Liz Warren | Storyteller

        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…

          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…

           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…

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…

         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…

      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…