The Elves and the Shoemaker

My choice as the first story in this series is one you probably know – The Elves and the Shoemaker. To illustrate it and the points that come after, I’ve selected some random pictures of shoes from my photo archive along with a couple I’ve taken this week.

Here’s the story: 

A poor shoemaker was down on his luck. He had only enough leather left in his workshop to make one final pair of shoes. He didn’t know how he and his wife would survive after that. But before going to bed, he cut out the leather thinking he would sew that last pair of shoes in the morning.

That night, while the shoemaker and his wife were in bed, two naked elves came to the shoemaker’s workshop and sewed and finished the pair of shoes.

In the morning, the shoemaker was almost speechless. WHO could POSSIBLY have made the shoes? And they were SO beautifully made, not a stitch was out of place. When a customer came into his shop that morning, he definitely wanted those shoes – and paid a lot of money for them. So now the shoemaker had enough money to buy leather for TWO pairs of shoes. Read the rest of this entry »

Thinking about how you present a story can really help your memory of it. Props, rhythms, sounds, actions – this blog has talked about all these before. On the right, for instance, is my sea-tray which I featured in The Magic of Objects. But thinking about memory gives a timely prompt for thinking about such things again. Also useful is beginning to think about how different stories relate to each other. All over this earth, in every culture past and present,  are stories with similar themes. Developing an awareness of the relationships between them – what’s similar, what’s different – helps with an awareness of story in general. It develops the memory muscles. And that’s what storytelling is all about – developing your muscles as a storyteller so as to feel confident about sharing your stories and giving your listeners the pleasure of them too. It’s not work that ever ends. But as you go on, the process becomes part of the way that you think.

1. Developing effective presentation

Developing your thoughts about how to present your story can really help you as the storyteller. Decisions about presentation help embed your memory of what you are going to tell. For instance,  it’s important to pay attention to how your story will sound and where you may add good sound-effects. This applies whether your story is destined for adults or children. Refrains where appropriate can also add texture and help your audience to follow the direction the story is taking.

Another possibility if you’re telling to children is to introduce the story with some kind of game that not only relates to the story but encourages visualisation. Read the rest of this entry »

Stories have shapes and structure – just like people or tables or trees. I love thinking about stories in these terms. It’s another kind of visualisation and it can lead to many happy half-hours with pencils and paper, doodling and drawing and finding ways to discover the different patterns underlying your stories.

But how do you see it? There’s a question! Maybe you’re the kind of person who likes to look at things in a geometrical way, making patterns that look a little bit like the exercise structures in my local park.

Or perhaps you prefer to look for natural patterns such as those made by the branches of trees? Read the rest of this entry »

Back in London, I’ve been walking round my local park thinking about one of my favourite stories. It’s a West African story about the Sun and the Moon and how they got into the sky. Whether with adults or children, I find it a great story for telling. It’s also a highly  productive story on which to base a workshop. It gives plenty of opportunities for image-rounds,visualisation, storymapping, hot-seating and other types of workshop activity which can all be seen as contributing to memory work. The story essentially deals with change, a theme which affects us all deeply. It stood me in excellent stead at a conference, now years ago, to celebrate and lament the end of the ILEA, the Inner London Education Authority, when Mrs Thatcher closed it down.

Here’s the story retold very briefly:

How Sun and Moon Got Into the Sky

When Sun and Moon still lived down on this earth, Sun used to go often to visit his friend. His friend was Water and one day Sun asked him why he was always the one to be making the visits. Why didn’t Water ever come and see him? Water said the reason was that he’d never been invited. Sun was apologetic. But when he asked Water to come and visit, maybe even that very day, Water expressed a worry that Sun’s house might not be big enough for him. When Sun assured him that all would be fine, Water suggested that Sun should go and make his house bigger. It wasn’t just him, Water explained to Sun; there was an awful lot in him besides. Read the rest of this entry »

What better time for thinking about memory than the start of a new year. And thinking about memory is what I plan to do in this blog over the next few weeks. I want to write about it in a descriptive way, paying account to how different kinds of remembering interconnect with each other. I hope you might respond with points from your own experience. Maybe they’ll tally with mine, maybe not.

Getting ready

As National Storytelling Week comes closer at the end of this month (details at http://www.sfs.org.uk/nsw), there’ll be people all over the UK engaged in work on remembering stories. Some may be nervously planning to tell a story for the very first time. Others will be old hands at both remembering and telling. Yet, though well-practised in the techniques, they too will be engaged in memory work – perhaps preparing a new story for one or other of the week’s events or maybe ‘re-remembering’, namely revisiting a story that they already know in preparation for retelling.

Some of my most fascinating chats about how memory works have been with a concert-pianist friend of mine who used to be my piano teacher. He has dozens of large-scale pieces of music literally at his finger-tips. If he was so disposed, he could sit down and play any or all of them straight off. Poor me, in contrast, I’m daunted at the prospect of memorising even one single page of music. How on earth do pianists do it? Read the rest of this entry »

As the sun sets on 2011, I’m thinking hard about my Storytelling blogs for 2012.

I’ll be starting them again next Saturday. But I’d love to hear from you about what you’d like to see them cover.

So do me a huge favour and let me know what topics you’d like to see and any questions you’d like to ask. I’d really like to make the blog as responsive as possible. I’d love to know if it’s useful to anyone out there – and in what way – and what you’d  like to see considered.

Please take a minute or two to send me an email – you’ll find the address at the end of my website. Or you could put your message in the Comment box at the end of this blog.

Meantime, all my best wishes for the New Year. I hope it begins really well for you and proves fulfilling as it goes on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a Welsh winter sunrise to wish you the best of all possible season’s greetings.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Just one week to go before Christmas Eve, which was my mother’s birthday. Each year the day brings memories of hilarious hours in the kitchen with my mother stuffing the turkey and massaging it with butter, making extra supplies of mince pies and sausage rolls and preparing vegetables for the Christmas dinner.

Another feature of my growing-up Christmases was getting out of bed in the shivering cold in time to get to Plygain, the 6 a.m. Christmas service at the chapel we used to attend, which was Tabernacl Chapel in St. David’s. Plygain is a traditional service which still takes place at cock-crow in quite a few different parts of Wales. On your way to Plygain, the sky is still dark. By the time you come out, wishing everyone “Nadolig Llawen”, “Happy Christmas”, the light is just coming into the sky.

By tradition, anyone who comes to the Plygain service in St. David’s can take part if they wish by giving a reading, a prayer or a Christmas carol. The last time I told the Baboushka story, which is my offering here today, was at a Plygain service.

Baboushka

The Baboushka story is Russian, ‘baboushka’ being the word for an old woman who, in a sense, is everyone’s grandmother. I love the story because it’s not just about giving, though this is its central theme. It’s also about the ability to change. ‘I’m too old to change,’ my father used often to say after he retired. Then in the last years of his life he began saying a different thing: ‘You’re never too old to change.’ It seems to me this is a useful approach in these difficult times. Read the rest of this entry »

Stars are the focus of this week’s blog – not the celebrity sort but the ones in the  sky. They are especially worthy of attention at this time of the year. The bright star in the East plays a vital part in the story of Jesus for those with Christian beliefs. And for all those who bother to look up in the sky on clear nights, I’m sure you’ll agree the stars look especially bright in contrast with December’s darkness. The longer I look up at them, the more they seem to draw me upwards into the sky to join them. They expand my sense of time and space.

Star Apple

The Star in the Apple is a much-told tale. I first heard it from my storyteller friend, Sally Tonge, and I loved it. You may know it already. It gets told and written in all kinds of ways with all kinds of different details. Just look it up on the Internet and you’ll see some significantly differing versions. But what I love most is that everyone’s version depends on the same central fact – so amazing to children and adults who never knew it before – that if you cut an apple across the middle, you’ll find it has a star inside. Read the rest of this entry »

Giving is at the heart of the Christmas story. It’s central to storytelling too. Sharing a story, you pass on something the recipient can either keep and ponder or pass on to others. Last week I was contacted by someone enquiring about a story I told over twenty years ago. The story had been remembered and often retold. And it hadn’t been ‘mine’ to start with,  but one of those traditional stories that gets remade from teller to teller.

In the Spirit of Christmas starts today with two items focused on children. The first is a Christmas-time chant – and I’m including it in this first Christmas blog in the hope that it will give any of you who work with children plenty of time to get to know it before sharing it in the run-up to Christmas.

The second item is a story generally known as The Little Fir Tree.

Going to See Father Christmas is a chant I created myself but on a traditional pattern. I’ve used it many, many times, always with enormous enjoyment both for myself and my audiences. As my pattern (for I believe in recycling tried and true materials), I used the well-known action chant, Going On A Bear-Hunt, which you may already know either in its traditional oral form or from Michael Rosen’s book of that name. Read the rest of this entry »