Is it just me? When I’m going on walks, I’m always childishly delighted when I spot a face or an animal shape in a rock or a tree. It’s like playing The Transformation Game, only in the landscape.

The Transformation Game

This storytelling game arose from my fondness for objects – plus the fact that, on a visit to Bruges, I’d acquired a double-lidded basket in a Sunday market. It became enormous fun to ply this basket with unusual objects, then play The Transformation Game with different suitable groups.

The Basic Plan:

As the facilitator, you first point out that you’ve got a double-lidded basket and that, inside, there are some interesting items.

Then you ask for a volunteer to come forward and choose which lid of the basket to open. Of course, both lids open onto the same inside but it’s a bit of fun to pretend that the choice is real.

Now you ask your volunteer to feel around in the basket and, not looking at what’s inside, to pull out an object of his or her choice. And of course, if it’s children you’re working with, they’re going to enjoy tittering about the possible things they might feel – a living snake or a real eye. (more…)

Storytelling games help develop useful qualities in the storyteller. Quickness of mind; the power of a single word to change a story’s mood and direction; the fun of the unexpected – all these are exercised when you get going.

Some games are great for groups. More on that next week. Some can be like solitaire – good for playing on your own or maybe with one other. Hence this week’s item, The Insert Game.

I’ve only ever shared The Insert Game with friends before. The example I’ve created for this week’s blog involves a cat. (Not surprising since I love cats!) So my illustrations today are also of cats – one I spotted on a Pembrokeshire roof, the neighbours’ slinky gray, our own lovely black cat Minky and an exotic Brixton stray cat which we refer to as Big Balls (because that’s what he has).

The Insert Game: Background

I quite literally developed this game in a dream. (more…)

My Easter gift is an engaging Russian story-rhyme that I’m calling The Easter Egg. I hope you’ll like it and, between now and Easter, maybe share it with someone else. For me, it brings back some favourite memories.

For several years after it re-opened to the public, I was a kind of storyteller-in-residence at Somerset House on the Strand in London. At holiday-times, I’d do storytelling sessions on all kinds of themes. One theme was Somerset House itself: it abounds in historical tales. Another theme was gold and silver: Somerset House became the home of the Gilbert Collection of gold and silver treasures before this was moved to the V & A. Other themes were provided by the special big art exhibitions that were mounted at Somerset House. One I particularly remember was of Treasures from Russia. It gave me the reason and prompt for researching a repertoire of Russian tales that could relate to some of the marvellous objects that were on show.

Rare and beautiful egg-shaped boxes came up in several of these connections. So I was delighted when I succeeded in finding a Russian egg story to put in my rattle-bag of tales for telling at Somerset House.

Here it is. But I’m afraid I can’t tell you exactly where I originally found it. No doubt in some old volume of Russian traditional tales. Which one exactly I don’t remember. (Note to self: ALWAYS keep a note of where you find a story. Years later, you’ll kick yourself if you don’t because by then you’ll have forgotten.)

The Easter Egg

This is a story about a little Russian girl who lived with her father and mother right next to her grandmother’s farm.

This little girl would often help her granny by feeding the animals or collecting the new-laid eggs.

One day just before Easter, her mother was making bread in the kitchen.

Her father, who was the local priest, was in church preparing his Easter service.

Then something terrible happened. (more…)

This week’s story is another of my favourites. It’s for the upper age-range of younger children, not the very young ones. (See my comments at the end of the blog.) 

Mr and Mrs Hak-Tak

Mr and Mrs Hak-Tak were very poor. They didn’t have much of anything at all – not much food, not much money, not much time to rest. They both used to work very hard.

One day, Mr Hak-Tak was digging over the piece of land where he always grew his vegetables. Suddenly, his spade hit something hard in the earth. He heard it! CLANG!

‘That’s funny,’ said Mr Hak-Tak. ‘I’ve dug this ground a lot of times. But I’ve never heard a clang before.’

Mr Hak-Tak was VERY puzzled. He dug down until he discovered what had made the noise. He dug it out. It was a big metal pot – a VERY big metal pot.

‘That’s strange,’ said Mr Hak-Tak. ‘I’ll take it home to show Mrs Hak-Tak.’

But when Mr Hak-Tak picked up the pot, he couldn’t hold it at the same time as his purse. So he put the pot down, put his purse inside it, then picked up the pot and carried it home.

Mrs Hak-Tak was astonished. ‘Where did you get that pot?’ she said. When Mr Hak-Tak explained, she was even more surprised. ‘Well, it looks like a very nice pot,’ she said. ‘It could come in useful. So I’ll give it a clean.’

It was when Mrs Hak-Tak started cleaning the pot that she noticed Mr Hak-Tak’s purse inside it. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I put it there to carry it home. I’ll take it out.’

But when Mrs Hak-Tak went back to the pot, she couldn’t quite believe her eyes. Inside was Mr Hak-Tak’s purse! (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…)

Stars are the focus of this week’s blog – not the celebrity sort but the ones in the  sky. They are especially worthy of attention at this time of the year. The bright star in the East plays a vital part in the story of Jesus for those with Christian beliefs. And for all those who bother to look up in the sky on clear nights, I’m sure you’ll agree the stars look especially bright in contrast with December’s darkness. The longer I look up at them, the more they seem to draw me upwards into the sky to join them. They expand my sense of time and space.

Star Apple

The Star in the Apple is a much-told tale. I first heard it from my storyteller friend, Sally Tonge, and I loved it. You may know it already. It gets told and written in all kinds of ways with all kinds of different details. Just look it up on the Internet and you’ll see some significantly differing versions. But what I love most is that everyone’s version depends on the same central fact – so amazing to children and adults who never knew it before – that if you cut an apple across the middle, you’ll find it has a star inside. (more…)

Christmas is coming and the geese are getting fat. And if you come back next week, you’ll find the first of three Christmas-time Blogs. Meantime, the last of this Making Connections series is about making up new stories – and, of course, it includes some keys.

Some keys to making up new stories

Some people blanch at the idea of making up new stories. Sor others, it’s what storytelling is all about. I personally cannot imagine spontaneously making up a new story in front of an audience – not unless it’s an audience of children and I get them to help me create a story between us. Yet I’m tremendously happy to sit at home and make up a story for telling in response to some special request for a story, maybe about a particular place or for some special occasion. And I’m very prepared and delighted to make up a story in writing, be it a children’s novel or a short piece of adult fiction. Funny, isn’t it, this business of what we can and cannot do?

Fortunately, there are some simple techniques and patterns to help us with making up stories on the spot and enabling others to do so. These include the wide variety of storytelling games which will make good subjects for future Blogs. (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…)

Storytelling Starters moves on this week to its second theme, Making Connections. The magic of objects will still be here, but now in the new context of finding and making links – links between different types of stories, links between storyteller and audience, links between real objects, inner feelings and imagination.

Keys – and a personal story

Keys are mundane, commonplace objects, and are also amazingly symbolic.

Say ‘key’ to me and my mind starts buzzing – with memories of my Aunty Mali’s house where keys were a major presence (all labelled and hanging in bunches), with my frequent anxiety as to whether I’ve got the house-keys on me when I go out of the house, with story-stories of the traditional type in which ‘keys’ are present in many guises from answers to a riddling question to what’s needed to resolve a quest. (more…)

The Flexible Fan

Fabulous, fan-u-lous, fascinating …

a piece of material that can make a flexible fan inspires imaginations, sparks imagery and fires story-potential.

How I discovered the magic of the flexible fan

My most flexible fan – the  brown-beige one pictured here – was given to me on one of the storytelling courses that I ran in Redbridge at the end of the 1980s. The courses were mainly for parents and I was asked to run them as a contribution to the borough’s National Oracy Project programme. Consisting of a half-day session per week, each of the courses ran for ten weeks. Almost apologetically at the end of one session, one participant on one of the courses (she also worked as a school dinner-lady) handed me this odd piece of pleated fabric. ‘You never know,’ she said, ‘it might come in useful.’ I asked her where she’d got it. ‘It’s a piece of cut-off old blind,’ she reported.

Around the same time, my storyteller colleague, Karen Tovell, (we ran ten years of monthly workshops together) showed me how to use a much larger flexible fan made from two sheets of fibre-paper in order to tell the lovely Chinese story of the Willow Pattern plate. I remember being entranced as Karen showed me how many different shapes could be created – tree, bridge, door, sun, moon, boat , bird, stars- and how magical they could be in a story.

How to provide yourself with your own flexible fan (more…)