By Janice Harrington, Champaign Public Library
1) Thou shalt not forget the child is the most important story programming element
2) Thou shalt not forget that after the child, the story is the most important element
3) Thou shalt be literature-based (show the books!)
4) Thou shalt not allow props to hide the story
5) Thou shalt not use props that are old and ugly
6) Thou shalt play
7) Thou shalt include at least one oral story each storytime
8) Thou shalt engage and involve the children
9) Thou shalt engage and involve the parents and/or teachers
10) Thou shalt praise a lot
Compiled by Barbara Griffin, Olga Loya, Sandra MacLees, Nancy Schimmel, Harlynne Geisler, and Kathleen Zundell. July, 1993.
Stories are to share and tell. While we encourage the art of sharing stories, we also want to encourage respect in out community.
You deserve repect. Respect other tellers.
A storyteller's personal, family and original stories are her/his copyrighted property. It is unethical and illegal to tell another person's original, personal, and family stories without permission of the author/storyteller.
Folklore and folktales are owned by the folk, but a specific version of a tale told by an individual teller or found in a collection is that teller's or author's copyrighted property. If you like a folktale a storyteller has told ask that teller for a reference of where it can be found. Research the story by finding other versions, and then tell it you own way.
Published literary tales and poetry are copyrighted material. They may be told at informal story swaps, but when you tell another's story in a paid professional setting, you need to request the author's/publisher's permission. You need to research copyright law.
When telling anywhere it is common courtesy to credit the source of your story.
Pass stories, share stories, and encourage respect within the storytelling community.
*Please feel free to copy this etiquette statement and pass it out or read it at storytelling events.
By Janice M. Del Negro, Dominican University
Storytellers and story listeners comprise a transparent subculture in the United States today. This subculture exists not on the fringes of public life but smack in the middle of it: in libraries, schools, museums, churches, businesses, coffee houses, night clubs; under tents, under stars, and underground. This organized subculture has strong professional, regional, and national ties, and it is devoted to the perpetuation and preservation of oral storytelling.
Recent (in the last one hundred years) library history indicates that oral storytelling was thought to have met its demise several times in the twentieth century: in the 1930s, when budget cuts and limited staff curtailed library programming; in the 1960s, when audiovisual was the rage; in the 1990s, when computers took over the world. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of storytelling's death were then (and are now) greatly exaggerated. School and public librarians, instrumental in if not responsible for the success of the mid-1970s American storytelling revival, continue to do what they have always done: connect children, young adults, and their families to literature, language, and oral narrative through the art and craft of storytelling.
Storytellers in the library tradition of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries claim great benefits for children who listen to stories, from the practical expansion of vocabulary to life-altering encounters with the beauty of language and the structure of narrative. Storytellers outside the library tradition claim benefits as well, such as the creation of community, a sense of connection to history, even spiritual and physical healing. In the United States today there are hundreds of individuals who identify themselves as storytellers in what is called the revivalist tradition. They tell, retell, adapt, and re-imagine traditional folktales in order to tell them to listening audiences of all ages. These revivalist tellers are not limited to folktales; they also tell historical tales, personal stories, autobiographical material, original pieces, literary tales, participation stories, Bible stories, urban legends, myths, epics, and tales of the supernatural. If you can name it, there is someone, somewhere, telling it.
A fast overview of storytelling in the United States today indicates that storytelling is alive and well. Annual storytelling festivals all over the country feature well-known (at least within this particular subculture) professional platform tellers. Sometimes these festivals offer opportunities to non-platform tellers, such as the Tuskeegee Airmen, who told stories of their World War II military careers at the Illinois Storytelling Festival Elders Tent in 1999.
There are storytelling festivals in nearly every state; local, regional, national and international storytelling organizations; a national directory that identifies hundreds of professional storytellers; and countless webpages devoted to the art and craft of storytelling. There are special interest groups revolving around specific types of tales and specific types of audiences; there are online discussion groups; a storytelling webring; homepages for individual storytellers and storytelling organizations; and websites of folktales, myths, and legends that are used for research and source material.
In July, 2002, the National Storytelling Conference (which moves from region to region annually and draws primarily from the United States) had more than 400 participants, including individuals from Canada, Brazil, Australia, and England, and Ireland. Dan Keding, storyteller and balladeer, did a three part article on the future of storytelling in Sing Out! magazine (Summer 1999, Vol. 43, #4; Fall 1999, Vol, 44, #1; Winter 2000, Vol. 44, #2), in which he interviewed platform tellers about the future of their art. The Association for Library Service to Children holds a storytelling concert at the American Library Association's annual summer conference. The National Council of Teachers of English has a position paper on the educational benefits of storytelling. East Tennessee State University offers a masters degree in storytelling. The Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., the Folklife Center in San Antonio, Texas, the Children's Museum in Indianapolis, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures in Champaign, Illinois, park districts, hospitals, prisons, and additional institutions too numerous to list have incorporated storytelling as an integral part of their ongoing programming.
Up and coming young storytellers are being nurtured in educational and recreational environments. Kevin Cordi is a full-time high school storytelling teacher with an established storytelling troupe called Voices of Illusion. This young adult troupe has produced two audiocassettes, and they are dedicated to stories of non-violence. Their website (designed and maintained by student participants) offers information about the organization, as well as advice on how to start your own storytelling troupe. Cheri Stewart, a youth services librarian at the Brighton Park branch of the Chicago Public Library, runs a successful project in which local storytellers train junior high school students to tell stories to younger children. The National Storytelling Youth Olympics, sponsored by East Tennessee State University, includes middle-school and junior high participants from across the United States. More and more storytelling festivals and conferences are providing performance and learning spaces for young tellers.
Storytelling is being used successfully as a tool for communication, mediation, and conflict resolution with incarcerated young adults (Bob Kanegis, Santa Fe, New Mexico) and homeless teenagers (Lorna Czarnota, Buffalo, New York). Interest in folklore and mythology is a natural extension of storytelling with young adults, the hero's journey being seen as a rite of passage for both young men and young women.
In school and public libraries storytelling is a tool for motivating reading; a way to improve writing skills; a way to build classroom community; a way to teach moral values; a way to connect children and books. Storytelling has a memorable impact on listeners, whether it's life changing, attitude changing, or just mood changing. Janice Harrington, head of Children's Services at the Champaign Public Library and an impressive storyteller herself, emphatically states: "No one has ever said 'I remember that computer program you gave me' but they have often said 'I remember that story you told.'" Harrington notes that most school and public librarians learn storytelling, by necessity, on the job. Professional development today is much more likely to be in the area of technology rather than storytelling, whatever its benefits, due to the huge push to get libraries online and to produce a techno-literate student population.
Still, librarian storytellers tell on. Despite fierce competition for the attention of youngsters storytelling remains an undeniable presence in libraries, schools, and other formal and informal communities. Storyteller David Novak said:
"We have a media-saturated culture partly because we know we need stories. The storytelling revival is ultimately not about the importance of stories, but the importance of oracy. To tell is not merely to report, but to discern. Storytelling is like a hazel wand, finding things out, paying attention. The act of storytelling is the act of paying attention to the story, and getting the audience, the listener, to pay attention." (Sing Out! Summer 1999, Vol. 43, #4, p. 99)
The library is in a unique position: it is the only agency that offers storytelling as a way of connecting children and adults to books and literature. Librarian storytellers are forceful advocates for traditional literature, telling stories that motivate listeners to search out the books from which those stories come. A strong folktale collection is a place where minority voices can be heard, literally as well as figuratively. Storytelling is a practical public relations tool that enables librarians to think outside the box, and outside the building via outreach programming. In the past storytelling was a tool for accessing the library collection; now and in the future storytelling is and will be a tool for accessing the entire community.
There is an unofficial canon of traditional tales commonly used in story programming and passed on from one librarian storyteller to another, formally and informally. Both the stories and the act of storytelling itself form a basis for a common experience, and create a group of listeners with a tentative common culture engendered by shared knowledge.
While national organizations will continue to be a force in the storytelling community, it is likely that the storytelling community itself will decentralize geographically, moving away from the idea of a central physical plant. The online storytelling community will become more cohesive as more storytellers (and story listeners) gain access to the web. Online resources proliferate: listservs, discussion groups, websites, resources for folktales and mythology, and numerous other resources float in the ethernet like virtual jellyfish. Storytelling is already an online presence, from the digital storytelling center to audio-portions of long-distance classes to e-mailed stories exchanged during virtual story swaps. Web-based techno-telling is limited only by the human imagination and the available software.
Storytelling online, on television, on the radio, on video, and on audio are portals to a variety of storytelling opportunities, despite the fact that real-time telling online is not the same experience as participating in a storytelling event in which both teller and listeners occupy the same physical space, and recorded stories are at least one (seven-league boot) step removed from the live storytelling experience. "E.B. White once said that television invites us to abandon the primary and near for the secondary and remote. The role of the storyteller will be to bring people back to the primary and near." (Novak, Sing Out!) The venues for storytelling and the types of stories told will continue to evolve, although the modern practitioner's primary definition will (while expanding to include ever-changing variables within the art) remain essentially, elegantly simple: storytelling is the live transmission of story from the storyteller to the active story-recipient.*
Stories connect us to our past and to each other. Stories inspire discussion, communication, and more stories. In the broadest terms, storytelling is a way of creating a common culture in which we all know and share the same stories, and are encouraged to seek out others.
New storytellers will bring a new energy to the art, pushing the envelope further in terms of content and venue. Both male and female tellers, some more overtly than others, are creating powerful, radical retellings of traditional material that is inventive, unpredictable and cleverly wrought. The reimagination of traditional stories will create a new body of relevant, folklore-based tales that are related to if substantially different from previously collected folktales.
Technology is a glutton for time, but then so is storytelling. School and public librarians are nearly overwhelmed with having to add computer specialist to their already long list of unacknowledged skills. In such frenetically scheduled multi-tasking, where can there possibly be room for stories and storytelling? Librarians, especially youth services librarians, are experts at squeezing blood from stones and separating poppy seeds from ashes. Librarian tellers, committed to the tradition of storytelling in libraries (exemplified in the United States by Ruth Sawyer, and in Canada by Alice Kane), continue to do what they've always done, and then some. They tell stories. In the last three decades their repertoire of stories has expanded to include other, less often heard, often marginalized voices, one story and one librarian storyteller at a time.
Storytelling, inside and outside the library setting, will continue to blossom slowly and steadily. The future will be founded on the emerging class of journeyman storytellers, those middle-ground practitioners somewhere between kitchen table and platform tellers. These "journeytellers" (librarians and teachers among them) will use storytelling in their everyday lives and professions, establishing a strong base of storytellers that will cut across genders, cultures, and economics. Given enough time, these storytellers may create a body of work that will form the basis for a common culture, a unity created from the diversity of many.
The storytelling movement will grow slowly, but inexorably. The roots are deep.
*I am sure I will be coming back and tinkering with this definition ad nauseum
