Tell Me Something Good
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Participation: Listening and Beyond
What makes a good participation story? Storyteller Donald Davis says that if your audience is listening, they are participating. Engaging our listeners’ imaginations is surely the essential participation intended by most of us. Taking the activation of imagination as our foundation, storytellers often find it effective to engage the bodies and voices of listeners…
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Jack – A Hero for the Ages
You may be surprised to hear who one of my favorite hero-tale tellers is: Donald Davis. Donald, best known now for his original family and personal stories, grew up hearing Jack tales from his grandmother. Most of them were long quest stories that could be strung together. Donald says that depending on how much time…
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What Path Do You Follow to Find a Hero Tale?
Most of us have our favorite books and websites that we rely on to find our stories, including hero tales. I’ve got more books than I can keep up with, and sometimes all I need to do is sit down with some of the ones I’ve had for a while. I often discover gems…
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Hero Tales: Rites of Passage in Story Form
Transformation is the key to a good hero story. The hero, whether male or female, must be utterly and irrevocably changed by the events narrated in the story. A hero story is the narrative equivalent of a rite of passage. Just as the new adult cannot return to childhood after puberty, the new hero cannot…
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The Steps of the Hero’s Journey
Reference, Background, and Guide to The Adventure of the Hero from The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell with other supporting material © Liz Warren 2009 “The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for…
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Invoking the Folktale Muse
Would you recognize the folktale muse if you met her on the street, or in your dreams? When I was first becoming a storyteller in the mid-nineties, I went to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. I was overwhelmed with the range of storytellers and stories that I heard. I heard Elizabeth Ellis for…
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Who’s Your Favorite Folktale Teller?
One of my favorite tellers of folktales is Janet Means, and this is one of my favorite pictures of her from her SMCC Storytelling Institute graduation. I love several things about how Janet tells folktales. First, she has a great talent for selecting stories that are a fit for her. She goes for quirky ones…
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Are You a Tourist or a Resident in Folktale Land?
Where do we find folktales? For most of human history that question would have made no sense. We wouldn’t have found folktales; we would have been immersed in them, and in the broader folk tradition that contained them. Most of us did not grow up in a living story tradition, so we find folktales…
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A Mouse, a Bird, and a Sausage
Folktales are the bedrock of a storyteller’s repertoire. Donald Davis says that he learned to be a storyteller from listening to his grandmother and his uncle tell him stories. He learned the powerful narrative structure of folktales and uses it to this day to create his original stories. Most of us have folktales in our…
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Tell Me Something Good
Hey, Storytellers! How’s your repertoire? Wouldn’t you like to learn some new stories? Wouldn’t you like to see and hear your fellow tellers on a regular basis? Of course you would! So here’s the plan: This year the East Valley Tellers of Tales is sponsoring a year-long, blog-based exploration of genre. The intent of Tell…