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.

What makes you happy?

Monday night I told a version of the Italian tale Happy Man's Shirt at the Jonesborough Yarn Exchange radio hour. It's a story that has been around forever and I first read it in one of Jane Yolen's incredible collections, Favorite Folktales from Around the World. I brought the story forward in time--not quite contemporary but almost.  Our performance included a piece about kudzu and the potential for a kudzu theme park, so I gave the solemn boy a rich father who owned properties in Jonesborough and beyond, in the land of kudzu. The father wanted his son to be outgoing as he was, so that when the time came to inherit his properties his son would flourish and prosper. A preacher, thinking a spiritual transformation was in order, suggested a "come to Jesus" moment and baptized the boy who never cracked a smile. Then a woman with fifteen raucous children invited him to stay with them for a bit, but he was not amused by the noisy bunch. Finally, a politician approached him and talked him practically into the ground about any and everything, but the boy looked at him with solemn, intelligent eyes and refused to agree and laugh with him.

 Finally, the father was out hunting one afternoon and wounded a rabbit. He followed the rabbit but was distracted by wonderful music coming from just over the hill. It was a young man singing happily amid a flock of sheep and a herd of goats.

"Come with me," said the father, "and I will make you rich if you will make my son happy."

"No," said the singer, "I have everything I need right here. I live in a beautiful place, I have a guaranteed job--goats and sheep love kudzu. No, I'm happy here and I will not leave."

"Then let me buy the shirt off of your back," said the rich man.

The young man stepped back, alarmed. "You are crazy, go away and leave me alone."

But the father, in desperation, grabbed him and ripped his jacket open to seize the shirt off of the man's back, but he discovered the shepherd wasn't wearing one.  He went home dejected and depressed, but when his son welcomed him with an open heart, he realized he had overlooked something very important--to love his son just as he was. They lived happily ever after.

Cancer strikes again

I just lost my friend Rita to cancer. While we were not close, she was a loyal person whose smile and willingness to participate in anything I came up with was always appreciated. I will miss her.  As a supporting member of the Jonesborough (TN) Storytellers Guild, she was superb, attending meetings, offering to help those of us who are performing storytellers in any way.  Just two years ago, she and her husband walked in the Jonesborough Days Parade, holding our banner between them. Not long after that, she was diagnosed with dread cancer; now she is gone, but her memory will linger long.

Equal pay for equal work in America

Whether we like it or not, women still earn a lot less than men, often for the same work. It's time we made some noise like our ancestral sisters did when they demanded the vote, or when our sister Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus.  Thank goodness for a president who speaks for the people, whether the people choose to listen or not. Equal rights belong to all of us--male, female, black or white and no matter where your ancestors came from.

Hooray for President Obama--let equal rights reign!

Ted Hicks, Appalachian Storyteller

The man and his stories--Ted Hicks' 

photo taken by Valerie Menard of SilentLightImages.com

 on Beech Mountain

Ted Hicks--more than just Ray Hicks', the storyteller's son

Some time ago, when I was collecting the oral histories for my book, Southern Appalachian Storytellers: Interviews with Sixteen Keepers of the Oral Tradition, I visited Beech Mountain.  For those of us immersed in the world of Performance Storytelling, going up to that fabled mountain is akin to a sacred journey.

 The ancestral home of Ray Hicks and his family sits on top of Beech Mountain in a hollow so secluded and lovely, one would never know there was a madhouse of a resort on the other side of the mountain.  Since the discovery of Ray's oral tradition storytelling in the early 70's, many have made that trek and left with a curious sense of satisfaction and mission.  Hicks' language was, in many ways, linguistically connected directly to the old English spoken when his ancestors migrated to America.  That he knew the stories they brought over the water with them made him even more unique.

Unfortunately for me, I made the trip long after Ray's death in 2006, but it was still a rare treat to listen to his wife Rosa, and his son Ted speak about him and tell their own stories.  Tall--but not quite as tall as his father was, Ted is an imposing man in his fifties with dark brown hair and an expressive face, and at times, it took all I could do to disentangle the stories of mother and son from one another.

I asked Ted when he began telling stories, and was surprised to learn he had always known the stories--having heard them from birth, but never told them.  It was not until illness struck that he began to express himself as a storyteller, entertaining other folk on the van down to the doctor from the mountain top.

Ted's storytelling is completely natural--a simple extension of his normal self, albeit a compelling one! Having listened to many of his father's recorded stories, I detected the cadence learned from Ray, but the authentic storyteller's voice is all his.  Ted Hicks walks in his father's footsteps, but he is the tradition-bearer now, strong, humorous and true.