A couple of years ago when I saw an announcement about a Storytelling workshop presented by faculty from the Storytelling Institute at SMCC my heart started racing and I could feel the blood rushing through my veins. Why? I was not a storyteller, nor did I have much experience with stories or storytelling events. Yet I felt such an urgency to attend. The Workshop was scheduled for 40 hours, which meant I had to use a week of vacation time from my job. I registered for the workshop and requested the time off from work. I was really looking forward to learning how to tap into the creativity supposedly all humans possess. A vision of myself as practical, someone who was more comfortable with the real world and solving real-world problems was planted early in life. As the oldest of six children, I was not one to spend much time imagining. Imagining was something my younger siblings did in the considerable free time children had growing up in the fifties, before television became the ubiquitous presence it has now. Reading was a valued pastime in my family but, if you can believe it, I was read stories from newspapers, not storybooks. Thanks to television productions of Peter Pan and the success of Walt Disney, however, I did experience some fantasy during my formative years. Nonetheless, my ambition from early adolescence was to become a journalist, and so, I had no expectations when I attended that workshop the first day.
On the first day, I was surprised and challenged by the interaction required in the classroom. I’m much more comfortable listening and participating intellectually than I am performing what I am learning, so I was terrified at the directive to tell a story in class not long after starting. I was in a state of panic when gratefully I remembered a childhood incident with my brother that might develop into an entertaining story, but I was not sure. After we did several exercises to prepare and my turn came, I told my first story. I told it on my feet, in front of a group of people I had just met, shaking inside and out. And I lived through it. The performance of telling a story is still incredibly difficult for me; but, I understand the importance of storytelling in the oral tradition. The storyteller’s voice, their body language, and the energy that flows between the teller and the audience creates an experience that cannot be done between writers and their readers. It is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned so far. Moreover, it is a lesson that I thought I knew. I have learned since that there are degrees of knowing and sometimes the only way to achieve a higher degree of knowing is through experience. As a writer, I am trained to believe that awareness of one’s audience is imperative; however, the response from the audience is necessarily delayed and sometimes non-existent while the oral delivery of a story provides immediate response. As a result of this knowledge and because I believe in the importance of the oral tradition, one of the many other things I must learn on my journey as a storyteller is how to resist the message my brain sends to scream “NO!” whenever I am expected to perform.
Storytelling is hard work for me. As an introvert, I am naturally inclined to avoid too much interaction; not because I don’t enjoy it, but because it takes so much energy. It is also hard because of its complexity. There are so many stories and so many types of stories, I have not acquired the confidence that I can choose those that are right for me. Because storytelling is hard, I often have to remind myself of why learning the art of storytelling is important to me. The main reason is that I need to find a way to tell my own personal story. I need to find my voice. And, I need to share my story with others who might need some inspiration to continue on their journey. I remember reading about the concepts of different selves. We all have a public self and a private self. Personally, my two selves share happiness and optimism. However, my public self is comfortable sharing only the happy, positive or humorous side of my story. My private self knows that I avoid telling or showing the sad and painful side of how I became me. My dilemma is finding a way to merge my two selves in order to tell the whole story. It is the only way to leave a meaningful message.
The image at the top of the post can be found here.
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