“All tommorrow’s flowers are in the seeds of today.” Spelling mistake included, this was the thought on a hand-written sign in a florist’s shop I passed on Friday.

The thought kept jangling in my mind. Where had I come across a similar idea? Surely it was only a few days ago? Surely I could remember? Then, this morning just before sitting down to write this blog posting, I did.

“Life is funny sometimes – how small acorns of an idea grow into something so much more and take on a life of their own.”

The comment was in an email earlier this week from a teacher I’d worked with a few years ago. At that time, she took up storytelling with her class in a big way. It’s great to hear that evidently she has stuck with it. Obviously, it’s grown into something important for her.

Both comments made me remember a story.

The story: Tomorrow’s flowers

Once there were two water pots. One was whole. One was slightly cracked. Each day, their owner, a farmer, would sling them over his donkey, one each side, to go and fetch water from the well.

On the way to the well every morning, the uncracked pot would mercilessly boast to the other. ‘I’ve got no cracks but you’re rubbish. I don’t know why our farmer doesn’t chuck you away.’

And so on…and on … Every day it was the same (and I think there are some people who are just as destructive in the way they put others down.)

In the end, the pot with the crack burst out to the farmer: ‘I can’t stand it any longer. I’m no use at all. You should throw me away. Who would want a pot that is cracked?’ (more…)

Two stories caught my attention this week. One is about a cuckoo so it’s a story I link with the element of air (hence my photo of sky). The other is about a message in a bottle that was recently fished out of the sea. This links in my mind with the element of water (hence my photo of a sadly rubbish-filled bit of the Thames). Both stories have caused me to ponder, partly because they so stirred my emotions, partly because they are true. (more…)

Hooray!!! Now you can subscribe to my Blog. See below for what to do. What a pleasure this facility has now been sorted – all thanks to the ever-helpful Tim Howe. Comment, Warwick, Poems, Subscription – it’s been a week of good things.

Comment

A comment from a reader always feels good to get. Jo had been enjoying my recent series on Getting Participation. She loves creating stories with children. She describes sitting with a piece of material and allowing the children to choose any object around the room. ‘We decide where we are, the material for example could be blue and shiny, maybe we are at the bottom of the deep dark blue sea. Each child takes a turn describing what their object may be: a cotton reel becomes a pirate ship, the pencil is the mast, the ship has sunk, the button becomes the treasure …’ And so, as Jo points out, they end up with their own story.

Warwick

On Wednesday evening, a hearteningly warm and engaged response came from the students on Hilary Minns’ excellent Storytelling Module at Warwick University. I’ve been going as guest storyteller to Hilary’s course for about ten years now. The students are all studying child development for a Foundation Degree. One of the stories I did with them was Little Bear on the Long Road. (The prop I always use for this story is on the right in a painting I made of him when I was in hospital four years ago.) On this visit, it was brilliant to meet the person responsible for setting up a similar course at Telford who had come along for the session.  I believe, and have always said so, that such courses should be available nation-wide. (more…)

Taking risks is not easy. You push yourself out of your normal groove. Then you see where you’ve got to. Sometimes you like it, sometimes you don’t. But whichever the outcome, hopefully there can be a morsel of learning.

A step on the road

For instance, I’ve never much liked photographing people, certainly not strangers in the street or the park. I feel a bit superstitious about it, like the Masai tribespeople I once encountered on a remote journey in Kenya. They didn’t want their pictures taken: they felt it was robbing them of their spirit. I feel a bit the same, as if taking something from people unawares. Last Sunday, however, I discovered I’d found a way to try it out.

We were sitting in Battersea Park by the river. A constant stream of people went walking by and I became fascinated. I liked the variety of clothes and ways of moving. I liked the rhythms of walking and the regularity of the steps. Suddenly I found myself with my camera raised, pointing at trees the other side of the path. Then I clicked whenever people crossed my camera screen. I liked the fact that it felt anonymous and that, on the whole, I was photographing people from the back. I include a few of the results today: evidence of me taking a risk. (more…)

It’s arrived. Storytelling for a Greener World is an important new book about how to engage people in our natural environment through stories and storytelling. The official launch date is April 11th and the foreword is by Jonathon Porritt of Friends of the Earth. The inspiration came from Alida Gersie and a wide range of storytellers provide the contents. The essay I feel privileged to have contributed is on the effects on teachers and children of working with a Pembrokeshire legend about the Preseli hills.

Storytelling for a Greener World is meticulously designed to provide a really helpful, inspiring resource. For details for buying it, see below.

My key word:

The key word for me is engagement. I increasingly realise it’s why I do what I do. Again on Wednesday, I felt its impact when spending the day at St Stephen’s Primary School in Shepherds Bush. The children remembered. They remembered me, they remembered my stories. I’d been there last year in their Arts Week. I’d gone there again a few weeks ago on their special day for celebrating stories. Now on Wednesday, their wish to let me know that they remembered came out strongly in all the groups, none of them more than the youngest. The little red monkey, Matty Treweller, Nokomis of the great rain … characters and themes from stories they’d previously heard from me were called out with great joy as each session began. It felt like the children were keen for me to realise that we’d already established a common bond through participating together in the world of story.

Where there’s been one story, there’s always another. (more…)

A girl pushes her fingers down the back of the rear seat of an abandoned Renault car in the scrapyard near her home. As she exlores the hole her fingers have found, she feels the hard-edged corner of what is surely a box. Determined to get it out, whatever it is, she returns to the scrapyard a day or two later. This time, she succeeds. She sees that the top of the box is covered with fabric which could be Indian or Chinese and inside, when she opens it, she finds a shining glass figurine of what looks like an elephant man. The elephant man will turn out to be a statuette of Ganesh, the Hindu god. But even before the girl finds that out, her questions have begun.

Questions on World Book Day:

At Ysgol Dafydd Llwyd in Newtown, Powys, on World Book Day this week, the children were brilliant at thinking what those questions might be. How had the box got down the back of the seat? Who put it there? Why? Who did it belong to? What might the figure be worth? How old could it be? Where was it made? Did it have any special significance? How much might you get if you put it on eBay? How long had it been in the Renault? Could you trace its rightful owner?

Ysgol Dafydd Llwyd: (more…)

Today is St David’s Day (more on that later) and also the last of my current series. Getting Participation has focussed on Early Years children but is applicable, I believe, to all ages. Enjoyment and relish of words; the value of vocal tone and pauses; the enormous power of silence – all such things can make an enormous difference in storytelling. On other previous occasions, I’ve written about rhythms, refrains and rhymes as vital in helping children to feel included and also, of course, about props.

But today I want to write about the over-riding point of all this, namely why participation is worth bothering about and the value of working to achieve it. I have a storytelling anecdote which might help me convey what I’d like to say.

Why it’s worth it:

One time I was telling stories to a class of 14 and 15 year-olds in a Welsh School in mid Wales. We were in an otherwise empty room for the storytelling. The pupils were sitting on cushions on the floor and looking very relaxed. Some began moving onto their stomachs, their heads propped up on their upraised hands. Suddenly, surprisingly, right in the middle of the story, one of the boys moved onto one arm, lifted his head up and spoke to the room. ‘What’s going on here?’ he said. ‘What’s happening to us?’ (more…)

I surprised myself this week. I wrote a poem in Welsh. It’s a mourning poem, an elegy, Marwnad in Welsh, and it came to me in my sadness at the death last Sunday of my good friend, the Guardian journalist Simon Hoggart. Simon had been a friend for 49 years, ever since we met in Cambridge. With all his restless humour, acute perceptions and capacity to make me laugh like a drain, he has felt like an integral part of my life ever since. But only after several days of returning to my poem for him did I begin to realise that my feeling in writing it had anything to do with my storytelling.

First of all, I don’t usually write poems. Yes, there have been one or two in the past. But despite loving and often reading poetry, I’ve never thought of writing it as something for me. Certainly not in Welsh. Only through attending a weekly Welsh class at London’s City Lit have I recently developed enough confidence to try writing anything at all in Welsh, let alone anything vaguely literary. Welsh was not the language of my home (my mother was English-speaking). I did not grow up bilingual. Yet I grew up surrounded by Welsh – for instance, in Primary School, we used to learn and recite a Welsh poem each week – and the sounds of Welsh have always run deep in my blood.

Now, as I gain confidence to start writing in Welsh, and particularly this week since starting that poem, I’m really beginning to understand how different languages endow you with different ways of seeing and feeling. And back with my poem, for it’s not yet quite finished, I’ve also made another connection. Mourning poems are a very strong part of Welsh poetic tradition. So although writing that poem for Simon felt like my own personal thought, I was actually picking up on something that I realise now was in my bloodstream.

So there’s the nub of it. It’s been a sad week. But it’s also been a good week. For I’ve started realising through sadness how much my storytelling has also owed specifically to my love of the Welsh language, its sounds, its intimacy and its grandeur. Every language has its own traditions. Every language has a world of seeing and feeling inside it. And through storytelling as through poetry, whatever the language we use, we endow our listeners with that seeing and feeling. Could anything be more valuable? And isn’t it really important to acknowledge this value in a country that has within it not only English and Welsh but, by now, such a huge diversity of people from other language-backgrounds too? (more…)

WIPs is the name we give to a group to which I belong. There’s no flagellation involved. WIPs stands for Works in Progress. Today, 30th November, we are having a long Saturday session in which all kinds of different things will be presented – songs, readings, piano pieces, a cello piece, some pots which one of our members has made, a sculpture another is creating and a piano duet that has been newly composed by the same group-member who is playing the cello.

For my part, I’ll be reading Shopping List, the story I mentioned last week. At the end of it (which will be just before tea), I’ll be asking the group if they can work out from the story what the shopping list had on it. For me, the experience will be a test of how well my story held their attention. For it’s a very true thing – it’s almost a storyteller’s rule – that you certainly won’t remember what you didn’t listen to in the first place.

Last week I said I’d include Shopping List in this week’s blog. But since the whole thing is four pages long in total, I’ll confine my offering to the first section. I do hope you enjoy it. I should add that it’s part fiction, part childhood memory, part current life. Items from the shopping list are in RED. 

The Shopping List Story:

It was early, but not THAT early, and already it felt like there was too much to do. (more…)

A few weeks back now, after an evening with a group of friends, one of them sent me a very nice email. It said he’d really loved a story I’d told and that he’d love listening to me even if I was just reading a shopping list. I was properly flattered and suddenly reminded of a couple of ideas I’d come across once when looking into memorisation techniques.

The ancient Greek technique

One idea from ancient Greece is an exercise for remembering a group of items. You start by mentally associating each item with an object in a room that you know. You have to really focus, making each association as intense or funny or fantastic as you can. After you’ve done that, you should be able to remember your group of items whenever you want to. Just take a mental walk round that room. As you catch sight of the objects in it, the associations you made should flood into your mind – and with them the items you wanted to recall.

The Shopping List Story

The shopping list technique is similar except that it involves creating a story. Perhaps you’re about to go shopping and you haven’t got any paper to make a list. Or maybe you’ve just got vast holes in your brain like I sometimes have these days. (It’s age!) Don’t panic. Mentally assemble the items you want to remember to buy and then start devising a story that connects them up. It can be any kind of story – as ludicrous, fantastical or realistic as you like. The activity could be a fantastic exercise for a class of children (aged about 7 or upwards?) Or equally satisfying with a gaggle of grand-children (Liz – could this be one for you?) Or maybe it’s just what is needed if you’re on your own (in bed with a cough).

Give it a whirl!

This week I’ve had plenty of time. The cough I’ve had for nearly three weeks suddenly became absolutely pernicious and I’ve have had to spend more than one day in bed. Boring. So I got out the two shopping lists my friend had sent me after I’d emailed him back. I hadn’t told him why I was asking him for a shopping list. I’d just said it was for a project I had in mind. Kindly, he sent me two. One was a list of ingredients for a Christmas cake. The other was an ordinary sort of list consisting of 17 different items.

Sitting in bed, I set about my story which I intend as a kind of present for him. I didn’t do much with the Christmas cake list – too long and complicated. But I didn’t entirely ignore it either. Come back next week and I’ll tell you what resulted – or part of it at least. Meantime why don’t you also give it a go? The full 17-strong list is below. If you’re doing it with a class of children, you could always suggest they select just three or four items for their storymaking.

The Shopping List:

Milk….Eggs, medium….Butter, unsalted….Orange juice….Cucumbers….Carrots….Green beans….Lemons….Limes….Diced stewing steak….Cream cheese….Andrex toilet roll….Persil non-bio washing powder….Dettol antibacterial surface cleaner….Stainless steel polish….Vitamin C/Zinc tablets….Tea tree and Mint shower gel

PS: Good luck!

Photos this week are pretty obvious. Cows to represent milk (and, yes, I’ve chosen these particular cows because they were the  most fetching I’ve ever photographed and in the most fetching place in New Zealand). And wooden eggs to represent real eggs (and isn’t it lucky they’re wooden since our cat takes the greatest pleasure in pawing them off their little dish whenever he jumps onto my desk). (more…)