I must have been about ten when my extremely shy father decided to broaden his horizons. It started with his company "suggesting" that he should attend a Toastmaster's group to work on public speaking skills. He began to give speeches and found that he liked talking in front of people. One day, he saw an ad in the newspaper for a storytelling group meeting. He realized that the meeting would take place near where we lived and he decided to go check it out. According to him, when he got home, Blue Eyes and I were less than polite when we demanded to know where he had gone to on a Saturday afternoon.
As he continued to tell stories, he began to contact his daughters teachers. Blue was excited to have him come and tell to her elementary classes. I, however, had entered middle school and as all teenagers, wanted him to leave my teachers alone. So, instead of coming right out and asking him if he could come in and tell stories (for free), he would appear at the parent/teacher conferences, wearing a hat and shirt, and sometimes a coat, saying "STORYTELLING" or something close to it. This always prompted a reaction from my teachers causing them to ask about his clothing, allowing him a plug. I was less than thrilled, and started haunting these meetings to keep him from getting a chance to publicly embarrass me. After leaving high school, his storytelling antics became less embarrassing.
My parents have always been great believers in education and reading. At a young age I was allowed books with actual pages, because I was already hooked and knew better than to try to eat or rip the pages. I am now interested in film, which is another form of storytelling. And my father finally convinced me to come and film one of the festivals he attends each year. The Chicken Festival.
It was actually a lot of fun. I like hearing stories, yes, even when my father tells them, though I prefer him not to tell stories about me to other people, while I'm in front of him (A concept he never has quite understood). Attending this conference/festival I began to think.
In the illiterate parts of the world, the tradition of storytellers has always been a bigger deal. They were the memory keepers, for a collective. They also brought the news of the world to their communities. When we say "I see" to show we understand something, they would say "I hear". It wasn't very long ago when most people couldn't read and so no written records were kept. Now their are whole collections of stories, folktales, fairy tales, epics, etc that have been recorded and the tradition of sharing these orally has diminished. This is disheartening because, storytellers are also entertainers. They could/can take stories and shape them to be meaningful to their audience, whereas a book, or a movie becomes dated over time and they changes of customs and fads.
We need our storytellers. We need stories in our lives. I think I'll go back to the Chicken Festival next year.
