My current series of postings is about how to get children actively participating in stories. As the basis of today’s tip, I’m focussing on a well-known nursery rhyme. It’s come back to mind because of what’s been going on recently in the outside world. The pot-holes in my road have been overflowing with it. People at London bus-stops have been moaning about it. Friends have asked glumly if it’s ever going to stop. And of course the ‘it’ has been the rain. Here’s the nursery rhyme:

     Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
     In a shower of rain
     He fell in a puddle
     Right up to his middle
     And he never went there again.

Because of the incessant rain – and today’s clear skies in London serve as a reminder of how bad it’s been – this rhyme could be a good one to include in Story-time soon. It may even be an advantage if the rhyme is already familiar to the children. Handled in a different way from usual, it can help you build up your techniques for getting participation from them. (more…)

Once again, it’s the time of year to tell the Star Apple story. It’s one of those stories that can be infinitely adapted to suit your audience. I love it. I also love hearing (as I did on the recent occasion when I got that Lifetime Achievement Award) that one storyteller who’d come across the story on this Blog then told it with great effect to an audience and absolutely loved the response. My great thanks to Sal Tonge who first told it to me.

Star Apple

A little child (make it a boy or a girl) is always saying, ‘I’m bored’. The child’s mother has plenty of answers – ‘tidy your bedroom’, ‘do your homework’ or ‘go and play with your toys’ – but the child keeps coming back with the same complaint. Then one day (probably sometime about now!) the mother says, ‘Well, why not go and find a little green house with a chimney on top and a star inside.’

The child is suitably mystified. He or she goes and searches the toy box. There’s nothing that fits the description.

Then the child goes out to the street. Up and down the street he or she goes, peering at all the houses one by one in case one has turned green, gained a chimney and developed a star inside. No luck.

At that point, the child goes to call on Granny who lives next door. ‘Gran,’ says the child. ‘You know Mum?’ ‘Yes,’ says Gran in that strange way that adults do. ‘Well,’ says the child. ‘Mum’s gone made. She said I’ve got to find a little green house with a chimney on top and a star inside. And there isn’t one.’

‘Well,’ said Granny. ‘Have you looked really hard?’ ‘Yes,’ says the child. ‘And there isn’t one.’

Then Granny says, ‘Well, Let’s go in the kitchen and we’ll have a look there.’

In the kitchen, Granny takes a green apple out of the fruit bowl and says, ‘See, here’s a little green house. And look,’ she says, wiggling the stem, ‘it has a chimney on top.’

‘But it’s supposed to have a star inside,’ says the child. ‘Well, let’s have a look,’ says Granny.

So Gran picks up her knife (be careful, don’t leave the knife hanging around).

And when she cuts the apple in half (and when you do it, don’t cut downwards but across the middle), she reveals the star inside.

Try it and see. Any children you know will be amazed and delighted. In my experience, so will the adults.  And that’s the end of the story except, of course, you could now cut up the apple and share it around.

Happy Christmas! Enjoy the magic. Enjoy the stars. And enjoy the prospect of a whole new year ahead.

P.S. I’ll be taking a holiday from my Blog over the next couple of weeks except perhaps for putting up a picture or two. (more…)

Why is it that the stars in the sky especially draw our attention in winter? In the deep darkness of this part of the year, they seem to shine all the brighter.

As well as playing a prominent part in the story of the birth of Jesus, stars are present in so many of our Christmas traditions – at the top of the Christmas tree, in street decorations, on Christmas cards. For me, they are a vital theme in stories for this time of the year.

Stars are about the magic of looking up into the sky and feeling an immensity that’s beyond our imagining. Yet our imaginations lengthen and widen in the very act of looking.

Loawnu Mends the Sky: a Chinese story

One star story I love telling to children is about how the stars first got into the sky. I came to know it in a beautifully written version which was sent to me by Vivienne Corringham for possible inclusion in my collection of stories, Time For Telling.

Time For Telling came out in 1991. It proved very popular and  ‘Loawnu Mends The Sky’  deserved its place there.  It’s very well worth looking up. If you can’t find Time For Telling, (it’s out of print but is still held by many libraries), you might be able to track down the two paperback volumes into which it was later divided. ‘Loawnu Mends The Sky’ is included in the volume entitled, The Big-Wide-Mouthed Toad-Frog. What follows is my summary of it – but it’s really not difficult to imagine how to fill it out for a full telling. (more…)

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat and it’s time to tell some good winter stories, the sort that give us the kinds of symbols we need at this time of the year. Light in the darkness. Kindness to others. The beauty of giving presents. Getting together and making good cheer.

So between now and Christmas, I’ll be doing what I usually do – reminding myself of some of the stories I’ve found it good to tell in the lead up to Christmas.

My story today is really about the power and comfort of light. It has no specific link to Christmas. Yet it feels as if it fits. For as my South African god-daughter noticed when she came here the first time – it was what made her feel the British winter was special – lights in the darkness are magical things. Candle-light, firelight, the sparkle and dazzle of Christmas lights in the trees – even the Oxford Street lights this year, lights within giant white snowballs, are enough to bring a sense of wonder and cheer.

So here it is, a Chinese story about a young man who gets lost in the darkness on his way home after finishing work late one very cold winter night. The young man is called Kuan Lo and my name for the story  is The Path of Light.

The Path of Light

It was very cold and very dark and very late when Kuan Lo started walking home. Worse still, when Kuan Lo was crossing the moor that he had to cross in order to get home, he suddenly realised he didn’t have a clue where he was. Somehow or other, he’d lost his way. Then, just as he was wondering what he could possibly do, he saw the flames of a fire ahead and from the same direction came the sound of laughing voices.

When Kuan Lo reached the fire, he saw a most surprising sight. Sitting very comfortably on the ground round the fire were a whole lot of big men. They looked just like wrestlers usually looked and Kuan Lo felt a little bit worried. What if they started to fight him?

Instead when the men saw him, they called out in the friendliest way. ‘Come and have a drink with us!’ So Kuan Lo sat down and at once they were all chatting and laughing. The men were extremely sympathetic when Kuan Lo said he was lost and then after a while, they said they’d like to show him a trick that they had. Kuan Lo wondered what they were going to do.

Well, each one of the wrestlers stood up – they were very big men with big, fat stomachs – and in an instant they were climbing on each other’s shoulders, one after the other, until they’d made a high tower of people. It seemed to reach up to the stars. Kuan Lo looked up at it in amazement. Then, oh dear, it started to wobble and suddenly the tower of people was falling. And it fell, but very slowly and gently, until it was lying flat on the ground.

But when Kuan Lo looked where the tower had fallen, he saw no people, just a long path of white light. At once, the path of white light began moving slowly, gradually, over the moor. Kuan Lo was amazed and started to follow. And do you know what? That path of white light took him all the way home. It didn’t seem to take long to get there and when Kuan Lo saw his own little house, he felt very glad and grateful. ‘Those wrestlers made a path of light and it’s brought me safely home,’ he said to himself as he opened his front door and stepped inside. ‘I’ll never forget them’.  And he never did. (more…)

Do I dare call myself a storyteller? Hallowe’en is a popular time for storytelling. Yet I absolutely hate Hallowe’en – not because of the spectres, witches, zombies and demons but because of the commercialisation. Fancy-dress clothes get hired, kids run round knocking on doors, then look at you blankly when you appear, not sure what to say or quite why they’re there.

Baba Yaga

I don’t like Hallowe’en but I like Baba Yaga, the ugly old hag of Russian fairytale. She seems entirely the sort of ambivalent character we could do well to remember at this time of the year. A creature who inhabits the shadows, she lives in the depths of the forest in a hut with chicken legs that spins endlessly round. To get in to the hut, indeed to survive Baba Yaga at all, you have to know the correct thing to say. According to Afanas’ev, the Russian story-collector, she uses her very long nose to poke the fire and her sharpened iron teeth to devour young, tender victims.

But it’s often possible to outwit Baba Yaga. In fact, sometimes you feel she’s got something extremely insightful about her – for if you have courage and a good, kind heart, she ultimately respects it and will spare you. And when she spares you, you will afterwards be all the stronger for it.

HAG

Last week, I encountered Baba Yaga when I went with one of my god-daughters to see a play called HAG at the Soho Theatre in London. Produced by The Wrong Crowd company, the play generally followed the pattern of Vasilisa the Beautiful, one of the most well-known of Baba Yaga stories. It made strong use of puppets but was by no means aimed at young children. From its hilariously satirical approach to the stepmother character and her two mocking daughters (these were shown as a bodiless, twin-headed puppet), I could sense how it would appeal to the teenage audiences for whom it’s apparently at least partly intended. The play’s main character is a sweet-natured girl whose mother has died. With so heartless, vain and cruel a stepmother, she has in consequence to face some of the worst demons this world can throw up.

Coming out of HAG, it was particularly nice to encounter a large group of young women who, it turned out, had been brought to see the play by their English teacher. They had obviously got a lot from it.

So let me recommend Baba Yaga stories for audiences young and old. Plenty can be found on the Internet and, for young children, there are a number in picture-book form. In these, quite suitably for the age-group, Baba Yaga is usually presented simply as a witch who has to be fled. HAG reminded me that Baba Yaga’s significance can be more complex and, as such, her appeal far wider.

And meantime remember your clocks …

Yes, do remember to turn your clocks back on Saturday night or Sunday morning.

I well remember the occasion when Paul and I were in Italy on holiday and, over several days towards the end of our holiday, were surprised to notice that our hotel dining room was virtually empty each time we turned up there for dinner. Not until the morning that we left did we understand why.

Because of the earliness of our departure, we’d organised with the hotel-owner the night before that he would be up early in the morning to sort out our bill. We got up. He wasn’t there. Indeed, he had to be sent for and when we finally saw him coming up the road, he was still doing up his trousers and repeatedly calling out ‘Mama Mia’ in a long-suffering voice as if he couldn’t quite believe what these mad British people were up to. Shortly afterwards, we realised why. Days before, the clocks had gone back. We’d been completely oblivious.

Got any similar stories? The theme’s a good one for story-sharing. (more…)

It’s great to come across a new collection of extremely tellable tales. Girls, Goddesses and Giants by Lari Don (A & C Black) has just this week come into my hands as one of a lovely pile of books I’ve been sent to review for School Librarian magazine. Chris Brown, the magazine’s long-term Books Editor, is just about to retire from that position. He’s done a marvellous job over all of the years. I shall miss him. He always seems to know what books I will value receiving.

Girls, Goddesses & Giants addresses a continuingly important need in stories, namely for strong girl heroines. When I was growing up, I always identified with the young men who were the usual fare in the hero department. Heroines were in shorter supply. Whenever a brave prince was rescuing a kidnapped princess doomed to be sacrificed to a voracious dragon, I became the sword-wielding prince as well as the princess.

Lari Don is not only an author. She’s a practising storyteller too. She has felt the same strong need. And as she says in notes at the back of her book (these include helpful hints on adapting stories to suit your own style), she has felt compelled to satisfy it even while actually being in the middle of telling to an audience of children. The 12 stories in her collection come from all over the world. One of my favourites is a Cameroonian tale, Mbango and the Whirlpool. It brought back to my mind Philip Pullman’s point, made in the interview I quoted a week or two back, that a main reason why children love folktales and fairytales is their belief in justice. They want to see fair play being done. (more…)

A surprise contribution to this blog arrived this week from Jean Edmiston, my friend and long-term colleague as a storyteller. Jean lives and works in her native Scotland these days so I don’t get to see much of her.

But we often speak on the phone about stories, storytelling and our common approach, which is to believe in how stories can empower imagination for everyone if they are approached in a sharing way. Below is what Jean wrote.

The bag of pebbles (more…)

August days are times to relax, take your shoes off, go for a swim. They’re also times off for your mind, opportunities to notice things in a different kind of way, mull them over and allow the seeds of a story to sprout in your mind.

Years ago, Paul and I went on holiday to the isles of Mull and Iona. We were intrigued, on Mull, by the number of mail-boxes we passed. Again and again there they were on the road-side at the turn-off to farms and houses. Contraptions where the postman could leave people’s post, they came in different colours, shapes and sizes. Many looked like little houses. We couldn’t help noticing and commenting on them. In a flash, Mr Beaton existed.

The mail-box story (more…)

This week I’ve been struck once again by the continuing tale of the cuckoo. The tale is told in serial form in regular blogs from the BTO (British Trust for Ornithology). What enables it to be told at all is the electronic tag. By tracking a small group of selected cuckoos on their annual migrations, these tags are helping scientists to establish what particular difficulties are contributing to the marked decline in cuckoo numbers in Britain. The cuckoo whose tracking I’ve helped support by contributing a small sum of sponsorship money is one that has been called Lloyd. He’s one of the cuckoos from my native Wales.

But it wasn’t Lloyd who became the centre of attention in this week’s BTO blog. It was one of the English tagged cuckoos called Chris.

The Cuckoo’s Tale (more…)

Two significant dates are in view. March 1st is St David’s Day. Whether you’re religious or not, it’s an important day for people in Wales and for Welsh people outside it. It’s the time to pay special attention to the gentle Patron Saint who as he was dying urged those around him ‘to do the little things’. Gwnewch y pethau bychain. I think what St David said is important, namely attending to the detail of people’s needs in the world around you. Which I hope includes valuing the part stories can play.

A great story for St David’s Day is the one I call The Door in the Mountain. To find it, please look back in my Blog Archives to my posting for February 2012. When you read the story, you’ll see it’s not only got daffodils in it – and of course daffodils (or leeks) are the St David’s Day emblem. In the story, a single daffodil becomes an apt symbol of wonder, living on in the mind long after the real daffodils the little girl finds have gone brown and withered and died.

World Book Day 2013

A week later on March 7th comes World Book Day 2013. This day gives a chance to celebrate what books do for all of us who have access to them. Fact or fiction, they can take us into worlds we might never otherwise reach, transcending time and place and our own physical selves to enable us to see things from other points of view. I hope it also prompts us to remember organisations like Book Aid – for there are still too many people in this world who do not have access to any books (or Kindles or the Internet).

One of my best stories for telling makes a bridge between St David’s Day and World Book Day. The kernel of it was told to me at a Local Legends workshop I led in St David’s. The rest developed around that kernel as I told it and retold it. I recently wrote it – not the story itself so much as my experience of telling it. I hope you enjoy what I wrote. (more…)