Storytelling Starters ~ Monkey
Saturday, May 24th, 2014
Two separate events have brought monkeys into my mind this week. One was receiving a message from a student on the Warwick University course I visited a few weeks ago. She was getting in touch to ask me where she could find a copy of the Little Red Monkey story that I’d told in my session. She’d liked it and now hoped to tell it. But she hadn’t been able to find a copy either on this blog or my website.
This surprised me: it’s one of my favourite stories for children and I thought I’d posted it on this blog a while ago. So I sent her a copy and told her she could also find it in my book, Stories for Young Children and How to Tell Them (A & C Black).
Now, of course, I feel I must remedy my previous omission. So please look below for the story with, at the end, a few hints on how you might tell it. Also if you’d like to hear me telling it there are links to my website.
First, though, here’s a thought-provoking little poem. It’s called The Prayer of the Monkey and it comes from the set of poems, Prayers from the Ark, that I acquired a few weeks ago. Prayers from the Ark was written in French by the little-known poet, Carmen Bernos de Gasztold. It was translated into English by Rumer Godden and, in the version I have, was published by Macmillan in 1966. Last Sunday, I read the whole set to a special group to which I belong. We call the group Works in Progress or WIPs for short. When we meet, each of us presents something creative that we’ve been working on.
This time, I presented Prayers from the Ark. I feel the poems are ideal for speaking aloud (reciting poetry was one of my loves as a child) and I hope soon to be offering public readings of them, for example for charity concerts. I see them as fables that are in tune with one of the world’s great needs of today – that we should as a species become far more aware that we share this beautiful earth with all kinds of other creatures, both wild and domestic. So here is The Prayer of the Monkey. But the monkey is not the loveably cheeky monkey of most people’s imaginations. It’s a melancholy monkey. It might make us think! (more…)