Early last Saturday morning, a very old friend of mine passed away – the artist, John Knapp-Fisher. John lived in the North Pembrokeshire village of Croesgoch. He had his gallery and studio there, all part of his home, and I knew him for almost 50 years.

Knowing John and seeing his work over time has given me a lot to think about. Principally he made me think about seeing. John was primarily a landscape artist. His painting and drawing drew attention to the world as he saw it and felt it. In the strong way they did that, they became a means for other people to see it too.

One afternoon a few years ago, John and I drove together to Goodwick to look at where the 19th century Welsh storyteller, Shemi Wâd, had lived. The street has long gone. But John and I had studied a photograph of it – it’s the photo I’m including here – and for an hour or two we walked around, looking at where that street had been from every conceivable angle. I noticed what exact attention John paid to the details of seeing, the lie of the land, the different perspectives.

I didn’t know it at the time but the painting that emerged not very long later must already have been starting to live in John’s mind. It was a painting of Shemi and his street, a kind of view into an imagined past and also a recognition of how the past lives on.

I cherish the memory of that afternoon, as of so many other times with John. It made me think about how visualisation may work for an artist – different in some ways than for a storyteller but in some central ways the same. It strengthened my awareness of the powerful links between memory and imagination and that both are part of seeing. It also made me realise more fully than ever before how consistently John worked, his mind in a constant engagement with the world around him, its colours and shapes, how it changes and how it stays the same. (more…)

Nice to be asked back. New stories required. This will be the third time – or maybe the fourth, I must check my notes – that St Stephen’s School in Shepherds Bush has invited me to come to tell stories. This visit will be for a day in their Arts Week in March and I’m thinking fresh stories would be a good idea – for me as much as for them.  Even as this thought occurs, I’m also thinking that the process  of  preparing new stories could be  a good subject for a new series of blogs. So here goes: Repertoire Refreshment (for humans rather than pigeons)! Let me know if my approach appeals. Maybe you have a different perspective.

Step 1 – choosing a story

I’ve already started thinking about a story I read in a book. Now which book was it? It was ages ago. One I reviewed for School Librarian? Was it Middle Eastern tales? Palestinian perhaps? I’ll check my shelves. Meantime, I’m asking myself why this story in particular has come back to my mind. I’m trying to remember what it’s about. 

A young woman with two brothers. Her brothers disappear. There’s evil in the air and also magic. The young woman must get those  brothers back, she loves them, they’re an important part of her life. There’s a mountain she’s going to have to climb – it’s literal and symbolic and a big risk. But she sets out with courage and passion. First she succeeds in saving one brother. Then she manages to save the other. Despair and determination give way to joy. (more…)

One lunchtime in the New Year before we came back to London, we went down to the Sloop Inn, the pub in the village of Porthgain. It’s a popular pub. Over the years, we’ve spent many enjoyable hours there, sometimes sitting inside, sometime out. It’s a place where you can let time be easy.

As we usually do these days, we went to sit at the table in the corner by the bar that’s set aside for locals. Sadly, the number of these has declined of late but, I’m glad to say, I’m still regarded as a local even though I spend more time in London than Pembrokeshire. After all, I grew up in the area and I’m back there  often.

We were just finishing some fantastic crab rillette (it made me think of those poor crabs last week) when my old friend Morgan came and joined us at the table. Morgan has long been the manager of the Sloop and a fantastic job he does of it too. Like Eddie of last week’s crab story, Morgan also has a fund of hilarious tales. Many are descriptions of events in which he himself was involved. Many are stories you could call jokes. Whatever the sort, he makes them all seem so real. The particular story Morgan told on this occasion is a gem in my opinion and his telling of  it accords delightfully with my current thoughts on storytelling.   (more…)

How many times must I have chanted these words as a child while jumping onto the rock in my picture, trying to arm-wrestle other children off while I did so?

I’m the King of the Castle!

Get down you dirty rascal!

The rock was a familiar part  of my world. I accepted it as it was. I never thought about the whole shape and size of it for, until this very time last year, I’d never seen or imagined the lower half of it – not until the incredible storms that hit these shores had scoured out Whitesands beach, taking at least four foot of sand out to sea and leaving the whole of the rock exposed.

Then, last summer, going down to Whitesands beach  and looking leftwards, I was amazed all over again. This time, I couldn’t see the rock at all until I actually walked across the beach to look for it. I remember thinking someone must have stolen it for now, since the tides had brought the sand back, even the very  top of it could hardly be seen. (more…)

‘Why don’t you go round making a tape-recording of the stories of the street?’ That was the question of the tall young man at the party we went to on Thursday night. ‘Then you could offer it to the Lambeth Sound Archive,’ he said.

The party had come about in an unusual way. About a fortnight ago, two lovely young women had turned up at our door with a bunch of invitations. Although the street is, in my view, a very friendly and neighbourly street, I had never consciously seen either of these two before. Now here they were inviting us to a Winter Warmer.

And what an excellent occasion it turned out to be! The talk and the stories flowed. A particular part of the fun for those of us who’ve lived in the street for a while – and some of us have lived here an extremely long time – was when we got on to telling some of the stories of the street.

For instance, there’s the scaffolding story.  (more…)

If you’re looking for stories, chants and rhymes you might tell in the run-up to Christmas, please check back through my previous blogs. Just type the word Christmas into the Storytelling Blog References box on the left of this page. This will provide you with lots of links to previous blogs with Christmas stories. I hope you might find something to suit you. But if you’re interested in spending a moment thinking about some of the qualities that lie at the heart of storytelling, please read on. (more…)

Last weekend, we were trying to find our way round to Door 3 of the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff (we were there to sing on the pitch before the Wales/Fiji rugby game). When we got to Door 5 and the way wasn’t obvious, we asked an official standing in the road: ‘How do we get round to Door 3?’ His answer made us laugh (typical South Wales humour!): 

‘One foot in front of the other is usually recommended.’

I love people’s odd little ways of saying things. In recollection, they often turn into the kind of tiny tale I find so useful in my storytelling. They come direct from people’s perceptions. They’re true-life tales – fabulous for putting into the interstices of a storytelling session as connectors, sometimes because they’re odd or funny, sometimes because they can introduce the theme of a story I’m about to tell.

Maori style:

(more…)

Wildlife is always interesting. Most mornings these days when I draw the curtains, I see a big, handsome fox on the roof of the shed the other side of our back garden wall. Usually he’s still asleep. When he wakes, he stretches and yawns. Sometimes he then moves onto the tree-platform or storage-shed next door. I suppose he feels safe on these vantage points.

As for cuckoos, I learned a lot more about them last Saturday when I went to a fascinating talk on bird migration by a scientist from BTO (British Trust for Ornithology). Since then, thinking about what I learned has made me conceive a new storytelling idea namely, to devise something I could call The Cuckoo’s Story. As with the Mabinogion story I told in North Wales a couple of weeks ago, there’s a bit of a back story.

The back story:

Cuckoos were part of my childhood. In our living room, we had an elaborately carved cuckoo clock: the cuckoo would pop out each hour on the hour, much to my delight. Besides, all round my grandparents’ smallholding deep in the countryside near Cilgerran, I’d hear that crazy repetition of the cuckoos’ call throughout the  cuckoo season.

Then a couple of years ago, I was re-introduced to cuckoos by a friend (Hilary, a million thanks!), who told me about a cuckoo-tracking project being run by BTO. I signed up to sponsor a cuckoo. Welsh cuckoos were being included among the birds being fitted with tracking devices. There was even an invitation to suggest names by which the tracked birds could be known. I remember suggesting Taliesin, the name of one of the earliest Welsh poets.

So that’s how I started getting some cuckoo knowledge. In this Blog previously, I’ve mentioned the astonishingly long and (to me) heroic journey that our cuckoos make each year. Not that they’re really OUR cuckoos at all. Each year, they spend only about 6 weeks in the UK. Then they’re off –  across Europe, the Mediterranean and the Sahara and, after a sojourn in West Africa, down through Africa to the Congo. Then after their time in the tropical forests, they’re on their way back to the UK to breed.

New knowledge: (more…)

A set of tall tales that were told by the old Welsh storyteller Shemi Wâd provided the theme of the Research Seminar I gave this week at the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling in Cardiff. I loved preparing and giving the lecture.  An added pleasure was when a veritable posse of Cardiff storytellers turned up to join the academics in the audience.

One question that came up after my talk was whether the motifs of Shemi’s stories were shared with other storytellers of his time (he died in 1897) or whether they were special to him. A mixture of both, I’d say. As a sea port, Goodwick where he lived and its twin town Fishguard had plenty of sea-captains among their residents. And, as we all know, stories travel.

Certainly Shemi didn’t get his ideas from books. He was illiterate. The only book in his tiny cottage was a leather-bound copy of the Book of Revelation and, from one of our main sources on Shemi, the eminent Welsh writer Dewi Emrys,  we know that Shemi used it only to strop his razor every other day. When Dewi Emrys was a boy –  for, as a boy, he used to hang out with Shemi – he opened the cover of that leather-bound book and an enormous great cloud of the dust of ages flew out.

How a tradition grows: (more…)

A bit of patter is part of the art. It may be only to say where a story comes from, where and from whom you heard it. Or it may be something about the weather, the event or the audience you’re addressing. It may be some introductory narrative that includes something about being a storyteller (after all, lots of people still don’t know what to expect) or you may have a joke that puts people at their ease. Whatever it is, it’s all part of creating a receptive atmosphere.

Dylan Thomas in Fitzrovia:

This week, I participated in the Fitzrovia Festival, an annual week of events that take place in the area round London’s Fitzroy Square. This year’s festival has been dedicated to Dylan Thomas. I did two sessions of Dylan Thomas readings and, among other things, my patter for my second session included a delightful (and true) little story I once heard from one of the people involved. This was an English lecturer on a visit to South Wales to see her daughter and her daughter’s two little children. An excursion to Laugharne had been planned so as to visit The Boathouse where Dylan Thomas lived and the shed where he worked. The children had heard a lot about this proposed excursion and on the way in the car, one of them piped up from the back, ‘Mum, will we see see Dill and Thomas?’

For my first session, which I knew in advance would be for young children, one piece of patter that came in handy was what I’d discovered a few days previously when making decisions about what poems and prose-readings I’d offer. Two possible poem options – Poem in October and Poem On His Birthday sent me scurrying to look up when Dylan Thomas was born. A hundred years ago, yes. But when exactly? The answer was 22nd October – the very day of my readings.

Preparing for the 6-year olds:  (more…)