachute into a community and I’m part of its life for a while before moving on to the next one.” Jay has told stories to students at Stonehendge, to adults in the heat of Niger, Africa, to theatergoers in Dublin and London and at storytelling festivals in Scotland, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. His stories have also been heard on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Jay’s stories also include commissioned works like The Spirit of the Great Auk, Pouring the Sun, Edna Robinson and Father Joe.

When he isn't on the road, Jay runs a writing workshop at his home. His other interests include reading everything from Walt Whitman to Herman Melville to Flannery O’Connor to Emily Dickinson. And he enjoys listening to jazz, classical music and opera. “I love Maria Callas. Her singing touches a joy that’s very deep.”

Jay has just finished a political novel called Harry’s Our Man, and is creating a story commissioned by NASA for its 50th anniversary.

Press Play to hear Elaine Wynne who is a clinical psychologist speak's on uses healing stories with children on the Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolf.

Elaine Wynne was a Storyteller first. Stories flowed freely around the kitchen table and from an Anishinabe/Irish man who lived on the farm where she grew up. She told stories to her young children and then in the early 70's finished a degree in Storytelling and Image Development for Non-Profits. She began to perform as a storyteller and then in 1982 got a degree in the Psychology of Human Development (Storytelling and Healing as a main focus) and became a Licensed Psychologist.

She worked six years at Mpls. Children's Medical Center and developed a story called "The Rainbow Dream", used by children and adult cancer groups for many y ears. Later, her work using storytelling to teach self management to 2-5 year olds with asthma (with Daniel Kohen, M.D.) was published in the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis, and in numerous medical and psychological journals in Europe. R esearch on using stories and games as teaching methods showed significant reduction in emergency clinic and hospital visits over a two year period.

Elaine has performed and taught storytelling (and storytelling as a healing art) in Norway, Sweden, England, Ecuador, Japan, and Singapore, as well as in numerous places around Minnesota and the US. Last year, she presented a performance workshop at the 12th annual Pediatric Emergency Management of Humanitarian Disasters in Cleveland. She won Grand Prize with her husband (Storyteller Larry Johnson) at the Tokyo Video Festival for a storied exchange between children in St. Paul and London. She and Larry conduct and teach about Cousin Camp which they developed with their 13 grandchildren.

You can read more about her in this cool article in the Daily Planet

Press Play to hear David Novak who was interviewed by Eric Wolf on storyteller’s compass using narrative as guide on the Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolf.

The Scattered Brain

by David Novak

“I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies
I saw boys, toys, electric irons and T.V.’s
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there”
David Bowie, Five Years

I’m dreaming about a legless blind man when the radio alarm wakes me. In the short time it takes me to crawl to the bureau to turn off the radio (an arrangement designed to get me out of bed) I hear the DeeJay tell me that 5% of men surveyed admitted to wearing women’s underwear. I drift to the kitchen to feed the cat and dog and pour the coffee and juice. I go to the front door to collect the morning paper which informs me of the multimillion dollar judgement against O.J. and of an area magnet school which teaches children how to play the bagpipes. By the time I step back inside, my son is awake and Darkwing Duck is “getting dangerous” on the TV. I’ve been awake for less than 30 minutes and already I’m drowning in a sea of information, images and stories.

The day is far from finished. Everything is far from finished. I feel like my life is in the hands of an insomniac channel-surfer: unfinished stories in constant collision with one another adding up to one story: life today. It is all so scatterbrained. I worry: what am I adding to the noise as a voice telling stories in the thick of all this? Who am I to enter the fight for everyone’s attention? What is the point of storytelling in the technologically determined culture of today?

Exo-Brain

Technology enhances us: clothes enhance skin, glasses enhance eyes, wheels enhance walking. Such enhancements extend our physical bodies outward. Our techno-bodies can “see,” “hear,” and “reach” farther than our bio-bodies. We technologically express our bodies outward, forming an exoskeleton of clothing, cars, and houses. Inasmuch as our communica- tion media express images, ideas, and informa- tion, we express our minds outward too, forming an exo-brain. The exo-brain is the scattered brain.

In The Global Village (1989) Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers discuss the way technology affects cultural change. New technology, they suggest, begins as a distinct figure set against the current cultural ground. Eventually that technology becomes the new cultural ground. As our new technologies become assimilated they reform the ground which determines our culture. McLuhan and Powers:

“Media determinism, the imposition willy-nilly of new cultural grounds by the action of new technologies, is only possible when the users are well-adjusted, i.e. sound asleep.”

To be “well-adjusted” in this sense, is to be accepting yet unthinking; to be an open receiver like a well-adjusted antenna. For such media determinism to be possible, it helps to have a populace that is illiterate, anti-intellectual, inarticulate, and emotionally reactive. The well-adjusted user is hungry (literally and figuratively); dissatisfied with what he has (”been there, done that”); afraid of the unknown (”brand x”); afraid of the outside (the only safe places, we are told, are the places where you find an approved point-of-sale that accepts the right credit card); accepting without thinking (uncritical and thereby open to shallow rhetoric and “sound bites”); has a short attention span (being therefore less likely to scrutinize merchandise or ideas very closely); and is impulsive (reacting to ersatz emergencies from headline news to one-day-only sales.) In short, the well-adjusted user lets the scattered brain do its thinking. The scattered brain directs our attention to what it considers important, leaving what does not interest it to be forgotten.

If this is the culture we live in, it is also the culture that welcomed a revival of story- telling. Why?

A Gentle Reminder

I have just finished a story program for a family night at a local school. The occasion is a combination of book fair and turn-off-the- tube week. During the program I presented some cats cradle figures and used them to tell Jack & The Beanstalk (see Storytelling World vol. 2, no. 1, Winter/Spring 1993.) Children come up to me, chiming the giant’s refrain and asking how they can learn more about string figures. Adults come up to me with a slightly different response. For the children, this is new information. For the adults, this is old information that was lost until they were reminded of it. I will call these two responses: minding and reminding.

First of all, minding. The telling experience brings a wealth of stimulation to the young listener in the form of images, rhythms, patterns, sequences, emotions, and ideas. The aural stroking between real-time-and-place teller and real- time-and-place listener is something that our sciences have begun to verify as essential to brain growth in early childhood. The recognition of this importance is bringing a new validation to the storytelling art in a culture obsessed with technology.

4/18/97

AP-Washington – In a day of “talking about baby talk” and how brains grow, President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton offered parents simple child-rearing advice: Songs and storytelling fire up infants’ brainpower.

When we tell stories to children we are truly minding them.

Next, reminding. Adult listeners at storytelling events are often surprised by the recognition that storytelling evokes. Listeners tell us, “Gee, I haven’t thought about that in ages…” “I’d forgotten what it was like to…” “I remember when…” and so on. A wealth of dormant memories and experiences are invited up from the deep past to the surface of our present minds. Such storytelling reminds us, literally re-minding: giving us back our minds. It is as though we have lost cognizance of who we are amidst our scatter-brained lives.

What’s going on? Why are people having little epiphanies in the company of storytellers? I believe that there is something missing in our modern media saturation that the storytelling revival is providing us. Something primary to who we are. Something that our daily distraction has lead us away from.

In a prophetic essay for Harper’s in 1938, E. B. White wrote:

“Clearly the race today is between loud speaking and soft, between things that are and the things that seem to be, between the chemist of RCA and the angel of God. Radio has already given sound a wide currency, and sound “effects” are taking the place once enjoyed by sound itself. Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images – distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar than their originals.”

These days we are enchanted by the Elsewhere and attend to matters “distant and concocted” at every turning. Admittedly, storytelling itself advertises the Elsewhere: “Once upon a time, long ago and far away.” But there is a difference. The medium is the message and the very medium of the told story carries a message distinct from other media. There is a different kind of Elsewhere being advertised by storytelling. We are urged to look away from that which distracts us to that which has become the most remote: the primary and the near.

Version x.x.x

Each new software package is incrementally defined as version x.x.x of an incomplete and never-finished idea-set. Are we cracking the silly idea that a thing is made and maintains its shape immutably? That meaning is constant? All things change. All things are in some state of iteration, always shifting. Set in stone? It is the property of stone to diminish. Organic? Living? If so, then growing and evolving. We live between the last version and the next version. Storytellers have always known this. But the market place has a vested interest in keeping things unfinished in order to keep the customer. “Keep the customers satisfied” becomes “dissatisfy the customers in order to satisfy them.” This is how Scheherazade survived: with perpetually unfinished stories. We are sold software and systems that are not ready and then charged for the more complete (but still unfinished) version, paying for the privilege of beta-testing someone else’s product. While we rush ahead to get the latest version, all new and improved, we are littering our lives with all the old, obsolete versions. Our lives are cluttered with the hard and soft wares we abandon on impulse as our scattered brains chase the latest hot item. The more we neglect the past, the more we will be burdened by it. How did grandma get to be sick and alone in a wolf-infested woods, anyway?

Story Technology

Stories, as technology, enhance memory and understanding. Storytellers are a sensual, human medium. Modern electronic media pretends to respond to its users, but is hopelessly remote and uninvolved. The user who stays too long at the hearth of such media may suffer a kind of sensory deprivation. The storyteller brings touch in the form of aural stroking and warmth in the form of being truly present. Neuroscience now confirms what ancient voices have always known: storytell- ing is important emotive and cognitive technology. Storytelling as true virtual reality, transfers experience while massaging the listener and influencing growth.

Storytelling is re-minding the user at the center of the scattered brain; directing attention back to the primary and the near. Storytellers are strengthening our ability to endure long, considered thinking: to listen, to reflect, to discern, and to feel deeply and knowingly. McLuhan and Powers continue: “There is no inevitability where there is a willingness to pay attention.”

Within our scattered brains we seek something, hungrily, in the bright distracting lights around us. Yet we are perpetually dissatisfied. We are like Nasruddin searching in the sunlight for the gold coin he knows he lost in the dark.

Clockwise

So busy were we
moving papers around the room
we failed to see the East
and the dawning of the day.
So worried were we
at the tallying of doom
we failed to see the South
and the brightening of the bay.
So certain were we
at the importance of our task
we forgot to note the West
and the fading of the light.
So lost were we
we forgot to ask
the sirens of the North
the meaning of the night.

Light & Dark

There is a house in Mailbu, halfway up a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I was a guest in this house when I was in Malibu to tell stories. The evening of my performance, my hosts had left early to prepare for the event and I was leaving the house to join them. Out of habit, I checked to be sure I was turning off the lights as I left the empty house. I noticed a bright light coming from the bathroom and reached in to flick the light switch off. The switch was already off and I was momentarily confused as I tried to determine the source of light in the room. Then I realized that the light I was seeing was coming from the late sun shining low over the ocean and through the bathroom window. I was trying to turn off the sun. I had somehow forgotten that a room in a house can be lit by sunlight.

Today our manipulation of light puts the day/night cycle into our hands – or perhaps more correctly – the illusion of the day/night cycle into our hands. Lights are on at all hours and there are many times when we begin our artificial days long after the sun has set. The time to turn out the light is the time of cessation: bedtime, sleeptime, endtime, deathtime. “Turn out the light, then turn out the light” remarks Othello before extinguishing the candles and then extinguishing Desdemona.

So what does this have to do with a storyteller turning off the sun on his way to tell stories? In his introduction to the Pantheon collection of Grimms Fairy Tales, Padraic Colum writes: “The prolongation of light meant the cessation of traditional stories in European cottages. And when the cottages took in American kerosene or paraffin there was prolongation. Then came lamps with full and steady light, lamps that gave real illumi- nation. Told under this illumination the traditional stories ceased to be appropriate because the rhythm that gave them meaning was weakened.” The prolongation of light has pushed back the shadows of the hearth where, once upon a time, stories were told. Further, the prolongation of light has weakened the “rhythm that gave them meaning.” That rhythm, simply stated, is the time for light, the time for dark, the time for work and the time to tell stories.

We have prolonged the light: we can work whenever we want (and more than we wish) and we have prolonged the seasons: I can buy fresh corn in February. We have changed the ancient rhythm. Is there only cacophony? Or is there a new rhythm?

“Today, while raking the front lawn, Todd said, “Wouldn’t it be scary if our internal clocks weren’t set to the rhythms of waves and sunrise – or even the industrial whistle toot – but to product cycles, instead?”

“We got nostalgic about the old days, back when September meant the unveiling of new car models and TV shows. Now, carmakers and TV people put them on whenever. Not the same.”

Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

The Hearth

The tradition of the hearth is still among us and played out regularly in many technologies. When we go to the cinema, popcorn in hand, to watch shadows flicker on the wall, we are practicing a human behavior as ancient as the first domestic fire. (As an aside, it is interesting that popcorn is so intimately linked with the cinema ritual. Certainly, on the American continent, popcorn has been enjoyed by fireside story listeners for a long time!) There is something soothing about sitting in a dark theatre. The cinema is a communal hearth creating adhoc communities that exist for a few hours and then are scattered. The television set and the computer screen provide the hearth of the modern home. This hearth is available at all hours. We can bathe in its stories and images, from waking to sleeping, whether the sun is shining or the moon is full.

For a long time now, the modern hearth has maintained the broken rhythms of the scattered brain.

Reversal

McLuhan and Powers describe the cycles of technology as moving through four phases: Enhancement, Obsolescence, Retrieval and Reversal. For example, the automobile en-hances travel, obsolesces the horse and buggy, retrieves walking as recreation, and reverses into the inefficiencies of the traffic jam.

The modern hearth brought the Elsewhere into the home and rendered the need to be out there obsolete: we could stay home and still be in the Elsewhere. We could, as The Firesign Theatre told us, be in two places at once and not anywhere at all. We were brought indoors to look out of doors. The hearth still functioned as a hearth: it was the organizing principle of the home. But the rhythm of this hearth belongs to the scattered brain. The technology that enhanced information and cultural unity is reversing into insanity.

The insanity of the scattered brain is driven by an insatiable appetite. If storytellers are not careful, they stand to be consumed by that same appetite.

Appetite

In the storytelling revival we are fond of drawing sharp distinctions between “our kind of storytelling” and other story media. The thing we don’t often admit is that we all serve the same appetite.

Our bodies have certain basic appetites. Today we are able to satisfy those appetites to excess. We suffer illnesses from our over consumption of fats, sugars, and salts, and have learned the importance of a balanced diet and exercise in order to maintain our health. Similarly, we have an appetite for images. Today we are able to satisfy that appetite to excess.

Stories are rich in images. When we tell stories we are feeding that same insatiable appetite that consumes T.V. radio, cinema, billboards, magazines, etc..

Are there consequences to a surfeit of images? Are there illnesses of the mind and the soul that can result from too many images, all cluttered and confused?

Less is More

It is easy to say that what the world needs now is more storytelling. But what if what the world needs now is less storytelling?

Traditional storytelling was often restricted to certain seasons and certain times in balance with the life of the community. Taboos against telling stories out of season were (and still are) common. If we are genuinely concerned about the health of our storytelling culture we will have to come to terms with the notion that there is a time to tell and a time to be silent. In a way, we try to do that with efforts like “turn-off-the-tube-week.”

The idea of less storytelling is a heresy, perhaps. My intention is to challenge some of my own assumptions about the relationship between our current storytelling revival and modern technology. I think there is a need for more of certain kinds of storytelling. Yet even as we are serving that need we are in danger of losing our direction and succumbing to the rising confusion around us.

The point is: the appetite for image is insatiable and it is being served at a feverish pace throughout our culture. Storytellers such as myself, who are on the verge of the entertainment industry, are in danger of being consumed by the scattered brain. Doing so we may become famous for 15 minutes, but we may also cease to be true storytellers and render ourselves obsolete.

What is the relationship of the storyteller to the other storytelling media? Is it simply that of the story-producer? (I’ve got a story to tell and a story to sell.) When you put a storyteller in front of a camera and broadcast that storyteller, you turn that storyteller into another TV program. The entertainment industry looks at the storyteller and sees one of two things: a writer or an actor. The media looks at the storyteller as a kind of product. If storytellers wish to get involved in the entertainment industry (and why shouldn’t they, considering the celebrity and the remuneration) they will have to come to terms with the voracious appetite for story that drives the industry. If the storyteller becomes merely a story-product, something essential will be lost. For the real art of telling stories is concerned not so much with being the producer of the unique story as with understanding when to tell and when to be silent and how to match the right story with the right listener at the right time. In short: the art of telling stories requires a good sense of rhythm.

To tell, we know, means to report; but we must remember that it also means to discern.

Wayfinding

“The Spider Woman taught us all these designs as a way of helping us think. You learn to think when you make these.”

-Navajo teenager speaking to folklorist Barre Toelken regarding string figures.

Consider the metaphors which abound in the new technology: Net Web Mosaic Link String. These are the first technologies. They describe pattern and complexity. These are the constants of the human experience, still alive within the mutable modern media. We are finding our way in complexity like Theseus in the Labyrinth. Many of the current video games concern themselves with wayfinding in mazes and worlds where the rules are unknown and waiting to be discovered. Does the mind get stronger from the exercise? Or lost, in Spiderwoman’s web?

“Wayfinding is a set of principles. An art. And at the center of the circle of sea and sky is the wayfinder practicing the art, trusting mind and senses within a cogni- tive structure to read and interpret nature’s signs along the way as the means of maintaining continuous orientation to a remote, intended destination.”

Will Kilselka, An Ocean In Mind

The new cultural ground now brings the center back to the user. The home video recorder breaks the broadcast schedule cartel and allows viewers to determine when they watch. The personal computer takes the next step: allowing us to watch when we want and to broadcast what we want. Control of the technological hearth is coming back into our hands. With it comes all the confusion and chaos of “the second Tower of Babel” that Victor Hugo describes. In response to this chaos we are developing more and more powerful “search engines” to help us navigate the madness.

The same need that brought about the search engine has brought about the storyteller. The art of the storyteller is the art of the wayfinder. The teller gives us the cognitive strength and the story constellations that we need to find our way. In keeping the ancient rhythm, the storyteller is here now to help us stand once again at the center and reorient ourselves to ourselves as well as to one another. The storyteller is minding and reminding the scattered brain.

Sources:

An Ocean In Mind by Will Kilselka University of Hawaii Press. 1987.

Introduction to The Complete Grimms Fairy Tales by Padraic Colum. Pantheon Books. 1944/1972.

The Dynamics of Folklore by Barre Toelken. Houghton Mifflin. 1979.

The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century byMarshall McLuhan & Bruce R. Powers. Oxford University Press, 1989.

Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. The University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. HarperCollins. 1996.

Notre Dame of Paris by Victor Hugo. English translation by John Sturrock. Penguin Books USA, Inc. NY, NY. 1978.

One Man’s Meat by E. B. White. Harpers Magazine, vol. 177. October, 1938.

Spiders and Spinsters by Marta Weigle. University of New Mexico Press. 1982.

Teleliteracy by David Bianculli. The Continuum Publishing Company. 1992
–
David Novak

A Telling Experience
“Finding ourselves together telling stories.”

PO Box 15122
Asheville, NC 28813
(828) 280-2718
www.novateller.com

Press play to hear Elizabeth Ellis who was interviewed by Eric Wolf on the relationship between Storytelling and the Development of Ethical Behavior on the Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolf on Wednesday, Dec. 3 at 8pm.

Elizabeth Ellis Writes…
If I had a nickel for every time someone (attorney, state trooper, loan officer, IRS agent) has made fun of me because I told ‘em I am a storyteller, I could take us all out to dinner. At a nice place. With tablecloths. Because often the public perception of storytelling is that it is fluff and foolishness.
Well, we storytellers know better, and we have survived an entire movement of Back to the Basics and Almighty State Testing. What the left brain-ers don’t realize is there is another entire level of education far more basic to being human than the 3 R’s will ever be.
The most basic things about being human come from the right side of the brain, not the left. Chief among them is the ability to make ethical decisions. I am not talking about following the rules. Remember that the Nazis were great rule followers. Ethical decision-making requires the ability to imagine the effect of my behavior on your life. Without an active imagination, a child is an ethical cripple. The new study about the state of ethics of America’s youth just out from the Josephson Institute (http://josephsoninstitute.org/ for the full details of the survey) has many people in our culture asking themselves, “How did we get on this handcar? And where are we headed?
Hearing stories told leads to the development of empathy. And empathy is essential for all ethical decision making. I have been talking about this for more than thirty years. Recently other folks have begun to say the same thing. I am pleased by that, ’cause I’m not gonna live forever. Check out P.J. Manney’s article “Empathy in the Time of Technology” in the September, 2008 Journal of Evolution and Technology. (http://jetpress.org/v19/manney.htm if you want to read the entire article, especially the interesting part about the development of ‘mirror neurons’.)
Please join me for a discussion of how storytelling contributes to the development of ethical behavior on this Pod-cast, but also in your guilds and story circles and list serves. In a time of national financial hardship, it behooves us as tellers to be able to challenge people’s thinking about the importance of story and it’s role in right brain development. Storytelling is neither fluff nor foolishness. It is how we change the world “one listener at a time.”
Oh, and by the way, if you happen to be a attorney, state trooper, loan officer or IRS agent or some other form of left brain-er, it is the key to learning to “think outside the box”, which is imperative if America is to remain an economic power… (Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: How Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Riverhead Books, 2006.)…but, that’s another story.

A Short Biography
Designated an American Masterpiece Touring Artist by the NEA, Elizabeth Ellis grew up in the Appalachian Mountains. A children’s librarian at Dallas Public Library before becoming a professional storyteller, the “Divine Miss E” is a versatile, riveting teller of Appalachian and Texas tales and stories of heroic American women, though her personal stories are arguably her best. Invariably hilarious and poignant, she is a repeated favorite at the National Storytelling Festival. Selected a Listener’s Choice at the 30th Anniversary of the National Storytelling Festival, she is a recipient of the John Henry Faulk Award from the Texas Storytelling Association and the Circle of Excellence Award from the National Storytelling Network. She has mesmerized nearly a million children in her thirty-year career as a professional storyteller.
Elizabeth is also well known for her workshops, which offer training for beginning and seasoned storytellers. Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories, which she co-authored with Loren Niemi has been described by NAPRA ReView as a “great leap forward in the literature of how to put stories together with art and truth”. It received a Storytelling World Award.
Jay O’Callahan says, “Elizabeth Ellis’ voice sounds like chocolate tastes.” Her stories are just as addictive as chocolate. A mother and grandmother, she makes her home in Dallas. www.elizabethellis.com

Tired of the tin sound? Purchase a HQ Mp3 File of Interview #063 Donna Washington for $2.23 The Anatomy of a Scary Story

Donna Washington Writes…
Why do kids love ghost stories? I asked my eleven year old son this question because I have discovered that my academic and empirical observations about these sorts of subjects often bears little resemblance to the actual answer. He was good enough to inform me that he loves the fact that the characters are frightened and they have no idea what is about to happen next. He didn’t say word one about wanting to be scared. In other words, it’s the idea of the scary thing being someplace far away from you so that you can have a good scare in a safe place and then walk away and be all right. Just for the record, that’s what I thought. In other words, I agree with the expert.

http://www.donnawashington.com