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Storytellers of Ireland/ Aos Scйal Eireann Child Protection Policy *Storytellers of Ireland/Aos Scйal Йireann regret that there is not a statutory vetting system for all those who work with young people and vulnerable adults in the Republic of Ireland and will continue to lobby for this* Policy Statement Storytellers Of Ireland / Aos Scйal Йireann are committed to the promotion of Storytelling in a safe environment for all. Our Child Protection Policy is just one in a series of best practice policies we are currently working on. While SOI do not employ or hire out Storytellers we advise all story tellers to adhere to the Child Protection Policy. This Policy has been drawn up in line with ‘Children First’ The National Guidelines for the Protection and Welfare of Children. In addition to this policy in promotion of safe working environments with children, Storytellers of Ireland / Aos Scйal Йireann also undertake to make members aware of any Child Protection Courses available to them and organize such courses from time to time for members. Places where a Storyteller might find themselves working with children Schools Libraries Youth Clubs Summer Project Activities Birthday Parties Festivals Workshops Club Halls After School Projects Crиches Hospitals Detention Centers Cultural Centers Every Group Working with Children is required to have its own Child Protection Policies in Place. These should be available to anyone working with that group and you should feel free to ask to see them if you wish. If in doubt follow the policies of the hiring group. Other Policies to ask for include, Accident procedure, Discipline and Emergency Procedures (in case of Fire etc.) For the Hosting Group and Storyteller: Issues to be aware of In the present climate of child protection awareness more and more groups need to be able to stand over the choices the make for their activity programme. They will be required by Boards of Management and organizing committees to ask certain questions before they hire any artist. Be prepared therefore you may be asked; If you have attended a child protection course. If you have a Child Protection Policy For a references from places where you have recently worked. (It would be no harm to ask each school or youth group you work in if you can pass on their number as a reference should you be asked for one.) You may be asked to sign a declaration form to say you know of no reason why you should not work with children Likewise there may be questions you would like to ask the hosting group before undertaking a particular booking. The age of the children The number of children per session Ethnic mix / religious mix / special needs Taboo subjects (different religions or cultures have different topics the consider taboo for children) That there will be a responsible adult from the hosting group present for the duration of your session or workshop (This is very important by law you should never be left on your own) Any policies or procedures you would like to be aware of before beginning the session (Child Protection, Discipline, Accidents, Emergency et) Code of Behaviour for Storytellers Treat all young people as individuals, equally and with respect, regardless of gender, age, religion, ethnicity, Involve the children where appropriate in decision making. Offer constructive age appropriate criticism, encouragement and praise Use material appropriate to the age and wishes of the group. Have fun and encourage a positive atmosphere Respect a child’s or young person’s personal space Discuss discipline procedures with the hosting group before hand and be familiar with their policy Never spend time alone with children. If meeting with children individually do so as openly as possible, leave the door open inform another responsible adult of the meeting Do not use or allow the use of offensive or sexually suggestive physical or verbal language to go unchallenged Do not single out an individual child for unfair favoritism, criticism, ridicule or unwelcome focus of attention. Do not allow or engage in inappropriate touching of any form. However there may be unavoidable such as providing comfort or reassurance to a distressed child. Or in story drama situations. In all cases physical contact should only take place with the consent of the child. Do not physically chastise children or young people Do not socialize inappropriately with children or young people outside of structured organizational activities Do not take children to your home Do not take children alone on car journeys, if this is unavoidable do so only with the full consent and knowledge of the parents and someone in the hosting organization. Do not do things of a personal nature for children that they can do for themselves. Do not allow allegations a child makes go without being recorded and addressed Reporting incidents All Groups working with children should have a designated person to deal with any issues or concerns to a child’s welfare and safety. Should you have a concern for any child you are working with whether because of their response to a story or the content of a story they created, speak to the group leader and designated person In a school this would be the Classroom teacher first and then the designated person of each school In a library speak to the organizing librarian In a Youth Group the Group leader of the day and find out who the designated person of the club is. The Designated Person from Storytellers of Ireland / Aos Sceal Eireann is Tim Ditchburn Email: timditchburn@gmail.com. He is also available to guide you through the steps you need to make. If you have reasonable grounds for concern contact the duty social worker for the area in which the child lives (SOI designated person has a list of all these numbers) Be aware that a HSE social worker may want to talk to you to hear your direct observations or what the child said to you. Do’s and Don’ts of dealing with Disclosure It may happen that a child might make a disclosure to you, should this happen; Stay Calm Listen to the child rather than question them directly. Don’t ask leading questions Offer them reassurance and take them seriously NEVER PROMISE TO KEEP A SECRET Explain (age appropriately) that you will have to tell a designated person and who that is if you know In all cases record the concern in writing for yourself as soon as possible and in as much factual accuracy as you can. Leave out any assumptions or conclusions on your own part. Record what was said, or what happened, when and where it occurred, who was present and what action was taken Go directly to the host Group’s Child protection Officer who will initiate the group’s own procedure. Confidentiality Information will be passed on a need to know basis Giving such info to others for the protection of a child is not breach of confidentiality Confidentiality re a disclosure cannot be promised to a child Photos Never take photographs without permission, be aware that some children are not permitted to be photographed. Photos clearly identifying a child or children should not be used without the permission of the parents. Printed Photo’s should never appear with the full name of the children included. Where possible take pictures which do not leave a child identifiable form the picture. Recruitment / courses web info re courses attended All Storytellers appearing on SOI/ ASE Website are asked to sign a vetting cert to have their name cleared by Gardaн as soon as a procedure is in place by Gardaн to do same. It will be marked clearly on Web entries if a Storyteller has completed a Child Protection Course. SOI will advertise Child Protection Courses run by themselves and other organizations which members can attend. Allegations against Staff In the event of an formal allegation being made against a member of SOI, full co-corporation will be given to the authorities Two separate procedures will be followed The Designated Person within SOI will deal with any issues to do with the child or Hosting Group. The Chairperson of SOI will deal with any issues to do with the Storyteller If the allegation as against the Designated Person the deputy Designated person should be contacted. Following an emergency Committee meeting the member will be informed of the allegation and the nature of the allegation. They will be given an opportunity to respond Should a Garda investigation follow the The Committee will remove the member’s name and page from the SOI website for the duration of the investigation until the investigation is over. Should their name be cleared their web the member’s name and page will be reinstated. Should the person a conviction follow their name will be removed permanently from the Website. Health and Safety Never leave children unsupervised. Provide a Safe environment In case of an accident follow the policies and procedures of the hosting group. Let a responsible adult from the group take over. Make a written record of any incidents for yourself with the time date and nature of the incident and response and give a copy to the hosting group. Be aware of Fire Drill notices etc and should the fire alarm sound let the responsible adult from the hosting group take over, remember all such incidents require a calm response from all adults present. Designated Person The Designated Liaison Person for Storytellers Of Ireland / Aos Scйal Йireann is: Francis McCarron 087 206 8601. Deputy Designated Person Pat Speight 087 8679943.

Imagine the scene: 27 first-class pupils come storming into the classroom, pushing each other, falling over each other, shouting, laughing, yelling – a right ruaille-buaille The teacher appears in the doorway. ‘Five minutes at the most,’ she says reassuringly to the storyteller at her side. ‘That’s the most they can manage. After that, there’ll have to be something else.’ The storyteller stands in front of the children. Under the eye of the teacher, they go to their places and sit down. There is still unrest. But now it’s in the children’s hands – their fingers are tapping, kneading, fiddling with pencils, rubbers, pencil-cases. The storyteller waits. She nods at the teacher, who greets her briefly, but she waits another moment. At last she begins to speak in a soft voice: ‘In a land far, far away …’ ‘Turkey,’ one boy calls out. ‘Ghana,’ shouts another. ‘… Grandpa lives,’ suggests a third. ‘Oh, I think it’s a lot further than Turkey. Further than Ghana. It’s a country that is so far away that the sun can hardly find it in the morning…’ ‘Zombie-land!’ ‘Star Wars land!’ ‘Shoot them dead!’ They are all shrieking out wildly. ‘… there lived two children. They were just about your age. Five or six years old?’ Affirmative nods from the children. They start to swing back on their chairs, they’re wriggling, slithering, there’s more noise. ‘And these two children were poor, very poor.’ Sudden silence. Not a sound. The children are spellbound. ‘And one morning, their mother was looking all over the house, to see if she could find a crust of bread. But there was nothing. No matter how hard she looked, not a crumb was to be found.’ The children are hooked. They’re following the storyteller’s every move with their eyes, mouthing her words after her. When the storm bursts in the door of the hut, they duck. When the leaves turn into cake at the end, so that the poor people are always going to have enough to eat, they lick their lips with satisfaction. And after twelve minutes, they clap and call for ‘More! More!’ Nine months later. The first year of school is almost over. The storyteller comes into the same class. Once a week, for nine months, she has told fairy tales to this class. The change is remarkable: the process has become ritualised. The children, obviously engaged, listen for forty minutes, and at the end, Milan, who comes from Bosnia, calls out: ‘The book. Give me the book with the story in it. I want to read it.’ These scenes are from a project whereby professional storytellers told international fairy tales in a Berlin primary school (Wardetzky/Weigel 2008). It could just as easily have happened in any European country. The school is typical of thousands of state primary schools in highly industrialised European countries. Here in a nutshell you have the growing problems that schools in the developed world have to deal with: disciplinary problems, limited concentration spans, the grip on the imagination of consumer media and computer games, the alarming reaction to the theme of poverty in the world’s richest countries. But it also shows what storytelling can do. After nine months of concentrated listening comes a request for a book, in order to read the story again. I want to investigate with you now how much the storytelling really contributed to the changes I have mentioned. We’re going to examine the power of storytelling in the context of the ordinary primary-school classroom. We’ll look at four central aspects: Storytelling as an incentive to read Storytelling in a media age Storytelling in the multicultural school Storytelling and the literary tradition Storytelling as an incentive to read Let’s begin with the idea of storytelling as a way of enticing children to read, and we’ll keep in mind the example of the Bosnian boy who wanted to read the book that had the story in it. On their first day at school, some children can already recognise and write a few letters; others are familiar with picturebooks; but there are others who know books only by hearsay. What’s waiting for them at school is the opening of a door into another world: the world of print, and with it, the world of books. Letters, as symbolic signs, are the key to expanding the horizon of experience and of knowledge in a whole new way. Can we adults really estimate what the mastery of this key means for the development of a person? By the time children come to school, they already have an enormous amount of experience and of learning behind them, a phase of learning that does not include writing or, in most cases, books. At no stage in their lives do people learn so quickly, such complex things, and with such good retention, as in that earliest stage before being able to read. It is the stage of elementary acquisition of highly differentiated knowledge, of unforgettable memories, of complex ways of thinking and feeling. During this pre-literate phase, a child acquires a fundamental appreciation of how people live together in a particular society, and of the values, ideals, prejudices and taboos that constitute the basis of that society, and this basic knowledge is usually decisive for how the child lives his or her life. The child constructs this knowledge and understanding of the world initially through sense impressions and through the spoken word. Hearing, sight, taste, smell and touch – that’s how a world is grasped and recognised in the short space of five or six years. For children, what they perceive through the senses and the spoken word is their memory store, with which they construct their understanding of the world. That settling into the world is achieved through the immediacy of sensory experience. But then, on going to school, the child is confronted with a radically different medium of understanding: writing. The immediacy of experiential learning meets something quite new: the mediated nature of symbolic signs. At first, this symbolic system of writing is for the children a strange, dead, cumbersome instrument, which reveals its significance as a key to the world only very gradually (and often with a great deal of difficulty). Even when children know their letters, and make their first attempts at writing, they have only achieved the most basic pre-requisite in order to use writing as a cultural technique and to inhabit the world of the symbolic sign. For a certain period of time, writing remains for them something impenetrable, something hermetic. We are talking here about writing, but the same thing applies to the book as medium. Picturebooks aside, a book is as foreign to a child at first as hieroglyphics on tablets of the Gilgamesh epoch are to us. In Germany, we use the metaphor of the ‘leaden desert’ to describe a written sentence in a book. Lead is heavy, a desert barren. Why should a child bother to give himself up to this leaden desert? Why should she set out to find the stony path into the world of print? In particular, children who have not been surrounded by books at home, and by parents who read, will ask this question. But even in the case of children who do not come from educationally deprived households, we must not underestimate the importance of this question, because learning to read is difficult, or, as Aristotle puts it: ‘Learning hurts.’ Why take on this pain? In the last 40 to 50 years, academic research, in partnership with teaching praxis, has gone to enormous lengths to develop methods that can make learning to read and write attractive to children. They use practical, playful learning methods that are intrinsically motivational, and many of these methods certainly achieve their aims. But what gets forgotten is the fact that children must realise why it is worth learning to read in the first place. They must get some sense that books are not just dry archives, but a treasure chest of adventure, journeys into unknown worlds and times – treasures in which enjoyment and special pleasures are to be found. They must be made curious about the treasures that lie dormant in books, waiting to be awakened. How better to get this idea across than by telling the stories into which the leaden desert of print can be transformed? Storytelling is the surest, most reliable bridge into the world of the book. It builds on the method of learning and understanding that children are already familiar with – the oral. As we have seen, children starting school are still learning largely through oral language and unmediated sensory perceptions. We can assume that learning to read is all the more difficult, the further this process is removed from the oral. The oral is the familiar, and therefore the bridge to the unfamiliar. Anyone who is not at home with print, who has not learned to understand the ‘magic’ of literary models of the world, who does not know what it is that a book promises, such a person will presumably find it difficult to overcome the strangeness of print, and to use it as a transparent medium, in which the mediated is transformed into the unmediated. If you observe children who are listening to well-told stories, then you don’t need any other proof that they are completely umbilically connected to the oral, and that for them, only the orally transmitted word has the force of truth. In storytelling, a particular form of apprehending the world is carried through, which has its roots in early childhood, and which is later always experienced as pleasurable, because it links into and affirms primary strategies of perception and processing. The much-quoted pedagogical maxim that ‘you have to meet children where they’re at’ means (among other things) that oral and narrative gateways into the world should take their place as methods of teaching and learning in the classroom. The orally based superstructure of the child’s view of the world and understanding of life finds its natural continuation in storytelling. Without meaning to question the importance of the didactic process of mediating reading and writing that goes on every day at school, there is nevertheless no more effective way of guiding children towards books and reading than storytelling. For this reason, storytelling must not be just an incidental in the junior classroom, a spoonful of sugar that is offered to the children now and again to sweeten the drudgery of school. Storytelling has as important a part to play in the classroom as mathematics, music and sport. The mediation of literacy cannot succeed without a strong connection to the oral. Therefore storytelling can’t be a marginal or coincidental surplus, a one-off-encounter. It must be a fundamental, daily experience for children. This means that teachers need to be good storytellers. And this in turn means that they must be taught storytelling by the best storytellers in the country, as part of their training. But this is not enough in itself. Professional storytellers need to be a part of the school staff, alongside teachers, that is to say, storytellers in residence. One-off encounters with storytellers make a nice break in the routine of school life, but this has limited effect. Only through long-term encounters can the storytelling profession really come into its own. Professional storytellers possess different talents from teachers. They have at their disposal a broad repertoire of stories, from which they can choose the most appropriate to the situation. And they are performers. They understand the dramatic structure of a story. They can create and maintain suspense. With their voice, their body language and their miming, they can create imaginary worlds. This is their profession, their craft. And to put this to work in the service of schools is one of the most pressing challenges of current educational politics in the developed world. ‘Current educational politics’ – this is the cue that points us towards another reason for the urgency of our need for storytelling at school. Storytelling in a Media Age After the dramatic cultural change that resulted from the displacement of the print age in favour of the age of digital media, we are facing today the challenges of a world in which essential functions of the storyteller are being taken over by technical media. Today, stories are increasingly mediated through the visual language of television, video, film and computer games. Children can easily satisfy their hunger for story through audiovisual media. But what gets lost here – and this is an alarming finding – is children’s ability to create their own images in their heads from the written or the spoken word. The experience of the school project mentioned at the beginning was that it took about eight weeks before a boy called out in surprise, ‘Oh, now I can see it all in my head!’ We can assume that the imaginative faculty is blocked in a large proportion of children. The map of their fantasy has been filled in with ready-made media images. This kind of colonisation of the imagination corresponds to the difficulty that children have in developing their own images from signs – that is to say, from spoken or written words. This kind of imaginative ability, however, is an essential pre-requisite for the understanding of the spoken and the written word. Literacy has to do not only with reading-readiness but especially with imaginative ability. And, unlike in the print age, this ability must now be taught. Imagination is a muscle, and, as Ben Haggarty says, it needs to be nourished and exercised. Excessive consumption of media allows this muscle to atrophy. But why is the storyteller the best kind of person to teach children how to develop their own images? The storyteller, after all, mediates a story, as does the television, through image and sound. He himself is a medium. He narrates using the language of his body and his mime and the modulation of his voice – it is an audiovisual experience, just like the TV. What is different, though, is that he is a living medium, and he does not mediate images in pure form. He does not mediate an image in its concrete form, in other words, not materially in colour, shape, movement, but through the ephemeral medium of the word and of body language. He mediates signs of the image. He is a medium of the symbolic. His words, miming, gestures are signs that stand for images and emotions. He transforms images that are in his head into words, gesture and mime. If he is talking about the green scales of a dragon, then he sees them in front of him, and when he describes how the sword falls from the hero’s hands in horror, then he transfers image and emotion to the listeners. He stimulates the fantasy muscle into activity. He feeds it with the energy of his own imagination. And this energy effects the transformation of the sign into concrete images and meanings. How this process is executed by the brain has not yet been discovered. It is a wonderful secret that we all know, without being able to explain it. The dominance of media-influenced images in the imaginations of children needs a living person, the flesh-and-blood storyteller, to act as a coach to the ‘imagination muscle’. Nobody can dispute the storyteller’s role as king-pin in this process. The significance of storytelling as a way of activating the imagination in the digital age cannot be highly enough estimated. Sometimes the objection is made that, with the dominant consumption of electronic media, children’s ability to listen to a story that is mediated purely in words has already been lost. This opinion is nonsense! The act of performance that produces the one-to-one relationship between child listeners and storytellers is incontrovertible proof of the fascination with the unmediated contact that is created by storytelling. The transformation of (hyperactive) children into willing listeners is a repeated experience among professional storytellers. If a storyteller is herself moved by what it is that she is unfolding in words and gestures, then this will usually also move the listeners, and open the channels to the fantasy, to the imagination, to sensitivity and to cognition. And this can transform a wild horde into a community of listeners. The Canadian storyteller Dan Yashinsky describes as follows a drastic experience with a group of youngsters who were outrageous in their behaviour: These boys […]sitting so rapt around, [...], playing pranks, bashing each other […], farting as noisily and often as possible […] Yet when the storytelling began they became utterly quiet and well behaved. […] By some mysterious power the storyteller was able to transform my wild pack of boys into a community of listeners. Homer himself would have been proud to play for. Every one of them had been labelled by teachers and social workers as having ‘severe attention deficits’ and ‘unmanageable behaviour’. Yet when the stories began, I watched them relax and breathe more deeply, their eyes shining with joyful – and sometimes fearful – anticipation. What was the secret of this astonishing art? (Yashinsky, 21). The secret seems to be that the over-saturation of children with media experiences engenders a kind of hunger that cannot be satisfied even by the most sophisticated consumption strategies of the media: the ‘hunger for the personal’, as H. v. Hentig has dubbed it. The longing for a living counterpart remains virulent and restless, even in the most perfect media-world. This is the basis of the supposition that as storytellers we are irreplaceable: nothing compares to the auratic space that exists between storyteller and listener. In storytelling, the circle of childhood and with it, the circle of the oral, is closed again. Children, and indeed adults, enjoy the regressive pleasure of taking part in an orally mediated world. Storytelling in the multicultural school Another challenge facing schools in the industrially developed world is that in some of them, a large proportion of the children come from a variety of countries, and that their grasp of whatever the national language happens to be, is poor. Immigrant children acquire the language of their new country as a formal language at school, and as an everyday sociolect, which is superimposed on the interaction with the formal language. In addition, a not inconsiderable proportion of them learn classical Arabic in Koran-school. In other words, at least some of the children are shifting in and out of four different languages. This Babel renders them literally ‘speechless’ – in other words, helpless – in many situations, and this hinders them from responding verbally in a way that is appropriate to the situation. This often leads to compensatory physical activities to make up for this helplessness. A large part of the problems that schools experience, especially the escalation in violence, has, among other things, to do with pupils’ inability to express themselves verbally and thus to resolve conflict verbally. Work on the national language of the country is essential to successful integration. The children have to suss out an emotional path that can lead them safely through this linguistic Babel. This is the only way it is possible to put them in a position where they can later take an active and self-determined part in commercial, cultural and political life. Even from this point of view, storytelling can play a key role in the life of the multicultural school. It differs from other pedagogical methods that are used to teach national languages to pupils in that it does not mediate language in the abstract, conceptually, grammatically or orthographically, but through suspenseful, exciting stories. In this way, the children experience language primarily in its emotional qualities, and it is exactly this that turns out to be the most effective means of persuading the children to listen and to actively use the language. The acquisition of language is achieved through a process that is high in emotional participation. This may be the decisive factor in the effectiveness of storytelling as a method of mediating language. Furthermore, the effectiveness of storytelling in the mediation of linguistic competence may be explained through a parallel with mother-tongue acquisition. What happens when a mother-tongue is acquired? Every child finds its own way, and certainly at its own pace. No child learning his or her mother-tongue acquires vocabulary and grammatical rules consciously and systematically. The child finds his own way in the ocean of words and independently builds up the lexical and grammatical system that constitutes the mother-tongue. He learns the language implicitly, not through regular lessons. A child experiences much the same thing through listening to stories. Here too he or she is confronted with an ocean of words. Here too she or he acquires an implicit understanding of the lexis and grammar of the foreign language. The child acquires the foreign language through a self-directed, autodidactic learning process, through which she determines her own way, at her own pace. This method of language acquisition is based on the principles of self-optimisation and self-correction. Through repeated encounters with linguistic patterns and turns of phrase, lexis and rules are internalised, without explicit mediation. And it is the child herself, and not some ready-made, one-size-fits-all curriculum, that determines how fast and how much she learns. We have to expect that there will at times be some resistance to all of this, but in my experience, negative attitudes are limited, and in most cases can be attributed to a kind of contagion brought about by the group dynamics of the classroom. The refuseniks soon come to realise that their schoolmates are curious and delighted listeners. They don’t want to lose out on this, and they gradually let go of their resentment. And the story reveals its seductive nature: anyone who has become engaged by the conflict in the story wants to know how it is resolved. Carrot rather than stick: the long-recognised pedagogical recipe for success succeeds once again. The scene I described at the beginning also reveals another, socially relevant element that is of burning concern in the multicultural school. The children who took part in the school project described earlier were electrified by the theme of poverty. Wherever and whenever this theme is touched upon, there are spontaneous reactions. Scarcely any other theme creates such an unreservedly obvious effect. A few examples … In one story, a merchant is mentioned at the beginning. The question comes unbidden: Is he rich? A girl has golden hair: Golden? I’d cut it and sell it. Bones are buried in the earth: Money will come out! The fisherman has one wish left. What will he wish for? Wealth! The protagonists find a chest in the castle: It’s full of gold, and they use it to buy food! The children have found a golden bird. They took a photo of it. It was 569 gold, and they got lots of money for the photo. One child made up a story of his own: A man and woman were very poor. The man fished and the woman cleaned. When the woman went out to get some air, a man came riding by on horseback. He gave her a bag and said, ‘You can wish something for yourselves, and it will be granted. But softly, and always into the bag.’ They wished for everything they needed and they got very rich and lived in a castle. And they gave some of their money to the poor, and then everyone was rich. In stories like this, the children identify so much with the hero that they switch into the first person: A boy finds a hen. I had a hen, and it could spit out money. Then I bought an enormous house, twenty rooms. Every room has a cupboard. I sleep in one of the rooms. There are three toilets and a room in which the hen sleeps. It is called Gold-hen. These examples make it quite clear where it is that the desires of these children are ignited – in that area of their lives where they experience the most basic deficits: in material neediness. Overcrowded accommodation, the search for work, hunger, lack of money – this is where the fairy tale becomes a mirror where they see their own social reality reflected. Here they find articulated things that otherwise are not spoken of. They experience poverty and unemployment as existential themes that at the same time are taboo. Poverty is often an extreme burden in their everyday lives. At school it is seldom communicated, or not at all, or only superficially. And then suddenly the children encounter characters who are in the same social and material predicament as they are themselves. The majority of fairy tales rock the shaky ground under their feet, and in fact many fairy tales thematise that very shakiness. Wide awake and with obvious concentration, they follow how the fairy tale heroes manage to change their destiny and gain wealth and prestige. In the promises of happiness that characterise the folk tale, these children trace their original, inscribed meaning. The elemental longings of the folk are located in the material: in conquering all-consuming poverty and the vain search for gainful employment. For these children, poverty is not a metaphor, not a symbolic representation of deprivation or lovelessness. For them, it is what it was for those with whom the folk tale originated: actual lived experience. We need to keep constantly in mind the close relationship that exists between social and linguistic problems. It is not that social problems can be solved through language-learning, but that language problems can spring from and can reinforce social problems. But that’s another issue. Storytelling and the literary tradition Finally, I want to look briefly at the significance of storytelling for the teaching of literature. We must not forget that the extent of literary education today and of our relationship with the treasures of world literature is very largely determined by, restricted by and possibly even suppressed by the media. This is an indication of the loss of part of our cultural memory. I have extensive experience of telling old stories (ancient Greek myths and epics and fairy tales and sagas from different cultures); and a constant of all this experience is that storytelling is a reliable bridge over which ancient materials can be conveyed right into our time. These centuries-old stories were certainly orally narrated and came to be written down only relatively lately. And they have, through a process of ‘communicative imprinting’ (Blumenberg), retained for centuries, an ability to touch and engage the listener and, more recently, the reader. Something is addressed or articulated in these stories that relates to the fundamentals of our experience of being in the world: they tell of birth and death, love and jealousy, loyalty and betrayal, mercy and greed, wealth and poverty, desire and disappointment, covetousness and renunciation, things that are always and everywhere significant. Told in the most intimate or the most sociable of narrative spaces, and later transmuted into literature, these stories have created a substrate that is ‘so pithy, so valid, so authoritative, so affecting, that they are constantly offering themselves as the most useful substance in any search for the elemental behaviours of human existence’ (Blumenberg, 166). In my work telling traditional stories, I am constantly reminded that in spite of the inertia of stories trapped between the covers of a book, the germ of orality that is immanent in the text can be brought to life in the telling of the story. Ovid considered his texts principally as something to be read out loud, and so did Basil. The Grimms’ and Perrault’s sources are mainly oral. This germination only expresses itself with full validity when it is restored to its most appropriate medium – the oral. Their inscription in print has congealed these stories; their sensuousness is released only in living narration. And that is the reason for my appeal to all of you here in this room: tell the old stories that can only be rejuvenated through us. The violence and the pithiness of their imagery, the hardness and the ruthlessness of their existential conflicts, the tension and the explosiveness of their action – these cannot be exaggerated. They are like the ocean, whose fathomless depths are inexhaustible. You will see how, when they are told, these stories lose their age, their fustiness and their strangeness, and acquire brilliance and abundance, and the listeners – children as well as adults – will thank you for it: the shiver you have made run down their spine, the laughter that they share with you, the suspense that makes time stand still – these are magic moments, and for the sake of such moments it is worth while always and everywhere to tell stories. Bibliography Hans Blumenberg: Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt/Main 1984. Kristin Wardetzky/Christiane Weigel: Sprachlos? Erzдhlen im interkulturellen Kontext. Erfahrungen aus einer Grundschule. Hohengehren 2008 (im Erscheinen). Dan Yashinsky: Suddenly I heard footsteps. Storytelling for the twenty-first century. Toronto 2004.

A language-support project for children from immigrant families Kristin Wardetzky (Project leader) Christiane Weigel (Support) 1. Socio-cultural environment In Berlin, especially in areas with high proportions of foreigners, both primary and second-level schools are having to combat worryingly low levels of linguistic competence. Yet, linguistic ability is one of the key competencies for self-determination and active participation in economic, cultural and political life. For this reason, we have established an apparently unspectacular but in the long term tremendously effective project in an area of the city where language problems are threatening to escalate, an area known as Berlin-Wedding. The African quarter, home to our project school, the Anna Lindh School, is one of the poorest areas of Berlin. Every fifth inhabitant (of which 40% are children under seven) lives on social welfare, and many of these are the third generation of their families to do so. Confined living spaces (a two-roomed flat for a family of five) are the norm, uneducated homes dominate, parents may be illiterate and many cannot buy schoolbooks for their children. Poverty is an everyday experience here. S.- one of the 176 children taking part in our project – is a thin, 6 years-old, pale girl, who is late every morning, because her mother does not wake her up and she has to get her own breakfast. Even on her birthday, nobody gets up with her and gives her presents. S. has no paintbox and no gym things, although her teacher has written several times to her mother. Nobody pays for her school milk and lunch, but S. has worked out strategies that allow her to get what she needs in semi-legitimate ways. She prefers that to the shame she experiences when a teacher notices that she is missing something. At home, there are, at best, stories from the television. She has been to the cinema twice in her life, with a woman from the youth welfare office who sometimes visits her. ‘She is also a German,’ says S. ‘But I am not Germany. I am Bosnia.’ In the Anna Lindh School up to 90% of the children who take part in the project are non-native German speakers, some of whom need major support. 80% of them were noted as having a poor or inadequate command of the German language when they started school. Their mother tongue – Turkish, Arabic, Serbo-Croat, Russian, Polish, Georgian, Czech, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Hindi – remains the everyday familiar medium of communication, but no more than that. The connection between the language and the cultural heritage of their parents or grandparents has largely been severed. As a rule, the children have a clear sense of their non-German identity, but their relationship to their country of origin remains vague. The children of immigrant background taking part in the project learn German in two forms: as a formal language in class, and as an everyday sociolect, which overlies or possibly displaces their use of Hochdeutsch or formal German. A not inconsiderable proportion of these children learn another language – classical Arabic, in the Koran schools, in which there is an extremely strict regime. 2. Concept In this environment, in which even primary schools have to combat serious social, cultural, religious and ethnic problems, we set up our project. Its central purpose is the mediation of the German language through the art of the spoken word – the art of storytelling. This is realised by three professional storytellers who are graduates of the Berlin University of the Arts, Sabine Kolbe, Kerstin Otto and Marietta Rohrer-Ipekkaya. The project is run by the Institute for Pedagogical Theatre of the University of the Arts. The three storytellers told fairy tales to first- and second-class pupils twice or once a week over a period of two years. International fairy tales were told, primarily tales from the cultures from which the children’s families come. The stories were told, not read. The tales were neither abridged nor simplified. The project insisted on an oral literary language that is clearly differentiated from everyday speech. The stories were deliberately not reduced to a supposedly child-friendly version, and only occasionally were pictures used to support the storytelling. Even the playful sequences were limited. Objects were often used, which afford the children sensory-aesthetic experiences. In this way, the vocabulary in which the children re-told the stories they have heard, and in which they could make up their own stories, is extended. Over the course of the project, the tables have turned, and the children have increasingly developed as storytellers themselves. 3. Process The practice of storytelling was at first largely unknown to the children, even those without an immigrant background. Television as omnipresent family entertainer for the most part determines family life. Books of fairy tales or children’s books are hardly ever present in the home. M. answered the question whether they had books of fairy tales at home in this way: ‘No. But I was sick, and I got a book from the doctor. I often read in it. It has stuff about your throat. That you must always drink and your hand over your mouth.’ In answer to the question whether stories are told at home, J. answered: ‘My mother doesn’t do that. Because she’s always on the phone, sits at the computer, and then it’s dark, we’re in bed. sometimes she promises, but then she forgets again.’ N. says: ‘My mum and dad doesn’t do that. My mum goes to the computer and plays. She goes to the telephone: 660060. Then it’s Carsten’s turn, my dad, and tells about the game. People can fight in it. I find it boring. My mum never tells stories.’ Questions about what the children do in their free time made it clear that they and their parents spend most of their free time watching TV or on the computer. Often, on a Monday morning, the six- to eight-year-olds could tell you all about the crime scene of the previous evening. And if the storytellers asked about the nicest thing they did at the weekend, TV, Gameboy and Playstation usually have pride of place. Also at school they have no experience in storytelling. Some teachers sometimes read children’s books aloud in the classroom. Most of the teachers hesitate to tell fairy tales. They believe that they are too cruel for children and have an obsolate concept of female behavior. A big amount of prejudices make it difficult to convince them that tariy tales – especially wondertales – are helpful for children zu develop their imagination, their language and to come in touch with their (inner psychological) conflicts. So what the three storyteller did was very unfamiliar. That must be emphasized to understand the meaning of the project. When the children started school, their ability to follow an orally transmitted story was only rudimentary. So how did the storytellers make themselves comprehensible to these children? They used, either spontaneously or quite deliberately, the full range of their expressive repertoire, and hoped in this way to bring the children into the world of the story, even if they did not understand particular words. Their narration took on the nature of a performance: they explained unfamiliar concepts or objects not so much with words as with gestures and actions; the trajectory of the story was not only created out of words but hinted at by playing a character or an actions. In this way, understanding was achieved through multiple channels of communication that accompany speech interactively. When a story is told playfully, performed with body and mime, then its words are embedded in a rich network of sense impressions, which is essential in order to experience the story fully. What is ‘hell’ exactly? what does ‘suspicion’ mean? Where does the prince go when he goes into a ‘chamber’? What kind of ‘lore’ is ‘propagated’? What is Grandma doing when she ‘berates’ Maschenka? For them, a ‘miller’ is a man who takes away the rubbish (since the German word for rubbish is Mьll, the same syllable as in Mьller, meaning a miller). They associate ‘Donau’ (the word for Danube) with Dцner (as in kebabs), the river ‘Spree’ with the word ‘spray’, the word ‘Kohle’ (meaning coal or charcoal) with cola (as in Coca-Cola). Those are just some of the innumerable irritations that come up during storytime, but which are only very rarely directly explained as they would be during German class. At the end of the story, however, the children had usually acquired an understanding of the meaning of the word, and of how to use it, without any explicit explanation. They made up their own translation and own imagies. In the best case, they used the new words or phrases themselves when they retold the story. In its first few weeks, the project did not look as if it was going to be successful, and we felt dubious rather than triumphant about it. Only the very first storytimes gave any indication that our high expectations might be met – that the storytellers would really be able to win over mostly hyperactive children and children with glaring language problems. At first, the children listened, fascinated, and ended the class with loud clapping and calls for ‘More, more.’ But the magic soon wore off. The humdrum life of the school worked its brutal way into storytime. Storytime was like a weathervane: one minute the children were concentrating on listening and enjoying themselves, and the next minute there would be uproar and not a chance of finishing the story. It was difficult to make out the reasons for the change. None of the recipes for success that had worked before could be relied upon: the difference between success and failure was balanced on a knife-edge. The struggle that the storytellers had with this phenomenon of unpredictable disruption took up more time than the storytelling itself. After storytimes like this, there were serious arguments about the value and even the possibility of telling stories in this environment. Was the concept too demanding? Should the narratives be reduced in favour of playful or other creative interests? Should more visuals be used to aid comprehension? Should the language used be adapted to the everyday language of the children? 4. Results After about six weeks our attempts began to meet with the first glimmerings of success. After six month the children were listening for up to 40 minutes(!) with visible emotional engagement. They were enjoying the quiet in which you can hear that famous pin drop. They joined in with verses and certain turns of phrases. The interruptions and questions of the children were increasingly attributable to genuine curiosity and surprise. They no longer expressed their displeasure or their joy at events inarticulately, but verbally, and were more and more driven by the desire to give their feedback in words that imitate the poetic vocabulary of the storytellers. When a new story started, they made more and more frequent references to ones they had already heard. Their witty comments testifed to their observation and their understanding of stories that are sometimes complexly structured. Especially in comparison with the classes that have come to this only in recent months, the development in understanding of the structures of fairy tales is clear. In one story, the bad king throws a baby into the water. ‘What’s going to happen to the child now?’ the storyteller asked. ‘Maybe it will fall into a a waterfall.’ ‘It’ll die,’ the ‘newbies’ guessed. The same question elicited the following utterances from a class who had been involved in the project since the beginning: ‘But that must have been a lucky child!’ ‘Maybe someone will rescue him.’ ‘Maybe he will grow wings!’ More and more often, the children predict the principles of how the story works. Storyteller: ‘He slept at an old woman’s. But what he didn’t know was …’ ‘J: ‘A witch!’ Storyteller: ‘Having reached the king, he seeks the hand of the lovely princess. M.: ‘Oh, now there will be three tests.’ In retelling the story (which took up more and more of the time after about half a year) it was always surprising what details the children remembered. Children who, when tested at the beginning of the project, could not understand basic words in the German language were now using the most unusual expressions. Often, in making the effort to re-tell the story, the children were aware of the difference between the language of the storyteller and their own linguistic range. Whereas they got by in everyday life with minimal constructions and without declining nouns or conjugating verbs, dispensing with the future and the past tense (preterite), their linguistic ability let them down when they wanted to express the often complex time structures of the fairy tale, and they wanted to emulate the plasticity of the descriptions used by the storyteller. I. is one of the boys who clearly suffers from his linguistic limitations when he tells a story. He speaks very slowly, thinks a lot in between, and searches his memory for the right words. He comes across as almost apologetic when he stumbles in his speech. He is afraid of not being able to express things that he obviously has in his head: ‘I understood more. It’s just that I can’t speak the language so well.’ He makes the effort to find solutions within his limitations. In the story he is telling, there is a betrothal at the birth of a boy that is to be fulfilled when he reaches the age of 14. I. tries to use the subjunctive: ‘He will, when he would be 14, then he would marry the princess.’ In other places, he tries to use the preterite (past tense), and uses repetition to reproduce the very long duration of a journey that was particularly emphasised by the storyteller: ‘And he goed and goed and goed to a tree.’ W. speaks only Polish at home and has only been a short while in Germany. She uses the auxiliary verb ‘has’ to create all her sentences; moreover, she uses only the feminine article. Nevertheless, in retelling the stories, she shows a growing feeling for the importance of choosing the right word, and looks hard for words that echo the utterances chosen by the storyteller. The storyteller said, ‘Full of anger, the robber crumpled the piece of paper.’ savouring this ‘crumpling’ (the German word is ‘zerknьllte’), so that one could almost hear the rustling of the paper. But W. can’t quite remember this lovely word, and in trying to find the right sound, she creates a similar sounding ‘word’: ‘He “geknicht” the piece of paper’ – which is meaningless, but echoes the KN sound in ‘zerknьllte’ and also echoes the word ‘geknickt’, meaning bent or folded. An English equivalent might be something like ‘He “crimped” the piece of paper.’ Later in her telling of the story, she took on board some of the storyteller’s original expressions and achieved an unusually high standard of expression for her: ‘He calls these boy and says: I have never before seen these little house! Where are your parents? With whom do you live here?’ As already mentioned, in the course of the project, the children also began to make up their own fairy tales, which they told to their classmates. They evinced a secure command of fairy-tale structures, motifs and images, which they often combined adventurously, in their own stories, with everyday life and with media experiences. Children who, at the beginning of the project, were constantly interrupting each other now listen patiently and respectfully to each other, and they are capable, in second class, of telling little stories, which may be fragmentary but are sometimes coherent. Although the children found it difficult, at the beginning of the project, to create short, one-sentence stories, they gradually came to know the fun of creating and telling stories. Over many months of listening and experimenting, the ability to create exciting stories developed, stories that differ from everyday life. This development may be illustrated by the four stories of M.: (1) 08.09.06: Once upon a time in Austria. I drove a car. To the supermarket. (2) 09.11.06: Once upon a time there was a lovely day. They went out by boat. They were pirates and they were happy. There was a waterfall, they fell down. There were elves and other nice things. The pirates didn’t believe it. That’s the end. (3) 18.12.06: Once upon a time there was a house, and there was a haunting in it, and when I came in, there was a tree trunk, there was an owl in it. It wanted to eat me. I hit it with the tree trunk, then I buried it. Then a handsome prince came out and I married him. (4) 11.01.07 Once upon a time there were a man and a woman, they were very poor and wanted to have a little money. The man was always fishing, and the woman cleaned. When the woman went to snatch fresh air, there came a man on horseback. He gave her a bag and said: ‘You can wish something for yourselves, and it will be granted to you. But softly and always into the bag.’ They wished everything for themselves and got rich and lived in a castle. And they gave from their money to all the poor, and then everyone was rich. Some of the initial problems – and we were not aware of this at first – were not only in the area of language deficiency, the lack of vocabulary, but in the area of the imagination, and this was independent of the ethnic background of the children. For a considerable proportion of the children, their imagination was blocked. Other things occupied their fantasies – often, shockingly, even in the case of first-class pupils, sex and crime. That is to say, the map of these children’s imagination has been drawn, but it shows only readymade images. At the beginning of the project, the stories that the children made up themselves were marked by violence. The children of one second class were given the task, in one session, of telling tall tales. The children’s stories concerned fights, killings, exploding bombs. Children who were present were often killed off in their classmates’ narratives. S.: ‘He threw a grenade. Exploded. Valentino is died, and his legs were salami. To God they are, and he gave him one last chance. In the house they went. In the house was a bomb. The house explodes.’ The children laughed themselves to death at every explosion, and seemed almost high, which fired up whoever was telling the story even more. Afterwards, the storyteller asked the children if they played at bomb explosions at home. ‘Yes,’ M. answered, ‘on the computer there’s Torpedo. There you can destroy a whole Titanic.’ Storyteller: ‘And you enjoy that?’ A euphoric chorus of ‘Yessss!’ as answer. This colonisation of the imagination was paralleled by the difficulty the children had in creating images in their heads from hearing the spoken word, in other words, the difficulty they had in translating the heard into the visual, using images they have constructed themselves, not previously ‘given’ images. When one boy called out, ‘Now I can see it all in my head!’ it was like a breakthrough. This ability to see what was told is an indispensable prerequisite for understanding not only what is heard, but especially what is read. Literary education has to do not only with reading-readiness, but in the same way with imaginative ability. And obviously that must be cultivated today – in the digital age – much more diligently than in the ‘Gutenberg age’ (or the age of print). Only then can literature really ‘arrive’ or can a literary text be transformed into individual fantasies, in order to broaden horizons. The access to the world that is mediated by literature is only possible by means of a closely woven network of such individually formed, subjective imaginations. One of the storytellers began to ask each of the children, after a story, what picture they had in their heads. Though the children were at first completely incapable of creating their own pictures, or at least of describing them, the desire to imagine what had been told developed by degrees, and this was observable also in the re-tellings of the children. M. narrated: ‘Then the grandfather (Daddy Frost from the Russian fairy tale of the same name) come by coach. The coach is gorgeous. Bright white and has a red door and it has a white horse. A feather on top. Put her down, and then came this man. He has a white beard and this light colour. Then he came closer, and then he said, Are you warm? I’m warm. He comes closer: Are you warm? I’m warm. Then third time. And then he put cuddly things for her in it, and she got in.’ Neither the way Daddy Frost looked, nor the fact that he spread out ‘cuddly things’ for the girl had been mentioned by the storyteller. 5. The long term The long-term nature of this ‘infusion’ with the ‘vitamins’ of language and imagination is effective: after about one year, the children spontaneously act out fairy tales in their plaid after school, and they also plaid at storytelling: one child is the storyteller, and the others listen. In class, the teachers were amazed at the improvements in the areas of vocabulary, grammatical inflection, fluency and especially at the way the children were more and more able really to listen properly, instead of just half-hearing. “Half-hearing”, said one first-class teacher participating in the project, “they know how to do that from home. ‘Do this … leave that, stop the other’. In one ear and out the other, that’s how it is in their families. But now you can really see that they are starting to listen and to think!” Listening is a basic prerequisite of human communication and indispensable for learning at school. This is also taught through storytelling. All the teachers who took part, with their children, in the project, described an improvement in concentration, creativity and verbal expressive ability in their pupils. “If we have pieces of reading now, and I say, ‘We’ll just read as far as here, and then you tell me what might happen next?’, then they have so many ideas. And I have the feeling that some children who didn’t talk nearly as much before, they can join in the conversation too.” Another teacher: “And then of course it’s fantastic to observe the children, how they sit there with their mouths open and their eyes shining, and go along with it. That’s really, really lovely. When some children are really in bad form, and they are completely wound up, the way the storytellers are just able, with their art, to calm even these children down, so that they find a kind of inner peace.” Especially children who, in the ordinary classtime, always came across as finding it difficult to concentrate and to learn, benefit from the new situation and the creative, unpressurised access to language and literature. “F., for example, even though he is sometimes so completely undisciplined, the storytellers manage to get him to listen. And now he can formulate proper, coherent sentences, and can express himself well, he has sophisticated ideas, which you wouldn’t expect of him. He has a real fantasy world. But in class, it’s always such hard going” - so said the class teacher. H. is a boy who, at the age of just eight, has been up before the police, for the second time, because of serious physical attacks in the school yard, and for whom it is impossible to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time in class and concentrate on something. ‘But he is so enchanted with this storytelling project, it is as if he has found an island of relaxation,’ the teacher claims. H. is very calm at storytime, verbal utterances are rare from him. But, especially when the hero is fighting a dragon or some other monster, he is nevertheless visibly involved, physically and mentally, and sometimes it seems as if he finds an outlet for some of his aggressive energy when he turns himself into the hero or the dragon. In interview H. says, he would be embarrassed to tell stories in front of the whole class, but in the more intimate situation of the interview, he starts to tell one story after another. In doing so, he uses recognisable elements from past storytimes. His stories are harrowingly concerned with abandonment, betrayal, persecution and death. An extract: ‘Once upon a time there was a wood. There was only one wild boar. Just one, otherwise, none. It ran, home. No one was there.”Where is Mum?” that’s what he said, though there was no one there. Just said that, called “Mum!”, as loud as he could. Mother came. “Where were you? I was looking for you.” Said the mum: “I was near you all the time.” “But I looked left and right. You weren’t there.” ”‘Then I was above you” “I looked there too.” ”‘Then I was at home.” She lied. And it wasn’t his mother anyway. She had a mask and a suit. She was all dead. The wild boar didn’t know it.’ W. likes telling stories and often does so. Admittedly, it takes time and is difficult to follow what she says in her strong Polish accent. She often leaves out words here and there, and she stumbles. Because of this, the teacher often cuts her off in class, and her classmates avoid contact with her. In interview W. enjoys unhurried attention and re-tells the complex fairy tale from storytime the previous week, with impressive accuracy and with faithful detail. At the end, I have to read out to her what she has narrated, and she is completely surprised and impressed that she has told this whole story by herself. She wouldn’t have believed it of herself, and neither would anyone in her German class. D. has enormous language problems. He stutters and needs lots of time to re-tell a story. He constantly wants to give up, when the words won’t come out, and he criticises himself. He enjoys it very much that there is enough time for him in the interview and is very proud when I show him how many pages I have filled with my transcription of his storytelling. He can tell the stories well and coherently, uses a lot of images in his narration, and is happy about this: ‘Then came the beautiful princess. What is she called? The princess? Princess Beautiful she could be called.’ When I ask him if he wouldn’t like to tell a story to the other children, he answers, ‘No. I stutter.’ The distance the children had come is striking. We demanded a huge amount of them: listening (almost) without physical/motor activity, to stories of considerable length told in a poetic language unfamiliar to most of the children; images and motifs, which have hardly any analogues in the immediate sensory and intellectual experience of the children. The reasons for the success of the project laid primarily in its long-term nature and the richness of experience that the children were afforded, trusting that, over a long incubation period, the imaginations of these children could be enriched by poetic stories. The results are – and let’s be absolutely clear about this – related to the professionalism of the storytellers and to the intensity, the regularity and the long-term nature of the undertaking. What the storytellers invested in time, effort and specialism exceeds what a teacher could be expected to provide. Storytelling is a specific art form, which a school can benefit from, if an appropriate space is made for it. In some of our neighbouring European countries, in France, England and Norway, for example, this has already happened. Professional storytellers operate there in schools and introduce the children to the oral and literary tradition of the country – an example of the successful integration of artistic professionalism into the life and learning of school. 6. Sustainability This project stands alone in the cultural landscape. In order to ensure sustainability, we have applied for funds from various foundations in order to further integrate professional storytellers with their artistic skills as mediators of language and literature into the everyday life of the school. It is planned to extend the project to other local schools in different areas of the city. More storytellers have been preparing for this task since October 06, likewise graduates of the University of the Arts. In regular meetings, they are acquiring a broad repertoire of international fairy tales and myths, as well as the skills to encourage the language competence, the literary sensibility and the creativity of the children. In addition, eight teachers from the project school took part in a storytelling workshop. At the University of the Arts in Berlin there are regulary courses in storytelling especially for teachers to encourage them tellin stories and fairy tales in the regular classroom. Heartfelt thanks to Marie-Agnes von Stechow for her help with our application for third-party funds for the financing of the project and for various kinds of support with regard to content. Translation by Siobhбn Parkinson, Ireland The project will be comprehensively documented and published in Septmeber 2008 by Schneider Verlag Hohengehren: Kristin Wardetzky/Christiane Weigel: Sprachlos? Erzдhlen im interkulturellen Kontext. Erfahrungen aus einer Grundschule.

An address by Donald Smith of the Scottish Storytelling Centre to Storytellers of Ireland/Aos Scйal Йireann Training Day 25thSeptember 2005 At Collin’s Barracks, Dublin Sponsored by The Arts Council Deis Scheme Well, it’s very, very nice to be here. It’s very exciting actually to see so many positive and enthusiastic and also talented people all getting together to really put the shoulder to the wheel of advancing the storytelling scene in Ireland. It’s very exciting and it’s tremendously positive for us in Scotland because, really, we can’t do what we’re doing if you don’t do what you’re doing, if you can see what I mean. We sort of depend on each other. And just in that regard, I thought I might begin just by mentioning something. "They were not butterfly-in-the-case scholars..." Sixty years ago the world was a rather eventful place. It was 1945 and there was quite a lot going on, one way or another. The atomic bombs had been dropped. The concentration camps were being opened up in Europe and it wasn’t maybe the happiest of years and yet that was the year that the Irish Folklore Commission, based here in Dublin, employed a Scotsman, a Gaelic speaking Scotsman called Calum MacLean to start to act as their professional agent (not like one of the many volunteer collectors who supported the work of the commission), to gather stories in the Western Isles and Highlands of Scotland. A quite astonishing fact when you look back on it. And that was to have huge implications. I don’t think I would be sitting here today talking to you if the Irish Folklore Commission hadn’t done that in 1945, because it lead on to the foundation of the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh, which was founded by Calum MacLean and Hamish Henderson. Calum MacLean was a very interesting man. He was a Gael, as we would say, a native born Gaelic speaker. He was born on the island of Raasay, which is between Skye and the mainland. What’s interesting about that is that that was a very, very Presbyterian, Calvinist Protestant island which was to produce some very, very talented people including Calum MacLean’s older brother Sorley, who was to be become probably the greatest of the 20th century Scottish Gaelic poets. However, Calum MacLean really found a second home, a spiritual home, if you like, in the Uists, in South Uist and Barra, which were of course the great Catholic islands of the Western Isles and great centres of tradition. He actually converted, he became a Catholic. He died tragically, quite young, from cancer. But in his time he made a huge impact, not just in the sense of the scholarly side of folklore, which, of course, is very important and led on to the School of Scottish Studies and all that. (And when the school was founded one of the first things was that the Irish Folklore Commission donated to the school copies of everything that had been collected by Calum MacLean in Scotland under their auspices.) But there was another side of it, that was actually (you could argue in the long run), almost more important - and that was that Calum MacLean and likewise his Scots compadre, Hamish Henderson, were passionately committed to the maintenance of living traditions of storytelling and song. They were not butterfly-in-the-case scholars. They were absolute cultural, and to a large extent, political activists in Scotland. They were people who came to be hugely respected in communities up and down the country and they brought to the attention of a wider public not just the continuing existence of the older traditions of storytelling and song, but that those living practitioners and artists of those traditions deserved a place in the modern world and a recognition for their artistry and their knowledge. And really in doing that, (in not simply withdrawing the thing into an academic institution and spending their time in going to those worthy conferences that academics go to over the world), in doing that side of it, they sowed the seeds of a much more community-based activist revival of older traditions that is still going on. And out of all that, storytelling was probably the last thing to get on the wagon. (I know storytellers here are always trying to get off the wagon – we were busy trying to get on.) The music and the songs got the attention first and gradually people began to realise that the storytelling thing was strong. So that’s a wee background, because I think the values and attitudes that were laid down there continue to be so important. A living community thing, albeit in changed and changing social circumstances. "What was it that we learned from the older traditions?" Now what did we learn? Because we’re really here to talk about training and skills and all that sort of stuff. What was it that we learned from the older traditions? What was it that, as people who were keen on storytelling and keen to take storytelling forward, what was it that we learned from the Calum MacLeans and the Hamish Hendersons and the people they collected from and that they brought, and indeed, the Tradition Bearers who are still coming to our clubs and to our schools and all the rest of it? I want to suggest to you that there were three elements, if you like. One was that storytelling was supposed to be entertaining, it was about entertainment and that was at the core of the tradition. And by the way I just don’t mean humour there. Entertainment is something wider than humour. The capacity to hold and engage was utterly fundamental. I mean, nobody was going to sit there out of a sense of duty. And I’m sure we’ve all had the experience at times of listening to some people - that it was a bit like ploughing your way through a whole giant packet of Allbran that was a month past its time. There is a sense and there remains a sense - and I think you have to own up to that and you have to put it up front at the very beginning, that there is - I’m not going to say ‘natural talent’ because I don’t actually necessarily believe in that concept – (I’m going to go on to talk about skills, skills that can be learned and improved.) I think I’d rather talk about ‘natural inclination’ because, at the end of the day, I do profoundly believe that that sense of ability to hold and engage comes, if you like, from people’s internal imaginative delight and engagement with stories. If somebody in their own mind is not hungry to know about stories and listen to stories and live with stories then what they do isn’t going to come across of interest. So you can see there is an element there that is about natural inclination. I’m not going to put it stronger than that but I think we have to acknowledge that and say that this is going to be right for some people - for some people it’s going to be right in a big way and for others perhaps it isn’t. That was the first thing we learned from the tradition: the element that everything was based on entertainment, a good way to pass the time whether it was aimed to be consciously humorous or not. And I suppose what we carry on from that is just the enthusiasm, the desire to know about older traditions and stories and that’s something we all take forward. It’s an aspect of imaginative inspiration. "There is an art in storytelling and there is a craft to the telling of stories..." However there were two other things that we felt we were learning from the older tradition bearers and tellers and one is the whole area of art and craft. Because there is an art in storytelling and there is a craft to the telling of stories. There’s an art in stories. To be sensitive to the structure and pattern in stories. To stories that work well, stories that work less well. The stories that are going to be good for you because of their appeal. The stories that aren’t going to work for you. There is a whole area of an artistic sense of how the imagination pans out in a story that is for oral telling and has been honed and passed on through oral telling. And that is where we have to be ready to challenge the Arts Councils of this world, to say: this is an art. It is an art that is thousands of years old. And there is a deep level of construction, of form, of pattern, there’s a whole aesthetic about the way stories work and don’t work. And it is an art and we can study it and we can learn about it and listen to other people telling stories. And we can listen to how it’s done in other cultures and we can learn more about that art. And that is an art that if we respect it, as practitioners of it, then we should also expect those who are responsible for supporting and conserving and developing the art and the creative skills that lie behind it - we should expect them to recognise and support the art of storytelling. And then alongside that there are the craft skills of the telling, you know, which are more just knacks, knacks that we can see in operation, that we pick up from experience. That we can be pointed to by others and helped learn. And as somebody who is enthusiastic about storytelling, you feel you just go on learning. Years and years and years of just listening and enjoying what different people do and the way we do it. So that was the second element, the entertainment, the delight and the enjoyment that’s passed on and that we can gather from the older traditions. There’s the demonstration of art and of craft and those are things that we can actually study and we can learn from. So, remember , we’re talking about this in term of the training. "The tradition of the ceilidh house was the great social tradition in which storytelling took place..." And then there’s a third thing which I think is in some ways the area that we’re still most neglecting and that we’re just kind of opening up and beginning to deal with. All of the storytelling traditions existed in social contexts, right? The storytelling happened in specific social situations and that was not accidental. If I can just give two wee examples of it from our Scottish side, and remember - this is in the context of what we learnt from these early pioneers who brought the older traditions back to our attention. One of the things they were very, very good at and Calum MacLean has a marvellous, very easy to read book called “The Highlands”, where he spends a lot of time describing the actual situations he heard the stories in and the people he heard them from. Now in the highland or most rural side of the culture in Scotland, which still in the Highlands and the Western Isles was mainly borne on Gaelic, it was language-borne on Gaelic, the tradition of the ceilidh house was the great social tradition in which storytelling took place. And the ceilidh house, all it meant was the house where people knew if they went along in the evening they were going to get some stories. And all that ceilidh meant was “visiting.” It was just a form of neighbours getting together. And the pattern of what happened in the ceilidh house was one of those under-stated things. It wasn’t an obvious ritual but actually it really was. Everybody was so familiar with it that it just gently found its place. People would come in bit by bit and they would exchange a wee bit of the news, what had happened that day, what the news was, maybe then there might be a bit of a wider discussion about something that a newspaper had told or some development or somebody’s relation or whatever. And from musing and gossip and anecdote, at some point it would just slip in and somebody would tell the first story and after that it was a pattern of story and song exchange. And that, if you like, was a very profound way and a yet very unforced and natural way of emphasising neighbourliness, the sense of community. And perhaps the particular stories that might be chosen to be told… there might be a reason for that. It might be, oh, somebody just felt like telling that story and that was entertainment or that was somebody’s special story and they told it. But it might also have been some kind of a response to something that was happening in the community or in the wider world. And I’ve heard the ceilidh house tradition described almost as a Community Health sort of thing, as well as the do-it-yourself entertainment and, as well, as the main social structure which bore the community. Remembering, of course, as well that in those days, certainly in Scotland, the structures of organised religion were very distant. People all have this thing: “oh it was so religious…”. But actually in that older highland society religion was quite distant to the reality of life in local communities. Now the other social aspect of the tradition of ceilidh-ing was an urban one. We didn’t have a famine. We had the blight, a much milder form. We didn’t have the huge trauma of The Famine of the 19th century and the mass emigration. What we had was successive generations of Clearance. First in our Lowland areas, where people were cleared off the old farms villages and settlements to towns. And a lot of them came to the North of Ireland, actually, at different times and then on to America and Canada and the rest. And then in the 19th century when urbanisation really set in and there were huge pressures on “congested” areas of both the Highlands and islands, we had big clearances both overseas and into the Scottish cities which just mushroomed. And this was all tied up, in our case, not with agricultural failure but with Industrial Revolution. But the key thing was a massive disruption of the social and community patterns of the majority of the people. And it was after people were cleared into the cities, whether that was in America or here, that there was this tremendous upsurge in organised religion. The churches became the backbone of people trying to hang together for some kind of solidarity in the cities and out of that grew a great tradition of urban ceilidh-ing which was similar in its social purpose but really it enabled people with some kind of common connection, whether it be of place of origin, or culture, or a religious element or whatever it might be, or a class, a social class thing – the survival of the working people in these situations. People would tend to get together in a pub or houses and share stories and songs and that was a very humour-driven thing and some of our blackest, sharpest, absurdist stuff came out of that (and Glasgow was the great fulcrum of it), out of that kind of urban ceilidh-ing. And it’s interesting because the romanticised idea of older traditions tends to forget all that side of things. But that was an equally powerful and important part. So, if we recognise that there are those three elements - the entertainment, the inspiration, the imaginative delight; there’s the art and craft; and there’s the social context - what does that mean about how we might develop our skills and knowledge as storytellers working together and separately in today’s society? We’ve worked on the theme for a few years now of what we call “Traditions and Skills” That’s what we call our training programmes. And they’re always based on the humble recognition that to some extent, storytellers are born and not merely… whatever. You know, there’s always got be a sense of acknowledgement that people are going to come at this in different ways. And, remember, of course, you see the great thing is that in traditional culture and in a traditional community all these different aspects – the art, the craft, the inspirational delight, the social context and how that worked for the storytelling, was picked up as people went along, because they were part of it, they heard it, they knew what was going on, they soaked it up and the people who were sharp picked it up and saw what was going on and learned from it. And that’s not so easy now. We have to network and work together and look at very different social contexts. So “Traditions and Skills” is the theme we’ve taken and that, if you like, is a recognition of two aspects-- One: learning from tradition. (And when I say that, I mean all the aspects of tradition as I’ve talked about and described this morning; the social effectiveness, the entertainment, the art and the craft.) There’s so much that could be learned from the traditions. And those might not just be Irish and Scottish traditions ( in that case they’re all hopelessly mixed up anyway) but we might be talking African traditions here. There’s all sorts of ways in which we can learn on this side of tradition. And that’s acknowledging that there’s education here as well as training. There’s a growth of knowledge and awareness that goes on that is educational and vital for storytellers and for people who are supporting and working with storytelling and you can see an arena there – you want to educate your arts officers and your librarians and your teachers -- there’s a whole scope of people that’s drawn in on that. "What is a repertoire?" Two: On the skills side there’s the whole business about the art and the craft of stories and telling. So there’s a focus there on the actual narrative sources, whether those be traditional or contemporary; how they work; how you can choose; how you can develop, how you can work with them. And then also the individual teller’s skills and enthusiasms and interests and experience. And, a very, very interesting question actually, which takes you to the whole heart of this and I don’t even intend to begin answering or even suggesting an answer, because I think it is something you will want to wrestle with, collectively and individually: What is a repertoire? What is it that an individual storyteller should garner and develop and how do they do that? And do you just go around listening to what your mates start telling and pick up the good ones in the hope they’re not going to be there when you tell their story or whatever - And it wasn’t their story because they stole it from someone else in the first place. There is that whole fascinating question of how do you develop a repertoire that’s right for you? It’s a fascinating question and it’s tied up with that whole education and learning and growth of skills thing and you could call it a lifelong pursuit. So there’s that set of education and skills that are all around the tradition and skills side. Now there’s another set of skills that have become more challenging for storytellers because of the diversity of contexts in which you might find yourself telling stories now. The natural arena for storytelling was in the ceilidh house, or by tenement fireside or whatever it might be. Now, let’s not abandon that. That can still happen and in fact. I detect sometimes just a little glimmer of a revival of interest of people just doing gatherings of friends in their own houses. You know I think that’s there and that’s very interesting. However if you’re getting into storytelling now as community volunteer, as a working storyteller, to some extent, working professionally you’re going to end up in libraries, you’re going to end up in schools, down here in Dublin you’re going to end up in prisons, in barracks – it’s amazing where you’re going to be, and each of these situations is going to call for a set of interactive skills, right? It’s about the response and how you handle that. It’s about the telling of stories and it’s what you get back, what you enable by the telling of stories, what you get back from people and how you work with that creatively and positively respond to it. And I believe, of course, that that was always a part of the tradition -- the sense of response and engagement. But I think it’s become more important now because so often you’re asked in where people are looking for the storytelling to be entertaining, to be delightful and all those things, but also maybe they want it to inspire or open up some kind of educative process or it could be a community development situation where you’re trying to unlock what it is people want for their own community or their own situation and that could be a geographical community or community of interest – you could be working with a mental health group…. The variations are numerous. But in a sense what each of them is asking for is for the storyteller to go a wee step further forward than simply telling their stories. But, as I say, I refuse to see that as something that is entirely different from anything that’s gone before because I think it is about similar skills and active engagement but perhaps one has to be consciously aware of these being used in a different way and certainly applied to very many different situations .. And therefore that, I think, becomes very specifically something that we can learn about, that we can work together to improve what we do. And we can bring other people in who have different kinds of skills that would impinge on what a storyteller does. Ask them to support what we do and at the same time in these partnerships, whether with a teacher or an educator or with a health worker or with a community worker, there’s a two-way thing there where we storytellers can learn from them and, in fact, we’re going to see more of those people really becoming storytellers as well, which is an exciting thing. But also we have something to give. "We don’t want to claim that we’ve suddenly become magical healers..." There’s a phrase that is sometimes used in discussions – “parity of esteem”. I’ll stick it to the wall here as well, because that is an area we do have to think about, how we’re engaging in what we’re doing. We shouldn’t illegitimately trespass on areas of professional skill. You know there can be wee lines of demarcation here. Sometimes these need to be respected because we don’t want to claim that we’ve suddenly become magical healers, or whatever it might be. However there’s also an issue that what the storyteller does in that situation also deserves respect. Parity of esteem. It’s not just a matter of saying, “Right, oh well done, yes, if you come along we’ll have three stories, please, on why children shouldn’t pick their noses….” – you know? Yeah, you know what I’m on about there. OK, so: education and knowledge of the sources; the skills, the craft, the art of telling and of developing your storytelling; the interactive skills which are demanded by new situations and contexts, working with youngsters and all the rest of it. And fourthly: developing our understanding of these different contexts and what’s going on about them and the different partners. And then a final point , an absolutely pragmatic one, but I’m sure one you would be very much aware of yourselves as you’re laying the keel, if you like, of co-operation and structure as a network yourselves. You’d realise immediately that, as storytelling develops, there are all sorts of areas of business and management skill, teamwork, project work – like, it’s one thing working as an individual storyteller, what happens when you have to work with a group of other people. There might be other storytellers, there might be teachers and the rest of it in it. So there are all sorts of practical – parade-ground skills we could call them really here - about the management, teamwork and structure and all that. (Pat Ryan: It’s not only training the storytellers and organisers of storytelling, but it’s training those other professionals, too, how to work with storytelling.) Yes, sure. So there are practical aspects there which might find a place in a training programme. I’ve brought along copies of the last three years of Scottish Storytelling Centre workshop leaflets. And we do a selection in a central venue, as it were, but really only in order to promote the possibility of these themes happening in other places as well. If you see what I mean, it’s like the carrot. If you say: “at the storytelling centre there will be this workshop..” then what you’re also saying is, “but a local council or library or education authority could organise something around this theme that we could provide a storyteller for”. And behind that as well, I think it is also important to say that we do regularly do this -- get together as the working storytellers to work out ideas and share new things that are happening. (Donald reads from SSC workshop brochures) Storytelling Step-by Step That’s become a very established one. Introducing storytelling skills for librarians, for teachers or whatever. Resourcing The Tradition. Which is, as it were, re-sourcing. Engaging with different strands of material. For example, a lot of people in Scotland say, “Oh, you know, Norse stories are not about us” and then you find we’ve got all this Norse stuff in the North of Scotland and we can get in at that level to the tradition of the sagas. Can You Hear Me at the Back? A voice workshop. Taming Pokemon, Power Rangers and the Power Puff Girls . “This workshop looks at how the energy and enthusiasm children have for popular culture can be drawn upon in the classroom to develop fun learning activities.” Doing the Business … That’s storytelling organisation. Telling to Tots – Storytelling with the Under Fives Also there’s Beginner & Intermediate Storytelling Skills, Classes with experienced storytellers, Masterclasses. Living Stories: Children as Story Makers The kids developing their own (stories). Because when you tell kids stories that gets their imaginations going, they want to create and tell stories themselves. There’s a thing there on Scots language. The language, it’s a great way of getting language resources, getting people interested. We have Gaelic Media in the schools now so the storytelling’s a great way of getting the teachers and the pupils naturally using it. And there’s one we co-did with the Edinburgh Harp Festival on Storytelling and Harping So there are two of three people now that are doing storytelling and harping and that’s becoming popular. What did we have this year? Oh, Glendale Gathering for Scottish and Irish Traditional Storytelling on the Isle of Skye.. We had workshops, walks and talks – and the man who talked most was Miceбl Ross! No, no it was great, wasn’t it? Stunning. We had two days of astonishing sunshine in a remote glen away up in the North West of Skye, which is saturated with stories and traditions. I’m finito-ed. The thing I will say though is: I wouldn’t ever want to be an embarrassment by saying, “This is the way you should do it.” You will find your own ways of organising and themes and your own ways of tackling the geography issues. But there is something I want to say very quickly, to finish: I’m finishing back where I began about the whole exchange between Scotland and Ireland and all the different mixing of traditions, past and present, which seems an endless non-stop process that goes on. We have an international storytelling festival every autumn, The Scottish Festival, at the end of October each year and next year will be the first year that we’ll be back in our new Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh in The Mile, which we’ve been working away at and developing for the last five years or so. And for the first festival in our new home we’re going to take Scotland/Ireland as the theme. We’re going to go right back to our roots. So I just want to say that I am looking very much at developing a programme. I hope that we are going to be able to invite some of you folks over. Others may travel over to be part of this. We’re talking to the Irish Government about doing this, because it’s all about, again, respect, and the place of storytelling and the structures. We’re speaking to the foreign affairs people and I think that would be a great occasion for us. It would be wonderful to have you folks over. But also I think it might lead on as well because that hopefully will also assist in giving momentum to the increasing recognition that you folks are now gaining here and we hope the increasing support that your work will have from the government agencies, North and South. Email: scottishstorytellingcentre@uk.uumail.com Website: www.scottishstorytellingcentre.co.uk

I think that for a long time there has been a need for back-up publications and for an infrastructure to cultivate the art of storytelling. Storytelling is, I suppose, the primary aspect to folklore and the aspect which is nearest to various artistic pursuits and is, indeed, an artistic pursuit in itself. The better our definitions of what art is, the more we are progressing. For too long art has been regarded as a “high falootin” sort of thing which differentiates between people and which puts a few people on a pedestal. The rest of us come along to an artistic performance - a poetry reading, a drama or whatever - and we pretend to enjoy it very much. And indeed it could be very good; but even if it’s not very good we have to pretend to enjoy it. Otherwise the person beside us will say we are not cultured persons - unless we have an insight into what may be “un-insightable” in many cases. "Storytelling illustrates all of mankind’s cultural pursuits..." But that is never true of storytelling. Indeed, I think that if we define culture liberally and generously we have to say that culture is the reaction to the environment of each individual person who is alive in the world. And the communal culture is the aggregate of all the reactions, not so much the summation as the aggregate. Communal culture takes on a life of its own. All these things can be illustrated from Storytelling. Indeed, I would say that Storytelling illustrates all of mankind’s cultural pursuits. There is no reason at all for hiding storytelling under a bushel. We should proclaim it to the whole world; shout about it from the rooftops. Because in my view there is no other aspect of cultural endeavour which so totally embraces the human experience and also which is so democratic and which looks at us all as worthy people. Because any one of us tells stories of one type or another, and storytelling sessions are so inclusive. I think inclusive is one of those words. In defining things, or in developing a public understanding of things, it’s amazing how certain keywords become important, and I want the word inclusion to be important in any study of culture. I have had rows with various artistic people or people in the arts-planning world for several years past now, and one of the major difficulties I have had with them is that they are not capable of being inclusive. And number two: they are not capable of defining what culture is. That’s a major cnбmh spairne, a bone of contention, which I have with people who talk about culture and can’t even give a working definition of it. It’s because of these narrow-minded and, let’s face it, snobbishly ignorant views that Storytelling has been ignored for so long. There is hardly anything worse than to give power to an ignorant person who is also snobbish. I think, in fact, that such a person is worse than a tyrant, because when a tyrant is doing something to you, you at least know why he is doing it to you or he knows why he is doing it to you. But the other person, the snob, doesn’t care to even consider why he or she is doing you harm, because they think that they are doing it to advance themselves, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, nothing is as silly as to create division among people. "Nobody can be racist if they know about folklore..." Folklore fulfills the requirement of culture as something which enrichens human life. It also fulfills the various qualities which all true culture must have: that is, what is the most local is also the most universal and what's the most universal is also the most local. Now, of course, the universality of folklore is well known. In fact (are racist or)* nobody can be exclusive and nobody can be racist if they know about folklore, because to know about the folklore of your own people means that you will understand the folklore of other people and you will respect it. The people who are exclusive and who snobbish and all these sad qualities, they don’t know much about themselves, because if they did they wouldn’t be like that. The more we learn about our own people the more we respect other peoples. Therefore in folklore we know that many folktales, for example, are of far-flung occurrence throughout the world. But also in a very local sense… I come from County Limerick and there's a town there, Ballyneety (Baile an Fhaoitigh). Whitestown, it means actually, and there was a beggerman passing through there one day (and you couldn’t get it more local than this, I suppose) and a dog ran out, a savage dog and he bent down to pick up a stone to keep the dog away from him, naturally. But the stone was stuck to the ground and so the dog went and tore the arse out of the poor man. And all he could say was - he made a little verse: “Is olc an baile, Baile an Fhaoitigh, go bhfuil clocha ceangailte ann agus madraн scaoilte!” (“Ballyneety is a bad place because the stones are tied there and the dogs are loose!”). And that's very local, I would say, but in a human sense, of course, it’s very inclusive. To feel a bite in one’s posterior includes all different backgrounds, and it doesn't distinguish between traditions or communities! And the story resonates for a community of people who are living in the same place, who are gathered together or whatever, and equally for a wanderer who must always be on the look out! And that reminds me of a family at home in Munster, not far from my place, who were very traditional and had some great characters among them. Later on we found out, or somebody said, that if you traced their lineage back along, they were Palatines originally. The Palatines were settlers who became refugees from the wars of Louis XIV and they came and settled in many parts, especially of South Leinster and Munster. And somebody in their own place went to ask a senior member of this family: “Is there any tradition in the family that they came from the Palatinate, the Rhineland or that place in south Germany, originally?” “No” he says, “That's not right at all, we're all Irish and Gaelic”, he said, “Gaelic back to Brian Boru, all the way back!” he said. “And you’d know that”, he said, “by the names. For example, there's Donncha, the monk; and another cousin of mine is Pбdraig; and our grandfather was Seбn; and his grandfather again was Conchubhar; and then his father again was Rudolfo....” That was the Palatine of course. Did you ever hear of a Munster farmer called Rudolfo in your life? "Folklore, then, teaches us internationalism as distinct from multinationalism..." So folklore, then, teaches us internationalism as distinct from multinationalism. Well, you need only look around at the world to see what multinationalism does to people, to try to impose by power of finance or by power of arms one particular aspect of what one considers is one’s country's heritage - and those who consider it so do not usually know much about their own country’s heritage either. But internationalism, of course, the respect for different nationalities – as it is in our interest to help each other - is basic to an understanding of folklore. That’s why folklore studies always take place on an internationalist plain, that we should always study folklore by the comparative method, comparing different versions of traditions and so on and so forth. "Ultimately folklore is a humanistic thing..." One other aspect of folklore is very important - and this is not the least among the many virtues of this handbook - is that it gives contacts around the country for different groups and different organisations who are involved in performance folklore. And indeed in all kinds of approaches to folklore it is important that people are kept in contact with each other. This is important for the education of young people. We often think, because a commercialised sort of culture is dominant, that culture as a human pursuit is safe. But of course it is not safe. I’m not going to condemn outright all commercialisation. What I am saying is that it’s of very little interest to those of us who want to preserve folklore, because ultimately folklore is a humanistic thing. We want to place the human at the centre of planning - as distinct from profits or publicity or PR or anything like that, we want to put the human at the centre. Accordingly, we can apply the lessons of folklore to so many other aspects of life. We’re here and that’s good enough, we don’t have to justify ourselves. We exist, and because we exist we express ourselves. There is no need to justify ourselves. There's no need for Irish people to win Olympic gold medals or any such things, really. It’s nice if people do it, but you hear people saying “Oh, he won such a wonderful thing and he put Ireland on the map!” I mean, we don't really want Ireland to be on the map if self-deprecation is what it amounts to, because we’re ok as we are. Leave us alone! Respect us and we'll respect ourselves. It’s important to get this message across to young people. I remember a professor in an Irish University saying to me years ago that when he started to do interviews with students that he always asked them: “Tell me something about your place” He said he’d hear something very interesting from each student but, as time went by, over fifty years, he said that he noticed that the students would towards the end of that time say: “Sure my place is of no importance!” Now that’s a very, very dangerous thing to have happening in society, that young people think that their own place, their own community, the local people they come from, are of no importance. The importance of folklore to give confidence to youngsters should be recognised - a confident youngster never becomes a vandal, a confident youngster never becomes a snob, which is another type of vandal, actually! A confident youngster is always helpful and creative with his or her friends and associates; and that is achieved by giving people confidence in their own culture, in their own accents. I have tried hard to keep a Limerick accent even though I am in Dublin for thirty years. You can judge how well I have succeeded or failed, in listening to me as I talk to you now! But I think it’s important that we keep our own accents, that we keep our own identity. There’s a tremendous mix then, as we have here; or when we go further afield throughout the world to other countries, we find the mix of accents even greater still, and that is very beautiful. But without each having their own identity, you don’t really have any mix, because there is nothing to mix. Therefore it’s important that young people are taught to be proud of the skills and arts and crafts that they learn from their own people, and the stories and local history that they learn from them and so on. Enough study hasn’t been done on the aesthetic qualities of storytelling. We define folklore by saying, “Folklore is that part of human culture which is oral, which is traditional, which is variable, which is formulaic and which is anonymous”. These five points explain all folklore really. Oral, traditional, formulaic, variable and anonymous! But we don’t often study the aesthetic qualities of folklore, that is, what folklore does to inspire us, to give us a better vision of a better world. And in a sense that is what our art should do. There is a tendency (I think I should mention this) that if a person wants to become a famous Irish writer, you have to write everything horrible and nasty about your own people, and you have to say that the Irish people are narrow-minded, that they are vicious towards each other, that they are hypocritical about religion, that they are all sorts of nasty things. Of course this is the relic of colonialism, this is the colonial mind looking at people. In fact, Irish people, like all other people, are very good to help you when you are in need. They’re not so good to praise you if you succeed, I suppose, but you don’t need people when you are succeeding. It’s when you are failing that you need people. In reality, there are good people everywhere when you need them. The people have a genuine spiritual inheritance and a genuine spiritual environment; and anyway the portrayal of people as being nasty has shot its bolt, I think, by now. "In a sense, it’s the communal voice speaking through the personal creativity..." The wonderful conviviality that one gets from folklore is in fact the opposite of all that, the antithesis of that. This conviviality you'll notice, for example, if you collect stories on tape and if you transcribe them - the tremendous affection you get for the person when you listen to the person's voice. I can’t explain that, but there is something of the aesthetic in it. The same thing when you listen to a storyteller telling stories, that storyteller is, surely subconsciously, radiating a process which mankind has known for time immemorial. In a sense, it’s the communal voice speaking through the personal creativity. And, of course that’s why I support performance storytelling, because creativity is a very important aspect of folklore at all stages. It is not correct to divide things into heritage on the one side and creativity on the other hand. Now I know the artistic planners (at least in the 26 counties) appointed to these positions do this all the time. They have a lot of old foibles that they don’t really understand themselves, but they think it’s fashionable to say these things, and they say "Folklore is heritage, this is not creative". But in fact creativity and heritage are two sides of the same coin, and nobody knows that better than a storyteller, because each time a story is told it is actually a new creative performance. It is worth comparing the different versions of stories told by different people to see the way their personality works into the stories, and to see the way their production of the stories is affected by the audience, because the audience takes part as well. The whole question arises, then, of planning folklore as public performance. I myself personally think that it is absolutely wrong to put a storyteller on to a stage. I think that storytellers should sit among the people, among the audience, and preferably a few people should sit among the audience with an opening for a member of the audience to take part. I suppose if somebody tries to hog the show that they’ll get kicked out ultimately, one way or another. In itself, anyway, it is a good thing to have the storyteller among the listeners. The folklorist Carl Von Sydow was one of the great theorists of folklore, and he spoke of active preservers and passive preservers of tradition. And he understood, of course, active preservers as the minority who actually tell the complicated stories and passive preservers as the majority who know the stories but don’t specialise in telling them. But, of course, we all become active and passive at different times. There was a man who had a stallion above on the border of County Louth and Armagh some years ago standing at about 20 hands. He was a massive horse, a half Shire and a half Clydesdale, and I was saying to the man, “Would you be afraid of him?” And he said, “Well, not really, but I am wary of him because a stallion is a stallion for part of the day.” In a way, we are all poets and artists and storytellers for part of the time, so that we are all active part of the time and passive at other times. And it’s this wonderful intermix and interplay that makes the spoken word so dramatic. I am delighted that Liz said there that this handbook is open-ended and that it is a continual process. Looking through it I know several of the people who are in it well. I don’t know all of you - I should of course, mea culpa, but I am sure that all of these people here are inclusive open people and that they try to make time to talk to everybody, and that they would encourage other people to engage in storytelling as well; and that accords very much with Liz's objective here in having this as an open-ended handbook. "Nobody has an interest in folklore in isolation..." I remember working in 1987 on the draft which is now the UNESCO policy on the preservation oral folklore. At that time there were many proposals that there be networking between people so that they could swap storytellers and that they could visit each other, and that they could know that nobody works in isolation or nobody has an interest in folklore in isolation. Well, of course, in a sense we all have our own local communities but we do need to, and it is exciting and interesting to, meet people from other places as well. I wish that governments would take the UNESCO policy to heart. When the Irish Minister for Education proposed the acceptance of the policy I wrote her speech. That’s fifteen years ago and the government has never implemented the policy at all, which is quite scandalous, I think, but then there are vested interests in the artistic world who don't want to see storytelling blossoming. You know, there’s this idea that anthropologists are interested in – the Theory of the Limited Good. In our own place at home in County Limerick on May Eve people used to go out on May Eve and they’d get a canister or a bucket and they’d pick up the dew from one field and throw it over the ditch into their own field. The idea being, of course, that if you’re to gain someone else has to lose. This is the economists’ theory of ‘the national cake.’ But, of course, what's always forgotten by the economists, and often by the traditional folk as well, is the idea of human potential. Human potential is the artistic element in life, and human potential means that national cakes make no sense. You don’t have to take from one to give to another, what you should do is to improve the potential of everybody, and that is really what folklore should be about. It would be great if national ‘cultural planners’ – incidentally, I don’t know why people decide that they can decide cultural planning, it sounds to me a little bit self-centred as an opinion - could appreciate that. Anyway, to the extent that we can all put our widow’s mite into the box and we can all make suggestions, I make a suggestion that full financial support be given to endeavours like this and that endeavours like this feel comfortable and confident that they can continue to develop this very important part of Irish life, of reconciliation among all our people, of reconciliation on local levels. That involves the whole 32 counties actually, because there are so many types of divisions amongst people - we only think of a few specific ones but there are so many other types - and these divisions, if taken to mean variety, in fact enrichen life for us all. "There is nothing more poetic than folklore. Storytelling conducts its thinking through metaphors..." To have something with which we can engage like the verbal culture, which is the most human and the most humanistic pursuit we can have, to have that respected and to have that given public support! Think of the wonderful effect it will have on our young people and how our young people will understand art, will become poetic, because there is nothing more poetic than folklore. Storytelling conducts its thinking through metaphors, it offers in its own way a fanciful and alternative life which makes us all happy, because reality sometimes can make us sad. If, for example, you have a great misfortune, even a terminal illness, this can make you very sad unless you can think of life in a different sense. Folklore is one of the things that teaches us to do that, that the mind can be free. Go raibh mнle maith agaibh. Tбim an-bhaoch dнbh as bheith anseo. Tбim an-bhaoch dнbh as an gcuireadh a fhбil anseo agus go maire sibh i bhfad leis an iarracht seo agus leis an leabhairнn breб seo. This little book is a gem and I'd say if there are any reporters here you could say, "Verbal Arts Centre Launches a Gem". Thank you very much!

The Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture (CCWOC) opened in 2008. It’s the first institution of its kind in North America, focusing on creative practices and scholarly research in both oral and literary cultural activities. It serves the University of Manitoba, and the wider community. The CCWOC is well resourced, with a state of the art recording studio and a writing laboratory. Other artists in residence had produced audio recordings, video art, publications and performances. These previous writers/tellers in residence came from a variety of impressive backgrounds[1], so it was an honour to follow them. The role involved some teaching and storytelling, but I had freedom and time to work on writing projects I wished to pursue. When the writer or teller is in residence, one of her or his duties is to host a weekly storytelling circle. This can take the form of a story-swap, a workshop, or can focus on developing a group publication, recording or performance. Each week I led a storytelling workshop that took the form of a structured course, in order to cover various storytelling projects I’d participated in which were not so common in Canada (such as Kick into Reading, the football and storytelling project promoting literacy, and Listen Up! and Writing Together, and other long-term school residencies). I also held office hours to meet students, staff, and members of the community seeking comments on their creative writing, or advice regarding their own storytelling. The CCWOC supports all University departments, not just the Creative Writing and English degree courses, so many lecturers and professors also asked me to speak to their students on how storytelling and oracy[2] related to their disciplines, such as education, kinesiology, history, archiving, and community and international relations. Encouraged to take part in various readings, conferences, seminars and symposia happening while I was in residence, and to join in social and arts events in the community via CCWOC’s strong links with many organisations, I met a fair number of Manitoba storytellers and storytelling enthusiasts keen to share experiences. Stone Soup Storytelling Kay Stone, storyteller, writer and folklorist, is one of a large group of people who started Stone Soup Storytellers thirty years ago. Kay, then a lecturer on children’s literature and folklore, began a non-credit course at the University of Winnipeg. Twelve people signed up, and they met in a children’s bookstore. When the course finished, everyone wanted it to go on, and the shop happily continued as host. It was agreed that they’d all run the group, with no one person in charge. Kay certainly couldn’t, as she was just going on sabbatical. Collectively they devised a name and a way of going on. Everyone added their own ingredient to the project, hence the name Stone Soup Storytellers. They decided to sit in a circle, and not feature any guest as a solo teller. The story stick would go around with everyone in the circle getting a turn to tell or listen, as they wished when the stick came to them. Occasionally they had a guest, but that visitor’s turn was strictly limited to twenty or thirty minutes at most, and such featured guests were rare; Dan Yashinksy was one, Jan Andrews another. Stone Soup Storytellers assured that everyone had a turn. That was the key to its success—all contributed, the format was kept simple and there was never a plan to make it big, to aim at sharing stories, rather than performing them. Stone Soup Storytellers were at the children’s bookshop for two years. When it was sold, the group moved around several venues over the decades. The format worked everywhere, whether two or three people or a bigger group turned up at the space. Gatherings of like-minded souls wanting to share stories made each event pleasant and successful. They found it helpful having the same venue two years or more—meeting once a month, the continuity helped build and maintain regular participation. One popular venue was Heaven Cafй, although they settled there after much discussion. Because of its layout, it required dropping the circle and sitting cabaret style. They feared this would lead to greater separation of teller and listener and a more formal performative mode. However, they maintained their philosophy and style of practice by keeping the story stick going around the room. Heaven saw some of the best storytelling they had over all their years, and also attracted their biggest crowds. The cafй ‘s popularity brought new listeners and tellers every time. They found, however, it was best never to be too big. Kay thinks the largest groups numbered around forty, though Mary Louise Chown, another stalwart of Stone Soup (and other Manitoba storytelling institutions and events), claimed that sometimes as many as a hundred participants attended Heaven Cafй. Organisation ranged form informal to mildly organised, but never too organised. Early on they contacted a more experienced storytelling leader, Dan Yashinksy, in Ottawa. He advised: 1. No one person as the leader—that would lead to someone dominating, defining everything. 2. Meet regularly 3. Don’t push into a direction you don’t want (e.g., don’t do a festival or some big project just because some thinks that the group should or there’s a chance of money or wider publicity…. and don’t create a membership with membership fees and so on just because some one’s keen on organising) 4. Bigger is not better. It’s a considerable achievement, not only to maintain a storytelling event for thirty years, but also to do so by sharing administrative duties, all negotiated and determined by group consensus. The only rule was no reading aloud. This was mainly because there were plenty of book groups and creative writing guilds at the time, so chances to read aloud were plentiful. But none of these meetings provided chances to tell stories. When Stone Soup Storytellers did do a festival, it was small, informal, and local. Called Tall Grass Tales it ran for three years. Only storytellers in their region were involved, with payment made by bringing food to share. In the morning, tellers did a turn each. Then the circle opened to any wanting to tell a tale. They then divided into workshop circles, each smaller circle exploring whatever they wished. More experienced tellers led some of these circles. These smaller groups could spend the day with everyone sharing stories. They could also focus on a particular topic, or ask experienced tellers to guide them on issues causing concern, practical exercises, or discussions. The festival was successful as their regular Stone Soup meetings, due to the flexibility of organisers and participants. At the end of their two years there, Heaven Cafй was sold, leading to them trying various venues. They finally settled at Aqua Books, a quirky second-hand bookshop, cafй, and arts centre in Downtown Winnipeg. This shop hosted Stone Soup Storytelling for the longest period. The venue was free, but not always ideal: as a busy venue sometimes music or noise spilled over from other events, parking was difficult being in the city centre, and some participants felt uncomfortable in Downtown late at night. The Stone Soup Storytelling night I attended was the last at Aqua Books. Eleven folks took part, two of whom wandered off the street (and one of those newcomers told his first story). There was a wonderful mix of traditional stories, personal and family stories, and a group-shared telling with Kay starting off the tale of ‘Stone Soup’ then passing the telling of it around with everyone adding their own ‘bits’. It was a charming evening. It reminded me very much of storytelling evenings one finds at Wexford Story Houses. They, too, gather groups of people who know each other, meet regularly, and pass the story stick around so that anyone who wishes can share a story, poem, recitation or song. Recently Aqua Books has entered a phase of change and relocation. Though the shop will go on, while I was there it’s future uncertain, so Stone Soup Storytellers chose to open a new chapter. The original plan was to keep the format but meet in private homes, with occasional special storytelling events in public spaces. Since I returned from Canada, Stone Soup Storytellers have seen exciting developments promising a strong period of growth. McNally Robinson Booksellers have invited them to meet at their Winnipeg store. This is one of the biggest and most impressive bookshops ever seen, and a popular place with readers and culture vultures. Along with an impressive wide range of books, and a cafй offering great coffee and delicious treats (as many bookshops do these days), it is so large that by my count there were at least four areas for readings, book launches, children’s story times, and arts and crafts workshops (including sewing lessons!). Every time I popped in the store was busy and its events drew substantial crowds. This new home suggests Stone Soup Storytellers could be in for another successful thirty years. The Storytelling Guild of Manitoba and Other Resources and Events The Storytelling Guild of Manitoba started three years ago. Storytellers in Winnipeg and the province as a whole wanted an umbrella group connecting tellers, listeners and storytelling enthusiasts, and informing every one of storytelling activities around Manitoba. Mary Louise Chown and Wyne Drury, co-chairs of the Guild, are two active, popular, excellent storytellers with a long respected record in Canadian storytelling. Much like Storytellers of Ireland, the Guild promotes storytelling to wider audiences by providing information. It has a database of storytellers, lists events on their website, develops and disseminates resources, and organises workshops and meetings with visiting storytellers. A special resource The Storytelling Guild of Manitoba can be proud of is the Joyce Birch Memorial Library at University of Winnipeg’s Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures (CYPTC). Joyce Birch was a nationally renowned teacher/librarian and a founding member of Stone Soup Storytellers, and a much-loved, respected storyteller. She donated her library to the Guild when she passed away. Stored in the CYPTC, it’s a great collection and available not only to the storytellers but also to postgraduate students and visiting academics. There were numerous storytellers working in schools and community projects, similar to the work we see our colleagues doing through Poetry Ireland’s Writers-in-Schools scheme and other educational and community programmes. And besides the Stone Soup storytelling gatherings, there were also occasional performances in arts centres or, more often, in private homes. Across Canada and the United States, it’s become common for storytelling, and folk and traditional music enthusiasts, to gather for ‘House Concerts’. Some one with a room large enough for 40 or 60 people to gather hosts the event, with everyone making a financial contribution to cover the artists’ fees and expenses, and bringing food and drink to share. I attended one such House Concert, ‘The Dark of the Year’, with Michael Cobus, Kevin Scott, Tom Roche, Kay Stone and Mary Louise Chown, and music by Maniconomic. Being in early November the event celebrated the change of season and moving back of clocks, with stories and music from around the world exploring themes of light and darkness. Other good news arriving from Canada recently tells of more big developments in Manitoba. St. Boniface Museum has begun weekly Sunday storytelling sessions in French and English. St. Boniface is a lively French-speaking community in Winnipeg, a neighbourhood settled and developed by the French explorers in the 17th Century. It maintains the Universitй de Saint-Boniface and many other social and cultural venues supporting French speakers. The House Concerts continue, with variations, such as a ‘Flavors of India’ evening at Charisma Restaurant, with performances by Canadian and Canadian-Indian tellers and musicians. The Winnipeg International Storytelling Festival and The Thin Air Literature Festival and Tantalizing Glimpses of Storytelling Activity in Other Parts of Canada Jessica Senehi, who works at University of Manitoba as Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Stories in the Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice, is the organiser and director of the Winnipeg International Storytelling Festival. This event, happening in May and involving regional storytellers and tellers from abroad, is free to the public, and 2011 was the sixth festival. Jessica’s academic research focuses on narrative’s role in conflict resolution and cross-cultural exchange. Performances, workshops, and story sharing happen in schools, community centres, and libraries, not just one festival space. Featured storytellers in 2011 included Liz Weir and Dovie Thomason, two well-known faces for SoI members. Jessica’s husband, Sean Byrne, is from Ireland, and director of the Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice. He shares her passion for storytelling, especially with regards to the way storytelling brings people together to play a role in restorative justice. The Thin Air Festival happens in September around the time the teller/writer- residency at CCWOC begins. This literature festival also takes place across the city, in theatres, libraries, bookshops, schools and community centres. It features many prominent local writers, poets and storytellers, as well as verbal artists from across Canada and abroad. For me this was a great introduction the city and its people, and to many brilliant Canadian titles one wouldn’t discover over here (Canadian publications rarely get distributed in the USA or Europe). Kay Stone reported that other regions had activities similar to Stone Soup Storytellers. Alberta had lots going on, and Edmonton had an active storytelling swap that at one time met once a week. Saskatoon also had a successful storytelling group for a while. Many groups did appear to get bogged down doing big things, like running festivals. These seemed to take over, so that organisers burnt out, or ran out of funding sources, making continuity difficult. Of course, the biggest storytelling scene in Canada emanates from The Toronto School of Storytellers. Many Irish tellers have visited Toronto, and there are strong links between the two places going back to Alice Kane, the Ulster storyteller and librarian who did so much to influence storytelling and children’s library work in Canada. Kay acknowledged the huge influence of Toronto storytelling on the rest of Canada, and the city continues to play an influential role on the art form across the country. Aboriginal Storytelling Experiences as a writer and teller in residence in a place so new to me provided experiences causing me again to see the world as very small or utterly synchronistic. When I spoke at The Peace and Justice Centre and met Sean and Jessica, the work of people there reminded me of the work of so many SoI members (Jan Caspers, Liz Weir, Aideen McBride, Clare Murphy, and Jack Lynch to name but a few). They all have been involved in cross community storytelling and projects helping immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers share their narratives. And similar thoughts arose when talking with a few of the Aboriginal tellers I met. Just as Ireland has a strong traditional strain of storytelling, so does Canada, contributed by First Nations’ people. Manitoba alone has sixty-three First Nations, including six of the largest bands in Canada, with five First Nations linguistic groups: Cree, Ojibway, Dakota, Ojibway-Cree, and Dene. They maintain their languages and traditions, even through substantial historic and contemporary challenges, similar to those of Native Peoples in other parts of the world. The little Aboriginal storytelling I heard appeared integrated into intimate social interaction, rather than taking the form of a big, formal performance styles seen in some modern telling. In a few formal examples, it was applied as testimony for restorative justice and in truth and reconciliation initiatives. Time and a limited ability to travel due to my own work meant I heard little traditional storytelling. One teller at Stone Soup related a marvellous Coyote story, improvised in parts and incorporating traditional and personal elements. I was delighted to meet Margaret Lavallee, the Aboriginal Elder in Residence at University of Manitoba’s Bannatyne Campus, the site of the Medical School and Hospital. She is of the Sagkeeng First Nation, and as Elder-in-Residence for the Centre for Aboriginal Health Education, provides cultural oversight for the centre, directing events while supporting Aboriginal students in the health professions. Margaret was keen to share stories, and learn about Irish folklore regarding leprechauns, fairies, and little people. I told her of Eddie Lenihan’s work, and described several piseogs regarding fairy thorn trees, fairy forts (and winds and roads, and so on), and customs surrounding these. Margaret reported similar beliefs and stories among her traditions: tales of little people who protect places in nature and inflect serious consequences upon humans who disturb them. Many personal stories of individuals and groups are related through sharing, rather than performance. These arise from a process of truth and reconciliation regarding Aboriginal students’ experiences in Residential Schools[3]. As happened in many places as a result of colonization and missionary movements, Canadian Aboriginal children were often treated appallingly, forced to abandon their language, traditions and beliefs while living far from their families. There was physical, emotional and sexual abuse. There is also much debate regarding treaties and land rights, and decisions making an impact on the environment. Now many are bearing witness to these experiences, through oral history projects, and literature, drama, film and storytelling. One of the most delightful artists I heard was Tomson Highway of the Cree Nation, a celebrated writer and musician. Asked to speak at a university conference, his stories related what life was like in the far north when he was young, before boarding school, and how his life led to many joyful experiences and continues to do so. His vivid, passionate storytelling and charming personality made the fresh, clear wide-open spaces of northern Manitoba so real and appealing that one wanted to go there. Towards the end of my residency the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Aboriginal Students held its first Day of Learning by premiering a documentary film. Niigaanibatowaad: FrontRunners. This told of ten First Nation men, nine of whom were in residential schools, who ran from Minneapolis to Winnipeg carrying the torch to open the 1967 Pan Am Games. When these teen runners arrived at the stadium after tracing the 800 kilometre ancient message route, they were not allowed to enter; the torch was handed to a white runner to do the honour. Thirty-two years after, when the 1999 Pan Am Games returned to Winnipeg, the Manitoba province issued an official apology and invited the men to open those ceremonies. Their stories were made into a successful play and this film. Three of the frontrunners, Patrick Bruyere, Fred Harper, and Charlie Nelson, attended the Learning Day, and each stood in turn to relate their memories and comment on their stories. This was one of the most moving and powerful oral narrative experiences I’ve ever witnessed. Go West! In Kay’s opinion, the difference between the USA and Canada storytelling scenes is one of scale. Rather than put the focus on huge American festivals with big name tellers whom librarians from all over the States come to adore as featured performers, Canadian storytelling events were always participatory, and more local, incorporated into a wider setting like a community centre or popular public venue. Everyone was encouraged, and events depended always on local tellers taking part. In this I saw parallels with Irish storytelling. One of Irish storytelling’s many strengths is its variety, along with a strong sense of inclusiveness, intimacy, and connection to the local community. Whereas England, Wales and Scotland do often go for big festivals and names, and lots of publicity and large-scale projects, Ireland’s Yarnspinner, Milk and Cookie Stories, and Story House events, and the Irish storytelling festivals, always feature a significant amount local involvement, personal sentiment, informality and participation. Looking at the history of storytelling in Manitoba the last 30 years, this sort of storytelling has sustainability, with lots going for it. CCWOC has developed strong links with Poetry Ireland. Any Irish tellers or writers who make it to this part of Canada in the future will find a warm welcome and a wealth of storytelling. Websites: The Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture http://umanitoba.ca/centres/ccwoc/ Stone Soup Storytellers http://www.sc-cc.com/groups/stone-soup.html The Manitoba Storytelling Guild http://manitobastorytelling.org/ The Winnipeg International Storytelling Festival http://umanitoba.ca/storytelling/ Thin Air – Literature Festival of Winnipeg http://www.thinairwinnipeg.ca/ Storytellers of Canada – Conteurs du Canada http://www.sc-cc.com/organization.html Aqua Books http://www.aquabooks.ca/ [1] [1] Ignatius Mabasa (novelist, children’s writer and dub poet from Zimbabwe), Roberta Kennedy (one of Canada’s leading Aboriginal performers), Jan Andrews (one of Canada’s most influential storytellers), Armin Wiebe (Canadian novelist and winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award), Rody Gorman (poet, essayist and translator, working in Scots Gaelic and Irish, originally from Dublin now of Skye), and Gregory Scofield (one of Canada’s leading Aboriginal writers and storytellers), along with numerous writers and tellers from throughout Canada and the world for one-day events, seminars, conferences, and short-term residences [2] [2] Oracy is a term coined by Walter Ong in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: the Teachnologizing of the Word, to look at thought and verbal expression, putting artful oral expression on a par with literature, to explore the effects of oracy and literacy on each other. [3] [3] While the Residential Schools in Canada were organised for different reasons (that is, basically discrimination on ethnic grounds), their regime bore similarities to the Industrial Schools in Ireland (which established practices more to due with class) and the horrendous evidence of shameful brutality in recent reports of the latter that SoI members will be familiar with. Also, SoI members may be familiar with Dovie Thomason’s piece on the Carlisle Indian Industrial Schools, The Spirit Survives, which she performed at a special gathering of Dublin Yarnspinners in 2008.

The job provides a office and a flat right on the University campus, on the edge of Winnipeg. The required duties were light—about 6 hours of teaching a week. I ran a weekly storytelling workshop, delivered about half a dozen lectures over the term, and was available for tutorials to offer tips on creative writing for local writers and creative writing students, or on storytelling of local tellers. The rest of the time I was free to write and research whatever I wished. It was one of the most exciting and productive periods of my professional life. One very enjoyable aspect of the residency was meeting local tellers and finding out how storytelling in Canada has developed. While there things kept coming up I wanted to share with storytelling friends in Ireland, and so I’ve written an article that I hope SoI members will enjoy and find useful. There’s a strong connection between CCWOC and Ireland: Poetry Ireland has worked with them a lot and promoted the residency to PI members and members of SoI and the Writers-in-Schools programme, a previous CCWOC writer-in-residence was Rody Gorman (a Dublin native now living on the Isle of Skye who’s a much respected Irish/Gaelic poet), Liz Weir and Dovie Thomason have performed at the Winnipeg Storytelling Festival (which has connections to CCWOC), and it’s very likely another Irish teller or writer will be resident there in the future.

A lot of people would see an enormous difference between acting and carpentry. There is a relationship there in so far as in the business of working at a craft you have to do all the basic things. Like you have to have a script, you have to read it, you go in to rehearse and all the moves have to be worked out. The director and the actor, they discuss business, they invent business as they go along. Some things are accepted, some things are thrown out. And all that process goes into the making of a house. My father would often be in that sort of situation, in the renovation business, when he had to think of ways, on the spot, for doing it. And acting is very like that. I remember one time he had to move, you know, one of these large sheds made of poles. The farmer said it was too tall and he wanted it moved sixty feet down his field. So my father sat for ages thinking how he was going to do that. So then he came up with this plan. I don’t know where he got it. He cut the poles level with the ground, and when they would go down into the holes again that was sufficient for the farmer to lower the shed. Now he bolted planks along the sides of the poles, you see, and then he put planks on the ground as well. He had fox wedges, they’re slender wedges, when you drive them one against the other they go from nothing up to three inches or so. It lifts a thing. If you drive in the narrow end from each side it lifts it up. So they're all lifted up a certain way. Then he got a number of handles, like handles for a shovel. These were rollers, And he put them underneath, you see. And all he had to do was to get a number of men and move it gently. And they moved it gently down along this track. It had to be braced, of course, just in case. Several people came along to see it and when it came over the new holes that were dug in the ground it was lowered down gradually, by taking the wedges out, until it sat in its place. Everyone thought that he would have to dismantle it, take out every nail, but he didn't. But the sequel to that was that one of the men watching, who wasn't a tradesman, didn't have any training really in this business, decided he could do it himself. And he set about all the things he had seen. The one thing he forgot to do was to brace the business and he moved it too quickly and the damn thing sat down. The crash of nails and corrrugated iron twisting. And, of course, the world of pretence for the actors is a real world. If he weren't able to imagine to himself that that world is real, the world of pretence, I mean he'd have no business on the stage. Because if he's successful on the stage he makes it a real world for the audience down below. People so easily become involved in something on the stage, and they're lost to the world outside them while that is going on. First you have to believe yourself. There's no good in being a priest trying to convert a whole lot of Eskimos, if you don't believe in the thing you're selling them. You have to believe it explicitly yourself. In many ways the whole discipline of the rehearsal and the doing of it, the business and the dialogue, it cuts a sort of groove in the brain and then, if you have the trust in the thing that is outside you, you must have absolute trust, you know, because a human being is so weak, he's really nothing in himself . . . And, strange enough, if you do have the trust, and let it go and relax that little bit, everything comes all right. The worried person, or the person who panics, is usually the person who makes the mistakes, who hasn't the faith. It's a question of faith once you're out there. And if you didn't have it rehearsed and if it wasn't there, each piece waiting to fall into the place after another one, you're going to make mistakes and you have to cover up and everyone will see it. I was watching you pull the curtains which the designer used in 'A Winter's Tale' at the Peacock recently. Some of the people weren't quite sure what they should do with the curtains. You just marched up to them and pulled them out, as carefully and with as much concentration as you'd just played the scene. You know, I would go to that curtain when everyone had gone, after we had rehearsed that day and say 'If I approach it a certain way, you know, I'm going to be bawise to it and it's going to look wrong'. So you would have to go several times to it, until you found out that there was a place that your hand would just go and catch it and it would come across. First you have to do it very mechancally and then you add the easy, sort of natural thing to it afterwards. But you have to go through the strict, mechanical sort of thing, defining exactly where it is. And sometimes, in business like that, if the business isn't wedded to the dialogue you'll either do the business very well and forget the lines, you know, or say the lines very well and mess the business. Both things will have to be wedded, they have to grow together, so that it looks as natural as the priest on the altar when he takes the chalice, you know, and genuflects and raises it up and brings it down again and genuflects again. Most priests do that in a most wonderful, graceful way. And then puts his hands out over the book. And it is his years, in older priests particularly, it is his years of practice in doing it which make it look so right. It seems to me that that's the kind of conscientious approach which is fairly unusual in Irish theatre. Frank O'Connor once told me that he would write and 'twas there, down on the page, it was about to go to the publishers and he would say 'I'll have one look through it again' and he would find that there were things in it that didn't strike him as exactly right. And he would re-write. And each time that he would do that he would find that it improved what he had written first. It's like the carpenter with the press. It has some sort of an awkwardness in the door or the place where the handle was put or something like that. Standing back and looking at it, he finds that by making these few extra adjustments to the thing that it is more pleasing to his own sense. People do depend a lot on 'It'll be allright', you know. That is all right, I think, in fiddle playing, you know. It's all right for musicians. I've discovered that as being a different world. One time, working with Seamus Ennis, who was in the audience down in Gorey, when he saw part of the rehearsal, he said, 'Eamon', he said, 'at that particular point, I'll play the pipes in the audience'. 'But', I said, 'I haven't rehearsed it, so you see, I can't do it'. There's a contradiction there, though. You are both an actor, and doing your one-man shows, a seanchaí A storyteller, yes, which is very much in the line of the traditional fiddler. Because the storyteller in the kitchen, at the drop of a hat he'd tell a story. But actually, what has happened, and it happened unknown to me, is that I have to make it live for two hours in front of an audience and on a stage. I wasn't by a fireside anymore. And when you're in a plane you fly it, when you're in a car you drive it. I'm in a different place. So that it had to be changed. I had to get up off my ass, off the chair, and I had to move to other places, to make it interesting visually. It's very much like – not comparing somebody that's really wonderful with somebody like me – but it's very like what Sean O'Riada did with music. He took it out of that particular place, with the musicians sitting around, and they were no longer in the kitchen, they were on the public platform now, and he orchestrated it, he arranged it, he had the fiddle coming in here, he had the melodeon coming in there, and he got all his effects. You never had that before. In the ceilí band everyone thumped together at the same time, the whole lot of them went on together in a big blare of noise. On radio, where I told the stories first, it didn't demand that. I was nearer to the fireside and it is still the best medium for a storyteller because, as he paints the verbal picture, the person who doesn't see can fill in the background for it wonderfully well. Then television was the second place where I did them and the camera could give the variety – different shots, you know, close-up and two-shot and all that kind of thing, and just maybe one or two small movements. But I found on the stage that I had to adapt the entire thing and have a number of stories. I would work the visual interest into the links between the stories. So the show is made up of a number of stories and a number of links which go from one story into another, which has to be done so well for the actual show itself that you're not quite certain where one ended . . . the seam in the weave shouldn't show. If it does then the pictures are going too slow, like in the old projectors. The stories are not at all Irish in the sense of a self-conscious, pious, nationalistic Irishness. They're not at all puritan. This is one of the things that very few people realise about Ireland. It's very like what I saw in France one time, and what the French have, where they are in the centre of the world and nothing else matters. Very often you will find that kind of feeling in places in Munster and in Connacht. And they were never actively engaged in the fight for a republic. As a matter of fact, they were part of a bigger, human sort of a thing. And that is why, in most of the stories, you will scarcely ever find a reference to the Fenians or whatever. I went to America and I was being interviewed by a fellow for radio and he said to me, he said, 'You are a seanchaí. Is it not right that the seancai was chased by the Redcoats and had to go higher and higher up the mountain until finally they dragged him down and shot him. . . ' He had all this business, you see, this was a national hero coming out to talk about Ireland's great fight for freedom. It's all right to be talking about England and Ireland and that sort of thing, but they never regarded Ireland as something that was seperate, away from the world, you know. They talked about America most of the time, because the people went to America and they were coming back from America and they were bringing stories of America back. And you'd be talking about this man McKenna – well he went some place, Boston, Mass – they always put in the Mass or the Conneticut or whatever. So that you would hear 'I remember the last time I heard of him now, he told me he was in the Bowery, that he'd gone down a little bit.' As if it was over the road. As if it was over the road, yes. Strangely, in its seclusion, as it were, it was part of a bigger thing. And lots of the older stories, of course, they have to do with the fundamental things of life, like love and the chase and fighting and food and things of that kind. The things that you do hear about are landlords. But they don't talk about them in an English sense. They just talk about them as somebody who charged rent. I remember a line in one of your stories, about a wedding, where the newly-married couple go off to their room. And the line goes something like: 'People had enough upbringing at the time not to remark on what was natural'. You don't have this skittish thing about an open sexual relationship between a man and a woman. They went up and they put the box press against the door. Nobody commented. In some places there would be a certain amount of notice taken of it and people would forget their manners so much as to remark on it. It seemed to suggest, in a broader sense, that so long as you did no one no harm, your business was your business. There was something of that. If you didn't, as you say, impinge on other people, make them uncomfortable, make them suffer, well, that was your business then. Maybe they used to preach a little bit but not a great deal. They were, all those people, deprived people, really. They were people who really had it very hard to live and they were dispossessed in many ways, and things like that. And what saved them was the sense of humour, the sense of the ridiculous. We're talking a lot in the past tense. The kind of Ireland that you're talking about in you stories, do you think that it's still there or will last? No, it's not. And nobody, least of all me, would want it to last. Because life dies if it doesn't change. I think life abhors anything else. That is why I don't hold with people who say they want to keep Ireland this way or that way. But to say that we should have that sort of life back, like many of the things we want to keep, many of our traditions and beliefs and attitudes to life that we want to keep – that means stagnation. Setting those stories in the past is a convention, as far as I'm concerned. And it also helps me to colour in all the things, because I'm drawing from the experiences of my own childhood. A great lot of the detail which I would fill into a story is very true. I can even hear voices, almost. Strange the things that stick in one's mind, you know. Possibly, very important things were just passing by, floating by and I didn't notice them at all. It selects, you see. It holds onto some things dearly, just holds on to them and other things it dismisses. As a matter of fact, they say that as one gets older it's the earlier years one remembers. Whatever is the process whereby it sticks in the brain, that this is ever fresh. My father suffered a stroke before he died. His early childhood and maybe his teens and his twenties – he talked about those people all the time, he didn't remember anything about yesterday, he didn't remember the recent past at all. So maybe it is that things are stored when the blood was running red and fresh, when everything was young. INTERVIEW BY DAVID McKENNA

He experienced neighbourhood storytelling from an early age and described his carpenter father’s house as being a Rambling House, the local venue for the art of the storyteller in recent centuries. For those who thrilled to his radio and TV storytelling Eamon was the epitome of the seanchaí. There is an inaccuracy here. The term seanchaí described the communal bearer of multi-faceted traditional lore (seanchas). Eamon himself pointed out that he wasn’t a seanchaí - but 'played the part' of a seanchaí. Indeed, to be more accurate, he was more of a scéalaí (storyteller) – one of the several functions of the seanchaí. Given the nature of late 20th century Irish society it is questionable if the term seanchaí can now be applied to more than a few. (Some individuals like Paddy Lowry and Paddy Heany in the Slieve Bloom area may well approach that status.) It would certainly be inaccurate to give the term to most modern professional storytellers, given the fact that the traditional seanchaí was defined by the local audience to whom he (and it was usually a ‘he’) imparted his lore. It is ironic that the technology that did most to displace the traditional seanchaí – radio and television – was the same technology which bestowed the mantle of national popularity upon Eamon as a storyteller. By the mid 1950's the Rural Electrification project (begun in 1946) was changing the economic, social and cultural face of Ireland and around this time Radio Йireann began to devise entertainment programmes that approximated, on air, the 'rambling house', or 'ceidhlн house' format. The hugely popular Take The Floor, which was presented by Din Joe, and famously featured, for the first time, 'dancing on the radio' (not as daft as it sounds) began to feature Eamon in storyteller spots. He also guested on Ceidhlí House Tonight, which featured Sйan У Riada and his groundbreaking musical group Ceoltóirí Chualann. This led to Miceбl У hAodha giving Eamon his own programme, The Rambling House. While still a member of the Radio Repertory Company, he began to moonlight with some of the Ceidhlí House cast and present a version of the show in venues throughout the country. This new milieu, no doubt, occasioned a different kind of timing in response to the live reactions. Then, with the advent of the national television station, Eamon was featured telling tales for younger viewers. He had been pointed to traditional tales by Sean У Sъillabhбin of the Department of Folklore, in University College Dublin. He regularly visited the Gougane Barra region in West Cork to pick up tales and his fast developing repertoire was swelled by stories posted to him by his listeners. He notes that the source of one of his signature stories, The Looking Glass, was a traditional Chinese tale. Thomбs Mac Anna of the Abbey devised with Eamon a full-scale stage entertainment in Irish, featuring dramatised stories, music, mime, song, and dance under the title Scéal Scéalaí. Eamon went on to bring his storytelling persona to the stage in a series of seven one-man shows - In My Father's Time, The Story Goes, A Rogue of Low Degree, Bless Me Father, Your Humble Servant, The Rub Of A Relic and English That For Me (several of which he played in London and the U.S.) He christened this form of entertainment “theatre of the hearthstone.”(1) The move from a fireside seat to the stage called for a more active style of telling, one which he achieved with a mastery of ease that did not over-theatricalise the conversational integrity of his tales. Stories from these shows were published by Mercier Press and most of them are included in Ireland's Master Storyteller: The Collected Stories of Eamon Kelly (1998). (2) There was an essentially retrospective air of the revival to these presentations. As he said: Setting those stories in the past is a convention, as far as I'm concerned. And it also helps me to colour in all the things, because I'm drawing from the experiences of my own childhood. It might be noted that Eamon's early embodiment of the seanchaí had him playing the character as an old man, while the vocal texture of his telling changed over the years to more resemble his own natural voice. In a further irony, it is still common to find at rural folk festivals a young boy recycling Eamon's repertoire, dressed for the part in a suit, waistcoat and (junior-sized) iconic hat. An immaculate literary craft went into the assembling of his material (in this he resembled the great Armagh storyteller John Campbell.) Indeed the fine tuning of these stories reminds one of his background in carpentry and woodworking. One is reminded of the view expressed by the German thinker Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay, The Storyteller (Der Erzahler) (1936) when he says: A great storyteller will always be rooted in the people, primarily in a milieu of craftsmen. An essential function and impulse of the Tradition Bearer is to impart knowledge of the various crafts of the tradesman or farmer – a precise instruction on the traditional working technique. A story of Eamon’s like The Cat and the Splinter is less focused on the amusing anecdote it finishes with, but more essentially on the ‘how to’ of making a primitive light source from a bog deal splinter, a candle or a rush light. (The stories of John Campbell also often took a delight in the traditional crafts and passing on ‘how to do the job properly'.) Two theatrical productions to which Eamon was central drew much on the storytelling style - Stone Mad and The Tailor and Ansty (both of which, incidentally, bring together the ideas of a manual craft and storytelling). Miceбl У hAodha, commenting on his artistry, said: He is one of that rare and disappearing breed of men who, to paraphrase F.R. Higgins, could rib a ship or turn the secret joinery of song and story. An essential ingredient of Eamon’s art was a delight in the twists and turns of his native Kerry dialect. As he himself said of the Tailor Buckley: He brought much of the rhythm and music of the Irish language to English. His fellow Kerryman, the playwright John B. Keane, memorably described Eamon in full flight: He can take a word or phrase and swing it in front of you like a hypnotist’s pendulum so that he captivates you … It’s a magician’s art. But perhaps central to Eamon's style was his always teasing sense of humour. Reflecting on the peasant audience for storytelling in the past, he said: They were people who really had it very hard to live and they were dispossessed in many ways. And what saved them was the sense of humour, the sense of the ridiculous. A typical example of his humour can be found in his version of the children's Fianna tale, The Giant From Scotland, in which hesays: There was great trouble in the world that time too. Wars and rumours of wars, and giants came from Greece to fight the Fianna but if they did they were quiet men going home. Other publications of his include two collections of tales for children: The Bridge of Feathers and The Enchanted Cake; his two-part autobiography (again invoking the craftsman-like nature of his trade): The Apprentice and The Journeyman. His last public performance was at the Courtmacsherry Storytelling Festival in September 2001. He passed away six weeks later on October the 24th and is buried in Fingal cemetery. In 2004 the Storytellers of Ireland Irish Storytelling Handbook was dedicated to Eamon and the late Alice Kane. Let's finish with examples of a few of the traditional closing 'tags' or codas that Eamon delighted in. So put a sod on the fire, give an apple to the child and pour a drink for the storyteller. Or this one, which he favoured (and had adapted from a tag collected by Seamus Delargy in 1935 from a Galway teller, Йamonn б Bъrc): They went the lower road, I came the high road, they crossed over the stepping stones and I came by the bridge, they were drowned and I was saved and all I ever got for my storytelling was shoes of brown paper and stockings of thick milk. I only know what I heard, I only heard what was said and a lot of what was said was made up to pass the night away! (1) Folklore was central to the style of ‘peasant plays’ which became the signature contribution of the Abbey to world theatre. The first Irish language play ever presented in a proper theatre was Casadh an tSúgáin (The Twisting of the Rope), a one-act comedy by Douglas Hyde. Hyde was a founder of the Gaelic League in 1893 and a committed and notable collector of folklore. (He later went on to be the first president of the independent state) Casadh an tSúgain was based on a theme from folklore where a poetic stranger enters a community with dramatic consequences. It was presented as part of a double bill in 1901 with Diarmuid and Grania by W.B.Yeats and George Moore for the Irish Literary Theatre, a fore-runner of the Abbey. Reviewing Hyde’s play for a Paris magazine, L’Européen, J. M. Synge immediately glimpsed the significance of the work. It was to trigger his own creation of a folk theatre and he was to use variants of the same theme in two of his later masterpieces, The Shadow of the Glen (1903) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907). (2) Amongst his papers held in the National Library of Ireland are124 stories, compiled by Йilнs Nн Dhuibhne, many of them classified using the Arne-Thompson international folktale classification.