Grimm's Fair Tales in concert

Last night I told The Glass Coffin, a Grimm's Fairy Tale, at Rocky Mount Museum outside of Johnson City, TN.  There were six of us, all from the Jonesborough Storyteller's Guild, and all telling scary stories collected by the brothers Grimm 200 years ago. Our notions of what it meant to tell a tale of that sort varied, but all were true to the nature of the stories as translated from the original transcripts.

  While the subject matter was emotionally difficult, I found the telling of it easy--there is a clear path to follow in the story's setup: a defined beginning, middle and end. When a story is well-constructed like that, all a teller need do is prepare by learning it well, and then allowing the story to become what it wants to be at the moment of performance. In this instance, I was slated last on the program. I knew we had kept a room filled with adults interested, (and even some brave children over age 12), but it was my job to wrap it up and send them home with a good memory of the night.I think I did that, but more than anything, I hope that story settled into their collective psyche's as it did mine.

You see, The Glass Coffin involves a young woman literally preserved in a glass case, buried deep in a cavern under the earth's surface. She was violated--emotionally and probably physically, by a dark stranger in her own home. She refused to submit to his demands, and paid dearly with the loss of all she knew, and loved.  Her brother turned to a stag, her castle and village shrank to a miniature--also under glass. There are strange inscriptions etched on cave walls, the life forces of her people captured in glass bottles, and she, the young woman, wrapped in her own hair for cover, and a lucky young tailor who just happens to be in the right place at the right time. Check it out--it's a thought-provoking story that may change your way of thinking about fairy tales.

Performance Storytelling--Dispatches from the Other Kingdom

This past weekend I was at the National Storytelling Network annual conference in Covington,Ky. As part of a troupe including Joseph Sobol and Kenneth Tedford, I was honored to perform in Dispatches from the Other Kingdom featuring cancer stories taken directly from interviews with three people.  Joseph told his father's story, Kenny told his own, and I told a cancer patient's story.

Each time we perform this piece, the result is amazing, as people are stirred, and reminded of their own brushes with this dreaded disease.  It seems no one in today's world can escape cancer's tentacles, and everyone has either experienced it personally or knows someone who has.  Cathy touched me deeply when I interviewed her. I was still in the master's in storytelling program at East Tennessee State University, and working as the graduate assistant with a grant in conjunction with the Quillen School of Medicine, when we met. She had lost so many family members that to hear it was beyond staggering. On top of that, she lost her husband in an accident and then she got cancer.

Interviewing 28 people with cancer in various stages including hospice-care was a step beyond my experience in community relations at Big Bend Hospice in Tallahassee, Florida. I should have known when I left there that those stories I heard would follow me.  When the call came to interview these people and then share their stories, I was ready.

My reason for sharing this is to remind all of us to listen without judgment. People undergoing horrible life experiences may need only to share, and to feel human understanding in return.