Stories on the spot ...

The following anecdotes are notes I've taken the past few weeks as I've observed my preschoolers at play. With all the literature I'm still reading on how the brain naturally creates stories to explain things, I thought I'd see what examples I could find in real life. It didn't take long ...

David pulls Thomas the Train out of the train bucket and starts driving it on the wooden train tracks.
"Here's little Thomas. Number 1!"
Thomas is clearly too small for the tracks. Suddenly, David flies him off the tracks onto a blue section of the train table.
"Now he's swimming in the pool!"

(David observed a change in his play environment, and changed the action of his toy to fit that change logically.)



Two boys are in a tent. It's unclear whether they mean to exclude Charlie or not. Charlie looks around and picks up two cardboard building blocks, lifts them up over his head, and starts to hit them against the top of the tent.
"It's a stunder storm!" he cries.
The two boys come out of the tent with dinosaur toys.
"We must fight the storm!" and they and Charlie fight by flying their respective toys around in the air. No one is actually hit. The two boys recede again to the tent. Charlie remains outside.
"Drip, drop, drippety drop! It's gonna rain ..."

(Charlie created a purpose for his toys that allowed him to interact with the other children. They responded as David did, adjusting their play to a real change in their environment, so that the new element fit into the story of their previous play.)



Laura is using a dolphin stamp to decorate a piece of paper. She stamps two dolphins so they overlap each other.
"Look!" she says, "Two dolphins ran into each other!"
(She noticed something different, a break in her previous pattern, and then made up an imaginary story to explain how it happened.)
"Wow," I say, "That's interesting. How do you think that happened?"
"They were just swimming along," she starts, "and weren't watching where they were going! That's what happened in my movie at home 'The Day of the Fliers'."
(She extrapolated on the story by applying previous knowledge of / experience with another story to her reasoning in this story. If two dolphins run into each other, she can assume that it happened for similar reasons as she saw elsewhere.)
She continues to stamp the dolphins so they overlap with each other.



Now, I'll fully admit that my brain is full of stories, story-making, and storytelling thoughts these days, so that I, too, am engaging my brain's natural story-making activity to make sense of what observe. However, I hope you begin to see how just about everything a child says in play, every reaction they have to their environment, is an act of this story- and sense-making process. I am privileged to observe this activity every day I am in my preschool. They remind me that it is a process that continues into adulthood. Though, sadly, with as much valuable experience as we gain, our imaginative capacities for believing that a train can swim in a swimming pool or that dinosaurs can fight a "stunder storm" drastically decrease.

KSER Membership Drive

Oh, let's hope I remember everyone's name!

Top L to R: Kathy, Mary, Eva, Fern, me! (Avery), Willy

Bottom L to R: Naomi, Aarene, Rob, Jim

Welcome to the KSER 90.7FM membership drive, where Global Griot - the Sunday morning storytelling show - hosted a party of all live storytelling this morning. What a fabulous experience to take part in, and what wonderful connections we all made with each other!

We were all appreciative of Global Griot's hosts Aarene, Jim, and Mary, and to the station manager, Bruce, who were so welcoming, with kind words, nourishing treats (ever heard of Cackleberry Casserole?), and hot coffee. There was a lot of talk regarding future collaborations between the Seattle Storytellers Guild and KSER, which I hope will come to fruition soon.

There were so many stories told, from Fern's Irish tale of The Grain of Fionn mac Cumhaill (also known as Finn MacCool), to a Jack tale from Kathy; from Naomi's The Jazzy Bears (take-off on Goldilocks) to Eva's mysterious "Suspect". I was glad that both Rob and I told personal stories, too, because people forget so easily that crafting a story from your own life is just as much the challenge and delight as is developing folktales or other kinds of stories. There are so very many kinds of stories to tell, and it was wonderful to see them all represented by the different tellers present.

I was most inspired by the sense of community that was instantly created in that volunteer room, just outside the on-air booth. Bruce didn't really know what he was in for when he welcomed us and asked us, "What stories will you be reading?" "Um," we answered, hesitantly, "We don't read stories, we tell them. That's why we're called storytellers." Sure enough, after the first few of us had told, he piped up: "Oh, you know, I tell stories, too, about my daughters..." and next thing you knew, he was on the air, telling stories, himself. Ah yes, homo narrans, we are all storytellers ...

A peek into the studio from the volunteer room. Bruce, at the mic, is the station manager, and Maggie, in the green, is an Irish harpist and storyteller who opened up the show for us, but had to leave before the group photo was taken.

About half way through the show I answered a call in the volunteer room (we were also taking pledges, by the way) from a young boy whose first words to me were: "Could you tell the three bears one?" - "You mean, Goldilocks and the Three Bears?" - "Yeah, that one." I later spoke to his grandmother, who said he comes over every Saturday night to stay the night get up Sunday to listen to Global Griot. ... !!! ... So, I asked around, "Who wants to tell Goldilocks and the Three Bears?" - "Someone will!" I was reassured, which I passed on to the boy before we hung up.

Well, then we were all a little stuck. How does that story start, anyway? There are three bears, they leave the house, but why? And then there's Goldilocks, prancing through the forest, but what is she doing? Piece by piece we put it all together and within 10 minutes, Kathy and Naomi were in the studio telling two different versions of the classic story.

Ah, the sweet sense of community! What very different journeys we all had taken to that little building in Everett WA; yet, how warm and welcoming all were toward one another, as if we'd known each other all our lives. Who knows? Maybe we have ... in a storyteller kind of way.

Dear Charlie ...

Dear Charlie,

You amazed me today. Let me tell you the whole story.

We've been learning about all the German fairy tales this month, and today we spent a lot of time talking about Dornröschen, or Sleeping Beauty. After listening to the story at reading time, all you children went to the tables to decorate a picture of Sleeping Beauty's castle and cover it with the great bush of thorns that grew around it while she was sleeping.

Now, stories are stories, and everyone remembers them differently. One of my favorite things to do as a teacher is watch to see what my students take from the stories they hear, and how that comes out in their art work. Here's what you drew and glued on, and what you told me about it:

"There's the princess [black figure, above] trying to get the prince down. She needs a rope to get one [draws purple line down from black figure]. Here's the water all around. There are two flying pigs to guard the castle [drawn left of castle]. There's a key inside here [purple mark on rose in the castle entryway].

About green bush on the right (the great thorns that grew around Sleeping Beauty's castle):"That's the decoration. When you put strings on it, it looks all pretty. The decoration looks good."

Charlie, what a clear imagination you have! As you were telling me all about your drawing, you knew exactly what everything was, and when you wanted to tell me about something that was missing, you started drawing it as you told me about it.

I really enjoyed hearing what you added to the story, like I do hearing about everything you draw and think about. You have such an active mind, full of detail. Most kids do, and that's why I love taking the time to listen to you tell me about your pictures.

Thank you, Charlie. Hope you had a good time at school today, too.

"So, here's a sandbox [orange circle, bottom]. That's the Sonne [sun] and the Sonne dries up all the puddles. There's a frog [brown, lower left]. There's the chocolate stream and they put it in the wrapper. There are the muddy puddles in a drain that drains a lot of stuff. The Sonne is really hot - so hot, you have to eat ice cream." - Charlie, 4yr 2mo

Tcha Tee Man Wi Storytelling Festival

http://www.tchateemanwistorytelling.com/

"I'm a storyteller ... I take the long way home."

Regi Carpenter, featured teller

How to express the state of my mind and heart and soul at the close of this - or any - storytelling festival?? Perhaps it is best to share simple snippets of thought, as recorded in my journal, with the highlights of the weekend.

Friday night concert - Regi Carpenter was new to my schema of storytelling performers. She was so theatrical, and truly brought so many aspects of ART into the idea of storytelling as a performance art: song, movement, imagery, cadence of voice ... She reminded me of what Anne had said last weekend, that storytellers really use all the body has to offer to practice their art, because that is all they have. Yet, what we have is enough.

Saturday morning workshop with Joel ben Izzy - He began with a story about traveling to Mexico with Green Mountain Coffee and visiting a coffee plant where the hostess was just as joyful as can be ... he honed in a minute on the holes in the roof of the house. They were tiny pricks, really, but enough to shed quarter-size circles of light onto the floor. "These little thing," he said, "are what let us into storytelling." I could not help but remember Dayton Edmonds' story of the Sky Blanket and think: those pricks in the ceiling, they are like the stars in the Sky Blanket that remind us of the world beyond. Perhaps, then, stories serve a dual purpose: like the stars of the Sky Blanket, they remind us of what lies beyond the world we live in; and like the pricks in the ceiling, they let the light of the world beyond in to shed just a quarter-size illumination on something that happens here, in this world.

Picnic lunch with Fern, fellow storyteller and (very newly so) my boyfriend - I re-read a chapter from David Sobol's The Storytellers' Journey, titled The Archetype of the Storyteller: "I will treat the archetype of the storyteller ... not as a transcendent category, but as a dynamic process." Sobol features three "totemic tales", as he calls them, that seem to reflect different aspects of recognizing oneself as a storyteller, complete with an identity and purpose within human culture. The archetype, though, he seems to say, is not the identity, itself, but the process of identification. In other words, the processing of an experience in search of meaning.

... Meaning-making! This is what we tell stories for, each and every one of us! Yet, the one who finds meaning in the personal experience of finding meaning in all experience for the sake of all people ... that is the storyteller. The archetypal practice of storytellers seems now to emerge in my mind: The conscious craft of making meaning out of all life experience on behalf of and for the whole of humanity.

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.

Stories from the easel ...

I'm making Fische [fish]. They're purple. That's the water. Now the blue water. Purple blue water. That's the water. Fische in the water!

- Georgia, 3yr 6mo

Painting 1 Painting 2

Painting 1: "This is an old engine. It doesn't have any names. It rides on the tracks to far away. It has real sparks because the wheels are going a little bit faster, so real sparks come out. These little sparks go out of the engine and squeeeeeze and then they'll come out of the wheels a little bit faster and that's why there are sparks!"

Painting 2: "This is another old engine. They're friends. IT's because the drivers ... there are two tables, and they have breakfast. But sometimes the sparks go, little tiny ones come out when it goes a little faster. This one goes faster than the other one."

- Kevin, 3yr 8mo

From fish to infinity

Or, how Sesame Street saves us once again!

Please check out the NY Times column by Steven Strogatz examining concepts of math, from preschool on up. The column debuted today, and I thank my aspiring physics scholar of a cousin for sending me the tip! It all starts somewhere ...

Actually, what I found most intriguing in this debut column is the double-sided concept of abstract reality he addresses. Numbers allow us to deal with and engage with reality more efficiently, but, as he writes, "at a serious cost of abstraction." Yet, this very leap of abstraction leads us to the concept of, say, addition, which also helps us engage with reality more efficiently. Like most of the things I find cognitively magical, the powers of the abstract reality of numbers seems to function, in my thinking, like a double-helix: two seemingly opposite forces, bound together in relation with each other by the concrete connections we can observe, and thus forever influential on each other.

But don't let me put too many thoughts in your head. Read it for yourself!