In 1996 I was a special education teacher at a private school for children with Learning Disabilities in Greenwich, Connecticut. At the end of a PE class in which we had played dodgeball one of my students asked, “Ms. Dinshaw which team won?” His team had no doubt lost but being a ‘good’ teacher, I replied, “Both teams won, Ryan, because we played fair.” Ryan turned to his teammate and I overheard him saying, “Teachers just say that to make us feel better. We definitely lost.”
This mindset of “making people feel better” has seeped into my daily life and I see it in my storytelling as well. When people compliment me on the telling of a story I have just finished, my immediate response is, “Oh you can do it too.” Really? (asked rhetorically).
Just because you have a story to tell does that make you a storyteller? After all, haven't we been telling stories since the beginning of time? Those stories might not be in words as we know them now but the etchings in caves and cliffs do inform us of an incident that happened eons ago. Then the question arises whether an incident is a story or is it just an anecdote? Liz Warren in her book, The Oral Tradition Today: An Introduction to the Art of Storytelling writes, “Anecdotes relate an event; stories place the same event in a larger context of meaning.”
This leads me to wonder then how a person would do that, place the event in a larger context of meaning. The obvious answer could be by learning the art of storytelling i.e., what are the types of stories, story structures, where to find stories, how to memorize stories and the list goes on.
The next question that comes up for me is, is it sufficient to study storytelling to be a storyteller? To this question I would say no. Just like any art studying it is not enough, practice and coaching are integral parts of becoming a storyteller. After all, just because I learned ballet when I was young could I say I am a ballerina?
The natural question that follows is, can you be a storyteller without studying storytelling? To answer this question, I would have to first define ‘studying’. When we look at the preservation of stories through the oral tradition over hundreds of years and we learn how storytelling was taught and studied it is evident that ‘studying’ was definitely not how storytelling is studied today. Just by its definition ‘oral’ tradition was passed down from master to student, whether the student was a family member or an apprentice the master would take on, through verbal transmission. Just by the nature of the story the story structure was learned by the student not taught explicitly the way it is today. The student would spend years memorizing stories that would be told over days. And only after the student had multiple such stories under his belt would he be able to call himself a storyteller.
And that brings me to the million-dollar question; lacking the rigor of becoming a storyteller from the past can I truly call myself a storyteller? Maybe I am just a teller of tales.
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