Liz Warren | Storyteller

"But one year as I grew older

Mama firmly told me no.

When the boys went out on roundup,

Mama said I couldn’t go.

Then she tried to teach me cooking,

How to sew and keep the place.

But my heart was roping yearlings,

And I longed to barrel race."

(from "Tomboy," by Dee Strickland Johnson)

Last year I was the featured teller for the June meeting of the Dublin Yarnspinners.  I got an email from Aideen McBride in early May asking if I would tell for them again on June 12^th and I was delighted to accept.

The Dublin Yarnspinners are led by Aideen, her father Jack Sheehan, and Jack Lynch.  That’s me talking to Jack Sheehan at the left.  Jack is one of my favorite people.  I first met him two years ago when we both participated in Tales on the Rails.  We, and several other storytellers, told stories on the train from Dublin to Belfast to call attention to storytelling in general and to Cultra specifically.  Cultra is the annual storytelling festival at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum that Liz Weir has been organizing for twenty years. I had a great time with Jack and later told Aideen that, god forbid, should anything happen to my husband Mark, I’d be interested in her dad.  “Get in line,” she said.

Liz Weir drove me to Dublin for the evening.  When we got inside the Teacher’s Club on Parnell Square where the meetings are held, there was Dwight Oglesby sitting outside the room on a bench.  In just another moment, Sandy came around the corner!  Liz knew they would be in Dublin and had helped them figure out how to be there as a surprise for me.

They had a good turnout.  I’m not sure exactly how many, but the room felt full. Last year I told stories about my grandmother, so this year I told about my grandfather, Harry P. Irving.  After giving some general background and a few anecdotes about him, I told “The Horny Toad’s Grandparent’s.” Then I told Dee Strickland Johnson’s poem “Tomboy.” I finished the first set with “The Calf Scramble.” 

Then several people, including Sandy and Liz, came up from the audience to tell.  We took a break and I visited with lots of people from the audience including Richard Marsh, a Dublin storyteller, and a woman I’d met the previous year. When we resumed, several more people told and then it was my turn again.  I told “The Underground Forest” and closed with “A Full Brain,” a story about how storyteller’s came to be.  I had intended to work in “Ballerina Eyelashes,” but we ran out of time.

We had to drive back to Athlone, so we got out of there as quickly as we could – which wasn’t all that quickly.  Jack Lynch drove us back to the Setanta Car Park where we’d left our car.  We got back to Athlone about 12:30 a.m.  I expected to fall into bed, but my two flatmates, Mary Aldridge and Elizabeth Ursic, were still up, so we stayed up too and exchanged rants on various topics with them.