Tell me a story

In 1899, a pioneering librarian named Charlotte Keith took over the West End Branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Shortly thereafter, she advertised in local schools that a storytime would be held on Friday afternoons and that sixth, seventh, and eighth graders were invited to attend. On the first Friday, 300 children showed up to hear Miss Keith tell the story of The Merchant of Venice. When they left, not a single Shakespeare storybook was left on the shelves. More than a hundred years later—one chilly night last February, to be exact—120 children made their way to the Mark Twain Public Library, nestled in the wooded countryside of Redding, CT. They were elementary-school children, from grades K–5, dressed in pajamas and carting their favorite blankets and stuffed animals. As the local paper reported a few days later, the children had come to hear a storyteller, who "shared tales from Africa and Appalachia and [of] characters ranging from a clumsy bullfrog to the mighty Casey at the Bat."

What drew those parents and children away from their TV sets and computers in 2001 was the same lure that fascinated Charlotte Keith's audience in 1899: the sharing of imaginative stories between teller and listener.

Storytelling, particularly for children beyond preschool age, is a craft too often ignored by today's librarians, immersed in their daily tasks and overwhelmed by the demands of a constantly changing profession. But in fact, telling stories to elementary and middle school students, and teaching them to express themselves through story, can yield wonderful results: increased attention spans, imaginative writing, good group dynamics, and enhanced self-esteem, to name a few.

In his book, Teaching Through Storytelling, Kieran Egan urges teachers to incorporate narrative stories across the curriculum as a way to create interest in a variety of subjects and to increase students' abilities to retain information. "Stories are wonderful tools for efficiently organizing and communicating meaning," says Egan. He stresses that the lessons children recall in later life most often follow the story-form model.

The National Council of Teachers of English has also issued a strong statement on the value of storytelling in the school curriculum. "Listeners," it says, "encounter both familiar and new language patterns through story. They learn new words or new contexts for already familiar words.... Learners who regularly tell stories become aware of how an audience affects a telling, and they carry that awareness into their writing."

In the last 25 years, a growing number of professional storytellers have been traveling and sharing their art. The National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN, draws thousands every year to hear a selection of these star tellers perform, and having a professional teller invited to your own area can be inspiring and exciting. But children need storytellers all the time, not just for special occasions, and they particularly need those who can share a story in the intimacy and comfort of a small-group setting—in the classroom, the community center, the library, and around the campfire. They need storytellers who know them, are familiar with their daily world, and can encourage them to tell stories of their own.

How does a busy librarian, media specialist, or teacher fit storytelling into the school day or library schedule? First of all, we have to view storytelling as something everyone can do. In her book Storyteller, Storyteacher, Marni Gillard talks about a "story continuum," on which one can trace a direct line from "artful self-expression" to the fine art of storytelling. The first step on the continuum might simply be a conversational anecdote emerging from the need to make sense of an occasion or experience. As you share these everyday events with friends and family, be aware of how you are shaping your stories to engage your listeners. Many professional tellers now include performance-quality personal tales in their repertoires, and you can be sure they all began as anecdotal material.

The point is we all tell stories, and as we share our hopes and disappointments with others, we share with them our humanity. When telling stories—whether personal anecdotes, folk tales, or literary works—the important thing to remember is that you are sharing rather than performing. In The Way of the Storyteller, Ruth Sawyer says that the best tellers have "that intense urge to share with others" what has moved them deeply. Being immersed in a story, feeling the strong desire to share it with others, takes the emphasis off the teller and eases the performance anxiety many beginning tellers feel.

The most important ingredient in successful storytelling—a tip that you will read in all the how-to books—is that you must choose a story that you love. You may need to read many collections of stories to find the one that speaks to you, that makes you want to spend time learning it. It may help to listen to storytelling tapes while driving or walking—it's often easier to connect with a story that you have heard rather than read.

For many people, folk tales are the easiest stories to learn. Coming from an oral tradition, they have been honed through the years to a fast-moving, straightforward plot. They have stock characters and a minimum of description. They are free of pretense, contain a childlike sense of wonder about the natural world, and can be interpreted on so many levels that each listener takes from the story what is most important for him or her. Often, folk tales have a robust humor even as they convey subtle messages about human behavior.

Folk tales are not the only source for story material. Many children enjoy stories from real life, and the biography section of your library is rich in this material. Five years ago, while reviewing a book on the history of the modern Olympic Games, I found myself fascinated by the stories of some of the legendary athletes who have emerged since the modern Olympics began in 1896. I developed a program to present in schools and libraries about James B. Connolly, the first gold medalist in track events. That was followed by the story of Jim Thorpe, the great Native American track star who was stripped of his gold medals through a technicality (they were restored to his heirs many years later), and Jesse Owens, whose record-breaking scores rankled Hitler in the 1936 Games. For me, the heart of Jesse Owens's story, the real human drama, was the spontaneous friendship he developed with one of the German athletes, the mutual respect and joy in each other's company that grew between a black sharecropper's son from America and a young white man from Nazi Germany. Finding the vivid details in a biographical sketch and the anecdotes that define personality can be a rewarding challenge.

Possibilities for storytelling abound in collections and single editions of literary tales, as well. One such story has been with me for 30 years, ever since I first heard a classmate tell it in a storytelling course at the University of Pittsburgh. My classmate told "The Mousewife," a story published by Rumer Godden. (Godden had found the story in the journal of Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the poet William Wordsworth.) This strange tale of the friendship between a house mouse and a captured dove touched us all in the class, especially when the teller became choked with emotion as she related it. On a child's level, the story is about friendship and the mouse freeing the dove from a cage, but as I learned the story myself, it took on greater meaning about the importance of true friends in my own life.

Years later, I told the story in the living room of a group home for girls in Westport, CT. Eight teenage girls, whose lives had been disrupted by various problems at home, listened intently as the dove told the mousewife about life in the wild and the mousewife came to understand the dove's world beyond the window and his need to be free. When the story ended, there was a hushed silence until one of the girls said, "That's a story about therapy."

The best stories meet us where we are and create meaning for our own lives.

When you have made the effort to learn a story, you will want many opportunities to tell it, to make it an integral part of you. If you are a librarian, you can tell it to many different groups as part of classroom visits. If you are a teacher, you can offer to tell your story in other classrooms. The more you tell the story, the more you make it your own. Each audience will teach you something about the story. They may start chanting a refrain, and you will find you have a participatory story. They may laugh where you think the story is poignant. They may become hushed and thoughtful where you didn't expect that reaction. Whatever happens, you will learn from them and incorporate what you learn into subsequent tellings.

Storytelling at its best is a cooperative venture between teller and audience. Invite professional storytellers to your schools and libraries, by all means. Use their appearances to inspire your staff with the power of story. But do build on the excitement engendered by these events by featuring storytelling in your own classroom or library. The power of story can make a world of difference in your library, your classroom, and your students' lives.

Buzzeo, Toni and Jane Kurtz. Terrific Connections with Authors, Illustrators, and Storytellers: Real Space and Virtual Links. Libraries Unlimited, 1999.

Cabral, Len and Mia Manduca. Len Cabral's Storytelling Book. Neal-Schuman, 1997.

Egan, Kieran. Teaching as Story Telling: an Alternative Approach to Teaching and Curriculum in the Elementary School. University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Gillard, Marni. Storyteller, Storyteacher: Discovering the Power of Storytelling for Teaching and Living. Stenhouse, 1995.

Hodges, Margaret. "The Hereditary Profession" (unpublished paper). School of Information Science, University of Pittsburgh, 1983.

MacDonald, Margaret Read. The Storyteller's Start-Up Book: Finding, Learning, Performing and Using Folktales. August House, 1993.

Moore, Robin. Creating a Family Storytelling Tradition: Awakening the Hidden Storyteller. August House, 1999.

Sawyer, Ruth. The Way of the Storyteller. Penguin, 1998.

www.storynet.org 
Web site for the National Storytelling Network.

www.storyteller.net
Information about storytelling, tellers, and events.

www.ncte.org/positions/story.html
Position statement from the Committee on Storytelling of the National Council of Teachers of English.

www.yellowmoon.com
Online bookstore for storytelling books and tapes.

www.youthstorytelling.com
Web site of Voices Across America Youth Storytelling.