Liz Warren | Storyteller

 

 

 

 

 

 

As our beautiful city
of Phoenix starts to heat up, my thoughts turn to how am I going to get out of
this heat this summer?  Some of you are fortunate to be going to cooler
country for the summer, but many of us will only be able to manage a week or
two.   Magazines this month are devoting their entire issues to
travel.  Wouldn’t it be fun to tie storytelling into these travels? 
You can.

In the last two and
a half years I have downsized considerably.  In that downsizing I got rid
of many books. I now find that since joining the gang at storytelling classes
this collection again has started to grow.  There are so many good books
and I know you can probably tell me about some I don’t know and should know,
but storytelling for me  started with Frank Delaney’s book on
Ireland.  A novel, no big historical recount at this juncture.  The
book began with a storyteller who came to a house and people came from far and
wide to listen.  Later on we learned more and more about this man and the
story developed.  All I knew was I wanted to be a storyteller.  I
wanted to travel from house to house and tell a story or two and make a new
friend.

I again let my
imagination go free, from a story I knew of a coyote becoming tame to Sinbad
and magic carpets. I imagined myself traveling on that carpet with the spirit
of the coyote straining to be released from my lips with story.

I would like to go into a town and where there signs that read, “Rooms
to Rent”, or “Things to Do”. And I would have one that said, “Traveling Storyteller,
needs room and a meal”.  What fun I would have telling tall tales, putting
energy and action into historical stories and making every little girl in the
room the beautiful princess with the magical shoes on her feet.

Every adventure today and tomorrow can be a travelling
storytelling experience.  I realize I have already begun.  When my
anxious granddaughters went to camp for the first time, I sent along an
original story for each night.  My stories travelled.  Now I see
where someone is trekking on a bike this summer.  I do hope there will be
stories to tell at every stop along the way.

So brush up your camp fire stories, your family reunion stories,
short stories for meeting someone at a coffee shop or driving in the car.
 Make your stories travel and be a traveling storyteller.  And if you
see a sign in my town saying “Room to Rent to Traveling Storyteller” that would
be my ad asking you to come sit and tell me something good.