Suddenly They Heard Footsteps

by Dan Yashinsky

  There aren’t many books about storytelling as a way of life, but I have five great favourites. In The Crack in the Teacup: The Life of an Old Woman Steeped in Stories, Joan Bodger writes about how stories and myths made a frame for her life. French storyteller Bruno de la Salle describes his experiences as a contemporary bard in Le Conteur amoureux. The centrality of stories in the lives of three Yukon elders is explored and celebrated in the anthropologist Julie Cruikshank’s Life Lived Like a Story. Brother Blue’s extraordinary life as a storyteller and animator of North American storytelling is celebrated in Ahhhh! A Tribute to Brother Blue and Ruth Edmonds Hill. And of course Ruth Sawyer’s book The Way of the Storyteller continues to be a good companion.

  I have a shelf in my library with books I turn to for their wisdom about why oral literature matters. Alice Kane’s Songs and Sayings of an Ulster Childhood (edited by Edith Fowke) evokes an upbringing filled with poetry, family lore, music, proverbs. When you encounter her great collection of wonder tales, The Dreamer Awakes (edited by Sean Kane), you sense how her story-rich Ulster childhood prepared her for a life as a storyteller. Also in The Dreamer Awakes, Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst’s introduction is a superb reflection on the nature of wonder tales and their importance as a contemporary art form. Ted Chamberlin’s If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? is a fascinating book about the power of stories as a source of personal and cultural identity. Sean Kane’s Wisdom of the Mythtellers is a thoughtful exploration of myth.

  If you’re interested in international folk tales and fairy tales, Pantheon Books publishes a series called Fairytale & Folklore Library. It is a comprehensive introduction to the oral literature of a number of countries, and includes classics like the brothers Grimm and Afanas’ev’s Russian Fairy Tales, as well as Arabic, Chinese, African, African-American, Japanese and Swedish collections. In this series you can find treasures like Howard Norman’s Northern Tales, Jane Yolen’s Favorite Folktales from Around the World, and the incomparable Italian Folktales, by Italo Calvino.

  Other anthologies that I keep returning to include The Ch’i-Lin Purse: A Collection of Ancient Chinese Stories, by Linda Fang; Diane Wolkstein’s The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales; Richard Chase’s Grandfather Tales and The Jack Tales; Talk That Talk: An Anthology of African American Storytelling, edited by Linda Goss, Marion Barnes and Henry Louis Gates Jr.; any of Harold Courlander’s many collections: e.g., The Fire on the Mountain and Other Stories from Ethiopia and Eritrea, The Cow-tail Switch and Other West African Stories; East of the Sun, West of the Moon, by Asbjornsen and Moe, translated by George Dasent; all books by the Scottish Traveller Duncan Williamson, including Broonie, Silkie, and Fairies and A Thorn in the King’s Foot: Folktales of the Scottish Travelling People. I also have a Hodja Nasrudin shelf, with several collections of wise-foolish stories.

  My own love for Jewish stories has been enriched by many authors and editors. They include Martin Buber, Dov Noy (founder of the Israel Folktale Archive), Penninah Schram, Howard Schwartz, Steve Zeitlin and Diane Wolkstein. Yaffa Eliach’s Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read.

  There are several reference books you will undoubtedly find yourself visiting during your storytelling travels: A Dictionary of British Folk-tales, by Katherine Briggs; Margaret Read MacDonald’s The Storyteller’s Sourcebook; The World of Storytelling: A Practical Guide to the Origins, Development, and Applications of Storytelling, by Anne Pellowski; Caroline Feller Bauer’s New Handbook for Storytellers; Tales, Rumors, and Gossip: Exploring Contemporary Folk Literature in Grades 7–12, by Gail de Vos; Stith Thompson’s The Folktale, which looks at folk literature in terms of universal motifs and patterns; and, for a sense of how we first learn to speak the language of Story, Iona and Peter Opie’s superb The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren.

  One of the great things about storytelling today is that one can discover the world of Native North American oral literature through the writings of those who are part of it. A generation or two ago, access to published aboriginal stories was often via European writers, anthropologists and editors. Now, many Native storytellers have brought their art into the written domain. Books I particularly treasure include several by Basil Johnston exploring his Anishnabe heritage, Earth Elder Stories by the Saulteaux elder Alexander Wolfe and My Stories Are My Wealth, by the Yukon elder Angela Sidney. Joseph Bruchac is a well-known anthologist of Native American stories, and has also compiled a wonderful book titled Lasting Echoes: An Oral History of Native American People. Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller, by Harry Robinson (compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire) brings the Okanagan tradition to life through the perspective of a gifted storyteller. Thomas King, a Native Canadian novelist, has done some very fine retellings of Coyote stories. I also recommend Jaime de Angulo’s Indian Tales, an astonishing retelling of Coyote stories and medicine songs from California’s Pit River people. Robert Bringhurst has done a three-volume translation of Haida oral literature. The first book, A Story As Sharp As a Knife, is a profound exploration of myth and the lives of those who tell them. In his passion for what he calls the “classical literature” of North America, Bringhurst reminds me of the cross-cultural thrill Chaucer must have felt when he read and began to translate Boccaccio.

  There are many books that record Canada’s oral traditions. The Cape Breton storyteller Joe Neil MacNeil’s Tales Until Dawn (edited by John Shaw) is a fine collection of traditional Gaelic stories. Germain Lemieux has compiled an extraordinary series titled Les vieux m’ont conté, bringing together the repertoires of Franco-Ontarian traditional tellers. The series is up to thirty volumes. Helen Creighton and Edith Fowke were contemporary folklorists who collected and published essential story and song collections. I will also dare to include an anthology I edited called Tales for an Unknown City, drawing on Toronto’s One Thousand and One Friday Nights of Storytelling. The book reflects the multicultural nature of the city where this storytelling event takes place. For tall tales, I must recommend Ted Stone’s Hailstorms and Hoopsnakes, which evokes perfectly the setting where such stories flourish. Québec has given birth to an extraordinary storytelling movement, and the Planète rebelle publishing house has created a series of books and CDs based on the repertoires of many leading Québécois tellers.

  In the United States, August House has played a similarly important role in publishing the repertoires of American storytellers. They have brought into print stories by such tellers as Donald Davis, J. J. Reneaux, Jackie Torrence, Heather Forest and Michael Parent.

  There is a strong interest today in how storytelling can serve as a healing art. Two books have recently been published that open a window into this aspect of storytelling. The Healing Heart: Communities and The Healing Heart: Families, edited by Allison Cox and David Albert, have an impressive selection of stories, essays and personal accounts. They also feature excellent bibliographies organized into topics like “Violence prevention/peace initiatives” and “environmental tales.” For a very moving account of using stories in a healing context, see Michelle Tocher’s How to Ride a Dragon: Women with Breast Cancer Tell Their Stories. I also recommend an anthology titled Spinning Tales, Weaving Hope, edited by Ed Brody, Jay Goldspinner, Katie Green, Rona Leventhal and John Porcino. It is a collection of stories that have social justice themes.

  There are hundreds of good collections of stories for very young children, and these should be well represented in your local library. I will, however, recommend Celia Lottridge’s Ten Small Tales as the perfect anthology for anyone who tells stories to children under five. Every story in the book works beautifully with this audience.

  For storytellers working in educational settings, there are a number of good books I can recommend. Bob Barton’s Telling Stories Your Way: Storytelling and Reading Aloud in the Classroom is a fine introduction to this field. Tales As Tools: The Power of Story in the Classroom, edited by Mary Weaver, is a compendium of essays and e
xercises by many North American storytellers. Also useful: Children Tell Stories: A Teaching Guide, by Martha Hamilton and Mitch Weiss; And None of It Was Nonsense, by Betty Rosen; Mother Goose Goes to School, by Bob Barton and David Booth.

  Family oral history is a growing field. Many storytellers today develop family lore into performance pieces; others explore it as a way to enrich their understanding of traditional stories. Telling Tales: Storytelling in the Family, by Gail de Vos, Merle Harris and Celia Lottridge is a good introduction to this topic. For those who want to actively document their family heritage, Vera Frankenbluth’s Keeping Family Stories Alive: A Creative Guide to Taping Your Family Life & Lore is an excellent resource. Elizabeth Stone’s Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us has been an inspiring book for many storytellers.

  Then there are the hard-to-classify treasures. For a fresh look at how contemporary storytellers work with traditional material, I recommend Kay Stone’s Burning Brightly: New Light on Old Tales Told Today. If you like grand theories, David Bynum’s The Daemon in the Wood is a very original book that looks at some of the universal patterns of oral narrative. It will give you a whole new sense of what trees signify in your stories. Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales, a study of the bardic tradition, was an early inspiration for me.

  To end this tour, let me mention several good magazines and organizations that can serve as guides to the storytelling movement. In Canada and the U.S. you can subscribe to Appleseed Quarterly: The Canadian Journal of Storytelling by writing to the Storytellers School of Toronto (www.storytellingtoronto.org) and to Storytelling Magazine through the National Storytelling Network (www.storynet.org). I would also recommend Tale Trader, a storytelling newspaper published in Louisville, Kentucky. La Grande Oreille is an excellent magazine published in France. As well as these journals and magazines, many storytelling associations and guilds publish very fine newsletters. If you are seeking information about storytelling internationally, Margaret Read MacDonald edited a superb edition of Storytelling Magazine (volume 14, issue 2) with the theme of Global Connections. Storytellers from around the world describe more than twenty-three storytelling movements and provide contact information. Many of these movements have associated websites, publish directories of professional storytellers, and offer a variety of services and resources. In Canada, you can join Storytellers of Canada/Conteurs du Canada (www.sc-cc.com). In the U.S., you can reach the National Storytelling Network at www.storynet.org. Similar organizations exist in England, Scotland, France, Australia and many other countries, supporting the contemporary storytelling renaissance.

  As you fare forth to find your own storytelling resources, it’s important to remember that in the world of storytelling, the spoken word comes before the written word. The greatest assemblage of books cannot replace or displace the experience of listening to elders. The best website ever created cannot substitute for a quiet evening spent hearing a master storyteller spin tales from a wellchosen repertoire. The word of mouth is what draws us to this art, not the word of page or word of screen. Which reminds me of a Hodja story (everything reminds me of a Hodja story!). I’ll tell it to you when we meet.

  ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Achebe, Chinua. Anthills of the Savannah. New York, 1997.

  Afanas’ev, Aleksandr. Russian Fairy Tales. Translated by Norbert Guterman. Commentary by Roman Jakobson. New York, 1945.

  Balfour, M. C. “Legends of the Lincolnshire Cars.” In Folk-Lore II. September, 1891. I based my version of “The Green Mist” on Mrs. Balfour’s Lincolnshire legend. I took the liberty of bringing the story into the language of my own time and place, although I enjoyed sounding out the thick Lincolnshire dialect in which it was originally told and recorded. Both Alan Garner and Kevin Crossley-Holland have used this tale in collections of, respectively, goblin stories and English stories.

  Barton, Bob. Telling Stories Your Way: Storytelling and Reading Aloud in the Classroom. Markham, 2000.

  Bauer, Caroline Feller. New Handbook for Storytellers: With Stories, Poems, Magic, and More. 1998.

  Beier, Ulli. The Origin of Life and Death. London, 1966. My story about how death came into the world in The Storyteller At Fault is retold from Beier’s “Tortoises, Men and Stones.”

  Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” In Illuminations. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York, 1969. One of the greatest essays ever written on the art and nature of storytelling.

  Bérubé, Jocelyn. Nil en ville (recorded album). Montreal, 1976. “The Bird Colour-of-Time” is freely translated and adapted, with permission, from Bérubé’s “L’Oiseau couleur du temps.”

  Birch, Carol and Melissa A. Heckler, eds. Who Says?: Essays on Pivotal Issues in Contemporary Storytelling. Little Rock, 1996.

  Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Translated with an introduction by G. H. McWilliam. Middlesex, 1972.

  Bodger, Joan. The Crack in the Teacup: The Life of an Old Woman Steeped in Stories. Toronto, 2000. A great storyteller’s memoir.

  Briggs, Katherine. A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language. London, 1970. This is a splendid, two-volume collection of stories, within a comprehensive, scholarly frame.

  Bringhurst, Robert. Being in Being: The Collected Words of a Master Haida Mythteller SKAAY of the Qquuna Qiighawaay. Translated by Robert Bringhurst. Vancouver, 2001.

  ____. Nine Visits to the Mythworld—GHANDL of the Qayahl Llaanas. Translated by Robert Bringhurst. Vancouver, 2000.

  ____. A Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World. Vancouver, 1999. I don’t know of any other contemporary poet who has delved so deeply and thoughtfully into the world of myth.

  Bruchac, Joseph. Lasting Echoes: An Oral History of Native American People. New York, 1997.

  Brody, Ed, Jay Goldspinner, Katie Green, Rona Leventhal and John Porcino. Spinning Tales, Weaving Hope: Stories, Storytelling and Activities for Peace, Justice and the Environment. Gabriola Island, 2002.

  Bruner, Charlotte. “Fadhma and Marguerite Amrouche of the Kabyle Mountains.” In The Word-Singers, edited by Norman Simms. Hamilton, 1984.

  Buber, Martin. The Legend of the Baal-Shem. Translated by Maurice Friedman. New York, 1969.

  ____. Tales of the Hasidim: Later Masters. Translated by Olga Marx. New York, 1948.

  Bynum, David. The Daemon in the Wood: A Study of Oral Narrative Patterns. Cambridge, 1978.

  Calame-Griaule, Geneviève. Le Renouveau du Conte: The Revival of Storytelling. Paris, 1991. An interesting snapshot of the storytelling movement around the world, based on an international colloque that took place in Paris in 1989.

  Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver. London, 1974.

  ___. Italian Folktales. Translated by George Martin. New York, 1980.

  ___. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Translated by Patrick Creagh. Cambridge, 1988.

  Celan, Paul. Poems of Paul Celan. Translated by Michael Hamburger. New York, 1988.

  Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Toronto, 2003. A fascinating study of how stories define “them” and “us.”

  Chase, Richard. Grandfather Tales. Boston, 1948. A classic collection of stories from North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky. His “Wicked John and the Devil” is the seed of my story, “The Devil’s Noodles.”

  Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. In Chaucer’s Major Poetry, edited by Albert C. Baugh. New York, 1963.

  Colum, Padraic. “Storytelling New and Old.” In Horn Book, 1983.

  ____. The King of Ireland’s Son. 1978. One of the finest frame-stories ever written, and a great favourite of Alice Kane.

  Courlander, Harold. The Cow-Tail Switch and Other West African Stories. New York, 1947.

  ____. The King’s Drum and Other African Stories. New York, 1962.

  Cox, Allison M. and David H. Albert. The Healing Heart: Communities and The Healing
Heart: Families. Gabriola Island, 2003. Two important additions to the literature on storytelling and healing.

  Cruikshank, Julie. Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stones of Three Yukon Elders, with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, & Annie Ned. Vancouver, 1990. A very powerful exploration of how myth and oral history are interwoven with the life-experiences of three Native Canadian women.

  Dasent, George Webbe. Popular Tales from the Norse. Edinburgh, 1859.

  ____. Tales from the Fjeld. London, 1874. These two books contain Dasent’s great translations of the Scandinavian stories collected by Peter Christian Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe. I based my story, “The True Father of the House,” on a Norwegian story in the second collection.

  DeAngulo, Jaime. Indian Tales. Foreword by Carl Carmer. New YORK 1953

  De la Salle, Bruno. Le conteur amoureux. Paris, 1995. A wonderful account of a French storyteller’s career and repertoire.

  De Vos, Gail. Storytelling for Young Adults: Techniques and Treasury. Englewood, 1991.

  ____. Tales, Rumors and Gossip: Exploring Contemporary Folk Literature in Grades 7–12. Englewood, 1996.

  ____. Telling Tales: Storytelling in the Family. With Merle Harris and Celia Barker Lottridge. Edmonton, 2003.

  Downing, Charles. Tales of the Hodja. London, 1964.

  ____. Armenian Folktales and Fables. Oxford, 1972.

  Eliach, Yaffa. Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust. Oxford, 1982.

  Ellis, John M. One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales. Chicago, 1983.

  Falassi, Alessandro. Folklore by the Fireside: Text and Context of the Tuscan Veglia. Austin, 1980.

  Fang, Linda. The Ch’i-Lin Purse: A Collection of Ancient Chinese Stories. New York, 1995. A brilliant collection of Chinese tales.