First, thanks to all you lovely people who have voted for me to get the Lifetime Achievement Award which will be given out later today, September 29th,  in the BASE Awards ceremony in York. Lots of people have written to tell me they voted for me and I feel extremely touched. Whether I get the award or not feels quite unimportant compared with that kind of support.

Secondly, I’m glad to report that I did stop dithering about what my next series will be. Come back to next week’s Blog to see.

Thirdly, I just can’t resist two excellent items for telling that I came across this week. One is a loveable limerick that I’d written down in my Storytelling Journal back in the year 2000. The other – like my hay bales picture – has to do with harvests.

The Loveable Limerick:

Little Miss Myrtle sat on a turtle
Thinking it was a chair.
‘Ow-ee!’ said the turtle
‘I’m sorry,’ said Myrtle.
‘But I didn’t know you were there.’

By the way, my Storytelling Journal is an invaluable resource. Looking back at what I wrote in the year 2000 makes it obvious that someone who attended one of my storytelling workshops had told me that loveable limerick. Yet when I came across it all this time later, I had not a single recollection of it. Odd since I must have written it down because I was thinking it would be ideal for storing in that mental file of stuff that can come in amazingly handy on some entirely unexpected occasion.  I still think so! All I’ve got to do now is not only remember it but remember that I know it.

My second item fits into the category of stories for Autumn which is one of the things I was dithering over last week. It’s a traditional tale, here retold by me, and I think it’s ideal for young children. As to why I’d forgotten all about this too, I have no idea. I’m glad to have come across it again. It was in a neglected folder labelled Seasonal Tales that was languishing in my filing cabinet. (more…)

Next Saturday’s blog will start a new series. So far, I haven’t decided the subject. Anything you’d like to see? Please jot a note in the Comment box at the end of this blog and I’ll try to respond.

Next Thursday, March 1st, it’s going to be World Book Day, St David’s Day and my next WIPs meeting all on the same day. World Book Day speaks for itself – a day to celebrate the book, it’s usually a busy one for authors and storytellers. St David’s Day, in case you don’t know already, is the national day of Wales. It marks the death of our Patron Saint. As for WIPs, that’s a group of us who meet every couple of months to present something creative we’ve each been working on. Among us are singers, pianists, an oboe player, writers, a composer of music and a sculptor. Next Thursday, I’m planning to do a story set in Wales.

Here meantime is another Welsh story, the last in my series for younger children and an ideal story for telling next week.

The Door In The Mountain

Once there was a girl who loved singing and running. One day when she was playing hide and seek with her friends, she ran away from the rest to look for a place to hide and came across a door in the mountain. The door was ajar and she went inBehind the door was a tunnel and at the end of the tunnel was sunlight. So Betsy Bankhouse – for that was her name – crept through the tunnel until she came out on the other side and there she discovered she was in a new world that she’d never seen before.

As she looked round, Betsy saw a big blue lake and in the middle of the lake she saw an island. She desperately wanted to go there and when she got down to the edge of the lake, she saw exactly what she needed. It was a boat.

So Betsy got in and rowed that boat across the water till she came to the island. As she started climbing out, she noticed there were lots of little people looking out at her from the reeds. They said, ‘Welcome to our island, Betsy Bank-house.’ ‘That’s funny,’ thought Betsy, ‘how did they know my name?’ (more…)

Little Bear In The Snow

Here’s the story (as specially improvised for a snowy week):

Little Bear loved going out. One morning he woke up and looked out of the window and saw that everywhere was covered in snow.

Little Bear was very excited. He told his Mummy, ‘I’m going out.’ So he put on his boots, his hat and his gloves and off he went. (His Mummy watched him, of course.)

First he scrunched down the path leaving great big footprints in the snow. And when he got to the gate, he saw the long road in front of him all covered with snow.

Little Bear loved going along the long road. So he went through the gate and started to run. First he scrunched his way to the hill. In the snow, it looked all white and shining. He couldn’t wait to get to the top. And when he did, do you know what he saw?

His own toboggan! Someone had left his toboggan on top of the hill. So Little Bear got on it and slid down the hill. WHEE-EE-EE!

At the bottom of the hill, he carried on stomping through the snow – SCRUNCH! SCRUNCH! SCRUNCH! – until he came to the river. He was excited to see that the river was all frozen over with ice. So do you know what he did? Little Bear slid across it – WHOOSH!

And when he came to the other side, he carried on SCRUNCH! SCRUNCH! – till he came to the end of the road. And when he looked down, do you know what he saw? (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

Making Connections moves on this week to another story involving a key and the role of pattern in it. It’s a story in the style of the traditional tale.

Keys – and a tale for telling to children

Traditional tales

Traditional tales are one of the three great categories of stories where storytellers look for stories to tell. For some, their favourite category is personal tales like my last week’s story of a forgotten key. Others believe that storytelling is essentially about creating new stories, maybe even making them up on the spot. That’s something we’ll move to in a couple of weeks.

For most of the working storytellers I know, however, traditional tales form the bedrock of the stories we tell. We may reformulate a story, update it, relocate it or otherwise change it in all kinds of ways. But we like to maintain that, whatever we do, traditional stories are fundamental. They’ve stood the test of time. They occur in all cultures. They contain keys to the problems of life. Myth or legend, fairy story or fable, ballad or morality tale, they are at the heart of storytelling.

For many people – new storytellers especially – this raises one immediate problem. (more…)