How I met the world of stories...

At yesterday's storytelling evening, my friend and storytelling ally Nazli asked me point blank why I became a storyteller.  I was a little startled, and didn't have much time to think, so I just blurbed something about how lots of stories were told in the commune I grew up in.
Then later (now) thinking about it, I thought that there might be something here.
How does one decide that telling stories is so important that they are going to make this innocuous pastime the center of their lives?

A good friend of mine, who is an amazing guitar player, told me that he first learned to play in high school, to get this guitar playing cute girl to notice him....She never did, but it worked later... on others.

I guess that's why I started, to be noticed, by some really good storytellers.  A few years before I came to this world, my parents as part of "the return to the land" movement, sold all they had and moved to an big old house in Burgundy, there many people came to weave, die wool with plants, learn how to spin wool...etc.

Why would anyone want to spin by hand in a industrial world??  You know what my answer will be...stories!

When your hands are busy, and the looms pedals mark a nice wooden rhythmic tune...the only thing missing is a story.  A room full of people working with their hands, starts with something wonderful: calm silence.
Not the kind of silence where everyone is making to-do-list in their heads (metro silence) not the kind of silence where people are highly concentrated trying to solve a problem (exam room silence) no calm, non-busy, open silence, the kind in which we can stay.

This is the ideal soil for the story seed to grow.

There is a reason why they call it "to spin a story".

"pong, frrrup, shik shik...pong, frrrup, shik shik....pong, frrrup, shik shik" (loom pedals and comb sounds...)
The sounds, the quality of the silence, and then the words, the story, a great listening quality, and the weavers taking this newly spun story and adding it to their own fabric of images, sensations and experiences.

In this house I knew very early on that silence was beautiful and if I wanted to earn the right to break the silence, I needed to spin a good tale.
To this crowd of utopians, topic was important, message essential.  A mistake in timing or a twist lacking in originality and you would have to surrender the group's attention to someone else, or to the rhythmic silence.
It is with this audience that I first learned how to weave my experiences into stories.  They had all the qualities of an ideal story listening audience:

They liked stories, but they also enjoyed silence.
They were good listeners and they had nowhere to go.
They were picky, but when a story was good they would let you know.
They told lots of stories.

A story is a yarn, and a storyteller either spins it or weaves it, or both.
As a child of course I learned to weave like everyone else in the commune, I made my school bags, and my blankets, still today many of my bags are hand-woven, but today I realize that sitting on the loom all those years, I really learned to weave a different kind of yarn.

What telling tales can do...

After months of training new storytellers at Gazi university, today I was deeply touched by the comment that one student made about the way the course had affected her:

"One day, she said, after we started working together on tales, I found myself in car at a traffic light and all of a sudden asked my friends in the car if they didn't sometimes wish that the car had tall legs and could just get up and walk away above all other cars, they all looked at me strangely, no apparently none of them had imagined such a thing, nor did they seem to think that it was normal for me to imagine it, but I did and I could see it so vivdlidly, and what's more I had such great pleasure imagining it. Then, another day, home with my roommates, we were looking for a pot of soup that just mysteriously disappeared from the kitchen, I could just see how the ants could have just carried it away like they do to a dead bug, or anything else they steal. Then my friends just about called me crazy! But it didn't stop there, it's as if a door has opened and I see all these funny or beautiful things around me, every where, every day. So when the time for our storytelling week-end comes around; I grab my bag and run out, because here, at the story school, I feel I belong, here I have found others who, just like me, enjoy believing in the beautiful, quirky, magical images that spring in their mind. And so this week-end, even though I didn't feel good because of the complications of my operation, and even though in the morning I was in quite a bit of pain, I came, because this is my therapy, I feel good here because my imagination is free to roam, play and create magic."

Thank you!

Why do children always want to hear the same story? And should we worry about it?

Usually in workshops parents ask this question:

"Why do children always want to hear the same story?"

It is true, whoever has read or told stories to children is familiar with these demands:

"Tell me the story where the man fell in the hole..."
"I want the one where the princess lost her crown..."

"no not this one..."

"no, not a new one!!"

This of course may lead parents to wander if their child lacks curiosity or if they should force novelty on them, in brief parents wander whether this obsession is good for their children.

The short answer:  "It's good for them".

Now for the long one:

Bruno Bettelheim, a psychoanalyst who specializes in chidren and their need for fairy tales, says that children feel safe when they hear a story they have already heard, and that it reinforces the path of learning.

So when a child wants to hear the little red ridding hood again and again, he or she feels safe because he knows what will happen, no lions coming out of the woods, no pianos falling on the grand-mother, no getting lost on the way, just the usual wolf eating the usual grand-mother, like I said... a blissful feeling of safety...we've been there before, done that before...so the child can let the story take him away safely.

It's a little like climbing on a canoe without a paddle, if we don't know the river, we wouldn't try it, after all there could be a waterfall or fast currents just around the corner, but if we know the river, if we've been there before, then we can trust it, and let it carry us away on its currents, we will be safe.

I think as a child one of my favorite things to do was to get into an big old inflated truck tire (the inside part) and let myself float down the creak...the currents would take me left and right, back and forth, sometimes I'd get stuck on some big rock and have to push with my feet but most of the time I was  being carried, letting go of all control is great, but it takes trust. To me, letting a story I like and have heard 30 times already carry me away, feels like that that.

As for reinforcing the paths of learning? Children are excellent at prescribing themselves the story medicine they need.  The stories they ask for again and again, are the stories which help them digest and understand the world around them.