The Story-Teller's Start-Up Book
Page 6
Schimmel, Nancy. "Sources for Stories to Tell Adults." In Just Enough to Make a Story, 36-38. Berkeley, California: Sisters' Choice Press, 1992. Bibliography and comments.
Using Traditional Storytelling in the Home
Allison, Christine. I'll Tell You a Story, I'll Sing You A Song: A Parent's Guide to the Fairy Tales, Fables, Songs, and Rhymes of Childhood. New York: Delacorte Press, 1987. Good advice for the beginning teller in boxed columns sprinkled throughout the book. However, you will find more tellable versions of most of these tales elsewhere.
MacDonald, Margaret Read. A Parent's Guide to Storytelling. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994. Useful advice for the parent teller plus easy-to-tell stories.
Pellowski, Anne. The Family Storytelling Handbook: How to Use Stories, Anecdotes, Rhymes, Handkerchiefs, Paper, and Other Objects to Enrich Your Family Traditions. New York: MacMillan Inc., 1987.
. Hidden Stories in Plants: Unusual and Easy-to-Tell
Stories from Around the World Together with Creative Things to Do While 'telling Them. New York: MacMillan Inc., 1990. Simple plant crafts and accompanying stories.
Stories the Parent Creates for the Child
Brett, Doris. Annie Stories: A Special Kind of Storytelling. New York: Workman Publishing Co., 1986. The jacket copy says these created stories "allow children under ten to explore situations in an engaging, nonthreatening way through the experiences of an imaginary boy or girl much like themselves." Written by a clinical psychologist.
Collins, Chase. Tell Me a Story: Creating Bedtime Tales Your Children Will Dream On. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992. Stimulating the imagination to create your own bedtime stories.
Moore, Robin. Awakening the Hidden Storyteller: How to Build a Storytelling Tradition in Your Family. Boston: Shambhala Publications Inc., 1991. Creative visualization and inner journeys in search of one's guardian animal and the hidden teller within. The exercises are to be shared by the (Attire family.
Exploring Family Folklore
Zcitlin, Steven J., Amy J. Kotkin, and Holly Cutting Baker. A Celebration of American Family Folklore: Tales and Traditions from the Smithsonian Collection. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.
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Finding the Story
The tales are like rays of light, taking their colors from the medium through which they pass.
—W.A. Bone, Children's Stories and How to Tell Them
You are eager to focus on a story for your listeners. To begin you must find a story you want to tell. Where do you go to find a story? To a storyteller. Whether that teller is standing before you or is recorded in print, remember that this, tale passed to you through another's telling.
1. Find a storyteller in the written word.
Storytelling is an oral tradition. Print, Midas-like, declares a tale golden but freezes it into lifeless eternity. After generations of flowing, malleable, from tongue to tongue, the talc finds itself entrapped in one form. It is up to you to release the tale and set it free to flow again.
Somewhere behind that printed text stands a teller. To effectively retell you must reach back and touch that teller. This is not always easy. Many of our printed texts have been rewritten by authors with no ear for the spoken word. Early ethnologists often took down barebones story plots from their informants. Contemporary authors have used these plots as the bases for story collections. Rewritten with an eye to literary rather than oral considerations—and sometimes altered through vocabulary control or purification for a child audience—these tales move farther and farther from the teller's voice. You may recognize the seed of a good story in such collections, but trying to put that tale back into the spoken word is difficult.
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Collections by Storyteller/Authors
For easiest tale selection, try those stories which have been chosen by authors who are themselves storytellers. These tales, which come from the working repertoires of tellers, have already been refined for oral telling. These tellers have selected from their own repertoire tales which tell well. Here the author has already done the work of returning the story from frozen print to oral telling. Some of these collections even include notes with suggestions for telling the tales effectively. See the bibliography for collections by Anne Pellowski, Ruth Sawyer, and other author/tellers.
Storyteller/Author/Collector
Especially useful are those collections prepared by author/tellers who have collected tales directly from traditional tellers. I use the term "traditional teller" to refer to those folks who have learned their stories orally through elders in their own culture. Each of us may be a bearer of some tales from our own tradition, but most of us are basically "revivalist" tellers. We discover the tales in print and "revive" them.
Diane Wolkstein and Richard Chase are two tellers who collected from living informants. They then honed these tales for their own audiences through repeated tellings before selecting those which might best serve us. Note that they do not reproduce the exact words of the traditional teller throughout the tale. Though they stay very close to their sources, they have reshaped the tales slightly to work with our audiences.
Collectors Working Within Their Own Cultures
We are fortunate to have a few collections prepared by tellers working within their own cultures. Ethnomusicologists Moses Serawadda of Uganda and Adjai Robinson of Sierra Leone, and the Burmese folklorist Maung Htin Aung, for example, have produced delightful collections that share their cultures with our children.
However, being a member of a culture does not necessarily mean that an author has an ear for the oral tale. Evaluate each collection you discover carefully.
Folklorists' Field Collections
Today's folklorists are interested not only in the tale but also in the teller. Recent field collections give us verbatim transcriptions of the teller's words. These collectors also tell us about the tale-telling event. They discuss the teller's performance style, the audience response, and the function of the tale for audience and teller. Through such collections we can come closer to those tellers who bestow their tales on us. The works of Dennis Tedlock, Peter Seitel, and others offer a glance into the world of the folk teller. Not all of these tales will work for your audience, but these books will put you in touch with the living tradition of tale telling which you now join.
Finding the Teller through Media
Many professional tellers are available to you on audiotape or videotape. It is hard to bring life to words on a printed page, but once you hear another teller speak them, the tale may suddenly live for you. Professional tellers who write their own material—instead of using folk literature—often do not want their material retold. But the folktale belongs to no one teller. Feel free to take inspiration from another teller's taped rendition in creating your own version. (For discussions of such issues of storytelling rights, permissions, and copyrights, see items in the bibliography on page 72.) For one list of tapes and video material write for the catalog of the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling (NAPPS, P.O. Box 309, Jonesborough, TN 37659).
Finding a Live Teller
It is likely that storytellers live in your community. A little sleuthing may be necessary to find them. Watch the local papers for announcements of storytelling events, ask your local children's librarian for leads, and perk up your ears for news of traditional tellers. You may well have some living treasures right next door.
Many areas have storytelling organizations that meet regularly to exchange stories or present programs. See pages 97-
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99 for information on the national networks that can help you locate such groups in your area.
Find a storyteller whose style matches yours.
Each teller will speak with a unique voice. By listening to many tellers you will happen onto a few whose style suits you especially well. Let those tellers be your mentors. Examine the sources from which they select tales. Listen to their tapes over and over to und
erstand their techniques. Do not imitate but do draw inspiration from those whose telling pleases you.
Investigate those cultures whose tales excite you.
You may find that certain cultures produce tales that give you special pleasure. Syd Lieberman's Jewish tales may delight you; or the spunky, slightly ribald Haitian characters of Diane Wolkstein's Magic Orange Tree may insist that you tell about them. Perhaps the complex imagery of Padraic Colum's Legends of Hawaii will startle your imagination.
Wherever you find a spark, take a clue. Here may lie buried treasure. After reading The Magic Orange Tree I went straight to the library and ordered every collection of Haitian folktales available. If the Haitians were telling such wonderful tales, I wanted to see more.
Know that your local library can order through interlibrary loan (ILL) almost any book for which you can provide author and title. If it isn't in the catalog, just ask your librarian if they can get it through ILL. Most libraries can.
Start a story bank.
As you read and listen, start a list of stories you might want to tell some day. In addition to the story title, book title, and author, it is useful to jot down the catalog number of the book and note the library where you found it. To make certain I have the tale at hand when I want it, I photocopy those tales that appeal to me and keep a file of "Tales to Learn Someday."
Since searching for the "perfect" tale is by far the most time-consuming part of tale preparation, a handy file of preselected tales will serve you well in the future. Often a potentially good tale will not quite suit your need or mood of the moment. Just pop it into your folder for another day.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collections with Texts Close to Their Oral Traditions
These will be easier to retell since they were written down in the way the traditional teller spoke them.
Chase, Richard. Grandfather Tales. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1948.
. The Jack Tales. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1943.
Collected by Chase from friends in the Appalachian Mountains. Retold by Chase, who used these stories in his own repertoire.
Jacobs, Joseph. English Folk and Fairy Tales. New York: The G.P. Putnam's Sons, c. 1898.
. More English Folk and Fairy Tales. New York: The
Putnam Berkley Group Inc., c. 1898. These tales, collected by nineteenth-century folklorists, have changed little from their original tellings.
Robinson, Adjai. Singing Tales of Africa. New York: Charles Scribner's Soils, 1974. Tales from Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Ghana retold by a Sierra Leoone author who is a storyteller. His book includes music for all songs.
Scrwadda, W. Moses. Songs and Stories from Uganda. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1974. Serwadda is a Mukunja musician and storyteller. Alter receiving his master's degree in African dance from the University of Ghana, he began teaching with the Department of Music and Dance at Makerere University in Kampala. His book includes music for all songs .ilong with the words in both English and Luganda.
Tracy, Hugh. The Lion on the Path and Other African Stories. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1967. Tracy is a British ethnomusicologist who has spcnt much of his career in Zimbabwe. He includes musical notation for the songs. Two of these story-songs are performed by Tracy's son, ethnomusicologist Andrew Tracy, in Mapandangare: The Great Baboon (Studio City,
California: Filmfair, 1978) and The Dancing Lion (Studio City, California: Filmfair, 1978). These are available in both 16 mm and videotape.
Collections by Storyteller/Authors
These tales are chosen from the repertoires of school, library, and professional storytellers. The tellings worked well with their audiences. You may enjoy them too.
Bryan, Ashley. Beat the Story-Drum, Pum, Pum. New York: Atheneum
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Publishers, 1980. Though Bryan is primarily an artist, his extensive experience as a performer of his own work informs his storyteller's ear.
Chapman, Jean. Tell Me Another Tale: Stories, Verses, Songs and Things to Do. Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton, 1976.
Fitzgerald, Burdette S. World Tales for Creative Dramatics and Storytelling. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Press, 1962. More than one hundred multicultural tales. Most are very good for storytelling.
Hayes, Joe. A Heart Full of Turquoise.. Pueblo Indian Tales. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Mariposa Publishing Co., 1988. Pueblo tales retold from anthropological sources by a non-Indian teller with a good ear for story.
MacDonald, Margaret Read. Look Back and See: Twenty Lively Tales for Gentle Tellers. New York: The H.W. Wilson Co., 1991. Audience participation folktales with a gentle slant. This multi-ethnic collection features tales from twenty cultures.
. Peace Tales: World Folktales to Tall About. Hamden,
Connecticut: Linnet Books / The Shoe String Press, 1992. Some to tell, some to talk about. By this author and other tellers.
. Twenty Tellable Tales: Audience Participation Folk-
tales for the Beginning Storyteller. New York: The H.W. Wilson Co., 1986. Easy-to-learn folktales. Includes several longtime favorites of school and library storytellers.
. When the Lights Go Out: Twenty Scary Tales to Tell.
New York: The H.W. Wilson Co., 1988. A bit of spooky fare for every audience from not-so-scary preschool fare to the truly creepy.
Miller, Teresa. Joining In: an Anthology of Audience Participation Stories and How to Tell Them, edited by Norma Livo. Compiled by Teresa Miller with assistance from Anne Pellowski. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Yellow Moon Press, 1988. Audience participation stories from eighteen professional storytellers. Margin notes tell how the teller worked with the audience to carry forward the tale. Beginning tellers can learn much from reading these marginal notes and noticing techniques used by these tellers.
Pellowski, Anne. The Family Storytelling Handbook: How to Use Stories, Anecdotes, Rhymes, Handkerchiefs, Paper, and Other Objects to Enrich Your Family Traditions. New York: MacMillan, Inc. 1987.
. The Story Vine: A Source Book of Unusual and Easy-
to-Tell Stories from Around the World. New York: MacMillan, 1984. Pellowski, former librarian with the United States Committee for UNICEF has collected from around the world string stories, drawing stories, object stories, finger-play stories—a useful assortment of entertaining and easy-toexecute story material. Good repertoire stretchers for the beginning teller. Easy to learn and sure to please.
Sierra, Judy and Robert Kaminski. Multicultural Folktales: Stories to Tell Young Children. Phoenix: The ()ryx Press, 1991. Includes stories for
the very young, three to five years old.
Tashjian, Virginia. Juba This and Juba That: Story Hour Stretches for Large and Small Groups. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969.
. With a Deep Sea Smile: Story Hour Stretches for
Large and Small Groups. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974.
Over the years, several library storytellers have published collections of their favorite stories for telling. Look in your library for collections by Augusta Baker, Pura Belpre, Eileen Colwell, Mary Gould Davis, Mae Durham, Ellin Greene, Jeanne Hardendorff, Virginia Haviland, Eulalie Steinmetz Ross, and Ruth Sawyer.
Good Sources for the Traditional British Nursery Tale
You probably already know these stories—The Little Red Hen, The Gingerbread Boy, The Three Bears ... Refresh your memory and add these to your repertoire. Young children still love them.
Ilutchinson, Veronica S. Chimney Corner Stories: Tales for Little Children. Hamden, Connecticut: Linnet Books, 1992 (reprint).
. Fireside Stories. New York: Minton & Balch, 1927.
Richardson, Frederick. Great Children's Stories. Chicago: Rand McNally / Co., 1923. Reprint 1972.
lb Search for Tales from a Specific Culture
If you decide you would like to read more collections from a certain culture area, begin by checking the subject catalog in your local library h.). the subject heading "Folklore—China," for example. To compile a more lengthy bibliog
raphy of materials from that culture, check the sub-fret index to Books in Print. For a listing of collections from various areas see the "Ethnic and Geographical Index" in The Storyteller's Sourcebook byMargaret Read MacDonald (Detroit: Neal-Schuman / Gale Research, 1982).
iwo useful book series may have included collections from the culture area in which you are interested.
The Folktales of the World series, edited by Richard M. Dorson, offers a selection of folktales from each country. Motif and type numbers are provided along with scholarly comparative notes for each tale. An essay discussing the history of folktale research in that country introduces each volume. Each is prepared by a noted folktale scholar from that country.
Ilriggs, Katharine M. and Ruth L. Tongue, editors. Folktales of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
Christiansen, Reidar Th., ed. Folktales of Norway. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
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Degh, Linda, ed. Folktales of Hungary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
Eberhard, Wolfram, ed. Folktales of China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
El-Shamy, Hasan M., ed. Folktales of Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Massignon, Genevieve, ed. Folktales of France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Megas, Georgios A., ed. Folktales of Greece. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Noy, Dov, ed. Folktales of Israel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.
O'Sullivan, Sean, ed. Folktales of Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
Paredes, Americo, ed. Folktales of Mexico. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Pino-Saavedra, Yolanda, ed. Folktales of Chile. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.