Tuesday afternoon I launched the Summer Reading Program at Athlone’s Aidan Heavey Public Library at the beginning of a storytelling session. The next day it was on the front page of the Westmeath Independent. When my students returned from their break on Wednesday morning, Danielle was proudly bearing a copy of the paper for all of us to ogle.
For the past several weeks I’ve been planning weekly storytelling sessions for local school children with the executive librarian, Mae McLynn. Liz Weir will tell one week and I’ll be leading the other three sessions with local storytellers Susie Minto and Danielle Allison, and of course the two that came along on the program, Doug Bland and Joyce Story.
Last week Mae wrote and asked if I’d be willing to launch the summer reading program, and of course I said I’d be delighted. I took a book to present to the library at the launch, Chico, by Sandra Day O’Connor. It’s a beauty, and even though Justice O’Connor is my parents’ generation, the drawings are evocative of the Arizona I remember from my childhood. I thought it was the perfect mix: someone of Irish heritage writing about Arizona.
The newspaper sent a photographer who took a few details from me, and evidently thought I had written the book I was presenting. The caption says, “American author Liz Warren is pictured reading to enthralled students from Cornafulla NS in the Aidan Heavey Public Library yesterday.” Of course, there was no reading of books during our session! Oh, well. I imagine the library was delighted to be on the front page of the paper, and the article on the inside got the details of the summer reading program correctly which is what matters most.
We had an enthusiastic and focused group of listeners. I started off with “The Calf Scramble”, embellished with pertinent details to make it comprehensible to my young Irish listeners. Then Susie, a Scottish storyteller now living in Longford, told a riveting and compelling selkie story that she learned from storyteller Duncan Williamson, the famous Scottish Traveler. The mood and style was markedly different from my story, but she totally captured the students and pulled them into the story. Then I told the “The Horny Toad’s Grandparents”, which features horny toad pee amongst other nuggets of narrative nostalgia and then finished up with an interactive piece I learned from Susan Klein called “Earth, Water, Fire, Air.”
We were telling in the lower level of the library and at one point I noticed a group of teenage boys leaning over the staircase to listen. Danielle told me they were in the library to study for their “leaving certs” – the tests older children take at the end of the year. She was up there too with her two small children. I’m not sure when the boys gave up and came over to listen – at any rate the telling and the laughter finally got them. A good time was had by all, including the tellers.
Next week I’ll be doing the session with Danielle. Miceál Ross will be in town that day, too and I’m hoping we can persuade him to come along and tell something, too.
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