The Power of Telling

I began my storytelling career in 1981.The Shoreham-Wading River Middle School cast me as Hans Christian Anderson in the musical play by the same name. Up until that point in my life (all 30 years of it) I had never acted in a play. I was enthralled by the focus of the audience as I played my part and told Anderson’s stories and sang the songs from the play. It prompted me to read up as much as I could about storytelling and go, that October, to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee.

When I returned I was all set to tell stories in my classroom. I read a Jack Tale from the book Jack Tales, by Richard Chase entitled, “Jack and the Doctor’s Girl”. It was a fairly long story that was sort of broken into two sections. Part one dealt with how Jack linked up with some robbers to get the $1,000 needed to allow him to see the doctor’s daughter. The second part had to do with Jack proving to the doctor that his getting the $1,000 through trickery wasn’t a fluke.

I read the story a couple of times through and then decided that I would break it into two learning sessions. I focused on the first part solely. I thought I could learn it, tell it in class and then stop at the end of part one. I would then learn the next part for the following week and finish telling the story. As in most Jack tales, it didn’t quite work out that way.

I told the first part of the story and my class wouldn’t let me stop. That left me with telling the rest of the story from memory, having read it only a couple of times. I did and the class loved it. I was hooked.

Since I enjoyed the Jack Tale genre, I decided to tell similar tales on successive weeks. I previously decided that when I told these stories it was for listening purposes only. There would be no quizzes or work to do following the telling of my stories. The students really enjoyed the stories I told.

It was after my third Jack tale I discovered something both interesting and valuable as a storyteller/teacher.

The tale that I told was a typical Jack story, involving Jack and his brothers Will and Tom. This story was based on a story I had heard Donald Davis tell at the National Storytelling Festival and also involved a doctor and his daughter. In the story Jack is walking up to the doctor’s house to cure the doctor of his three illnesses. As he passes a herd of sheep, he notices some brown pellets on the ground behind each sheep. Now the line in the story goes, “Jack didn’t know what he could use them for, but he scooped up some of those pellets and took them with him.” As you can guess by the end of the story, he does use them and does get to marry the doctor’s daughter.

As the students in the class were returning to their seats I overheard students conversing with each other about the story. One comment went something like this: “You can’t tell me that Jack didn’t know how he was going to use those pellets when he picked them up.” The students then referred to other stories I had told them in the past and how Jack did the same thing all of the time. Without me teaching them, or planning a lesson, or questioning them these students were analyzing characters, motivations, plots, etc. All important things for writers of literature to know.

I realized that storytelling was much more powerful than I had imagined. Its practicality in a school/family setting was exceedingly important. Storytelling became a more important part of my life and direction for my future endeavors.