24 hours in Portland

Good old PDX. Just a train ride away from Seattle, yet I really do not visit as often as I should.

On this particular occasion, I was going to Portland for the express purpose of taking in as much of the storytelling scene there as I possibly could in 24 hours. You may think 24 hours is not a long time, but you don't know what I'm used to packing into 24 hours. Allow me to let you in on this adventure ...

I was so graciously hosted by storyteller friend and colleague Anne Rutherford, a fabulous teller I met last summer at a storytellers' retreat. She, like myself, is always eager to "talk story", which we proceeded to do almost the minute I put my backpack down in the guest room. I can still hear her saying at one point, coffee cup held mid-reach in the air, "You know, it's a privilege we have to sit with these stories ..."

Indeed, the life of a storyteller is paradoxically two-sided: we appear to most as performers, on stage, the entertainer at the center of everyone's attention; yet, like most entertainers, a vastly greater amount of time is put into the research, preparation, and practice. Like Anne says, first, we sit with the stories. We sit for a long time, and let them percolate through our brains and our hearts and our gut. And though we certainly think about effective presentation of a performance, we know better that the ultimate success of the performance is how it resonates with the audience and how those stories stay with listeners long after the telling. So, as we sit with these stories, we think: What resonates in that story on a basic human level? And that can take a while to recognize, let along prepare for presentation.

All this continued to flow through my mind as I watched local tellers from the Portland Storytellers Guild at their monthly performance showcase and appreciated the obvious care and conscientious preparation of each teller's segment. The last story of the evening was an old Welsh myth, I believe, told by a lovely woman named Conchetta. She ended the tale with a delightfully embedded appreciation of the tradition: "... Pay homage to the bards, for, had they not saved and told these stories, we would never have known of how Quill lost Rhiannon with the wit and generosity, and how Rhiannon won him back with her own ..."

The highlight of the weekend was a Unitarian Universalist service Sunday morning that featured a storytelling friend of Anne's, named Barbara, as the sermon-giver. Her story was titled "The truth about lies" and wove together several vignettes from different periods in her personal life. Each exposed a particular lie she had told, but with a delicate honesty that sought not redemption or forgiveness from others, but truth for herself.

"I don't think it's worth trying to be a truth-teller all our lives through," she said, "Lies are windows to the truth of what we fear most in the world. The best we can do is to know when we are telling lies and why."

It was an extremely moving story and event that left Anne and myself almost gasping for breath. As my afternoon train pulled out, I looked back on that city and on that weekend thinking:

Stories are lies, too, aren't they? They lie on purpose, either as fiction, or a folktale passed down many generations, or a crafted personal story ... yet not with the ill intention of deceit, but with the intention of - like Barbara - inspiring and discovering truth. This way of thinking about story helps me understand why some of my readings have described storytelling as a liminal experience, as a threshold. Stories, themselves, present a careful line between truth and imagination, the comfortable and the uncomfortable, the known and the unknown of ourselves and of the world. As storytellers, we walk that line, facilitating the process of each side informing the other not in discord, but in growth and development. Perhaps, then, that is the storyteller's craft: the weaving of dichotomous ideas together in a dance of tension that ultimately builds to cooperation. As the tension builds, truth and imagination, the comfortable and the uncomfortable, the known and unknown dance with each other, not against each other. By allowing these dichotomies to dance together, we find how embedded they are in each other; by allowing for two, we reach the wholeness of one.