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Also by
Margaret Read MacDonald
The Storyteller's Sourcebook: A Subject, Title, and Motif Index to Folklore Collections for Children
Twenty Tellable Tales: Audience Participation Folktales for the Beginning Storyteller
Booksharing: 101 Programs to Use with Preschoolers
When The Lights Go Out: Twenty Scary Tales to Tell
The Skit Book: 101 Skits from Kids
Look Back and See: Twenty Lively Tales for Gentle Tellers
The Folklore of World Holidays
Peace Tales: World Folktales to Talk About
Tom Thumb (Oryx Multicultural Folktale Series)
The Storyteller's
Start-Up Book
Finding, Learning, Performing, and
Using Folktales
Including Twelve Tellable Tales
Margaret Read MacDonald
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This work is dedicated to the countless children's librarians and teachers who understand that our children need to hear and see the finest artistry this world has to offer.
© 1993 by Margaret Read MacDonald.
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Published 1993 by August House, Inc.,
P.O. Box 3223, Little Rock, Arkansas 72203,
501-372-5450.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
MacDonald, Margaret Read, 1940-
The storyteller's start-up book : finding, learning, performing,
and using folktales including
twelve tellable tales / Margaret Read MacDonald
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87483-304-3 : $23.95
—ISBN 0-87483-305-1 (pbk.) : $13.95
1. Storytelling. 2. Storytellers—Training of.
3. Folklore. I. Title.
LB1042.M23 1993
372.64'2—dc20 93-1580
Executive editor: Liz Parkhurst
Assistant editors: Jan Diemer, Stephen Buel
Design director: Harvill Ross Studios Ltd.
Cover design: Bill Jennings
Typography: Heritage Publishing Co.
Thanks to these storytellers, who have given permission for
their ideas to be quoted here: Rives Collins and Pamela J.
Cooper; Rex Ellis; Gail De Vos; Debra Harris-Branham; Erica Helm
Meade; Spencer G. Shaw; Jimmy Neil Smith; and Diane Wolkstein.
This book is printed on archival-quality paper that meets the
guidelines for performance and durability of the Committee
on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources.
May you continue to speak out
against authors, artists, publishers,
and even storytellers who would offer
second-rate work that they call
"good enough for children."
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CONTENTS
An Invitation to Storytell 9
Your Place in Tradition 11
Learning the Story in One Hour 17
Performing the Story 23
Thinking of Story as an Event 31
Playing with Story 37
Teaching with Story 43
Teaching Others to Tell 51
Telling it Everywhere 55
Finding the Story 63
Looking at Stories Critically 73
Defending the Story 85
Accepting the Role of Storyteller 89
Networking with Other Tellers 97
Why Tell? Examining the Values of Storytelling 101
Belonging to the Story 105
Stories Audiences Have Loved 107
Turtle of Koka (Ki-Mbundu / Angola) 111
The Little Old Woman Who Lived in a
Vinegar Bottle (Wales) 117
Puchika Churika (Selkup / Siberia) 125
Marsh Hawk (Athabaskan) 133
Gecko (Lango / Acoli) 139
Kudu Break! (Basotho) 147
What Are Their Names! (Ki-Mbundu / Angola) 155
Aayoga with Many Excuses (Nanai / Siberia) 161
Kanu Above and Kanu Below (Limba) 167
Ko Kongolc (Nkundo / Zaire) 179
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Ningun (Nigeria) 185
Yonjwa Seeks a Bride (Nkundo / Zaire) 195
Works Cited 201
Index 207
An Invitation to
Storytell
If you have this book in your hands you must be curious to know more about the art of storytelling. Perhaps you have heard a storyteller and thought, I wonder if I could do that? Perhaps a colleague or teacher has suggested that you might enjoy telling stories to the children or adults with whom you work.
The Storyteller's Start-Up Book intends to convince you that preparing stories is easy and that telling them is such fun you will never want to stop once you have started.
Today hundreds of professional storytellers are circling the world sharing their tales. Do not be intimidated by their skill and polish. We need such artists to inspire us; but even more we need caring tellers in every home and community who will share story with the personal warmth and concern that only the intimacy of small-group storytelling can provide.
You are to become one of those sharing tellers.
I have prepared this book as a starting place for the beginning storyteller. I include techniques for learning and performing story and for designing a story event; criteria for the selection of storytelling material; many suggestions for settings in which you may use your storyteller's art; ideas for incorporating storytelling into the classroom; and ways to play with story in any setting. For each of these topics I provide selected bibliographies featuring the books I feel will most help you on your way. To help you keep your commitment to storytelling I provide information about networking with other tellers. Most importantly, I attempt to convince
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you, the would-be teller, that the telling of a story is a gift—a special joy which you can share.
To help get you started, I provide twelve lively, easy-tolearn tales that other beginners have enjoyed—a few for each listening level from preschool to teen. And hints and bibliographies are here to help you locate more tellable tales.
My notes on learning a tale are designed to help you learn a story without stress. I offer a list of books written by other storytelling instructors in case my approach doesn't fit your personal learning style.
I have also provided a litany of the reasons people need to hear story. Use this to convince your supervisor that what you're doing is indeed important, even though it sounds like you're having way too much fun to be working.
Know that there are as many storytelling styles as there are tellers. Once you have your footing as a teller, you will want to explore material beyond that which I can offer here. Bibliographies within this book suggest places to begin thinking about personal stories, myths, religious tales, and other genres. Keep listening, reading, and experiencing story until you find just the right mix for you and your audiences.
Storytelling offers many things to those who choose it. Stories can teach, nourish, inspire. They can carry a burden of political message, sometimes without breaking. It is clear that stories change to fit our worlds. Conversely, stories may change our worlds.
To this teller, story is joy, play. It is a chance to share this joy with story listeners. The story event can
range from quiet, intense listening to group playfulness which erupts into song and dance. The key to successful telling lies in nurturing and caretaking the audience—communicating directly with each listener.
Everyone can join in this art of storytelling. Here is a gentle, homely art that can take a lifetime of apprenticeship and still yield new rewards at every turn. But this simple art is so accessible that you can hear just one small tale ... and begin tomorrow to pass it on!
Your Place in Tradition
Everyone has a story to tell. And while we could spend a lifetime learning the art and technique of storytelling—perfecting our style and performance—for most of us, it is the simple telling of a tale
that's important. Something as ordinary as the events of the day, an old joke, or a traditional story we heard as a child. Storytelling comes from the heart, not the head, and nothing should keep us from the exhilaration and sheer pleasure of telling a story
—Jimmy Neil Smith,
Homespun: Tales from America's Favorite Storytellers
Many tellers, many tellings: It is good for us to realize that each teller who receives a tale filters that story through his or her own being to produce yet another variation on a theme. No two tellers present their tales in exactly the same way. Each new teller brings another perspective, another way of telling to the tale. And all are useful.
Just as there are many telling styles, there is no correct version of a folktale. There are myriad retellings, each differing from the others. The version you find in print represents only one telling of one teller at one moment in time. It has been frozen by pen or recorder. Now it is your turn to thaw out that story and let it resume its natural course of change as it meanders on from teller to teller.
Here are descriptions of three storytellers. Their styles are very different, but all were effective. Do not be afraid to develop your own style of telling. First, a Norwegian tale teller in the late 1800s:
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One cannot say he related his folktales, he played them: his whole person, from the top of his shoes, was eloquent; and when he came to the place in the story where Askeladd had won the princess and all was joy and wedding bells, he danced the "Snip! snap! snout! My tale is out!" to an old rustic measure.'
A description of Gypsy tellers in Hungary early in the twentieth century:
When the narrator was in a good mood, he acted out the tales more than he recited them. With the Kolderascha tribe it was the custom to tell stories during work, and often the plot of the tale was represented in drama form. "Sometimes there were four of us or even five who told tales. One was the wolf, the other a prince, the third was a giant, or caliph, or whoever was needed. This was real theater, do you understand? It could start in the midst of work. The others went on working, but in time when the action got more and more exciting, they did not care a bit for anything else and did nothing but listen, waiting their turn. For the farther the marchen progressed, the more people appeared. So, one, for instance, was to be the judge and immediately he sat down, his legs folded under him, twirled his moustache, and making a solemn face he started judging and talking wildly. And there was the accused standing before him, bowing deeply and full of fear. And there were the guards, and the people, and God knew what else!"
A New Guinea teller shows a totally different manner: She approached the kinihera with her customary air of composure and self-possession. In all the narratives she told she spoke quietly but confidently, without hesitating and without allowing action to substitute for words at especially dramatic moments.'
Lively, restrained, dramatic, or quiet, the world of story embraces all styles. This telling that we do is greeted in today's world with the excitement reserved for a new discovery. But its roots are as old as the human race. Surely those most ancient drawings that decorate our ancestors' caves must have been a visual record of story being told in that time. Some of the earliest recorded story texts left to us were imprinted on clay tablets by Middle Eastern societies nearly four thousand years ago. One Babylonian tale begins:
After God had created heaven,
heaven created earth,
earth created rivers,
rivers created ditches.
ditches created mud,
mud created the worm.'
Speak these words aloud. You are hearing the beginning of a four-thousand-year-old story. As you enter the realm of storytelling, stop for a moment to consider the antiquity of his tradition. You are about to take your place in a chain of tellers. The tales in this book did not spring from my own imagination. They came from the mouths of storytellers ... who heard them from tellers ... who heard them from tellers.... The chain stretches back and back, perhaps farther than we can understand.
Early in this century the Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen collected Eskimo tales of heroes confronting creatures resembling mammoths. For how many centuries must these tales have endured, tales framed in the days when mammoths still roamed the northlands?
In Theodor (aster's Oldest Stories in the World, Gaster
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presents translations of Assyrian, Babylonian, Canaanite, and Hittite stories found on cuneiform tables. The oldest of these dates from around 1600BC. Reading through this collection, I came upon an unfinished tale. "Here the tablet is broken," Gaster tells us. "And the story's ending is unknown."
But I had a good idea how that story would have ended. Just that week I had read in a collection of Russian folktales a very similar story ... with the ending intact. The tablet engraved nearly four thousand years ago had broken, but the oral tale had survived, passing from mouth to mouth through the centuries. There is something remarkable about a tradition with this tenacity. This story with which we dabble is powerful stuff. It will outlive us all.
It has been said, "The poet lights a candle, and then goes out." Each of you, with your stories, will light small candles. And who knows what flames take fire from your candle.
NOTES
Knut Liestol, The Origin of the Icelandic Family Sagas (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1930), 102.
2 Linda Degh, Folktales and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 184.
Catharine Berndt, "The Ghost Husband," in The Anthropologist Looks at Myth, by Melville Jacobs and John Greenway (Austin: Published for the American Folklore Society by the University of Texas Press, 1966), 244.
Theodor H. Gaster, The Oldest Stories in the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 93.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
To understand more about the place of story in oral tradition, browse in these:
Chase, Richard. Grandfather Tales. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948. See pages 1-17 and the conclusion of each chapter for a reconstruction of an evening of family storytelling among Chase's Appalachian informants.
Glassie, Henry. Passing the Time in Ballymenone. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. No folktales here, but lots of pleasing talk and a chance to watch an insightful folklorist looking at culture.
MacDonald, Margaret Read. "Origins of the Folktale Text." In Twenty Tellable Tales, 192-97. New York: The H.W. Wilson Co., 1986. Notes on tale collecting and performance style.
Pellowski, Anne. The World of Storytelling: A Practical Guide to the Origins, Development, and Applications of Storytelling. Expanded and
Revised Edition. New York: The H.W. Wilson Co., 1990. Drawing on years of research, Pellowski discusses the history of storytelling, and pays particular attention to the many unusual forms in which story is presented around the world—bardic storytelling, storytelling with objects, story with musical accompaniment. Fascinating to browse through, with an extensive bibliography.
Toelken, Barre. The Dynamics of Folklore. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. An overview of many areas of folklore research. Read and dabble in this book to understand the way contemporary folklorists look at culture. Thelken's bibliographic notes will guide the serious student to a more in-depth study of folklore.
; Wolkstein, Diane. The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales. New York: Schocken Books, 1980. In notes preceding each tale, Wolkstein tells us about each teller's performance and his or her audience's reaction. Read these notes to witness the variety of folktale performance within one culture.
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Learning the Story
in One Hour
Here is something you can learn as you go along. Apply everything that comes your way to a better understanding and use of it. Be your own teacher and your own critic, develop that love and propensity for it that can bring such immeasurable returns. We can give you a starting point; go on from here with a stout heart.
—Ruth Sawyer, The Way of the Storyteller
To begin, you will search for a story that delights you. This tale will be so wonderful you can't wait to go tell it. The chapter entitled "Finding the Story" on page 63 will help you in this search for your perfect tale. But for now, let's assume you have that story in your hand. Soon it will be in your head!
You have discovered your own special story and are ready to learn it. Block one hour to work alone, and begin.
I. Select.
Start with a story that you are eager to learn. When you finish reading a tale and jump up with excitement, exclaiming, "I can't wait to tell this!"—that's the tale you want to learn. Don't waste your time on material that doesn't inspire this eagerness to tell. And it may take quite a search to find a handful of these gems that feel just right for your telling.
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Concentrate.
Isolate yourself from clamoring children, ringing phones, and other interruptions. Be prepared to pace, talk out loud, and gesticulate. Some learners work well sitting quietly, but many find the intense energy needed to internalize a story calls for a body on the move.
Vocalize.
Read your story out loud. You have already read it silently several times in the process of choosing it for telling. Now listen to the language as you read aloud. Highlight any phrases which seem especially lovely or memorable. You may want to keep these in your own telling. Note any chants, songs, or onomatopoetic words which need to be retained intact in your retelling. Are the story's opening and closing so culture-specific or so well-written that you want to reproduce them exactly?
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