Storytelling: An art as old as civilization itself
When Mike Mennard was in kindergarten, he wanted to make a hat for a friend. “I made this beautiful hat, but I couldn’t make it stay on her head,” he said. “So I filled it with glue.” The hat stayed on, but little Mike found himself in a sticky situation. Now 38 years old, Mennard loves to tell that story and other tales about his childhood, the traumas of growing up and life in general.
His audiences usually are students in his English class at Union College or children in school classes he visits. But on the fourth Tuesday of every month, you’re likely to find him in a small meeting room at Walt Branch Library, telling his stories to other adults and listening to their stories.
Mennard always enjoys hearing John Ryan, a storyteller who has won tall-tale contests with his imaginative stories that suck you in with their plausibility but end in total fantasy. Such as his vivid account of excavating a cliff, only to discover that the rock was a live monster that was slowly digesting him.
Mennard and Ryan are two members of LIPS, Lincolnites Involved in Perpetuating Storytelling. It’s a group of people who get together regularly to swap stories or just listen to others tell them.
Sheila Schumacher, one of the organizers of LIPS, usually brings her version of a traditional fairy or folk tale or a ghost story. Others bring stories from children’s books, short stories, even Scripture.
The stories range from G-rated material appropriate for pre-schoolers to adult stories that might occasionally rate an R for language or violence.
There are stories of humor, pathos, drama and suspense. Stories to make you think. Stories that bring a tear. Stories with a message. And stories told just for the joy of spinning a good yarn.
Storytelling is an oral art form that is as old as civilization itself, Schumacher said. Unlike reading a book or watching actors perform on screen or stage, experiencing a good storyteller is like having a conversation with a close friend. “It connects people,” she said.
From earliest times, stories have served such basic social functions as relating the news of the day, imparting information to help people live and work together as a family or tribe, passing along wisdom from one generation to the next, and instilling group values. They also are an enjoyable way to while away the hours around a campfire or relieve the tedium of daily work.
Today, the oral traditions of storytelling have been replaced by a barrage of digital, electronic and manufactured media, but the basic yearning to hear a tale told by a real person continues, Schumacher and other story buffs say.
Schumacher was one of the founders 20 years ago of OOPS, the Omaha Organization for the Purpose of Storytelling. For many years, OOPS volunteers organized the annual Nebraska Storytelling Festival, which each June brings professional storytellers from across the country to perform for Nebraska audiences and inspire local storytellers. The festival was eventually taken over by another organization, Nebraska Story Arts, which for the past three years also organized the Moonshell Storytelling Festival in September at Mahoney State Park. Omaha storyteller par excellence Nancy Duncan was the driving force behind both organizations until her death from cancer in 2002.
This year's Moonshell Festival, from 10:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday at the park near Ashland, will feature nationally known storytellers David Novak, Gene Tagaban and Victoria Burnett, plus Omaha-based professional storyteller Rita Paskowitz. For the price of a park pass, visitors can hear tales of wonder and magic from some of the best storytellers around.
Paskowitz, who in previous lives was an actress and stand-up comic, now devotes her career to telling stories and encouraging others to tell them. Besides performing at festivals and other storytelling events around the Midwest, she gives workshops to schools and adult groups on the art of storytelling. She goes into schools as an artist in residence through the Nebraska Arts Council or Arts are Basic, sponsored by the Lied Center for Performing Arts. She's also involved in an Omaha-area program focusing on how to use stories along with other art forms in grief therapy.
Storytelling has a natural cathartic quality, helping people unburden themselves of problems and keep the world in perspective, she said. "All traditions have had stories to make sense of their world and explain things," she said.
The Bible and other religious traditions are filled with stories, and those are what people remember, she said. "If you want people to remember something, don't give them a list. Tell them a story. We remember the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark. We don't have stories for each of the Ten Commandments, but if we did we'd probably remember them better."
In her performances, Paskowitz combines tales from Jewish tradition with her own zany perspective to keep her listeners in stitches while stimulating their gray matter. She puts her own twist on fairy tales — often inserting a heroine who, instead of having the long blond tresses typical of the Grimm Brothers genre, sports a head covered with her own unruly, curly locks. "If it was me instead of Rapunzel, the prince would have to say, 'Rita, Rita let out your hair,’" she quipped.
She also retells stories she finds in children's books or other sources. One favorite is "Stephanie's Ponytail,” a book by Robert Munsch that gives her a chance to show off her "big hair." Little Stephanie decides to wear her hair in a ponytail. She tries it in all different positions — on top of her head, to the side, to the front. When performing in a classroom, Paskowitz does her own hair in a ponytail in all the crazy poses and the kids love it. "They shout, eeww, eeww, ugly, ugly," she said. "It gets them to participate."
In workshops she uses exercises to get participants to share their own stories. She asks everybody to talk about their name, what it means, how they got it, whether they have a nickname and how they feel about it. In another exercise, she asks them to pick one thing they're wearing — a shirt, a watch, a piece of jewelry — and tell a story about it. "Even if it's your last pair of clean underpants, there's a story there," she said. "The wonderful thing about stories is we all have one."
Gail Teten, secretary of Nebraska Story Arts, said the Moonshell Festival is a beautiful setting for people to share stories in a relaxed atmosphere. Despite its more formal aspects, a storytelling festival "is really just sitting around with friends (and) swapping stories," she said. She believes people relate to live storytelling because it appeals to a basic human need. "Even when there's a big crowd, you get the feeling that the teller is talking directly to you," she said. "Everybody listens from their own experiences; it's a very personal thing."
Teten, a media specialist in Omaha Public Schools, said she first got turned on to storytelling when living in Nashville, Tenn., and watching professional storytellers Jay O'Callahan and Jackie Torrence tell stories to local children. She remembers a gym filled with 300 restless kids and Torrence armed with nothing but a stool and a microphone. “I thought, ‘This isn’t going to work,’ but when she started telling, she had them mesmerized. The kids sat still for 45 minutes.”
Many storytellers attend events such as Moonshell to get inspiration and ideas for their own stories. But lots of people, like Teten herself, come just to enjoy. "For me it's almost like sitting in a hot bathtub — it's so relaxing," she said.
Elizabeth Kumru, an Omaha-area journalist and an organizer of the Moonshell Festival, recounted a story she heard several years ago by Dayton Edmunds, a Native American teller. It was a story about how music came to the earth.
Edmunds told about a time when all the animals had no songs and they all were grumpy and out of sorts. Then one day Raven heard a beautiful sound coming from high in the sky, but couldn't fly high enough to reach it. He tried and tried, by failed every time. Finally, Eagle said he'd try and when he flew up a little thrush nestled in his feathers and went along for the ride. When Eagle got near the beautiful sound, the little thrush flew on up through a hole in the sky and was able to bring the sound back to earth.
"When the little thrush came back, he opened his beak and let out a song. Robin heard it and he took that song for himself. Then thrush let out another song, and Bluejay heard it and took that. Soon all the animals took a song and they all had their sound. So whenever you see a little thrush, you should thank him for bringing music to the world," Kumru said.
That story makes her think about what happens at Moonshell. "At the festival, I feel just like that thrush … all these stories are just filling me up," she said.
Ryan, 69, who lives in Valparaiso, has had a number of careers over his lifetime, including working in schools as a speech pathologist and audiologist. In recent years he joined Toastmasters, a club dedicated to helping people hone their public speaking skills, and has taken acting classes at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He discovered he had a knack for storytelling, which won him top honors in several tall-tales contests through Toastmasters.
"I'm sort of reinventing my life" as a senior citizen, he said.
Ryan can make an incredible story sound believable. He also has no shame about borrowing ideas from all kinds of sources and making them his own.
One of his favorite stories is really an extended joke. It's about a couple who were unable to have a child and sought help from a doctor who was reputed to work miracles. He used some special techniques that eventually helped the woman become pregnant, but the couple were horrified when their baby daughter was born, because she was nothing but a head — no body. But they loved and cared for her, and eventually she grew to adulthood, still only a head.
One day she went to a bar and had her first drink. Amazingly, the alcohol caused her to grow a beautiful body. Everyone was overjoyed, but then she took a second drink and dropped down dead. The moral: She should have quit while she was a head.
Ryan said his family isn’t always supportive of his hobby. "They tell me, 'Don't tell that head story again.''" Nevertheless, he persists in trying stories out on his wife, children and grandchildren.
Last year he traveled with a group of Wesleyan students to New York City, where they performed drama and music. The only member of the troupe over age 25, he told a story about his cat who woke him up one morning by bringing him a freshly caught live mouse. "When you're sleeping late on a Saturday morning, you don't want a cat putting a mouse in your bed," he said.
Mennard has always loved to play with words and look at the silly side of life. He’s written two books, "Shall we Gather at the Potluck," a tongue-in-cheek look at church life, and "Can't Keep My Soul From Dancing," personal stories that are funny and inspirational. "Most of them are about what a dork I am, but hopefully they have a lesson. They're sort of like 'Chicken Soup for the Soul,'" he said.
He also sings and has a CD, "Something's Rotting in the Fridge," which is billed as "very wacky, very funny songs and poems for imaginative kids and families who love to laugh." A new CD to be released soon, “When Mother Goose Laid an Egg," sets the age-old rhymes to original new tunes.
Mennard’s programs for schools and children's groups combine storytelling, poetry and songs. He did several programs for last summer’s “Dragons, Dreams, and Daring Deeds!” at Lincoln City Libraries.
In one story, he tells about how when he was a kid he locked his sister in her bedroom. Unbeknownst to him, she climbed out a window and went to the next door neighbor, who called her dad, who came and found Mike looking sheepish outside his sister’s door. The story is a perfect segue into his song "My Genius Sister."
He said he enjoys going to LIPS meetings to see how others tell stories and to get ideas. "People tend to think storytelling is only for children, but it's really for every age," Mennard said. "Storytelling is what brought human communities together in the past, and today I'm afraid we've lost that."
Schumacher, media specialist at Lincoln Southeast High School, wishes more people would discover the joy of storytelling. LIPS has only a handful of regulars, and attendance was down at last summer’s Nebraska Storytelling Festival. Between 200 and 300, ranging in age from six months to 93 years, attended last year’s Moonshell Festival, Kumru said.
Schumacher has gone to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn., a three-day event that draws more than 15,000 people each year. It’s like a circus with several tents, each featuring storytellers, and participants can go from tent to tent overdosing on stories.
Storytelling will always have a place, she said. “After DVDs and computers, storytelling is a welcome relief. If anything, storytelling’s more important now than it’s ever been.”
Reach Bob Reeves at 473-7212 or breeves@journalstar.com.
About Moonshell Festival
The Moonshell Storytelling Festival will be from 10:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday at Mahoney State Park. Admission is free with park admission.
Storytellers include:
* Victoria Burnett — “a delicious mixture of story and music (that) delights and soothes the spirit.”
* David Novak — “unique stories with universal themes of character, courage, caring and wonder.”
* Gene Tagaban — “a captivating performer of combined Cherokee, Tlingit and Filipino ancestry.”
* Rita Paskowitz — a regional teller who hails from Omaha, “has a sparkly wit that lights you up like tinder.”
Events are at the Activity Center Mainstage (M) and Kountze Memorial Theater (T).
Here is the schedule:
10-11:45 a.m. (M) Stories for Families (ages 6-96), all tellers
Noon-1 p.m. (M) David Novak
1:20-2:20 p.m. (M) Gene Tagaban and Rita Paskowitz; (T)Victoria Burnett
2:45-3:45 p.m. (M) Stories for Families — David Novak and Victoria Burnett; (T) Rita Paskowitz
4-5 p.m. (M) Gene Tagaban
5-7 p.m. Dinner break
7-8:30 p.m. (M) Stories for Adults, all tellers
9-11 p.m. (M) Ghost stories, all tellers
For more information about Moonshell or other Nebraska storytelling activities, visit www.nebraskstoryarts.org. Nebraska Story Arts receives support from the Nebraska Humanities Council, the Nebraska Arts Council, the Cooper Foundation and a number of other Nebraska-based foundations.
Lincolnites Involved in Perpetuating Storytelling (LIPS) meets from 7 to 8:45 p.m. the fourth Tuesday of each month at Walt Branch Library, 6701 S. 14th St. Anyone is welcome just to listen. For information call Sheila Schumacher, 488-1151.
His audiences usually are students in his English class at Union College or children in school classes he visits. But on the fourth Tuesday of every month, you’re likely to find him in a small meeting room at Walt Branch Library, telling his stories to other adults and listening to their stories.
Mennard always enjoys hearing John Ryan, a storyteller who has won tall-tale contests with his imaginative stories that suck you in with their plausibility but end in total fantasy. Such as his vivid account of excavating a cliff, only to discover that the rock was a live monster that was slowly digesting him.
Mennard and Ryan are two members of LIPS, Lincolnites Involved in Perpetuating Storytelling. It’s a group of people who get together regularly to swap stories or just listen to others tell them.
Sheila Schumacher, one of the organizers of LIPS, usually brings her version of a traditional fairy or folk tale or a ghost story. Others bring stories from children’s books, short stories, even Scripture.
The stories range from G-rated material appropriate for pre-schoolers to adult stories that might occasionally rate an R for language or violence.
There are stories of humor, pathos, drama and suspense. Stories to make you think. Stories that bring a tear. Stories with a message. And stories told just for the joy of spinning a good yarn.
Storytelling is an oral art form that is as old as civilization itself, Schumacher said. Unlike reading a book or watching actors perform on screen or stage, experiencing a good storyteller is like having a conversation with a close friend. “It connects people,” she said.
From earliest times, stories have served such basic social functions as relating the news of the day, imparting information to help people live and work together as a family or tribe, passing along wisdom from one generation to the next, and instilling group values. They also are an enjoyable way to while away the hours around a campfire or relieve the tedium of daily work.
Today, the oral traditions of storytelling have been replaced by a barrage of digital, electronic and manufactured media, but the basic yearning to hear a tale told by a real person continues, Schumacher and other story buffs say.
Schumacher was one of the founders 20 years ago of OOPS, the Omaha Organization for the Purpose of Storytelling. For many years, OOPS volunteers organized the annual Nebraska Storytelling Festival, which each June brings professional storytellers from across the country to perform for Nebraska audiences and inspire local storytellers. The festival was eventually taken over by another organization, Nebraska Story Arts, which for the past three years also organized the Moonshell Storytelling Festival in September at Mahoney State Park. Omaha storyteller par excellence Nancy Duncan was the driving force behind both organizations until her death from cancer in 2002.
This year's Moonshell Festival, from 10:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday at the park near Ashland, will feature nationally known storytellers David Novak, Gene Tagaban and Victoria Burnett, plus Omaha-based professional storyteller Rita Paskowitz. For the price of a park pass, visitors can hear tales of wonder and magic from some of the best storytellers around.
Paskowitz, who in previous lives was an actress and stand-up comic, now devotes her career to telling stories and encouraging others to tell them. Besides performing at festivals and other storytelling events around the Midwest, she gives workshops to schools and adult groups on the art of storytelling. She goes into schools as an artist in residence through the Nebraska Arts Council or Arts are Basic, sponsored by the Lied Center for Performing Arts. She's also involved in an Omaha-area program focusing on how to use stories along with other art forms in grief therapy.
Storytelling has a natural cathartic quality, helping people unburden themselves of problems and keep the world in perspective, she said. "All traditions have had stories to make sense of their world and explain things," she said.
The Bible and other religious traditions are filled with stories, and those are what people remember, she said. "If you want people to remember something, don't give them a list. Tell them a story. We remember the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark. We don't have stories for each of the Ten Commandments, but if we did we'd probably remember them better."
In her performances, Paskowitz combines tales from Jewish tradition with her own zany perspective to keep her listeners in stitches while stimulating their gray matter. She puts her own twist on fairy tales — often inserting a heroine who, instead of having the long blond tresses typical of the Grimm Brothers genre, sports a head covered with her own unruly, curly locks. "If it was me instead of Rapunzel, the prince would have to say, 'Rita, Rita let out your hair,’" she quipped.
She also retells stories she finds in children's books or other sources. One favorite is "Stephanie's Ponytail,” a book by Robert Munsch that gives her a chance to show off her "big hair." Little Stephanie decides to wear her hair in a ponytail. She tries it in all different positions — on top of her head, to the side, to the front. When performing in a classroom, Paskowitz does her own hair in a ponytail in all the crazy poses and the kids love it. "They shout, eeww, eeww, ugly, ugly," she said. "It gets them to participate."
In workshops she uses exercises to get participants to share their own stories. She asks everybody to talk about their name, what it means, how they got it, whether they have a nickname and how they feel about it. In another exercise, she asks them to pick one thing they're wearing — a shirt, a watch, a piece of jewelry — and tell a story about it. "Even if it's your last pair of clean underpants, there's a story there," she said. "The wonderful thing about stories is we all have one."
Gail Teten, secretary of Nebraska Story Arts, said the Moonshell Festival is a beautiful setting for people to share stories in a relaxed atmosphere. Despite its more formal aspects, a storytelling festival "is really just sitting around with friends (and) swapping stories," she said. She believes people relate to live storytelling because it appeals to a basic human need. "Even when there's a big crowd, you get the feeling that the teller is talking directly to you," she said. "Everybody listens from their own experiences; it's a very personal thing."
Teten, a media specialist in Omaha Public Schools, said she first got turned on to storytelling when living in Nashville, Tenn., and watching professional storytellers Jay O'Callahan and Jackie Torrence tell stories to local children. She remembers a gym filled with 300 restless kids and Torrence armed with nothing but a stool and a microphone. “I thought, ‘This isn’t going to work,’ but when she started telling, she had them mesmerized. The kids sat still for 45 minutes.”
Many storytellers attend events such as Moonshell to get inspiration and ideas for their own stories. But lots of people, like Teten herself, come just to enjoy. "For me it's almost like sitting in a hot bathtub — it's so relaxing," she said.
Elizabeth Kumru, an Omaha-area journalist and an organizer of the Moonshell Festival, recounted a story she heard several years ago by Dayton Edmunds, a Native American teller. It was a story about how music came to the earth.
Edmunds told about a time when all the animals had no songs and they all were grumpy and out of sorts. Then one day Raven heard a beautiful sound coming from high in the sky, but couldn't fly high enough to reach it. He tried and tried, by failed every time. Finally, Eagle said he'd try and when he flew up a little thrush nestled in his feathers and went along for the ride. When Eagle got near the beautiful sound, the little thrush flew on up through a hole in the sky and was able to bring the sound back to earth.
"When the little thrush came back, he opened his beak and let out a song. Robin heard it and he took that song for himself. Then thrush let out another song, and Bluejay heard it and took that. Soon all the animals took a song and they all had their sound. So whenever you see a little thrush, you should thank him for bringing music to the world," Kumru said.
That story makes her think about what happens at Moonshell. "At the festival, I feel just like that thrush … all these stories are just filling me up," she said.
Ryan, 69, who lives in Valparaiso, has had a number of careers over his lifetime, including working in schools as a speech pathologist and audiologist. In recent years he joined Toastmasters, a club dedicated to helping people hone their public speaking skills, and has taken acting classes at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He discovered he had a knack for storytelling, which won him top honors in several tall-tales contests through Toastmasters.
"I'm sort of reinventing my life" as a senior citizen, he said.
Ryan can make an incredible story sound believable. He also has no shame about borrowing ideas from all kinds of sources and making them his own.
One of his favorite stories is really an extended joke. It's about a couple who were unable to have a child and sought help from a doctor who was reputed to work miracles. He used some special techniques that eventually helped the woman become pregnant, but the couple were horrified when their baby daughter was born, because she was nothing but a head — no body. But they loved and cared for her, and eventually she grew to adulthood, still only a head.
One day she went to a bar and had her first drink. Amazingly, the alcohol caused her to grow a beautiful body. Everyone was overjoyed, but then she took a second drink and dropped down dead. The moral: She should have quit while she was a head.
Ryan said his family isn’t always supportive of his hobby. "They tell me, 'Don't tell that head story again.''" Nevertheless, he persists in trying stories out on his wife, children and grandchildren.
Last year he traveled with a group of Wesleyan students to New York City, where they performed drama and music. The only member of the troupe over age 25, he told a story about his cat who woke him up one morning by bringing him a freshly caught live mouse. "When you're sleeping late on a Saturday morning, you don't want a cat putting a mouse in your bed," he said.
Mennard has always loved to play with words and look at the silly side of life. He’s written two books, "Shall we Gather at the Potluck," a tongue-in-cheek look at church life, and "Can't Keep My Soul From Dancing," personal stories that are funny and inspirational. "Most of them are about what a dork I am, but hopefully they have a lesson. They're sort of like 'Chicken Soup for the Soul,'" he said.
He also sings and has a CD, "Something's Rotting in the Fridge," which is billed as "very wacky, very funny songs and poems for imaginative kids and families who love to laugh." A new CD to be released soon, “When Mother Goose Laid an Egg," sets the age-old rhymes to original new tunes.
Mennard’s programs for schools and children's groups combine storytelling, poetry and songs. He did several programs for last summer’s “Dragons, Dreams, and Daring Deeds!” at Lincoln City Libraries.
In one story, he tells about how when he was a kid he locked his sister in her bedroom. Unbeknownst to him, she climbed out a window and went to the next door neighbor, who called her dad, who came and found Mike looking sheepish outside his sister’s door. The story is a perfect segue into his song "My Genius Sister."
He said he enjoys going to LIPS meetings to see how others tell stories and to get ideas. "People tend to think storytelling is only for children, but it's really for every age," Mennard said. "Storytelling is what brought human communities together in the past, and today I'm afraid we've lost that."
Schumacher, media specialist at Lincoln Southeast High School, wishes more people would discover the joy of storytelling. LIPS has only a handful of regulars, and attendance was down at last summer’s Nebraska Storytelling Festival. Between 200 and 300, ranging in age from six months to 93 years, attended last year’s Moonshell Festival, Kumru said.
Schumacher has gone to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn., a three-day event that draws more than 15,000 people each year. It’s like a circus with several tents, each featuring storytellers, and participants can go from tent to tent overdosing on stories.
Storytelling will always have a place, she said. “After DVDs and computers, storytelling is a welcome relief. If anything, storytelling’s more important now than it’s ever been.”
Reach Bob Reeves at 473-7212 or breeves@journalstar.com.
About Moonshell Festival
The Moonshell Storytelling Festival will be from 10:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday at Mahoney State Park. Admission is free with park admission.
Storytellers include:
* Victoria Burnett — “a delicious mixture of story and music (that) delights and soothes the spirit.”
* David Novak — “unique stories with universal themes of character, courage, caring and wonder.”
* Gene Tagaban — “a captivating performer of combined Cherokee, Tlingit and Filipino ancestry.”
* Rita Paskowitz — a regional teller who hails from Omaha, “has a sparkly wit that lights you up like tinder.”
Events are at the Activity Center Mainstage (M) and Kountze Memorial Theater (T).
Here is the schedule:
10-11:45 a.m. (M) Stories for Families (ages 6-96), all tellers
Noon-1 p.m. (M) David Novak
1:20-2:20 p.m. (M) Gene Tagaban and Rita Paskowitz; (T)Victoria Burnett
2:45-3:45 p.m. (M) Stories for Families — David Novak and Victoria Burnett; (T) Rita Paskowitz
4-5 p.m. (M) Gene Tagaban
5-7 p.m. Dinner break
7-8:30 p.m. (M) Stories for Adults, all tellers
9-11 p.m. (M) Ghost stories, all tellers
For more information about Moonshell or other Nebraska storytelling activities, visit www.nebraskstoryarts.org. Nebraska Story Arts receives support from the Nebraska Humanities Council, the Nebraska Arts Council, the Cooper Foundation and a number of other Nebraska-based foundations.
Lincolnites Involved in Perpetuating Storytelling (LIPS) meets from 7 to 8:45 p.m. the fourth Tuesday of each month at Walt Branch Library, 6701 S. 14th St. Anyone is welcome just to listen. For information call Sheila Schumacher, 488-1151.
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