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Story: 

From Fireplace to Cyberspace 

Connecting children and narrative 



Betsy Hearne, 
Janice M. Del Negro, 
Christine Jenkins, 
Deborah Stevenson, editors 







The Graduate School of Library and Information Science 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
39th Allerton Park Institute 



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ALLERTON PARK INSTITUTE 
Number 39 



Papers presented at the Allerton Park Institute 

Sponsored by 

University of Illinois 

Graduate School of Library and Information Science 

held 

October 26-28, 1997 

Allerton Conference Center 

Robert Allerton Park 

Monticello, Illinois 



Story: 

From Fireplace to Cyberspace 

Connecting children and narrative 



Betsy Hearne, 
Janice M. Del Negro, 
Christine Jenkins, 
Deborah Stevenson, editors 



The Graduate School of Library and Information Science 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
39 th Allerton Park Institute 



1998 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. on acid free paper. 
ISBN 0-87845-105-6 



Produced by The Publications Office of the Graduate School of 
Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana- 
Champaign, 501 E. Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820-6903 

Managing Editor: Monica M. Walk 
Production Assistant: Susan Lafferty 
Graduate Assistant: Kristin Shahane 
Cover Design: Heidi Kellner 

Publications Committee: Leigh Estabrook, Janice Del Negro, Monica 
M. Walk, David Dubin 




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

The editors would like to thank Monica Walk and her staff at the GSLIS 
Publications Office for their Herculean efforts to ensure us of a well- 
produced project on schedule; and the GSLIS staff (especially Kathy 
Painter) and the Center for Children's Books' graduate assistants Shirley 
Chan, Jennifer DeBaillie, Linda Fenster, Pam McCuen, and Kate McDowell 
for their labors of love in making the 39th Allerton conference run 
smoothly. 

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to re- 
print previously published work: 

Arthur Geisert's art from pages 16 and 17 of Pigs from 1 to 10, 1992; from 
page 15 of Pigs from A to Z, 1986; and from page 5 of The Etcher's Studio, 
1997. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. 

Joseph Daniel Sobol's chapter, "The Storytelling Festival as Ritualization 
of the Storytelling Revival Mythos," is excerpted from The Storyteller's Jour- 
ney: An American Revival (expected 1999) . Used by permission of the Uni- 
versity of Illinois Press. 

Cover drawings are created for The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 
by Debra Bolgla of the UIUC Office of Publications. Used by permission 
of the Center for Children's Books. 



e.s 



Story: From Fireplace to Cyberspace 
CONTENTS 

Introduction 

Betsy Hearne \ 

Section One: Story as Practice 

Janice M. Del Negro 3 

Storytelling in the School Library Media Center 

Anne Shimojima 4 

Tangled in the Web: Storytelling, Communication, and 

Controversy 

Karen Morgan 1 1 

Summary of Workshops 

Betsy Hearne 20 

Section Two: Story as Theory 

Betsy Hearne 22 

The Storytelling Festival as Ritualization of the 

Storytelling Revival Mythos 

Joseph Daniel Sobol 23 

Midwife, Witch, and Woman-Child: Metaphor for a 

Matriarchal Profession 

Betsy Hearne 37 

Evaluating Stories for Diverse Audiences 

Malore I. Brown 52 

Summary of Storytelling Concerts 

Janice M. Del Negro 59 



Section Three: Story as Literature 

Deborah Stevenson 60 

Book Linking to Story 

Judith O'Malley 61 

Narrative in Picture Books 

Or, the Paper that Should Have Had Slides 

Deborah Stevenson 66 

Construction, Illustration and a Plethora of Pigs: 

Reflections on a Lecture by Arthur Geisert 

Deborah Stevenson 78 

Section Four: Story as Institutional Culture 

Christine Jenkins 83 

The Cycle of Story: From Fireplace to Marketplace 

Or, "The Kids Keep Tearing Their Jeans" 

Christine Jenkins 84 

For Story's Sake: Reading as its Own Reward 

Janice M. Del Negro 96 

Conclusion 

Christine Jenkins 106 

Appendices 

Appendix A: Storytelling in the School Library 
Media Center: Bibliography and Resources 

Anne Shimojima 108 

Appendix B: Evaluating Stories for Diverse Audiences: 

Annotated Bibliography of Research Tools 

Malore I. Brown 1 23 

Appendix C: Allerton Park Institute 1997 Discography 

Janice M. Del Negro 1 25 

Appendix D: Resources for Storytellers: 

An Annotated Bibliography 

Loretta Gaffney 126 

Appendix E: Storycrafting: 

Retelling Old Tales, a Bibliography 

Janice M. Del Negro 130 

About the Contributors 135 

Index 

Jennifer Young \ 39 



Introduction 



Stories live everywhere, but they rarely stay in one place. Despite our 
attempts to classify, codify, and construe them, stories keep moving 
too mercurially to fit intellectual categories. Stories also shape- 
change. They shrink or expand depending on the listener, the medium, 
the time, the place, and the teller. So a storytelling conference becomes 
an organic experience and planning one is like lassoing an amoeba. What 
do you catch and how do you keep it? Or, less figuratively, what do you 
include and how do you preserve it? We decided on a program that incor- 
porated both telling stories and telling about stories, both practical and 
theoretical approaches, both oral and literary forms, with some graphics 
thrown in for good measure. What's in this book is only partially what 
happened during the conference a little more, a little less. The papers 
are revised, the tellings only described. 

The first section emphasizes practical application. Anne Shimojima 
draws on her twenty-three years of creative experience incorporating 
storytelling into a school library media center. Karen Morgan describes 
storytellers going electronic. Susan Klein andjanice Del Negro give work- 
shops on varied aspects of storytelling, Susan on young adult rites-of-pas- 
sage tales andjanice on the adaptation of traditional tales. The second 
section focuses on theory. Joseph Sobol examines the storytelling revival 
of the 1970s and '80s. Betsy Hearne looks at women's role as midwife of 
stories for children in oral, print, and professional traditions. Malore Brown 
gives a multicultural perspective on storytelling. Meanwhile, Janice 
Harrington, Susan Klein, and Dan Keding balance these papers with vivid 
storytelling concerts. We can't recreate them, but we can tell you what 
they told. 

The third and fourth sections move into the realm of story in book 
format, with Judy O'Malley book-linking thematically, Deborah Stevenson 
analyzing narrative in art, and Arthur Geisert storytelling the creation of a 



2 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

picture book with personal and professional aspects interwoven. Since 
Arthur's slide show eludes representation in print, we show a few pig prints. 
Finally, Christine Jenkins looks at stories as commodities in the economics 
of popular culture, and Janice Del Negro considers the story dynamic of 
literature in library culture. 

Good storytelling makes education an entertaining experience and 
entertainment an educational experience. Joseph Sobol's spontaneous 
balladry closed a conference that proved once again how much learning 
comes with playing, which is come to think of it what stories are all 
about. 

Betsy Hearne 

Co-editor and 1997 Allerton Proceedings Coordinator 
Graduate School of Library and Information Science 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
September 1998 



Section One: Story as Practice 



Belying the romantic ideal of a wandering storyteller shrouded in 
the misty fog of an imaginary past, librarians and teachers are 
deeply grounded professionals who recognize and appreciate the 
idea of information and story as tool chest. The first two papers to 
open these Allerton proceedings are eminently practical. They focus on 
building connections between individuals and stories. Anne Shimojima 
brings 25 years of library and storytelling experience to her presentation 
of successful and replicable story programming for students. Moving from 
person-to-person programming to virtual storytelling, Karen Morgan dis- 
cusses information sources about storytelling, storytellers, and folklore on 
the Internet and the World Wide Web. Underlying both of these informa- 
tion-rich papers is a love of story and a commitment to storytelling that is 

practical as well as magical. 

JMD 



ANNE SHIMOJIMA 

School Library Media Specialist/IMC Teacher 

Braeside School 

Highland Park, Illinois 



Storytelling in the School Library Media Center 

When a day passes it is no longer there. 

What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. 

If stories weren 't told or books weren 't written, 

man would live like the beasts, 

only for the day. . . . 

Today, we live, but by tomorrow 

today will be a story. 

The whole world, all human life, 

is one long story. 

Isaac Bashevis Singer 

Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus, and Other Stories (10-11) 



Last year, one of our second-grade classes studied Japan. I am often 
called upon to tell Japanese stories, but this time I decided to try 
telling a story that I had formerly reserved for older students and 
adults. It is a sad, serious story with an unhappy ending. I was a little 
apprehensive about the students' responses, but I launched into it opti- 
mistically. After about three minutes, I began to notice that the room was 
absolutely silent. The children's eyes were fixed upon me, and the air 
between us seemed to be alive, filled with that story, breathing that story. 
I realized that although the students were staring straight at me, they didn't 
see me at all. They were far away in Japan, seeing the images of the story 
unfold before their eyes. It was one of the moments that you live for as a 
storyteller, a moment when the story works its magic and your listeners 
are changed, whether for that moment or for a lifetime. 

Amidst all of the lessons on the use of the computer catalog, the care 
of a book, note-taking, research, and the Internet, we as library media 
specialists are charged with the happy duty of reinforcing in our students 



SHIMOJIMA/ SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER 5 

a love of literature. Twenty-five years of experience in a library media cen- 
ter have taught me that there is no better way to introduce children to the 
beauty of language and the power of story than to put down that book, 
look our students in the eyes, and tell a story. 

Storytelling is more than just entertainment, as we know. It is a pow- 
erful educational tool for the classroom or the library media center. Ev- 
eryone loves a good story, and stories are the perfect vehicles for teaching 
and learning. 

TEACHING VIA STORYTELLING 

First, and foremost, storytelling is an art form that nurtures the spirit 

Ellin Greene, in Storytelling: Art & Technique, says it best: Storytelling brings 
to the listeners heightened awareness a sense of wonder, of mystery, of 
reverence for life. This nurturing of the spirit-self comes first. It is the 
primary purpose of storytelling and all other uses and effects are second- 
ary (33). When we tell stories that have an inherent truth, we are feeding 
our students truth about living and about being human. Stories help us 
to develop compassion, understanding, and a sense of connectedness and 
the unity of life. Stories help us to see beyond our world into other worlds 
and into the hearts of other people. Stories help us to connect with a 
humanity that is bigger than we are as individuals. 

Storytelling deepens the relationship between teacher and students. I be- 
lieve that I have profoundly changed the nature of the relationship be- 
tween my students and me simply because I tell them stories. I first began 
to use stories with activities years ago, when I went to a fourth-grade teacher 
and offered to come to her classroom for 45 minutes once a week for a 
storytelling experiment. Over the next two months, I told stories and the 
children retold them, drew pictures, created a picture book, made a slide 
show, and did other activities to extend the stories beyond the telling. 
Over the course of those weeks, I began to notice that the children and I 
reacted to each other in a different way. When I saw them in the hallway 
or in the library, we smiled at each other as if we shared a secret, for 
storytelling, potentially one of the most powerful, intimate experiences 
available, had truly brought us closer together. 

Children trust someone who tells something truthful. The edu- 
cator who tells stories is actually giving a rare gift the gift of himself 
or herself. Only you can tell stories the way you do. Only you can pick 
the stories you do for the reasons that you do. We tell the stories that 
we love, that our hearts reverberate to, that our psyches respond to. 
We are truly sharing of ourselves with our students, if we choose our 
stories carefully and prepare them with integrity. It is also a great risk 
for us as tellers, for we are putting out in public something that is very 
meaningful without that book as our crutch to come between us and 



6 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

our audience. But like many risks, it is an activity that is ultimately 
self-affirming, and we are richer for having taken the risk. 

Storytelling enhances imagination and visualization. It is a creative ex- 
perience for all for the teller, who must create a mood and a vision of 
the story, and for the listener, who must create the images and the under- 
standings. The important work is done in the listeners' minds. This is 
where the story really comes to life. Students have to work for the story to 
be meaningful, yet it is work that is done effortlessly. The listening is 
active, not passive. I may select a story for my own personal reasons, but 
my listeners may take something completely different away and they may 
take different things at different times of their lives. I cannot control 
what their lessons are, nor do I want to. 

Storytelling provides food for fantasy, which encourages creativity, 
originality, and flexibility. It gives us material for daydreaming, for work- 
ing out our own anxieties, for imagining and wondering. We need this 
imagination to survive. The information age is here, but we need more 
than information. We need wisdom. Stories give us the material to de- 
velop that wisdom. 

Storytelling introduces children to literature and the beauty of language. 
Vocabulary is extended and patterns of language show us the joyful play- 
fulness of words. Using a rhythmic pattern has students immediately join- 
ing in a decided difference from my more inhibited adult audiences! 
This language is especially meaningful to students because the stories are 
so meaningful. When I tell a story that comes from a book that our media 
center owns, there is an immediate rush for that book and a long list of 
reserves. Children are eager to see the story in print and to experience it 
again through reading. Of course, storytelling also introduces students to 
the joy of literature even when they are unable to read. 

Storytelling enhances reading and uniting skills. Through listening to 
many stories, children develop a sense of story. They learn that stories 
have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories have a problem and a 
resolution. There are characters and a setting. This familiarity with story 
structure helps students to know what to expect when they are reading, to 
better understand it when they meet it, and to recall it better after the 
story is over. Children who know story structure are armed with a power- 
ful tool in their own writing efforts and they will innately understand what 
a story needs. 

Storytelling develops listening skills. These are skills in active listening, 
an experience where minds must produce images and the child must pro- 
vide some effort to get the reward of the experience. Students develop 
concentration and the ability to follow a sequence. They learn to focus 
and attend, even in the middle of a busy media center. 

One of my favorite times of the year is the annual telling of "Mr. Fox" 
to our fifth-grade classes. In the story, Mary, the main character, has 



SrilMOJIMA/ SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER 7 

stumbled upon the home of Mr. Fox, her wealthy but mysterious suitor. 
Mr. Fox is not at home, but Mary, curious and bold, decides to explore the 
house when the front door opens at her knock. Upstairs, she opens Mr. 
Fox's bedroom closet door to discover, to her horror, one huge vat of 
human hair, one of human bones, and a third of blood. She runs down 
the stairs only to see, through the window, Mr. Fox coming toward the 
house dragging a young woman. Quickly, Mary hides in the space under 
the stairwayjust seconds before Mr. Fox enters the house and starts up the 
stairway. When the young woman grasps the stair railing, he pulls out his 
sword and cuts off her hand at the wrist a hand that falls into Mary's 
lap and the room is silent and every single fifth-grader is listening! 

Storytelling introduces students to the world and other cultures. Every 
country has a rich heritage of story. All over the world we find the same 
themes of love, loss, betrayal, and journeying on the quest. We meet trick- 
sters in every culture, as well as silly folk, wise elders, brave heroes and 
heroines, and evil villains. We find that we are not alone in this world. We 
see where we fit in to the wonderful diversity of human life. Folklore is 
every child's heritage the history of humankind in stories. It is a way to 
celebrate our human similarities and our cultural differences at the same 
time. 

A STORY FOR EVERY OPPORTUNITY 

I never pass up an opportunity to use storytelling at school. Whether 
it is ghost stories at Halloween, a frog story during a unit on amphibians, 
coaching fifth-graders learning legends during a Native American unit, 
using stories with creative drama and creative writing, or during our six- 
week second-grade unit on folk and fairy tales, there is always time for a 
story. Children would rather listen to a story than do almost anything else 
in the media center, and frankly, I would rather be telling a story than 
almost anything else! But I am careful to provide times for storytelling 
without activities children need times just for the sheer pleasure of hear- 
ing a good story. 

In kindergarten, I start off by telling very simple stories, ideally with 
lots of characters but extremely simple plots. "The Great Big Enormous 
Turnip" is the first. I tell the story, then invite the children to act it out. 
We repeat the story as many times as needed to give everyone a chance 
(hence the large number of characters required) . Of course, another 
option is to choose stories with fewer characters and let students know 
that they will have a chance to act in the future, if not today. As I am 
asking, "Who wants to be Grandpa? Who wants to be the dog?," the stu- 
dents' hands are waving wildly and they are eager to jump up and take a 
part. I tell the story again, but stop whenever it is time for a character to 
speak and the children jump in with their lines. Having a repetitious 
story ensures that the children will remember their parts with ease. 



8 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

In every grade level, primary through intermediate, drawing a pic- 
ture of the most memorable part or the favorite part is a valuable activity. 
I love to see the pictures that my students have created in their minds and 
to know what made the most impression on them. Sometimes I give them 
paper that has been folded into three parts so that they can draw pictures 
from the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. 

Rewriting stories requires students to listen closely, recall events in a 
sequence, and use the vocabulary of the story. It also requires stories that 
are very, very short, with no repetition at all. Rewriting stories can be very 
tiresome if something has to be repeated over and over. Our first session 
is a joint one, where I tell a story and then invite the children to retell it as 
a class while I type it into a computer that is displayed on a screen so that 
they can follow along. If two classes retell the same story, I give copies of 
each to each teacher and invite them to post both in the room, so that 
students can see how the retellings produced different versions. In later 
stories, students will rewrite a story individually immediately after the tell- 
ing. I will also invite the children to change details in the story as they put 
it into their own words. We discuss what elements can be changed (e.g., 
gender of characters) and what cannot (e.g., the ending). We decide the 
point of the story. What is the theme of the story? What is this story really 
about? The room is dead quiet as the children are writing. 

Our six-week folk and fairy tale unit in second grade is made possible 
by the flexible schedule that allows each class to come to the media center 
every day for six weeks. During week one, we focus on fairy tales, with a 
telling every day followed by students filling out a story map. The six 
sections in the story map are protagonist, setting, initial action, antago- 
nist, problem, and resolution. A lesson on 398.2 (the Dewey designation 
for folk and fairy tales) helps each student to find a book to carry to the 
classroom for the class collection. Week two focuses on Cinderella vari- 
ants, starting with the classic Grimms' version. Children think they know 
the story, but they are surprised by this version that is so different from 
the Disney one, with its helpful birds, cut up feet, and wicked stepsisters 
being soundly punished. Story maps are still being filled out to reinforce 
children's familiarity with the basic story structure. Week three focuses 
on folktales from different continents, with notable picture books read 
aloud every day. During the fourth week, the telling of folktales from 
different countries each day is followed by an activity: drawing a picture 
and writing sentences describing the scene; retelling the story as a class as 
I type it into the computer; working with a partner to put strips of the 
story into correct sequence; drawing pictures of the beginning, middle, 
and end of the story; and drawing a map of the story, one in which the 
action occurs in many places. 

One whole-class activity is the creation of a picture book. A long story 
is chosen because it must be divided into at least as many scenes as there 



SHIMOJIMA/ SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER 9 

are students in the class. After the telling, I invite the children to recall 
the story. Key words from each scene are written on a sheet of paper, one 
scene per page. Then the scenes are assigned to the children, each tak- 
ing one or two, depending on the number of children. They take the 
papers to the classroom where they will each write the narration for the 
scenes. A day or two later, we gather together again and the scenes are 
read aloud in order. We check to make sure that nothing is left out and 
nothing repeated. I encourage them to be descriptive and to include 
dialogue. After a final edit, I type the pages. The children illustrate them 
and the entire book is duplicated so that each child has his or her own 
copy. 

The final activity is the "Battle of the Folktales." The students write 
practice questions (In what story did a girl receive help from a fish? How 
do you get to Mother Holle's house?) and the teachers hold class battles. 
The final battle is in the media center with representatives from each 
class on each team, to minimize the competitive factor. It is an exciting 
finish to a unit that results in every child truly loving stories. 

During our third-grade "Jack Tale" unit, we add on the activity of re- 
telling in a circle. After the telling, I seat the children in a big circle and 
start off the story again. After a few sentences I stop and turn to the next 
child, who continues the telling until I say stop. We continue around the 
circle until the story is retold. This is a great way to invite children to tell 
without the pressure of having to remember an entire story. 

During this unit we create a video of a story. It follows the same pro- 
cedure as the making of a picture book, with each child responsible for 
one or two scenes. This time the children each draw pictures of their 
scenes on a piece of 12-inch by 18-inch paper. They write the narration to 
their scenes and I videotape the drawings while they read their writing 
off-camera. This has become one of the most popular of all storytelling 
activities and students are encouraged to borrow the video to show their 
families at home. 

Our mythology/ astronomy unit in fourth grade provides another 
opportunity to bring storytelling into the curriculum. I put up a transpar- 
ency of a constellation and tell the Greek myth behind the constellation. 
The students will then each choose a constellation, make a transparency 
of it, and tell the corresponding myth to the class while showing the trans- 
parency. I've seen some amazing examples of student storytelling during 
this unit. 

More student storytelling is encouraged during the fifth-grade unit 
on Native Americans. Each student is required to find, learn, and tell a 
Native American legend and also create a picture book of the story. I 
meet with the students in small groups to coach them. Two meetings per 
group, a week apart, are necessary at a minimum. Later they will tell their 



10 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

stories to younger children as they give their presentations on Native 
American culture. 

These are only some of the many ideas that could be used to bring 
storytelling into the curriculum, either in the classroom or media center. 
Whatever ideas you choose, the rewards are great. If you've been reading 
stories aloud, you are already halfway there. My training in timing and 
expression came from the hundreds of picture books I read aloud over 
the years. It took only one time of putting the book down, looking into 
my students' eyes, and seeing their rapt attention to turn me into a be- 
liever in the power of storytelling. Above all, enjoy yourself. Have fun! 
Wrap your story with love and give it as a gift. Your students will love you 
for it. 

Editor's Note: A listing of references and resources, including a folktale unit-fllan 
for teaching second-graders, is included in the appendix of this volume. 

WORKS CITED 

Greene, Ellin. Storytelling: Art & Technique. 3rd ed. New Providence: R. R. Bowker, 1996. 
Singer, Isaac Bashevis. Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus, and Other Stories. New York: 
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1976. 



KAREN MORGAN 

Instructor 

Graduate School of Library and Information Science 

Founder, STORYTELL listserv 

Texas Woman's University 



Tangled in the Web: 

Storytelling, Communication, and Controversy 

Do you have time for adventure, have an interest in storytelling, 
and have access to a computer equipped with a modem, Web 
browser, phone line, and an ISP (Internet Service Provider)? If 
you have answered "yes," then adventure awaits: exploring storytelling in 
cyberspace. 

Let me give you a feel for the possibilities of cyberspace exploration 
by introducing three quite different cyberspace adventurers, all of whom 
share a love of storytelling. 

We'll begin with an octogenarian from a retirement community in 
Arizona, who used to count among his favorite activities both mountain 
climbing and accompanying his wife to storytelling festivals. Today his 
mobility is severely limited, but he still enjoys traveling to storytelling fes- 
tivals through festival Web sites as he sits in front of his bedroom com- 
puter. Four years ago, he told his son he'd never have use for a "fancy" 
computer and modem; now he's found new ways to communicate and to 
explore the world from home. He even gets his youngest grandchild in- 
volved in Web browsing. They rank highly the Web site of the Smithsonian 
^Magazine, which features an article on the National Storytelling" Festival 
(Watson) and includes colorful graphics, photos of tellers, and a record- 
ing of Don Davis telling a story. Web site visitors can either listen to Davis' 
entire (30-minute) story or to shorter audio clips. (A visitor who has never 
previously explored audio on the Web will find complete instructions on 
free downloading of the RealPlayer for audio.) 

Next let's travel to south Texas, where an energetic young teacher 
involves her fifth-grade class in a unit on storytelling by having them pose 
questions to the subscribers of STORYTELL, the Internet listserv (a dis- 
cussion group carried by electronic mait)~Ttedicated to dialogue about 
storytelling. The students get caught up in the excitement of the Internet's 
interactivity and the involvement of people, notjust from the United States 



12 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

but from around the world. These potential future tellers engage with 
their elders in the sharing of information and advice. The listserv mem- 
bers who become involved with this topic (or thread, in the language of 
the Internet) are strong storytelling advocates who appear eager to men- 
tor the youngsters. Their teacher's enthusiasm for storytelling keeps her 
open to postings on the listserv of new activities and new stories for the 
students. In the summer of 1997, several of this teacher's fifth graders 
were invited to tell at a state-wide, educational conference on storytelling 
and impressed conference attendees with their story selections and skill 
in telling. 

My final cyberspace adventurer is a busy Californian, a part-time youth 
services librarian and part-time teller, whose morning fix involves drink- 
ing the day's first cup of coffee while reading recent postings on Internet 
listservs and newsgroups. She often clicks her Web browser to the 
homepages of other tellers to see updates on their sites. Participating in 
forums devoted to storytelling renews her connections with others who 
care as much as she does for this ancient art form. It matters to her that 
she contributes to the ongoing dialogue about storytelling in cyber-space, 
and she has found herself particularly drawn to the controversies of cen- 
sorship and story ownership. Told more than once that she could not tell 
stories that included mention of witches, spirits, or devils, this woman may 
click to the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Free- 
dom Web page or follow ALAOIF, the American Library Association's Of- 
fice of Intellectual Freedom listserv. 

For storytellers, story listeners, and lovers of stories, becoming tangled 
in the Web involves as many opportunities and ensnarements as there are 
interested individuals. The Internet has locations which provide recom- 
mended stories for specific occasions or projects, traditional story open- 
ings and closings, articles on and about diverse storytelling topics, and a 
variety of full-text versions of stories, legends, tall tales, and even story 
jokes, riddles, and tongue twisters. The information may be provided 
directly in the archives of an Internet listserv, at a particular Web site or 
through hypertext links (highlighted textor^graphics) to many other Web 

Pages- 
Threads on listservs such ^s STORYTELL dtr\FOLKLORE/-or on 
Usenet newsgroups (open electronic discussion rbfunrsT^such as 
alt.arts. storytelling, alt.folklore.info, of alt.folklore. urban may provide 
stories and information not readily available elsewhere. Since 
STORYTELL's announced purpose, from its creation in January of 1995, 
was to be a tool for sustaining and supporting the interests and needs of 
lovers of the oral tradition and^fstSr^tellers around the world at all levels 
of interests and abilities, it ha never be^n used as a vehicle by individuals 
who want feedback on their writing skilfy as alt.arts. storytelling often is. 
More than other listservs or groups, STORYl EEL hasbecome the "home" 



MORGAN/TANGLED IN THE WEB 13 

on the Internet for storytellers. In my informal survey of the STORYTELL 
archives, I encountered numerous contributions to a wide variety of dis- 
cussion threads, including discussions of STORYTELL itself. In May of 
1997, one listserv subscriber stated, "STORYTELL is an international as- 
sociation" (Miller). It is a popular and active list, often with 50 or more 
messages a day, and has been active since it was established by the School 
of Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman's University. It had 
over 270 subscribers five months after its creation and today maintains a 
consistent list of about 400. This number includes individuals as well as 
library and other institutional subscribers. 

The ongoing and sometimes heated discussions, as well as the ex- 
change of stories, on STORYTELL and other cybergroups may redefine 
what it means to be a storyteller today and could possibly be responsible 
for reshaping storytelling organizations tomorrow. The open and wide- 
ranging discussions that have been on-going in cyberspace for the past 
three years chart a different course from the past. First, the conversations 
have been free and open to everyone able to access cyberspace. Next, all 
participants have equal voice and equal opportunity to participate in dis- 
cussions, raising issues as they see fit, not according to a large organization's 
agenda. Because there is no structured hierarchy in cyberspace dialogue, 
more voices are heard and more issues continue to be raised and debated 
in an open forum than ever before. Finally, the communication and col- 
laboration among diverse people concerned with storytelling from around 
the world have raised the awareness and consciousness of all on a variety 
of issues. 

Some of the debates on STORYTELL have featured "...intriguing ideas 
and sometimes tedious hair-splitting" (Schmidt). Discussions have cov- 
ered such complex issues as censorship of stories by others and by deliber- 
ate omission, story ownership, copyright, and the ethics of storytelling. 
Participants have weighed in on such diverse topics as storytellers' health 
concerns, which include dehydration, exhaustion, and voice protection; 
stage presence, who has it, and how it can be developed; and the business 
of storytelling, such as establishing fees, using microphones, and writing 
mission statements, brochures, and contracts. Questions, comments, sug- 
gestions, and criticisms are raised about techniques, style, and story attri- 
butions of nationally famous tellers. Additionally, criticism has been lev- 
eled at local organizations and national associations which exist to sup- 
port storytelling. Sacred cows have been discussed, poked, prodded, and 
sometimes butchered and barbecued. Activity in the real world has fol- 
lowed that in the virtual world: two years after subscribers to STORYTELL 
spent many months debating definitions of storytelling and what it means 
to be a storyteller, a committee of the National Storytelling Association 
took up the issue. This committee is now attempting to come up with 
some nationally accepted definitions. Conversations in cyberspace may 



14 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

stimulate and provoke in multiple directions, even providing inspiration 
for some to create stories or tell differently or simply to keep telling sto- 
ries. (All messages posted to STORYTELL can be found in its archives, 
housed on the Texas Woman's University Web site, and can be searched 
from remote sites by keywords or downloaded in bundles organized chro- 
nologically) . 

Part of STORYTELL's success lies in its sustained focus on the subject 
of storytelling with continuous conversations in cyberspace among regu- 
lar contributors and virtual passers-by. Participants say that the structured 
conversations have enriched their lives and acted as a powerful profes- 
sional development tool. The importance of listservs like STORYTELL 
can be best expressed by participants. Sharon Johnson said, "Personally, I 
feel that it is a wonderful means of communication for kindred spirits, a 
way to learn more about various aspects of storytelling, a method for help- 
ing others, and a discussion mechanism for issues and ideas of major and 
minor importance." Elizabeth Gibson added that, for herself, STORYTELL 
had brought "joy in the ease of real-time communication with a number 
of people," and, she continued, "I can read and take part in some very 
interesting discussions on storytelling issues. The discussions do not al- 
ways agree, but they give air to some of the concerns, ideas, and diverse 
points of view. ... it is just nice to know that there are others out there 
facing the same lions you are." Said Lois Sprengnether, "STORYTELL 
and FOLKLORE both give access to source material and resource people 
I need, whether it's finding a lost story, or exercises to use with a group of 
student storytellers, or just that great on-going feeling of camaraderie that 
says I'm not alone." Another aspect of participation in STORYTELL is 
revealed in Chuck Larkin's comments: "I have been performing now for 
25 years. I have a responsibility to pass on knowledge to the next genera- 
tion of tellers. The Internet allows me to read current issues and to both 
pass on my experience and pick up new nuggets of knowledge. This pro- 
vides for a rapid exchange of information with more people and for less 
expense then any other form of communication covering the same num- 
ber of participants" (Johnson). 

The reading of listserv messages goes on at all hours of the day and 
night: one person in front of his/her own computer screen, accessing 
messages, one at a time, all over the world. Normally this is a solitary act, 
yet paradoxically it is also a public one. The act of reading these messages 
deepens connections with others concerned about storytelling in the larger 
world. Jaye McLaughlin, a public librarian for the city of Fort Worth, 
Texas, explains that she particularly appreciates STORYTELL because of 
the "international input and questions which keep our limited outlook 
from here in the U.S. expanding" (Conversation). Surprising to some, 
especially in light of contentious debates on the list, a spirit of coopera- 



MORGAN/TANGLED IN THE WEB 15 

tion, collaboration, and community has developed among users of 
STORYTELL. Some subscribers frequently post to the list, others "lurk" 
and never post public messages. Yet all seem to carry on "side conversa- 
tions"; subscribers send e-mail messages off-list to continue discussions 
begun on the list, to congratulate someone on a comment or entire mes- 
sage well-phrased, to ask a question privately, and much more. An inter- 
esting phenomenon has occurred among subscribers to STORYTELL: 
some frequently post announcements of upcoming events, others an- 
nounce intentions to attend, and later meetings at events are arranged. 
People who have only known each other through e-mail begin to meet 
face-to-face; networking begun in cyberspace continues in person. 
STORYTELLers (as list members call themselves) regularly make arrange- 
ments to meet at festivals and workshops. Since most don't know one 
another by sight but only through their participation on the storytelling 
listserv, they wear neon-colored pins or badges that say "STORYTELL-er" 
for purposes of identification. 

TACTICS TO UNTANGLE THE WEB 

When you get tangled in the Web, is it difficult to unearth available 
storytelling sites, activities, and resources? How do you keep on top of 
changes? Although, as professionals, we know we need to stay abreast of 
new developments, we also know that change is constant and remains an 
integral component of the Internet/Web world. Knowing how to search 
rather than exact places to search is of key importance. This necessitates 
experimenting with different ways to search, which means coming to know 
and even love search engines. These devices enable us to deal with the 
nearly 100 million pages that are on the Web today (Cuvelier 59). The 
sheer volume of information can be staggering. Creating "bookmarks" or 
keeping a list of URLs (Universal Resource Locators) of Web pages and 
Internet resources may help, but familiar locations may suddenly move, 
disappear, or become temporarily inaccessible. If the secret of success is 
how well we deal with "Plan B" after "Plan A" fails, we better have such 
contingency plans available when our "search-strands" become tangled. 
Since there exists no centralized catalog of Internet/Web resources avail- 
able and no one single place to find what you need, searchers need to 
remain flexible. Search engines such as Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite, Alta Vista 
and Infoseek help organize the chaos. All the search engines operate 
somewhat differently, so spending time becoming familiar with each can 
be considered time well spent. Respect their differences and use various 
ones according to your purposes and your students' needs. Yahoo!, for 
example, provides results in matches divided by categories, such as arts," 
entertainment, and science, and includes Web pages, listservs and their 
archives, Usenet newsgroups, events, and more. All the search engines 



16 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

can be accessed for free while exploring the Web. Purchasing one or 
more of the various published guides to Web sites may help student 
searching. Copyright date is of tremendous importance; buy the most 
current edition of such guides as Most Popular Web Sites: The Best of the Net 
from A2Z. 

Searching the archives of major universities and folklore collections 
can result in grand adventures of discovery for Internet/Web explorers. 
Let's say you want to tell a story which comes from your deepest Southern 
roots. Unifying the story with a song of which you only have a fragmen- 
tary memory may be a challenge that you want to take up. Your informa- 
tion is sketchy with regard to the song, yet you feel it would add an impor- 
tant dimension to your story. You know only that the song involves "riding 
the rails." You also remember that your mama's second cousin used to 
sing it, and he was a hobo during the Great Depression. You ask yourself 
if you can find the song, fit it with your story, and make all the compo- 
nents work. Can exploring in cyberspace help? Maybe. There may be an 
exact fit or just an adventure in the search. Try going to the Web pages of 
the c .Southern Folklife Collection, where you'll find information about 
gospel and spiritual songs, Southeastern blues traditions, or links to Doc 
Watson's page to hear him perform "Blue Railroad Train." This may work, 
or there may be other answers for you still to be drawn from the tangled 
Web of Internet sources. This approach may work in building story reper- 
toire or creating curriculum tie-ins at all grade levels. Imagine interested 
students carrying out assignments involving history, literature, and music 
as they search the Web, constructing meaning through the text and mul- 
timedia to be found there. 

There are large numbers of locations from which to start cyberspace 
adventuring. Harvard University, for example, maintains an extensive list 
of links to folklore archives, folklore journals, folklore societies (both pa- 
per and electronic), folklore publishers, information guides, and other 
web sites. One link from the Harvard site of particular interest to anyone 
working with students from kindergarten through high school is the AskEric 
InfoGuide: Folk and Fairy Tales. 

Another valuable source for stories on the Web is Th,e Children '^Litera- 
ture Web Guide. Look at its Folklore, Myth, and Legend page. With its 
many links to other locations on the Web, this impressive site facilitates 
ongoing searches. From here you can connect to folklore reference sources 
such as "the Encyclopedia Mythica for information on legendary creatures, 
monsters, and the gods and goddesses of world mythology. Anyone inter- 
ested in working on comparative studies of Cinderella variants can find 
links to variants of tale type 510A on The Children's Literature Web Guide, as 
well as other links to a text and image archive of English-language 
Cinderellas, published between 1729 and 1912. Kay Vandergrift's fine 



MORGAN/TANGLED IN THE WEB 17 

Web site on Snow White has its own link here. Other links connect to 
traditional stories from Sioux to Sufi traditions, to Aesop's fables, and to 
the literary tales of Hans Christian Andersen. 

Resources on the Web can help enrich students' assigned work. Of- 
ten, school writing assignments are orally presented when they are in their 
final form; this presents opportunities for us to suggest storytelling tech- 
niques as a method of story creation or the use of storytelling skills in the 
actual oral presentation. Today more (wise) teachers are collaborating 
with each other and with their librarians. They instruct students in the 
use of storytelling techniques to select, learn, frame, and tell stories bet- 
ter. Not surprisingly, teachers find they are receiving better "final prod- 
ucts" after this exposure and perhaps some storytelling coaching. Why 
not take this one or two steps further? Try persuading social studies and 
English teachers to work with students on developing and telling family 
stories that are infused with history-based details. Some of these family 
stories may be set against the backdrop of larger historical events. Focus 
on these stories adds value to the individual's and family's experiential 
circumstances. Librarians could help in the crafting of stories and serve 
as adviser to Web searching for the purpose of adding accurate period 
details. Information can be pulled from such Web sites as The Sixties or 
The Vietnam War History Page to become part of the students' stories. Stu- 
dents who want to tell of their grandparents' (or great-grandparents') 
Holocaust experiences during World War II should find the Web site of 
the United States Holocaust Museum invaluable. A museum that uses story 
exquisitely, its site includes annotated videos, transcripts of the Nuremberg 
Trials, photographic archives, and much more. Also effective for use with 
students may be an article on "Jelling Farnily^ Stories," which can be down- 
loaded from the Web site of storyteller Miriam Nadel. For the adults work- 
ing with student storytellers, some of the articles on storyteller and coach 
Doug Lipman's Web pages may be of service. 

Some teachers and librarians may want to explore connections be- 
tween storytelling, readers' theater, or drama with their students. The 
Web can link students to theater sites as well as provide readers' theater 
scripts. Teachers may find useful ERIC InfoGuides and lesson plans for 
creative dramatics. Barry McWilliam's Elderbarry's Storytelling Home Page 
has links to all this, plus links to a detailed definition of storytelling by 
Chuck Larkin and connections to many professional organizations and to 
other storytellers' Web sites, which leads to more entangled links. Simi- 
larly generous in the amount of information made available is Doug 
v Lhomanjj3Veb site, which includes Janice Del Negro's "Recent Storytelling 
Titles," other bibliographies, and articles on performing, stimulating stu- 
dent story creation, telling to children, and the coaching of storytellers. 
Put the phrase "storytelling ring" into a search engine like Alta Vista and 



18 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

get an electronic version of that old library standby, the pathfinder, an 
annotated list of books (in this case, Web sites) linked by theme and topic 
(in this case, storytelling and storytellers). 

The Internet and the Web have grown exponentially in the past few 
years. Much of this growth is a result of word of mouth. (Storytellers, in 
particular, should easily be able to relate to this type of growth.) People 
become involved and committed to Internet use. It becomes an integral 
part of their lives just as it has with the three cyberspace explorers at the 
beginning of this piece. There is no doubt about the positive correlation 
of optimistic opinions among those who love storytelling and use the 
Internet and the Web. Their advice would be simple for storytellers, for 
lovers of storytelling, and for devotees of the oral tradition contemplating 
entangling themselves in the web of cyberspace. E-mail, you gotta have it! 
A storytelling listserv, you gotta have it! Access to storytelling Web sites, 
you gotta have it! As youth services professionals, even if you've been put 
off by the hype, frustrated by the constant change, challenged by the cen- 
sors, troubled by the lack of access and financial strain, and distressed by 
the misinformation or the lack of documentation, you need to utilize the 
Internet and the Web to communicate, to defend your views, to make a 
difference, and to shape storytelling as we enter the twenty-first century. 
Ken Nickerson, in charge of Microsoft Network Canada, recently stated 
in an interview that "the content teams for the Internet. . . have program- 
mers and artists, and now we've added the storyteller. . . [I]n the interac- 
tive world, storytelling is fundamentally critical, and we find ourselves with 
very few storytellers on the planet. And that's a shame, because storytelling 
is the future" (Randall 331). 

Editor's Note: Texas Woman's University's STORYTELL archives can be accessed 
by the URL http://www.twu.edu/lists/ and then selecting STORYTELL from the 
lists and searching by keyword. STOR YTELL quotes are used by permission; all 
efforts were made to contact participants. 

WORKS CITED 

American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom. Home page. 8 June 1998. 

<http://www.ala.org/oif.html>. 
American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom. "Subscribing to ALAOIF 

and Other Listservs." 8 June 1998. <http://www.ala.org/alaorg/oif/ 

news_inf.html#listserv> 
Archives of T\VU Discussion Lists. Texas Woman's University. 8 June 1998. <http:// 

www2. twu.edu/archives.html >. 
AskERIC InfoGuide: Folk and Fairy Tales. 8 June 1998. <http://ericir.syr.edu/Virtual/ 

InfoGuides/Alphabeucal_List_of_InfoGuides/folkandfairyl2_96.html>. 
The Children's Literature Web Guide. "Folklore, Myth and Legend." Ed. David K. Brown. 8 

June 1998. <http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/storfolk.html>. 

Cuvelier, Monique. "How to find Web sites?" PC Novice Guide to Netscape 5 (1997): 58-59. 
Doc Watson-American Folk Music Legend. Ed. Donna Cornick. 8 June 1998. <http:// 

sunsite.unc.edu/DocWat/DocWat.html>. 



MORGAN/TANGLED IN THE WEB 19 

The Encyclopedia Mythica. Ed. M. F. Lindemans. 8 June 1998. <http://www.pantheon.org/ 

mythica/>. 
Folklore and Mythology World Wide Web Sites. Harvard University. 8 June 1998. <http:// 

www.fas.harvard.edu/~folkmyth/fandmwebsites.html>. 
Johnson, Sharon. "Why This Listserv is Important." On-line posting. 24 October 1995. 

STORYTELL. 8 June 1998. <http://www2.rwu.edu/archives/storytell.html>. 
Lipman, Doug. Home page. 8 June 1998. <http://www.storypower.com/lipman/ 

index, htmlx 

McLaughlin, Jaye. Telephone conversation. 1 April 1997. 
McWilliams, Barry. Elderbarry's Storytelling Home Page. SJune 1998. <http://www.seanet.com/ 

~eldrbarry/>. 
Miller, Eric. "Storytelling Studies." On-line posting. 24 May 1997. STORYTELL. SJune 

1998. <http://www2.twu.edu/archives/storytell.html>. 
Miriam Nadel's Storytelling Page. "Telling Family Stories." Ed. Miriam Nadel. SJune 1998. 

<http://www.cinenet.net/users/mhnadel/story/family.html>. 

Most Popular Web Sites: The Best of the Net from A2Z. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Lycos Press, 1997. 
Schmidt, Judy. "Bravo!" On-line posting. 13 February 1996. STORYTELL. SJune 1998. 

<http://www2.twu.edu/archives/storytell.html>. 

The Sixties. SC Foundation. SJune 1998. <http://www.slip.net/~scmetro/sixties.htm>. 
Southern Folklife Collection. Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel 

Hill. 8 June 1998. <http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/sfcl/>. 
STORYTELL Discussion List Archives. Texas Woman's University. SJune 1998. <http:// 

www2.twu.edu/archives/storytell. htmlx 
Randall, Neil. The Soul of the Internet: Net Gods, Netizens and the Wiring of the World. Boston: 

International Thomson Computer Press, 1997. 
United States Holocaust Museum. Homepage. 8 June 1998. <http://www.ushmm.org/ 

index.htmlx 
Vandergrift, Kay. Snow White. 8 June 1998. <http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/special/kay/ 

snowwhite.html> . 
Vietnam War History Page. Class project, Virginia Tech University, <http://www.bev.net/ 

computer/htmlhelp/vietnam. htmlx 
Watson, Bruce. "Before Electricity, There was Storytelling." Smithsonian Magazine. March 

1997. SJune 1998. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian/issues97/mar97/ 

storytell, htmlx 

WORKS CONSULTED 

The Story telling FAQ. Ed. Tim Sheppard. SJune 1998. <http://www.lilliput.co.uk/faq.html>. 
The Storytelling Ring. Ed. Kerry Mens. SJune 1998. <http://www.tiac.net/users/papajoe/ 
ring.htmx 



The Workshops 



In each of their richly designed workshops, Janice Del Negro and Su- 
san Klein managed to combine aspects of the practice, theory, sources, 
and culture of storytelling. The title of Del Negro's session, 
"Storycrafting: Retelling Traditional Tales," reflects only part of what she 
encompassed in her group session, which provided information on story 
structure, story ownership, the ethics of story "adoption," and issues of 
public domain and copyright. She also conveyed, via demonstration and 
group participation, some strategies for retelling folk tales and launched 
participants into an exercise of cooperative adaptation. 

Del Negro's favorite slogan for novices is KISS, "Keep it simple, Stu- 
pid!" i.e., when in doubt, keep your story short, concrete, and specific. 
She reviewed the typical compression of folktales, including a quickly in- 
troduced initial incident and selective set of characters, through a logical 
sequence of events with climax and efficient conclusion (no lingering on 
the wrap-up). Several of the groups that split up to shape their own ver- 
sions of an urban legend came up with some splendidly bone-chilling tales 
situated in the Allerton Conference setting! 

Klein's workshop, 'Young Adults, Storytelling, and Rites of Passage," 
offered a tough-minded, open-hearted approach to teenage audiences. 
The key to telling stories to young adults is the attitude you bring with 
you, with emphasis on fearless affection, confidence, and a sense of hu- 
mor. You can recognize and defuse potential troublemakers by engaging 
them and making strategic alliances before beginning the story. Her re- 
sponse to one potentially hostile challenge, 'You better be good, b . . . ," 
was quick, to the point, and non^judgmental: "Count on it." Carry your- 
self as if you take no prisoners and project your voice accordingly, without 
forgetting that loving adolescents lessens fear of them. 

In addition to autobiographical stories, Klein told rite-of-passage 
folktales such as "Wood-Ash Stars" (included on her tape Wisdom's Tribute) 



HEARNE/THE WORKSHOPS 21 

that focused on the subtle metamorphosis of adolescents from child to 
adult. For teenagers, story is "soul work, that hot fiery little thing that's 
aching for attention." Her view of the audience as co-creator (imagina- 
tively, not literally; teens are embarrassed to participate in front of their 
peers) and her advice to get up and then get out of the story's way served 
to de-emphasize the storyteller's self-concern. 

Both Klein and Del Negro reiterated the importance of including 
nothing that doesn't move the story forward including the storyteller's 
ego. "It's not about you, it's about the story." And it's story that offers 
children, teenagers, and adults transformative power. 

BH 



Section Two: Story as Theory 



Stories seem to have generated almost as many theories as they have 
audiences, especially in the academic world. Three presenters at 
the conference spun their own theories on different aspects of 
storytelling and audience. Joseph Sobol analyzed the development of the 
National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, as a twentieth- 
century turning point in the "profession" of storytelling a movement 
beginning as down-home discovery and ending as organized stardom. Betsy 
Hearne made an analogy between women undervalued as midwives deliv- 
ering babies, and women undervalued as midwives delivering stories and 
children's books. She also examined the role of midwife/storyteller char- 
acters in juvenile literature, who seem to reflect some of the same charac- 
teristics of professionals in the field of juvenile literature. Malore Brown 
described the intensely varied responses of a multicultural classroom to 
her storytelling course assignment on Little Black Sambo, emphasized how 
important is professional educators' awareness of ethnically diverse 
folktales, and told about discovering the background of her own African- 
American family lore. 

BH 



JOSEPH DANIEL SOBOL 

Storyteller, Musician, Folklorist 

Instructor 

DePaul University School for New Learning 



The Storytelling Festival as Ritualization 
of the Storytelling Revival Mythos 



An excerpt from Chapter IV of The Storytellers' Journey: An American Revival (Urbana and 
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, expected 1999). 1998 byjoseph Daniel Sobol. 

In 1972, a schoolteacher and fledgling entrepreneur from 
Jonesborough, Tennessee, Jimmy Neil Smith, conceived the idea of 
a storytelling festival in his town. Smith's primary interest at that 
time was not storytelling, but civic revival. He was involved with the 
Jonesborough Civic Trust, a body which had organized in order to pro- 
mote local historic preservation and tourism. Smith was a young, ener- 
getic, and well connected member of the Civic Trust circle at the time. 
He conceived the idea for a storytelling festival, inspired by a chance en- 
counter with storytelling performance over his car radio. He brought the 
idea to his friends on the Civic Trust Board, offering to organize and pro- 
mote an event himself, with a target date of October 1973. The Trust gave 
him a small grant to produce it. Somewhere in the course of that week- 
end, the idea seemed to take on a life of its own. 

In 1982, just returned from the tenth annual National Storytelling 
Festival, storyteller and author George Shannon wrote a letter of appre- 
ciation to the NAPPS [The National Storytelling Association as of 1993] 
newsletter, The Yarnspinner. In it, he vividly expresses the power that the 
festival exerted over those who were caught up in the revival passion: 

The entire festival has become for the tellers and listeners a ritual of 
homecoming in the truest sense, a connecting point in the year's 
cycle. We return to a town we know, like Brigadoon, that is filled with 
magic of the finest kind. For the length of the festival (just as when 
a story is shared) all else ceases to exist. Time expands and deeper 
worlds are explored. It is a weekend spent surrounded by one's spiri- 
tual kin past, present, and future. For three days, no one has to 
explain their symbiotic relationship with stories, does not have to 
explain their vocation, avocation or passion. . . .The entire festival is, 
in ways, a giant folktale: being filled with familiar motifs and events 



24 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

that let us know where we are in the story of the weekend and of the 
year, that let us know we are in familiar lands and emotions, and can 
securely explore new worlds. And by its conclusion, the festival has 
become a blend of family reunion, the child's favored bedtime story 
cycle, and the third brother's search through unknown lands that 
through time, growth and careful listening, brings him back home 
and richer for the journey. . . . (1-3) 

In the structure of wonder tales, there is a pattern that reflects the 
dramatic core of the storytelling revival, as Shannon intuited. Vladimir 
Propp analyzed the wonder tale form thus: beginning with a blessed origi- 
nal condition, there follows a transgression and fall from grace, which 
must be redeemed by the hero's journey. S/he accomplishes the redemp- 
tion with the aid of magical tokens or helpers, which are gained by inward 
grace, special virtues, or by difficult lessons on the way. The return jour- 
ney is again beset with trials, temptations, and, often, further transgres- 
sions which must be redeemed before the final blissful reunion and com- 
munal restoration is achieved. Joseph Campbell took virtually this same 
analysis and endeavored to show how myths, sacred narratives, and fire- 
side tales from around the world tend to conform themselves to it. But 
perhaps Campbell's most affecting contribution lay in his enthusiastic am- 
plification, throughout his writing and teaching, of the psychological idea 
that the events of each human life can be viewed through the prism of just 
such a mythological journey. 

Anthropologist Victor Turner has written of ritual in terms that help 
us connect our mythic journey to the ritual pageantry of the storytelling 
festival: 

Ritual is, in its most typical cross-cultural expressions, a synchroniza- 
tion of many performative genres, and is often ordered by dramatic 
structure, a plot, frequently involving an act of sacrifice or self-sacri- 
fice, which energizes and gives emotional coloring to the interde- 
pendent communicative codes which express in manifold ways the 
meaning inherent in the dramatic leitmotiv. (81) 

I would suggest that in the liminoid spaces of storytelling festivals, 
where the primary communal mythos of the revival is being built, the 
ancient story of transgression and redemption is woven again, in meta- 
phoric resonance with the stories told from the stage. A powerful subtext 
of these outward performances is the wonder tale of the storyteller her- 
self, framed by the magic circle of the festival spotlight as the hero/ine of 
a cultural quest. Through the pilgrimage of the performing artist's path, 
she seeks to redeem society from its Hamlin-like sin of denying story and 
the primal unity that is story's gift. The storytelling festival became, for its 
most involved participants, a way of enacting a ritualized happy ending to 
the tale of the storyteller's journey. For the teller on stage, the festival is a 
homecoming, a redemption, a wedding of teller to traditions and to an 
idealized community. For the committed audience, the festival is redeem- 



SOBOL/THE STORYTELLING FESTIVAL 25 

ing, too: a homecoming to a kingdom in which storytelling is restored to 
its rightful place at the center of community life. 

The ritual form of the storytelling festival evolved to incorporate ech- 
oes of many other liminal zones across cultures and time the Mass, the 
Seder, the Eleusinian Mysteries, a brush arbor meeting, a tent revival, or 
American feast days like Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Fourth of July. But 
the death-and-resurrection story implicit in the conceptual framework of 
"revival" sets the overall metanarrative tone. At its heart, the revival story 
is a story of redemption, in which storytelling acts as a stand-in for the 
primal unities we have sacrificed in ourjourney of civilization. Storytelling 
pilgrims arrive at Jonesborough predisposed to believe that culture has 
fallen from grace. Somehow, sometime, we had sinned, by denying our 
selves, our heritage, our nature, the sacred "something" that for lack of a 
more authoritative word for it, we would now call by the name of "the lost 
art of storytelling." 

If we have not yet received the catechism when we arrive, the torrent 
of stories and exhortations about stories create a sense of cultic immer- 
sion, like the all-night chanting of the Mystery School, that immediately 
initiates us. The mythic pattern is read and enacted in the quickening of 
our spirits: In the beginning was Storytelling, and with Storytelling was 
Community. In Storytelling was contained the seeds of all the arts, sci- 
ences, education, politics, medicine, and law. As specializations multi- 
plied, Storytelling died, sacrificed to the 'soulless reflections of man's skill'; 
it descended into cultural oblivion, where it endured as a candle in the 
houses of the oppressed; on the third day of the storytelling festival, by 
the Sunday morning epiphany of Spiritual Storytelling, Storytelling will 
have risen again, to return the world to Spring. 

Like the medieval sin-eater, the culture's neglect of the simple com- 
munion of storytelling is made to stand in for a multitude of transgres- 
sions; and the weekend of resurrecting the art is an occasion for ritual 
cleansing. We repent and are absolved. "Pax Vobiscum. Go in Peace. 
Next year in Jonesborough." And in the center of the ritual drama is the 
celebrant-priest or priestess, the storyteller. 

"Revival" is never about actual death that story is too tragic and fi- 
nal. The key plot turn of a revival story is the revelation that death was 
only illusory, the result of our failed belief. No one believes that storytelling 
actually died, any more than the town of Jonesborough died if they had, 
there would be no town, no festival, no story. These precious things are 
perceived as having been abandoned, turned from, denied; their values 
obscured by ignorance and neglect (which is sin). We're then invited to 
repent gently, indirectly; we're after all most of us good middle-class late- 
twentieth-century adults, who would rather be caught in flagrante delicto 
than shouting and moaning on the mourners' bench. But by Sunday 



26 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

morning at your typical storytelling festival, we may have performed some 
of those same spiritual gymnastics. 

In what follows, I will attempt a deep reading of the National 
Storytelling Festival as cultural text. I will examine the ritual form of the 
event using Arnold Van Gennep's sequential model of rites of passage 
consisting of separation, transition, and reincorporation. And I will look 
at Jonesborough and the national storytelling revival scene through the 
theoretical glass of Victor Turner's "liminal and liminoid" ritual, and of 
his concept of communitas as the fundamental goal of ritual performance. 

Speaking strictly in terms of Turner's definitions, the festival is a 
liminoid phenomenon: it dwells in the realm of volitional, leisure activi- 
ties in a complex, postindustrial society, as opposed to the communally 
obligatory rites of passage and renewal in a tribal society. However, many 
of storytelling's most significant participants are quite selfconsciously seek- 
ing to revitalize roles, forms, and contexts from preindustrial lifeways. For 
these people, I would suggest that the event has had quite a different 
ritual and dramaturgical meaning than for those casual onlookers who 
have been drawn to the festival through its listing in Holiday Magazine'?, 
guide to the 100 best weekend getaways. The storytelling festival can serve 
as a laboratory for testing the adaptability of Turner's concepts. When we 
do, we find that liminal and liminoid aspects are actually tightly braided 
in the experience and perspectives of various participants at various stages 
in their lives and careers. 

Much depends on the individual's relationship to the festival whether 
they come as spectator, amateur enthusiast, aspiring professional, featured 
professional teller, local traditional artist or exotic culture-bearer, National 
Storytelling Association insider or functionary, aspiring or actual organizer 
of a satellite or rival festival, or any combination thereof. Depending on 
one's history with the organization, the festival, and the art form, and 
depending also upon one's belief system in regard to the ritual efficacy of 
those agencies, each festival can provide various levels of initiation, can 
generate manifold complexes of meaning; or, it can be just another gig, 
just another weekend. Depending on the particular psychological neces- 
sity of storytelling and of its ritual enactments in one's own life, a particu- 
lar festival can operate as a vital liminal rite, a casual liminoid episode of 
work or leisure, or a crass commercialization of what is already, for some, 
a sacred process. 

I will focus here chiefly on accounts from those most deeply invested 
in the storytelling revival those storytellers who treated the festival as a 
rite of incorporation in a storytelling community, and as a rite of revival 
for an art through which they were in the process of crafting a present- 
able social identity. I will concentrate on the experiences of those for 
whom the festival represented not just an optional leisure activity, but a 
public enactment of a ritual obligation to themselves and to a consciously 



SOBOL/THE STORYTELLING FESTIVAL 27 

conceived community. The depth and stability of these obligations and of 
this community are certainly open to question. Like other recent mani- 
festations of spontaneous communitas, they were formed very quickly, 
burned brightly, and tended to scatter as inner contradictions revealed 
themselves, or as social and economic tides ebbed or flooded. I will take 
both sets of phenomena seriously: those attendant upon the evolution of 
a spontaneous storytelling communitas, and those attendant upon its pos- 
sible decay. 

The generalized reading of the festival below will take as its chrono- 
logical reference the period of the late seventies and early- to mid-eight- 
ies, when the event was reaching its apex as a ritual center of communitas 
even as the pressures of increasing popularity and internal competition 
were beginning to drown the serendipitous ceremonies of innocence that 
generated that communal spirit. 

THE FESTIVAL EXPERIENCE 

Separation from everyday reality in the storytelling festival experi- 
ence begins, as we have seen, before the first story is told. At the National 
Storytelling Festival, paradigmatically, and to a lesser extent at many smaller 
regional festivals, the geographical removal of the festival site is an impor- 
tant element of ritual separation. Asjonesborough became truly national 
in scope, storytellers and would-be storytellers began to make the journey 
from all around the country. The effort involved became a part of the 
ritual and, in turn, part of festival folklore. 

Many would drive together, getting off work Thursday afternoon and 
driving all night. Jim May would ride down from Northern Illinois: 

It was a ritual for three or four years there, when I was teaching. 
We'd all pack into a van. Bring lots of bags of trail-mix. And head 
out right after school. And drive through the mountains all night 
\ kind of miss that part driving through the mountains all night. I 
think that's where the myth began. Those nighttime drives, with 
friends, and sometimes telling stories, and sometimes just listening 
to music, and napping, and changing drivers. But going through 
those mountains at night, and you'd pull off the road to rest, and 
you'd see those lights, down in the mist. If the conditions were just 
right, you'd just see that mist down there, and the lights of the towns, 
with these sort of mist-halos around them. And I think that, as much 
as anything, gave us the sense of a mythic journey. The fact that it's 
in the mountains is important, I think. Also there was something 
about crossing the Ohio River at Louisville. . . . There's something 
mythic about crossing those rivers, and there's some big factories 
there, and lots of lights. And we'd usually hit that close to midnight. 
So you'd be in the Kentucky mountains around two in the morning. 

The overnight journeys made a fertile ground for propagating spontane- 
ous communitas. The time of isolation within the womb-like enclosure of 
the car, van or bus allowed for a build up of shared expectation and 



28 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

commitment that overflowed onto the festival grounds. The all-night 
drives, too, fulfilled the functions of a vigil. Postural rigors and depriva- 
tion of sleep are traditional methods of inducing altered states. With the 
aid of this potent, non-pharmacological enhancement, the festival parade 
of narrative imagery could register with heightened intensity. 

Even those who flew to the festival could find in the flight a liminal 
zone of separation from everyday expectations and rules. The out-of-the- 
way-destination helped. It necessitated at least one change of planes, the 
last change being to a bumpy commuter flight into Tri-Cities Airport, Upper 
East Tennessee a field which could only handle dwarfish commuter jets 
or noisy prop planes with a dozen or so narrow, boardlike seats. Sponta- 
neous communitas would often erupt through the natural sorting process 
of these festival flights. Rafe Martin recalled: 

I remember the first time I went to NAPPS, the experience was, it's 
like I had seen the future. You know, you're flying down on the 
plane, and people are talking. ... It was like, everyone on the plane 
was talking storytelling. In other words, people were sharing who 
they were. I had been on so many flights, traveling around the coun- 
try to tell stories, and they're all dead. You know, it's people buried 
in business work basically going over figures and files; or sleeping; 
or reading really dumb books. And that's it. Instead, this was a flight 
of people all different walks of life, all different looks, all different 
ages and everybody was talking with one another. And there weren't 
racial issues, there weren't political issues I mean, it was like, "You've 
got an interesting story Neat! And then you get to Jonesborough, 
and you felt this was the future. People from different political 
backgrounds, nationalities, races, religions all getting along. And 
it didn't matter what you looked like, it didn't matter where you were 
from; what mattered was, if you could tell a story. And if you could, 
then everyone was going to be there for you. 

When the time on the highway or in the netherworld of airports and 
airplane cabins was done, there came the moment when one turned off 
the divided four-lane highway HE that runs past Jonesborough 's north- 
ern flank. You cruised down a road that narrows as it approaches an Exxon 
station, like a gateway at the foot of a steep hill. Taking a sharp right turn 
around the gas station, you found yourself abruptly bumping along on 
cobblestones, gazing up a crowded Main Street vista that has been cun- 
ningly recomposed into a living history tableau of which you were sud- 
denly a part. It is not a closed or complete tableau, but an open-ended 
collage, in which some of the dominant signifiers of twentieth-century 
culture power lines and corporate advertising logos have been conspicu- 
ously banished or hidden. Others, like autos and tourists, remain in the 
picture, decentering it further; and others, like the storytellers in their 
performing colors, and the harvest motifs sheathing the lampposts and 
spangling the sidewalks, make up a crazy-quilt of temporal references, in 



SOBOL/THE STORYTELLING FESTIVAL 29 

which the motley flags of post-sixties eco-gypsy culture are appliqued against 
a synchronic, traditional American background, with a sprinkling of syn- 
cretic, Pre-Christian accents. 

Moving slowly up the street, past two short blocks of brick and lime- 
stone shop buildings on the right, past the Mail Pouch Building and the 
domed county courthouse on the left, then past the long white clapboard 
Federal-style porch of the Chester Inn on the right, conspicuously marked 
and dated 1797, you would arrive at the central example ofjonesborough's 
floating historical signifiers: the Christopher Taylor cabin. This two-story, 
mid-eighteenth-century log cabin had been moved from the outskirts to 
the center of town in 1975, and reassembled on a strip of parkland be- 
tween the Chester Inn and the 1840s Greek Revival Presbyterian Church. 
The church is still a church, the inn has been restored through a state 
grant to be an office headquarters for NAPPS, and the cabin sits vacant 
most of the year, a mossy civic tool shed mysteriously transfigured by the 
knowledge that Andrew Jackson once slept there. 

It was here that you underwent the first initiatory ordeal of the festi- 
val: registration. Fitting yourself into a line that straggled down the flag- 
stone path back toward the street, you would gradually be borne toward 
the rough-hewn doorposts of the cabin. Stepping across the dark thresh- 
old to an interior smelling of damp earth and straw, you were confronted 
by tables of cheerful young votaresses, one of whom would take your name, 
address, NAPPS membership status, and money. In exchange, she would 
hand you, not a ticket, but a schedule, and a small, jagged-edged, calico 
swatch, pierced through by a safety pin. If you were to confess your puzzle- 
ment at this esoteric token, she might affix it to your shirt pocket with a 
soothing hand and the instruction that this was your weekend pass. You 
were to keep it constantly pinned to your person, transferring it dutifully 
from soiled shirt to clean, lest your way be blocked at the breach of a tent 
by one of the monitors volunteer staff primed to stand and murmur 
"Pass by" to only those initiates bearing the calico swatch. 

So, pinned and instructed, you walked out the back door of the Chris- 
topher Taylor cabin into the autumn sunlight, and found yourself on the 
edge of the Swappin' Grounds. If you were early enough, Doc McConnell 
would be there, capering about in front of his outlandishly painted wagon, 
dressed up in the stovepipe hat, frocktail coat, and clipped goatee of a 
backwoods Mephistopheles, warming up the crowds with comic patter while 
peddling real bottles of imaginary snake oil an innocently postmodern 
genre of parody in which the pleasures of reference have been emptied of 
the tensions of belief. 

McConnell played (and still plays, to a diluted extent) an important 
threshold role at the NAPPS festival and other Jonesborough events the 
"greeter." As the first performer that many would encounter at the site, 
and also as chief Master of Ceremonies on the Swappin' Grounds, 



30 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

McConnell took it upon himself to begin to induce the festival state of 
imaginative transport and self-forgetting. Being from the local area, he 
acted as a performing host, reaching out to strangers through the me- 
dium of his tall tales and hyperbolic patter. He introduced them to a 
rural, traditional world that was immediately assimilable, because entirely 
composed of inversions and impossibilities, offered up with an envelop- 
ing wink of complicity. 

"Where I live," he would shout, "in Tucker's Knob, Tennessee, it got 
so dry one year that the Baptists took to sprinklin', and the Methodists 
just used a damp washcloth." At the 1982 festival he told of a Tucker's 
Knob entrepreneur named Crazy Jim, who opened up a restaurant called 
"Down Home": 

And what he done, he hit upon a bonanza. He got in touch with all 
them old rangers, and them wardens, and property owners, and sports- 
men out in New Mexico, and Arizona, and Texas where they have 
them old hard-shell armadillos out there? And they're a nuisance 
out there, they claim. And so Old Jim had 'em kill all them old 
armadillos, and pack 'em in ice, and send 'em back there to Tucker's 
Knob. And old Jim fixes 'em in his restaurant, and he serves 'em, 
and calls 'em, 'Possum on the Halfshell.' 

The form of McConnell's story here is thoroughly traditional, but its 
content reflects the cosmopolitan system of social and economic exchange 
of which the festival itself is one expression. McConnell's Crazy Jim, in 
fact, could easily have been Jimmy Neil Smith, importing recontextualized 
storytellers from all over North America to small town Tennessee, and 
serving them up to nostalgic travelers who want their narrative possum on 
the halfshell of redemptive ritual. In the restored performance context 
of the festival, McConnell's tall tales performed an initiatory function analo- 
gous to the one they play in traditional male societies as narrative riddles, 
whose solution is betokened by laughter, and whose ritual reward is incor- 
poration into the community of knowers. 

If you emerged from the Taylor cabin after McConnell's set, you might 
have cocked one ear to a bellowing neophyte, while scanning the sched- 
ule with one eye and the gathering flood of passersby with the other, search- 
ing for old friends and acquaintances while simultaneously straining to 
plot your course from hour to hour and to prepare for the coming on- 
slaught of narrative overload. Overload is an essential transformational 
mode of festival consciousness. In the presentational equivalent of the 
cornucopia baskets splayed across the sidewalks of Main Street, three to 
six tents will generally be going at any given time, plus the Swappin' 
Grounds, and a cornucopia of consumable storytelling books, tapes, vid- 
eos, and souvenirs called "the resource tent." There is too much to do, to 
see, to hear (and to buy) throughout the weekend, and the more one 
desires to be touched and transformed by the experience, the more that 



SOBOL/THE STORYTELLING FESTIVAL 31 

too-muchness pulls on the mind. One experiences the mass of festival 
activity proceeding always just out of reach of eye and ear as a kind of half- 
conscious stimulant, simultaneously a distraction and a spur to renewed 
intensities of receptivity. 

The first formal sessions with the featured performers are billed as 
"Family Showcases" lightweight, mixed programs for general audiences 
and "Meet the Storyteller" workshops, in which performers are encour- 
aged to speak in an informal, personal way about themselves and their 
relation to their art form. These introductory sessions initiate the pro- 
cess, essential to the experience of the weekend, of becoming known to 
one another, in the peculiar heightened way that we allow ourselves to be 
imprinted by performing presences in an intentional hotbed of expres- 
sive energy. Friday evening, after a dinner break, comes the first "olio." 
In 1985, for example, the tellers lined up, seven in one large tent, seven in 
another. Each would tell a 10-minute story. When all had gone, there 
would be a break. The little flotillas of tellers would switch tents and start 
over again. Audiences could get a taste of each storyteller's energy and 
style, and could pick their way with a more informed instinct among the 
array of simultaneous offerings in various tents on Saturday. 

The olio serves as a baptism by immersion in the river of voices that 
constitute the festival in any given year. There is no pretense of closure 
since the festival is avowedly constituted of all its members. "We are all 
storytellers" is part of storytelling movement catechism. The National 
Storytelling Festival takes upon itself the task of representing, not just the 
national storytelling scene, but a storytelling nation. It is a different na- 
tion than the one represented, say, on the nightly network news, a nation 
revisioned in the bright silver of the revival mythos. It is a nation of story- 
tellers of individuals, groups, and communities empowered by the knowl- 
edge of their stories and by the ability to share them and to be heard by 
their own and by one another's communities. 

Before "multiculturalism" became an ideological shorthand for cul- 
tural work in the nineties, it was a vision struggling to be born in the 
gravitational field of the storytelling festival lineup. The schedule in 1985, 
for instance, included Spalding Gray, the autobiographical monologuist 
from New York City; traditional musician/storytellers from Ethiopia 
(Selashe Damessae) and Bengal (Purna Das Baul); a professor, Robert 
Creed, whose specialty was reciting Beowulf in Old English; a 78-year-old 
retired children's librarian, Alice Kane, born in Belfast and raised in 
Toronto; a Pueblo Indian novelist and poet, Simon Ortiz; Mary Carter 
Smith, a self-styled African-American "Urban Griot" from Baltimore; 
Penninah Schram, from New York, who specialized in Jewish folktales; a 
teacher from St. Louis, Lynn Rubright, who had developed large-scale 
pilot programs for storytelling in schools; Connie Martin, a colleague of 
Robert Bly in the use of folktales as heuristic tools in revisioning gender 



32 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

roles; revival performers with backgrounds in writing (Jay O'Callahan), 
theater (Jon Spelman), mime (Jackson Gillman), and music and dance 
(Heather Forest); and the great traditional Jack tale teller Ray Hicks. 
"These performers represent a wide range of styles and stories, traditions 
and cultures," wrote festival director Laura Simms in the program guide. 
"In 13 years, NAPPS has successfully created a place for storytelling as an 
important social, political, and healing art." 

What Simms meant by linking those three dimensions social, politi- 
cal, and healing in her mission statement, has to do with Robert Cantwell's 
interpretation of festival magic. The careful calibration of cultural repre- 
sentation in the construction of the festival program became for her and 
others a potent metaphor for the ritual construction of a peaceable king- 
dom. Geographic, ethnic, racial, gender, and stylistic balance are not ca- 
sual matters in this construction, but matters of world-shaping import. 

On Saturday, the formal storytelling activities run from 10 in the 
morning until 10:30 at night, in all the tents and the Swappin' Ground. 
Each featured performer generally has one one-hour slot to him- or her- 
self, then two or three other sessions that are shared with one to three 
other tellers. Sometimes these group sessions are planned around a 
theme in 1985, themes included "Men's Stories," "Women's Stories," "Sto- 
ries of the West," "Heroes," "Laughing Stories," "Stories With Music," "True 
Stories," and "Family Stories" sometimes the theme is only implicit in 
the contrasting voices of the tellers. Inevitably, one is drawn and quar- 
tered by one's appetite for things going on in many separate sites, until 
one is forced to surrender to the narrowness of a personal agenda. Ap- 
prentice storytellers and fans pick a favorite, or two, three, or four favor- 
ites, and try to follow them from tent to tent, studying and enjoying them 
under different conditions, large tent and small, alone and in various com- 
binations, watching them work off of one another and off of the energy of 
different crowds. It is an opportunity to be imprinted, as a teller, by sto- 
ries and by telling styles that resonate particularly with one's own person- 
ality and background that reach inside and awaken some slumbering 
sense of personal voice and vocation. 

By late Saturday afternoon, the vision (or more precisely, the audi- 
tion) of revived tradition, or of a polyphony of revived traditions all carol- 
ing their anthems under the banner of NAPPS, has been largely set in 
place, and the place prepared for the arrival and assumption of Ray Hicks. 
The staff car pulls up to the Tent in the Park, covered with dust from the 
mountain roads. The designated driver gets out to help Hicks unfurl his 
astonishingly elongated frame. His wife Rosa, tiny and thin as a six-penny 
nail, follows him out carrying bags of ginseng, sassafras, and angelica root 
gathered from the mountain, and some homemade apple cakes, all for 
sale. Whether Hicks is late for his show or not, he is instantly surrounded. 



SOBOL/THE STORYTELLING FESTIVAL 33 

Children and adults, friends, acquaintances and strangers, storytellers and 
tourists stop to ask him questions, to listen to his torrent of talk, to snap 
his picture, or just to gawk. Hicks's image has adorned so many posters, 
flyers, schedules, programs, not to mention newspaper and magazine ar- 
ticles on the festival over the course of 20 years, that it seems for a mo- 
ment as if the festival itself has stepped out of a car and stands waving its 
enormous arms between the resource tent and the road. 

This synecdoche remains compelling despite the fact that no one could 
be less typical of the contemporary storyteller bred by the revival and the 
festival than Hicks. Though the festival would move more and more to- 
wards professional tellers who were quite at home in the segmented world 
of the weekend schedule, it still needed as its symbol a man whose stories 
and whose entire consciousness came self-evidently from outside that world, 
and were only subject to being contained within it for brief, ritual de- 
scents, one Saturday afternoon a year. The Christian ritual, by analogy, 
takes as its centerpiece a man who was both born in a manger and im- 
maculately conceived. The incarnation of American storytelling in a cabin 
on Beech Mountain that has neither heat, running water, television, nor 
clocks is a similar boon to the devout imagination. 

In McConnell's unofficial Friday appearances he would act as a fore- 
runner to Hicks's storytelling messiah, baptizing visitors in Appalachian 
storytelling traditions in preparation for Hicks's Saturday descent from 
the Mountain of Transfiguration. The difference in their repertoires is 
appropriate to this complementarity. Tall tales are worldly and rough; 
Jack tales, for all Hicks's characteristic interruptions, are most often 
otherworldly, supernatural, and associated with the Jungian archetype of 
the sacred child. Tall tales play with exoteric/esoteric code-switching. 
Hicks's long wonder tales, particularly in his archaic dialect, are purely 
esoteric, difficult to listen to, but rewarding the faithful with microcosmic 
epiphanies of the total storytelling revival myth. 

After Hicks and his wife have been bundled into the car and driven 
away back up the mountain, there is a break for dinner. Food courts line 
the parking lot between the big Tent in the Park and the smaller tent on 
the hill. The resource shed, later to grow into a tent of its own, is open 
and booming; all the restaurants in town are full. These free, informal 
zones in the tightly scheduled weekend are the times when the web of 
personal connections are formed which will give a sense over the course 
of the year and the years that there is such a thing as a national storytelling 
community. Relationships are deepened sometimes with acquaintances 
from home who suddenly become, in this weightless sphere, the people 
in the world who most closely share your soul; sometimes with strangers 
from half a continent away who catch your eye and wind up sitting across 
from you in a heart-to-heart outpouring all the more passionate the further 



34 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

it soars from your daily life all this in the altered, festival state of emo- 
tional susceptibility brought on by two days on a constant roller coaster of 
narrative movement. 

After dinner there is another scheduled session, a kind of mini-olio, 
in which two to five tellers play off of one another in each of two to five 
tents. The sun has set. Stories told can deepen and darken, revealing 
new comic, tragic, or personal dimensions. There is a sense of imma- 
nence, of a premonitory excitement leading up to the ghost story session. 
The accumulated invocations of ancestors, of otherworldly visions, and of 
hostile, benevolent, or tutelary spirits thicken the atmosphere of dusk. 

Until 1985, all other activities would stop at 9 p.m. and crowds would 
gather at the foot of the hill northeast of Main Street for the walk to the 
cemetery for the ghost telling. The seasonal approach of the old Celtic 
New Year, the divide between the light and dark halves of the year, when 
the gates between the worlds stand open for a night, adds an atavistic 
shiver to the natural chill in the air. In the ritual form of the festival, this 
is the traditional descent into the Underworld, with the storytellers as 
shamanic guides. It is an opportunity to contemplate the lower, malevo- 
lent, and fearsome forms on the other side of the divide of life and death. 

In the mythos of the storytelling revival, the ghost telling has a dual 
resonance. In addition to being inevitably the most popular and profit- 
able event of a storytelling festival, ghost storytelling is one of the last 
living refuges for traditional oral narrative in contemporary American 
popular culture. Whether on Boy Scout trips, at summer camps, or on 
junior-high-school sleep overs, there remains a lively tradition of keeping 
the darkness homeopathically at bay with hoary old legends and grue- 
some new inventions. So as midnight approaches, the ritual dramatiza- 
tion of the revival myth deepens, in a thicket of subliminal paradox. 
Through the imagining of death our own as shivering mortals, paired 
with the projected death of storytelling as an art form and divine scape- 
goat-audience and art form are titillated into a state of exaltation. Though 
pronounced dead and buried over and over, here is the art of storytelling 
risen before us, reminding us that we are alive by leading us to the brink 
of annihilation to sites in the imagination where resurrection of the body 
is worse than death. "Go back to the grave," cries the father in "The 
Monkey's Paw," refusing the temptation to wish his dead son back in the 
flesh. While Jackie Torrence was telling this story in the cemetery in 1985, 
a drunken fan went wild, shouting, "Jackie, Jackie, I love you, Jackie!" with 
such mournful exuberance that she fell off the porch of the decrepit old 
house where she was standing, and had to be carried away. It was the last 
ghost telling in the Jonesborough cemetery, and a chilling glimpse of what 
it might be like to have the art of storytelling resurrected in the hungry 
flesh of American celebrity-worship. 



SOBOL/THE STORYTELLING FESTIVAL 35 

After midnight, the crowd is released. It streams down the hill like a 
fleet of candles in the dark, burning with the light of an art which has just 
been struck to life. After a short night of dreams, the festival faithful 
resurrect into the light of the sacred telling. These two events, ghost 
telling and sacred telling, are twinned in the ritual structure of the festi- 
val, dark giving way to light, yang to yin. The stories told here all concen- 
trate on positive images of spiritual experience. Revenants appear only to 
wipe a weeping eye and tell their loved ones they are at peace. Wailing 
and gnashing of teeth are stilled by a kind word or a gentle touch, from 
this world or the next. Gods and goddesses, saints and bodhisattvas play 
peekaboo from behind the fleshly masks that show to the world as bag 
ladies or simpletons. The holy fool sleeps forever in the divine mother's 
arms, and the sibilant whisper of palm rubbing palm would not disturb his 
sleep. 

At the height of the revival period, the sacred telling was the climax 
of the festival for festival initiates, as the ghost storytelling was its climax 
for the merely curious. Many of those who streamed down the hill from 
the cemetery would not come back, but would go away satisfied with the 
metaphysical teasing of the ghost stories. Those who were waiting to find 
a redemptive vision in storytelling would return in the morning for the 
sacred telling. The spiritual worlds depicted on Saturday night were ex- 
citing precisely because they were sundered from this world by great gulfs 
of fear. The spiritual worlds depicted on Sunday morning were gently 
joined to this one by currents of love, mercy, forgiveness, and courage. 

Like many another liminal rite, the trajectory of the festival moves 
downward into the dark in order to push the spirit up into the light. The 
revival preacher takes care to draw his eager audience into the steaming 
pit of hell before raising them into the dawn of salvation. The tribal ini- 
tiate may be symbolically buried or dismembered before being reincorpo- 
rated into his new status. At the storytelling revival event, once again, the 
symbolic protagonist of festival's ritual narrative is storytelling itself. Fea- 
tured tellers and committed audience celebrate the sacrificial death of 
the folk art, its harrowing of the hell of our haunted imaginations, and its 
resurrection as a tool of social connectedness and spiritual healing. By 
our projected identification with and dedication to the storytelling form, 
we are moved to shed fears and doubts and take on some of the power 
demonstrated at the festival, for reincorporation into our own lives and 
home communities. 

WORKS CITED 

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. 
Martin, Rafe. Telephone interview. 21 Jan. 1992. 
May, Jim. Telephone interview. 16 Apr. 1992. 

McConnell, Ernest "Doc." "Tucker's Knob." Storytelling: The National Festival. Audiotape. 
Jonesborough: NAPPS, 1983. 



36 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. 2 nd ed. Austin: U of Texas P, 1968. 

Shannon, George. "Dear Yarnspinner." Yarnspinner 6.12 (1982): 1-3. 

Simms, Laura. "Welcome to the National Storytelling Festival." Festival brochure. 

Jonesborough, TN: NAPPS, 1985. 
Torrence, Jackie. Telephone interview. 23 Jan. 1992. 
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process. Ithaca: Cornell, 1979. 
Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Trans, by Monika. B. Vizedome and Gabrielle L. 

Caffee. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. 

WORKS CONSULTED 

Birch, Carol. Telephone interview. 10 Apr. 1992. 

Cantwell, Robert. "Conjuring Culture: Ideology and Magic in the Festival of American 

Folklife." Journal of American Folklore 104.412 (1991): 148-63. 

. "Response to Peter Seitel." Journal of American Folklore 104.414 (1991): 496-99. 
Chase, Richard, ed. The Jack Tales. Boston: Houghton, 1943. 
Dorst, John D. The Written Suburb: An American Site, An Ethnographic Dilemma. Philadelphia: 

Uof Penn, 1989. 

Ellis, Elizabeth. Telephone interview. 11 Jan. 1992. 
Forest, Heather. Telephone interview. 23 Feb. 1992. 
Schechner, Richard. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London: 

Routledge, 1993. 

Smith, Jimmy Neil, ed. Homespun: Tales from America's Favorite Storytellers. NY: Crown, 1988. 
Sobol, Joseph Daniel. "Jonesborough Days: The National Storytelling Festival and the 

Contemporary Storytelling Revival in America." DAI 55 (1994): Northwestern U. 
Stivender, Ed. Telephone interview. 7 Jan. 1992. 
Wallace, Anthony F. C. "Revitalization Movements: Some Theoretical Considerations for 

Their Comparative Study." American Anthropologist 58 (1956): 264-81. 



BETSY HEARNE 

Associate Professor 

Graduate School of Library and Information Science 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 



Midwife, Witch, and Woman-Child: 
Metaphor for a Matriarchal Profession 

My great-grandmother had a passion for healing. Although she 
never gave and received pills or injections of any kind, she deliv- 
ered babies and cured or eased both herself and many others 
through time-tested herbal recipes meticulously written out in a Swiss- 
German Amish dialect. When she cut her hand open with a butcher knife, 
she sewed it back up again with a boiled darning needle. She was still 
canning and baking her own bread at the age of 94. After her husband of 
30 years died, she sat up all night with his body, as was the custom. Some- 
time toward morning, according to my mother, she left her rocking chair 
and walked slowly to the coffin. Then she began to probe, from head to 
toe, each part of the man she had loved so long. She stopped at his abdo- 
men, continued, returned to it, probed again, nodded her head, and re- 
turned to her chair. He had died of an abdominal tumor that was un- 
doubtedly cancer, and she wanted to know. 

My mother told me that story, and this one, too, about the time she 
went to break up the huge old house filled from cellar to attic with my 
grandparents' and great-grandparents' things. Desperately she dis- 
carded, gave away, auctioned, burned, or saved generations of relics. One 
artifact in question was my great-grandmother's box of herbal recipes. 
On the phone with my father, she mentioned her quandary over what to 
do with these recipes. "Throw them away," said my father, the doctor. 
"They're worthless." I was reminded of this story in reading an account, 
in Laurel Ulrich's tour de force A Midwife's Tale, of how narrowly eigh- 
teenth-century midwife Martha Ballard's diary missed destruction: 

When her great-great-granddaughter Mary Hobart inherited it in 
1884, it was 'a hopeless pile of loose unconsecutive pages' but it 
was all there. The diary had remained in Augusta for more than 
sixty years, probably in the family of Dolly Lambard, who seems to 
have assumed custody of her mother's papers along with the rented 
cow. At Dolly's death in 1861, the diary descended to her 



38 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

daughters, Sarah Lambard and Hannah Lambard Walcott. . . . Mary 
Hobart . . . was thirty-three and a recent graduate of medical school 
when her great-aunts Sarah and Hannah gave her the diary. "As the 
writer was a practising physician," she later explained, "it seemed 
only fitting that the Ballard diary, so crowded with medical interest, 
should descend to her." (346) 

Thus the diary was saved by a hair by an heir, one of the first women 
doctors in the second half of the nineteenth-century, who commissioned 
her cousin Lucy to bind it in linen and had a mahogany desk built espe- 
cially to hold it. Ironically, my father's mother had graduated from medi- 
cal school at about the same time as Martha Ballard's heir. However, this 
paternal grandmother died before my mother could ask her the strategic 
question about the value of herbal recipes. 

So it came about that, unlike Martha Ballard's private documents, my 
great-grandmother's were lost because of my professional father's advice. 
I have only oral fragments passed on as stories from my mother, and I 
know that boneset tea, whatever that is, may be one of the few known 
cures for migraine headache. One other note: in slightly earlier times 
and places, not only would Great-grandmother Eliza's records have been 
in doubt, but also her life. While obstetrics has not generally been consid- 
ered a dangerous occupation, midwifery sometimes was. The designa- 
tions of healer, midwife, and witch overlapped precariously, depending 
on patriarchal authorities and public mood. French historian Jules 
Michelet, in a classic nineteenth-century study recently re-published as 
Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Superstition, elaborates on what happened when the 
midwife-healer was labeled "witch" for applying her skills: 

The Sorceress was running a terrible risk. Nobody at that time had a 
suspicion that, applied externally or taken in very small doses, poi- 
sons are remedies. All the plants which were confounded together 
under the name of Witches' herbs were supposed ministers of death. 
Found in a woman's hands, they would have led to her being ad- 
judged a poisoner or fabricator of accursed spells. A blind mob, as 
cruel as it was timid, might any morning stone her to death, or force 
her to undergo the ordeal by water or noyade. Or, worst and most 
dreadful fate of all, they might drag her with ropes to the church 
square, where the clergy would make a pious festival of it, and edify 
the people by burning her at the stake. (83) 

Of course, male doctors used some of the same plants; midwifery and 
the medical profession had much to learn from each other (as did loath 
though clergymen might have been to admit it witchcraft and church 
doctrine). However, women in creative touch with nature were in danger 
of being seen as supernatural rather than natural. "Nature makes them 
sorceresses," quotes Michelet in reflecting the sixteenth-century attitude 
toward women associated with pantheism ( viii) . Giving birth and delivering 
life were too powerfully mysterious not to be threatening. Where there's 



HEARNE/MIDWIFE, WITCH, AND WOMAN-CHILD 39 

life, there's death only a fragile breath away; and women who controlled 
life might also have controlled death. Writes Ulrich about Martha Ballard's 
patients, "Between 1767 and 1779, Oxford lost 12 percent of its population 
in one of the worst diphtheria epidemics in New England's history. One 
hundred forty-four persons died, mostly children ages two to fourteen" 
(12). And this was not even a plague era. In one year, Martha lost three 
of her nine children, her uncle and aunt, eight of their eleven children, 
friends and neighbors, and many more. Fortunately, no finger of suspi- 
cion was ever pointed at Martha, as we shall consider later, but in face of 
uncontrollable, mysterious, threatening forces there often lurked the ques- 
tion: Who more than the life-bringer could be blamed for bringing death? 

And what does all this have to do with children's literature? Be pa- 
tient. Perhaps a storytelling link is already apparent. The midwife/witch/ 
healer turns out to be a common archetype in children's literature, a genre 
midwifed and nurtured by women. From a historical perspective, the par- 
allels between midwives delivering babies, midwives delivering nascent 
children's literature, and midwives appearing as characters in children's 
literature may come as no surprise. 

Martha Ballard learned some of what she knew from her own Grand- 
mother Learned, still alive in 1777, the year before Martha delivered her 
first baby (Ulrich 11-12). Wise Child, in Monica Furlong's juvenile novel 
of that title, learns herbal lore from midwife/witch/healer Juniper, who 
learned it from midwife/ witch/ healer Euny. Brat, a.k.a. Alyce in the 
Newbery Award book The Midwife's Apprentice, learns what she knows from 
midwife/healer Jane Sharp. Kit gathers symbolic knowledge from elderly 
Hannah in Elizabeth Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond: "Thee did well, 
child, to come to the Meadow. There is always a cure here when the heart 
is troubled" (85). Humpy, a.k.a. Lovel in The Witch's Brat by Rosemary 
Sutcliff, learns herbal lore from his healer/witch grandmother, though 
he does not have her Second Sight. Rosemary in Becoming Rosemary ab- 
sorbs the gift of healing from her midwife/witch/healer mother. Ugly 
One in The Magic Circle first learns the trade of herbal lore from her healer/ 
witch mother: 

She pointed out the herbs. She showed me the medicinal value of 
the hare's liver. She revealed to me the secrets of the river fish. I 
know cures from her. And through the years I have added my own. I 
have experimented, always following my instinct. But until now my 
cures have been offered only to newborns and their mothers and to 
my own sweet Asa. My heart is now in my throat. My breath comes 
hard. "I would heal if I could." "Then we must make you a magic 
circle," says Bala. "You can stay entirely within the magic circle, and 
no devil can get you." (Napoli 12) 

Like Ugly One, Laura Chant heroine of Margaret Mahy's The 
Changeover crosses the line from natural to supernatural in trying to heal 



40 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

her brother, and she does it, like Wise Child and Euny, under the supervi- 
sion of two older women who have done it before her. Say Laura's men- 
tors, "We will marry you, if we can, to some sleeping aspect of yourself and 
you must wake it. Your journey is inward, but it will seem outward" (139) . 
In each of the seven children's books mentioned, we see a knowledge of 
special power developed within a matriarchal network for passing on that 
knowledge. 

Among the several patterns immediately apparent in children's fic- 
tion about midwife, witch, and woman-child, then, is the intimate passage 
of intimate lore from masters to apprentices. The master is a mature or 
elderly woman, the apprentice a prepubescent girl (with the exception of 
one boy marginalized by his crippled body) , and both are typically differ- 
ent from others, often community outcasts or at best tenuously accepted 
if and when the regnant patriarchal society requires their skills. The ap- 
prenticeship is difficult, demanding, and ultimately dangerous because 
the female healer is dealing in the art of life and death. Her observations 
of nature involve a closeness to nature that is suspect in the eyes of the 
church and other male-dominated institutions. Women's sexuality is sus- 
pect because it is associated with the inevitable but mysterious power of 
birth and death, with the rhythm of moon and tides so often metaphori- 
cal of female cycles as to become a romanticized stereotype. (Less than 
romantic is the solution of Meghan Collins' "The Green Woman" to hedge 
her bets on herbal remedy by sending her own virile lover to bed the 
governor's wife, who has threatened to foment a witch trial unless the 
Green Woman can guarantee her an infant heir to the governor.) 

THE MIND-BODY CONNECTION 

The art of healing, as all of these apprentices learn, has to do with 
mind as well as body. Learning, as implied by the status of apprenticeship 
itself, has to do amazingly enough with education. Mental and spiri- 
tual health is crucial to physical health. And what, it turns out, is more 
crucial to spiritual health than storytelling and, even more specifically in 
each of these books, reading? "Juniper told me some amazing stories," 
says Wise Child in detailing her education in Celtic lore and later in litera- 
ture. "I wanted to learn, too, to lose myself in the pleasure of books, of 
stories and thoughts . . ." (Furlong 178). Kit, who teaches children to 
read through storytelling in The Witch of Blackbird Pond, passes on her old 
silver filigree hornbook to a child as isolated as herself (Speare 105). The 
shy orphan Alyce learns to read from a scholar who pretends to be teach- 
ing the cat: "Once Alyce knew all the letters and a number of combina- 
tions, Magister Reese began teaching the cat words, reading aloud bits of 
wisdom from his great encyclopaedia" (Cushman 79). Ugly One has 
learned to read from the father of her illegitimate child and uses a local 
burgermeister's books to study the skills and sorcery of healing. Lovel 



HEARNE/ MIDWIFE, WITCH, AND WOMAN-CHILD 41 

learns to read at the monastery from an illustrated book of physic herbs, 
"And all the while, though he was not properly aware of it, the old wisdom 
and the old skills that were in him from his grandmother were waking 
more and more; the green fingers that could coax a plant to flourish and 
give its best; the queer power of the hands on sick or hurt bodies (Sutcliffe 
38). . . . He seemed to be seeing with his hands as well as feeling" (40). 

Not only are storytelling and reading crucial in all of these books, but 
there is also a persistent association of storytelling and reading with magic. 
Indeed, Rosemary's strangely powerful older sister Con reads her mother 
Althea's books from a distance; the family knows because they see the 
pages turning by themselves while Con is minding pigs in the forest. 

Althea owned three books, books that Rosemary's grandmother had 
owned, and her great-grandmother before that. . . . Sometimes Rose- 
mary would be alone in the house, and she would walk by the table 
to see that one of the books had been pulled away from the others 
and opened. Slowly, very slowly, the pages would turn, as if blown by 
a breath from far away. . . . Sometimes, when Rosemary saw those 
pages turning, she would run into the forest so that she could find 
Con and sit and listen. (Wood 49-50) 

Magic associated with storytelling and reading may symbolize the more 
mysterious, intuitive, associative, or subconscious aspects of learning. We 
are to some extent moved and transformed by stories in inexplicable ways 
that seem to involve a metaphorical process important to understanding 
the human condition. Inherent in the work of healing is passing on knowl- 
edge not only of the ingredients, but of how and in what circumstances 
they are effective, how people respond to them in unexpected ways, how 
people react to life and death. This kind of knowledge is wisdom not 
information. It has to do with instinct, experience, observation, and val- 
ues, as well as facts. What each apprentice learns from her mentor com- 
prises much more than plant names and applications. Despite our scien- 
tific era, we still speak of the "art" of healing. Each of the apprentices 
must learn to honor her creative self, nurture her full identity, and pass 
on her knowledge in an oral or printed tradition before becoming a mas- 
ter of her art. 

Like the Fates who determine life and death on spindle or loom, these 
women often practice in addition to the art of healing the art of spin- 
ning and weaving. It's a domestic art, of course, but with a mythological 
resonance that's closely associated with the art of spinning a yarn, the art 
of storytelling. And the stories of these women, when they reach us, make 
gripping literature as well as historical lore. Here is a dramatic example 
linking the long, tedious birth attendances in the almost-lost diary of 
Martha Ballard, a weaver of flax, by the way, and a spinner of wool (we'll 
come back again later to women's proclivity for applied arts, generally 
underrated in comparison to "fine arts"). This entry is from April 24, 1789: 



42 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

A sever Storm of rain. I was Calld at 1 hour pm from Mrs Husseys by 
Ebenzer Hewin. Crosst the river in their Boat. A great sea A going. 
We got save over then sett out for Mr Hewins. I Crost a stream on the 
way on fleeting Loggs & got safe over. Wonder full is the Goodness 
of providence. I then proseeded on my journey. Went beyond Mr 
Hainses & a Larg tree blew up by the roots before me which Caused 
my hors to spring back & my life was spared. Great & marvillous are 
thy sparing mercies O God. I was assisted over the fallen tree by Mr 
Hains. Went on. Soon Came to a stream. The Bridg was gone. Mr 
Hewin took the rains waded thro & led the horse. Asisted by the 
same allmighty power I got safe thro & arivd unhurt. Mrs Hewins 
safe delivd at 10 h Evn of a Daughter. (Ulrich 6) 

Ulrich astutely points out the rhythm, repetition, and pattern of al- 
ternating "action sentences with formulaic religious phrases" here (7). It 
seems clear that in another age, Ballard might have been a noted writer as 
well as a noted physician. We must ask ourselves if what she was, a great 
midwife and storyteller, is any less for having been unnoted. 

Martha Ballard, without her 27-year diary, would have been recorded 
in public documents no more than the three times a woman was supposed 
to be for birth, marriage, and death (Tucker 8). Says Ulrich, 

The American Advocate for June 9, 1812, summed up her life in one 
sentence: "Died in Augusta, Mrs. Martha, consort of Mr. Ephraim 
Ballard, aged 77 years." Without the diary we would know nothing 
of her life after the last of her children was born, nothing of the 816 
deliveries she performed between 1785 and 1812. We would not 
even be certain she had been a midwife. (5) 

The only testimony we have of Ballard's service and talents is a private 
record, which Ulrich has proven accurate through painstaking cross-checks 
with public records, available from the same time period, of environmen- 
tal disasters such as flooding or of religious/political upheavals to which 
Ballard refers tangentially. Knowledge in the form of history, literature, 
arts, and sciences has traditionally been divided into public and private 
domains, the public belonging to men and the private to women, the 
former considered, until recently, to be of greater significance than the 
latter (Welter). 

MOVING BEYOND THE HOUSEHOLD STAGE 

More specifically, Western (and many non-Western) cultures have 
divided storytelling into public and private domains, with men in charge 
of the public and women of the private. Audiences for men tended to be 
other men in context of religious rituals or political arenas while audi- 
ences for women tended to be children and other women, on a house- 
hold stage. Extreme examples of this division, in current or recent prac- 
tice but rooted in ancient rites, are the exclusion of women from the 
Hassidic storytelling tradition and, indeed, the exclusion of all Orthodox 



HEARNE/MIDWIFE, WITCH, AND WOMAN-CHILD 43 

Jewish women from the synagogue room where readings of the Torah 
take place during Sabbath services; the prohibition against women's per- 
forming publicly in fundamentalist Islam; the prevention of women from 
administering priestly rites and sermons in the Catholic church; and the 
definition of pre-World War II East European coffee houses as a platform 
for male epic singers (see Lord's The Singer of Tales) . All the cultures in- 
volved here have a strong female storytelling tradition, but it is confined 
to the private domain. Parallels can be seen in the history of art, in which 
men have been more commonly acknowledged for painting and other 
"formal" graphic media, while women have only recently been counted 
artists for their work on quilts, knitting, sewing, embroidery, rugs, pottery, 
etc., all family-centered activities with practical applications. An interest- 
ing philosophical question might revolve around whether a lullabye sung 
through thousands of nights is of equal value to a symphony written by 
one whom the lullabye shaped. 

In the folkloristic realm, Charles Perrault, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, 
Andrew Lang, and Walt Disney all took stories collected primarily from 
women in domestic situations and translated them onto a public academic 
and/or commercial stage. This translation legitimized what had earlier 
been held in low esteem as old wives' tales. Even the fairy tales published 
by women such as Charlotte-Rose de Caumont De La Force, Marie-Jeanne 
L'Heritier, and Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy never achieved the status of 
work by intellectuals such as Perrault, the Grimms, and Lang, who had 
broader literary or nationalistic agendas. 

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially 
in Britain and the United States, women began to make a transition from 
storytelling in the private domain to storytelling in the public arena. With 
increasing access to education, they started to publish fiction cf. Nathaniel 
Hawthorne's letter to his publisher: "America is now wholly given over to 
a damned mob of scribbling women and I should have no chance of suc- 
cess while the public taste is occupied with their trash and should be 
ashamed if I did succeed " (Wagenknecht 150) but much of their work 
took the form of short stories in magazines for women and children, as 
opposed to "serious fiction," an area still dominated by men at that time 
(Shaker 6-7) . Similarly, the rise of professionalism among women saw 
them going primarily into service professions that represented an exten- 
sion of domestic duties: nursing (taking care of children's bodies) and 
social work, teaching, or librarianship (taking care of children's minds 
and spirits). As women pushed into the world of publishing, they were 
most frequently allowed toeholds in a relatively new business: translating 
an old literature for children, often folklore passed on by women, into a 
new literature for children, also cultivated by women (Hearne, "Margaret 
K. McElderry" 755-775). 



44 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Children's book publishing became a women's world that continued 
the old domestic gender patterns in a public arena, though it was a public 
arena significantly less valued than that of adult literature. With very few 
exceptions, women produced the books, edited the books, purchased the 
books, and inducted younger women in the ongoing cycle. As authors, 
editors, publishers, and librarians, women formed a flexible network with 
much role-switching between creative and administrative functions, just 
as women's creations have often blended art and application. Perhaps it 
is not surprising, then, that studies show girls as more avid readers, espe- 
cially of fiction. They are part of a gender-shaped storytelling tradition 
that is even now extending the oral/print transition into electronic me- 
dia. In their role as tradition bearers in both oral and print modes, women 
have midwifed children's literature, and children's literature about mid- 
wife/witches all by women reflects a reverence for tradition so pro- 
nounced that it's open to parody by scholars such as Diane Purkiss, who 
questions contemporary revisions: 

Although we no longer fear the witch, we still have not owned those 
dark feelings. Rather, we have sanitised the witch, so that she can 
become acceptable, transforming her into another one of our better 
selves. Now she is clean, pretty, an herbalist with a promising career 
in midwifery, a feminist, as good a mother as anybody if not rather 
better than most, sexually liberated (without being too kinky). (282) 

It is important to stress that the old girls' network, as idealized as it 
may be in the old girls' literature see, for example, quotes in Vandergrift 
(706) and Bush (732) is no more ideal than the old boys' network. Where 
there are issues of power, there are always related issues of control that 
can be exaggerated, in fact, if the power is seen as scarce or limited within 
a broader social context. Children's literature attended by matriarchal 
midwives who are neither perfect nor perfectly compassionate, but pow- 
erful in their own sphere (as we see in Cushman's portrayal of Jane Sharp 
and Mahy's of Miryam and Winter Carlisle) recreates the stereotype of 
good and evil witches by idealizing the former while the latter, only by 
implication, lurk unacknowledged somewhere in the shadows. Ironically, 
today's literary witch believes, as did some seventeenth-century witches, in 
her own magical powers despite the intervening period when educated 
feminists saw witches as victims innocent of anything more powerful than 
superstitious and homicidal public opinion. The midwife/ witch's magic 
currently represented in children's fiction is, like the seventeenth-cen- 
tury witch's magic, both powerful and threatened, both devoted to tradi- 
tional female values and subversive of patriarchal values. 

Midwife/witches and their apprentices in juvenile fiction are a para- 
dox of tradition and subversion. They follow the hero-journey cycle: cast 
out from society; summoned by destiny to travel through temptations and 
tests, often in the company of an animal helper; surviving the rite of pas- 



HEARNE/MIDWIFE, WITCH, AND WOMAN-CHILD 45 

sage to return to society or create a new one based on newly acquired 
knowledge. How old can this story pattern be? The knowledge of these 
women, and their stories, is subversive in viewpoint only; the narrative 
structure is as conservative as possible. It's what they do and tell, not how 
they do or tell it, that breaks boundaries. Folklore is often subversive in 
content, rarely in form, and these women are traditional storytellers, tra- 
dition bearers. 

THE TRADITIONAL BECOMES SUBVERSIVE 

Children's literature is, in fact, often radical in subject but conserva- 
tive in style. I have dealt at length with this idea elsewhere in examining 
both formally conservative children's fiction such as Penelope Lively's 
(Hearne, "Across the Ages") and folkloric form in popular picture books 
(Hearne, "Perennial Picture Books") , but the point has a place here in 
relation to the academy that today privileges us to evaluate storytelling 
and criticize children's literature. Having touched on parallels of mid- 
wife/witch in history and midwife/ witch in children's literature, I want to 
touch on midwife/witch in the library profession and its academic train- 
ing grounds where, to some extent, the traditional has again become 
subversive. 

Like midwives, weavers, and storytellers, the women who delivered 
children's literature and librarianship did not separate theory from prac- 
tice or art from application. Moreover, the scholarship of Jane Anne 
Hannigan, Kay Vandergrift, Christine Jenkins, and Anne Lundin, among 
others, shows over and again how deeply this women's field has depended 
on longterm anonymous service, flexible role changing, cooperative net- 
working, mentoring relationships, nonconfrontational resistance, and low- 
profile leadership. These are not characteristics highly rewarded in con- 
temporary academia despite lip service to several of them. As the Dean of 
the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago said recently, in closing 
down the School of Education (five years after the closure of the university's 
Graduate Library School), "we can't let a sentimental concern for chil- 
dren get in the way of hard scrutiny about whether we are producing 
quality work" (Bronner A27) . 

Just as children's literature was the female domain of a male-domi- 
nated publishing world, the critical evaluation of children's literature was 
fostered by female-dominated children's specialists in libraries and library 
education for nearly a century before entering the minds or departments 
of male-dominated English Literature and Education departments in the 
1970s. That entry, signaled by the involvement of male critics, has changed 
the critical evaluation of children's literature, and we need to think about 
how and why in determining a new balance of scholarship. Escalating 
attempts to make children's literature competitively prestigious with adult 
literature have resulted in some prose as impenetrable as the briars 



46 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

surrounding Sleeping Beauty, an apt comparison considering that only a 
select prince could find his way through. In a recent Horn Book Magazine 
article, "How to Get Your Ph.D. in Children's Literature," Brian Alderson 
points to the absurdity of a critical stance and language that feeds on itself 
instead of on literature. Perpetrating a classic hoax, he submitted a pro- 
posal to analyze The English Boy 's Magazine to conference organizers who 
described it as excellent and enthusiastically invited him to present the 
paper. 

My starting point will be an attempt to rescue the concept of parole 
from that of langue, perceiving a need for saussurian theoretics to 
give way in the analysis of socially designed texts to the more flexible 
critical potential residing in the insights of Bakhtin and Althusser. I 
will develop this through an examination of the dialogic qualities in 
the Empire-building serials by H.P Anelay, discussing not merely the 
nature of the intentionality of these essentially propagandist works 
but also the nexus of authorial discourse and readerly expecta- 
tion. ... I would assess the connotative semiotics of the printed im- 
age. This may lead me towards the unexplored territory of pictorial 
content as subliminal discourse in this instance on the hegemony of 
the imperial ethic. (439) 

Alas, confesses Alderson, "there was no such thing as an English Boy 's Maga- 
zine published from 1886 to 1902, nor any such person writing serials un- 
der the name of H.P. Anelay, nor any illustrator of those serials signing 
W.B.," as a check of any "shelf of mundane reference books on children's 
literature" (440) would have shown. What Alderson 's hoax shows up is a 
concern more for academic status than for children's literature. 

In its struggle for validation in a male-dominated hierarchy, is the 
literary criticism of children's books "growing up" to fit male-defined re- 
quirements? (Obviously, critics of both genders vary individually. I am 
looking not at individuals but at gender patterns as in noting, for ex- 
ample, that not all men have been U.S. presidents but all U.S. presidents 
have been men.) At a recent international conference on children's lit- 
erature, all four plenary session speakers were men, this despite the over- 
whelming majority of female presenters and attendees, not to mention 
the singular domination of women in the history of children's literature. 

WOMEN'S QUIET SUSTENANCE 

To some extent, the same pattern exists in the field of fairy tales, folk 
tales, and storytelling. Perhaps the most famous men to put fairy tales on 
the modern academic map have been Bruno Bettelheim, who champi- 
oned them upon a towering theoretical superstructure of Freudian inter- 
pretation, and Jack Zipes who challenged him with a Marxist reading. 
Relatively unnoticed has been the quiet, consistent women's work, espe- 
cially in the field of librarianship, that sustained the study and practice of 



HEARNE/MIDWIFE, WITCH, AND WOMAN-CHILD 47 

folk and fairy tales in children's culture for a hundred years prior to 
Bettelheim's recommendations in The Uses of Enchantment. 

Marie Shedlock, Ruth Sawyer, Sara Cone Bryant, Gudrun Thorne- 
Thompsen, Anna Cogswell Tyler, Mary Gould Davis, Eileen Colwell, Ruth 
Tooze, Augusta Baker, and many others spent their professional and in- 
tellectual lives advocating and acting on the delivery of folk and fairy 
tales to children. In his book Creative Storytelling, Zipes describes storytell- 
ers who visit schools and libraries. More often, however, school and pub- 
lic librarians are storytellers dedicated to just the kind of community- 
building he advocates, and an integral part of that community, as well. If 
their work has not been theoretically subversive, the very act of their 
sustaining storytelling programs decade after decade in the face of budget 
cuts and skeptical authorities has been subversive, not to mention the fact 
that Molly Whuppie and other active folktale heroines were mainstays of 
such programs from the turn of the century, long before politically cor- 
rected anthologies began to surface in the 1970s. Zipes himself is a strong 
feminist, but many folklorists, perhaps politically sensitive to their own 
insecure academic status, have consistently distanced themselves from the 
female- and child-associated areas of storytelling in librarianship and 
children's literature (Hearne, Beauty 148-154). Where is the story of the 
storytellers, the women who turned school boiler rooms and store fronts 
into houses of story in both oral and print traditions? 

School and public librarians share stories with children on a weekly 
basis without seeking either stardom or fancy fees. They have been doing 
it for a hundred years. Yet one male scholar at the aforementioned inter- 
national conference publicly praised another male scholar for the singu- 
lar feat of going into schools and working with children himself. The 
parallel might be Columbus discovering America. Could such disregard 
for indigenous inhabitants be due to an undervaluing of female librar- 
ians' and library educators' traditional treatment of literature as an ap- 
plied art? Has their work been at once discounted and coopted? Or has 
it simply been unnoted? 

While some fairy tale scholars a few female, but more often male 
have become academic supernovas, the women who kept folklore, fairy 
tales, and juvenile literature alive in libraries and library education for a 
century have faded from graduate school curricula (see Lundin's survey 
results in "The Pedagogical Context of Women in Children's Services and 
Literature Scholarship"). An escalating academic struggle for resources, 
time, and attention endangers awareness of the kind of invisible presence 
and quiet voice on which service-oriented women in children's literature 
and librarianship have typically relied to get their work done. The words 
"web" and "webbing" appeared frequently (even before web-masters com- 
mandeered the World Wide Web) in describing women who led the field 



48 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

of children's literature/librarianship and spiders, though effective, are 
notably silent. It is time to project our voices beyond the professional 
web, to define ourselves to a broader public community as women have 
done in other disciplines. 

Psychologist Carol Gilligan talks about the way females characteristi- 
cally develop a sense of justice as compromise rather than contest, an 
"ethic of care" (171-74). Anthropologist Nancy Chodorow describes 
women's blurred sense of ego boundaries as a basis for empathy. Philoso- 
pher Elizabeth Minnich asks us to create gender-inclusive curricula "re- 
covering women's stories within the complex intellectual traditions of 
higher education" (Lundin 841 ) . Sociologist Harriet Presser explains how, 
for many academic women, the personal is political and professional in 
Gender and the Academic Experience (141-156). What are the implications, 
for specialists in children's literature and librarianship, of these and many 
other voices examining intellectual midwives past and present? 

As a public-domain institution the university is still close to patriar- 
chal conventions. Remember that only in the past 50 years have women 
worked their way toward becoming a substantial percentage of faculty and 
heads of universities (the latter still deeply under-represented). And only 
in the last 25 years have women worked their way toward becoming sub- 
jects of history, literature, and science curricula in mainstream institu- 
tions. Women's stories, women's studies, women's development, it's still 
relatively new stuff new enough to be considered trendy and token rather 
than deeply imbedded and distributed. It's subversive stuff, and few claim 
to know exactly what it is or where it belongs. Often women's studies 
units run the risk of becoming marginalized. Isolated midwives, as we 
know from the history of witch-hunting, were in a dangerous position. 
Alas, Wise Child and Juniper had to be rescued by Juniper's ex-true-love 
playing deus ex machina with his sailing vessel anchored just out of reach 
of a pursuing mob a 1987 resolution remarkably parallel with that of the 
1958 book, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, 30 years earlier. 

The most successful midwives in terms of not getting burned at the 
stake were those imbedded deeply within the community rather than 
marginalized on its fringes. Nobody bothered historical midwife Martha 
Ballard in the 27 years of her midwifery, and nobody bothered literary 
midwives Althea in Becoming Rosemary or Jane Sharpton in The Midwife's 
Apprentice. These three characters, one actual and two fictional, were care- 
ful to remain encompassed in community. Indeed, community was the 
strength of successful midwifery. Historically, as many as four to six women, 
with tasks requiring varied levels of skill, attended a birth under the direc- 
tion of a midwife. 

By the same token, children's literature and librarianship cannot af- 
ford to be isolated from mainstream academia, including the information 
science component of LIS, the theory-driven bastions of postmodern En- 



HEARNE/MIDWIFE, WITCH, AND WOMAN-CHILD 49 

glish departments, and the education schools that are pushed to embrace 
quantifiable test-score approaches to learning. And yet children's litera- 
ture/ librarianship must also work to define, maintain, and assert its valu- 
ably distinctive and distinctively female balance between the creative 
and analytic, practical and theoretical, private and public, personal and 
objective, artistic and scientific, traditional and innovative. 

As a survivor of conflicts between these forces, which are so often 
divided in educational institutions the "higher" the education the more 
polar the division I nurture stories. Myjob is to tell stories about stories, 
to help deliver other people's stories, to examine stories, to keep the pro- 
cess healthy. Relevant to my understanding of this process is having birthed 
stories myself. Ulrich quotes an eighteenth-century midwifery manual to 
the same effect, that having babies was part of the preparation for deliver- 
ing them (12). (This, needless to say, might not have proved popular with 
male doctors as a standard requirement.) 

The story, its procreation; the literature, its practice: these are inte- 
grated, interactive processes. Let's not throw away the box of recipes. 
Although still suspect (for example, see Ritter's newspaper reports, "Mid- 
wives Battle State Crackdown" and "A Tough State for Midwives"), mid- 
wifery is in many circles increasingly valued as an integrated, interactive 
way to deliver babies. And it is no accident that metaphors of midwifery 
fit smoothly in a matriarchal profession that has delivered the private do- 
main of storytelling into the public domain of children's literature. 



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Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1960. 



50 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Lundin, Anne. "The Pedagogial Context of Women in Children's Services and Literature 

Scholarship." Library Trends 44 (1996): 840-50b. 
Mahy, Margaret. The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance. New York: Atheneum/Margaret 

K. McElderry, 1984. 
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New York: Carol, 1995. 

Napoli, Donna Jo. The Magic Circle. New York: Dutton, 1993. 
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May 1997. 
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 

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Vandergrift, Kay E. "Female Advocacy and Harmonious Voices: A History of Public Li- 
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Wagenknecht, Edward. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Man and Writer. New York: Oxford UP, 1961. 
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1995. 

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1977. 

Baxandall, Rosalyn and Linda Gordon, eds. America 's Working Women: A Documentary His- 
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Ed. Chris Miller. New York: Basic Books, 1996. 41-59. 

Colum, Padraic. Story-Telling, New and Old. 1927. New York: Macmillan, 1968. 
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Conway,Jill. True North: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1994. 
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Tales for Teachers and Storytellers. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1976. 
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women 

Healers. Old Westbury: Feminist Press, 1973. 
Ellis, Sarah. "Pinch." Back of Beyond: Stories of the Supernatural. New York: Simon Schuster/ 

Margaret K. McElderry, 1997. 

Forbes, Thomas Rogers. The Midwife and the Witch. New Haven: Yale U P, 1966. 
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Ballantine, 1986. 



HEARNE/MIDWIFE, WITCH, AND WOMAN-CHILD 51 

Hannigan, Jane Anne. "A Feminist Analysis of the Voices for Advocacy in Young Adult 
Services." Library Trends 44 (1996): 851-874. 

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Norton, 1988. 

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813-39. 

Johnson, Edna and Carrie E. Scott, eds. Anthology of Children 's Literature. Boston: Houghton, 
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Linde, Charlotte. Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. New York: Oxford U P, 1993. 

Lively, Penelope. Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived: A Memoir. New York: Harper, 
1994. 

Monter, E. William. "The Pedestal and the Stake: Courtly Love and Witchcraft." Becoming 
Visible: Women in European History. Ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz. Bos- 
ton: Houghton, 1977. 

Orlans, Kathryn P. Meadow and Ruth A. Wallace, eds. Gender and the Academic Experience: 
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Paley, Vivien. The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: The Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom. 
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Pellowski, Anne. The World of Storytelling. New York: Bowker, 1977. 

Pierson, Kate. "Knocking Down Straw Women: Re-examining the Premises of Feminist 
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Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary 
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Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist and Louise Lamphere. Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford: 
Stanford U P, 1974. 

Sawyer, Ruth. The Way of the Storyteller. New York: Viking, 1942. 

Schimmel, Nancy. Just Enough to Make a Story: A Sourcebook for Storytelling. 3rd. ed. Berke- 
ley: Sister's Choice Press, 1992. 

Shedlock, Marie L. The Art of the Story-Teller. 1915. Rev. ed. New York: Dover, 1951. 

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Stewig, John Warren. "The Witch Woman: A Recurring Motif in Recent Fantasy Writing 
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Webber, Jeanette and Joan Grumman, eds. Woman As Writer. Boston: Houghton, 1978. 

Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. New York: 
Methuen, 1984. 

. "Tales Worth Telling: Searching for Stories that Challenge Our Poisonous Myths." Utne 
Reader (September/October 1997): 38-42. 



MALORE I. BROWN 

Assistant Professor 

School of Library and Information Science 

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 



Evaluating Stories for Diverse Audiences 



Legends take us back to the origins of the tribal people, to their 
hopes, struggles and defeats. There are many cultures which have 
stories that are not readily available in print. The information is not 
found in libraries, but exists within the hearts and minds of individu- 
als called Storytellers. 

Legends are a celebration of the human spirit, part of our Ameri- 
can tradition, and the history of our country. To this very day they 
are being told, altered, and retold. In this book, the author attempts 
to present an interesting version of chanted literature. The legends 
are told in his voice, echoing the voices of his ancestors. The author 
does not attempt to present the only account or version of the leg- 
end, nor does he wish to offend similar tribal Storytellers. If the reader 
enjoys these myths, the author in retelling them has achieved his 
purpose. 

It is important to understand the roles and power of the Story- 
teller. These oral historians are given the responsibility of remem- 
bering and reciting their Native American Culture. It is through their 
ability that we understand their true heritage. (Cuevas 2) 

I would like to share an example of evaluating stories for diverse audi- 
ences with a diverse group. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwau- 
kee School of Library and Information Science, I teach a class called 
"Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults." This past spring, 
I had a very diverse group of students registered in the course. The group 
included two African-American females in their late 20s, one African-Ameri- 
can female in her early 40s, one Caucasian female in her mid-40s, several 
Caucasian females in their mid-30s, one African-American male in his mid- 
30s, and one Caucasian male in his early 30s. I started the semester with 
the basic lecture about what to look for when evaluating materials plot, 
theme, style, etc. By the second or third class session we were evaluating 
books. I had the idea of evaluating that very old story, Helen Bannerman's 
The Story of Little Black Sambo, which had been reissued in two different 



BROWN/EVALUATING STORIES FOR DIVERSE AUDIENCES 53 

versions in 1996: Julius Lester's Sam and the Tigers, illustrated by Jerry 
Pinkney, and Bannerman's The Story of Little Babaji, illustrated by Fred 
Marcellino. Each student read the new editions and was required to go to 
the university library and look at two of the older editions, with 
Bannerman's original text, in the historical collection. 

I have a rule in my classes when we discuss and evaluate materials: we 
mention the good qualities of the item first and the negative last. This is 
to ensure that the students do not get drawn into a purely negative discus- 
sion and never get around to the positive attributes of a work. 

I opened the discussion of these three books by asking for reactions 
and thoughts from class members. One of the twentysomething African- 
American females said she had never seen The Story of Little Black Sambo 
and she was glad to be able to look at it, but she "didn't know what all the 
fuss was about." She also thought the illustrations which have caused a 
great deal of controversy were funny. The discussion took off from there! 
The fortysomething African-American woman explained the hurt and 
hatred those illustrations caused during the racial turmoil of the 1960s. 
The fortysomething Caucasian woman said she had received an original 
copy of The Story of Little Black Sambo as a child and had hated the illustra- 
tions but loved the story. The discussion moved to Sam and the Tigers, 
which includes a source note from Lester about The Story of Little Black 
Sambo. Some of the students loved Sam and the Tigers, and others hated it. 
One of the stated reasons for disliking the book was the fact that all the 
characters were named Sam. Everyone loved the Bannerman book (illus- 
trated by Marcellino) , The Story of Little Babaji, except for the African-Ameri- 
can male, who suggested that the illustrations stereotyped Asian Indians. 
And the discussion continued. This was an example of evaluating a story 
and two variants of that story. Evaluating stories in print is a challenging 
task and even more challenging with a diverse group. 

The issues are similar in storytelling. These students of different races, 
sexes, and ages had very different reactions to the story variants they stud- 
ied, reactions that depended on their cultural experiences as well as their 
individual viewpoints. So, too, will a storytelling audience bring their own 
cultural perspectives to the story they hear. The creators of these variants 
were also responding, consciously or unconsciously, to cultural contexts 
for The Story of Little Black Sambo; so, too, must storytellers engage with the 
cultural contexts of the stories they tell. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF RESEARCH 

The most common obstacle to the powerful telling of a story is the 
teller's lack of knowledge; research into the background of tales can allow 
the storyteller to enhance and add credibility to already powerful 
storytelling. The teller is encouraged to use indexes and collections to 
research variants and origins, to enhance the story development and enrich 



54 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

the telling. Aarne and Thompson's The Types of the Folktale, Eastman's or 
Ireland's Index to Fairy Tales, and Margaret Read MacDonald's The Storytell- 
ers Sourcebook offer a starting point. Other worthwhile resources available 
for teller research include motif indexes, examinations of folk culture, 
dissertations on folklore, discussions of superstition and the supernatural, 
dictionaries of folk language and expressions, encyclopedias of folklore, 
collections of stories, riddles, rhymes, and jokes, and the list goes on. Story 
collections themselves often provide substantial background, since some 
print variants include a source note to assist in the understanding of a 
story. Betsy Hearne, in her July 1993 School Library Journal article "Cite the 
Source: Reducing Cultural Chaos in Picture Books, Part One," proposed 
that producers of picture-book folktales provide source notes that set these 
stories in their cultural context and that those of us who select these mate- 
rials for children consider how well the authors and publishers meet this 
responsibility in our evaluation of such books. 

Using the indexes, poring through collections, and finding source 
notes is time consuming, so why should a teller go through all of this 
work? Because knowing more about the history and origin of a tale allows 
the storyteller to immerse him- or herself in the story and understand it 
better, thereby telling a believable story and increasing his/her level of 
comfort in the retelling. The research conducted by a storyteller often 
reveals overlooked or hidden qualities of a story and allows the teller to 
relate that story with greater detail and knowledge, becoming a clearer 
vehicle. The more the teller is able to learn about the many elements of a 
particular story, the truer the voice of the story will be (Livo and Rietz 10). 
A serious storyteller will eventually need to look beyond the text of the 
story to learn to tell the story well; an informed storyteller enhances the 
story and renders a rooted and credible telling. Acknowledging the 
sources, whether the story is documented in folklore, heard from another 
person, or read somewhere, sets the story in context and allows listeners 
to prepare themselves accordingly. As a storyteller becomes familiar with 
the culture of a story, a sense of confidence, authority, and authenticity 
begins to emerge. 

There are many forces at work in the making of a story. Knowing the 
requirements, conventions, and etiquettes of the culture generating a tale 
pulls the storyteller closer to it. The actual creativity of the teller adds to 
these forces. Without adequate background on the contents of a story, 
the teller may not be able to convey the story's themes or know what kind 
of creative latitude, linguistic and otherwise, is appropriate. Oftentimes, 
for instance, stories make references to artifacts (Pellowski 216). Usually 
the artifacts are not incidental or utilitarian. They carry special cultural 
meaning important for understanding the stories. For example, if a story 
makes use of a mango tree from which the protagonist picks a fruit, mean- 
ings indigenous to a specific culture and the hidden implications of the 



BROWN/EVALUATING STORIES FOR DIVERSE AUDIENCES 55 

reference are important. Substituting a more contemporary or local, more 
recognizable tree may violate the integrity and meaning of the story. 

African stories are often characterized by a particular kind of oral 
tradition. Many of the stories are "pourquoi" or "why" stories," stories 
which explain animal and human characteristics. The repetitive language 
and styles that encourage interaction with the storyteller make them ex- 
cellent choices for sharing but also reflect a particular cultural tradition. 
Personified animals, often tricksters, are popular subjects for African 
folktales as well as folktales of other cultures. 

Many North American folktales and stories have roots in the cultures 
of other parts of the world or have been influenced by written literature. 
Identifying tales that began in a specifically North American oral tradi- 
tion may be difficult or impossible. Four types of folktales found in North 
America have been identified by researchers: Native American tales that 
were handed down over centuries of tribal storytelling; folktales that came 
from African countries and were changed over time, becoming African- 
American tales; European tales containing traditional themes, motifs, 
and characters that were changed to meet the needs of the New World; 
and boastful tall tales that originated on this continent. 

Native American tales are usually considered the only traditional tales 
truly indigenous to the United States. Some Native American tales have 
motifs in common, but differ in other ways from region to region and 
tribe to tribe. Many of these are, like African stories, pourquoi tales, ex- 
plaining why or how animals obtained specific characteristics. Like people 
in many other cultures, Native North Americans also have mythology that 
explain the origins of the universe and natural phenomena. Magical ani- 
mal trickster figures such as Rabbit, Coyote, or Raven are also popular in 
Native American culture. In addition, traditional tales of legendary he- 
roes reflect many important values and beliefs of various groups. These 
legendary heroes have many of the same qualities found in heroic tales 
from other cultures. 

Maintaining a balance between story traditions and invention during 
the story delivery is the responsibility of the storyteller; it always has been. 
The teller who becomes a student of a story's folkloric substance can bet- 
ter balance story form and invention, and can support a more powerful 
delivery. To tell a story well, with power and with honesty, one must know 
more than just the story, and one must achieve a necessary intimacy with 
its "life world" (Livo and Rietz 2). 

EVALUATION OF STORIES 

Before discussing the selection of stories for a diverse audience, it is 
important to discuss the selection and evaluation process of stories in gen- 
eral. Researchers stress a holistic approach to the evaluation of stories 
prior to telling, emphasizing the necessity of examining theme, 



56 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

characterization, setting, and style. These are important elements in the 
success of a good tale no matter what audience the tale is for. Most impor- 
tant in evaluating and selecting stories for a diverse audience is to use the 
same critical guidelines that are used in selecting mainstream materials. 
In evaluating stories, tellers must first ask if the tale is well written or trans- 
lated. Equally important are the setting and point of view. The setting of 
the story should be clear, believable, and authentic. The details should be 
natural and interwoven into the action. Just as in mainstream stories, 
characters should be believable and have depth. Interactions between 
the characters should sound natural and unforced. The story should hold 
the attention of the listeners within a credible sequence of events. Tales 
should succeed in arousing the interest of the listener and the teller. In 
essence, the selection process for stories of diverse cultures does not dif- 
fer greatly from the selection and evaluation process of mainstream sto- 
ries. We still look for cultural accuracy to insure that issues are repre- 
sented in ways that reflect the values and beliefs of that culture. 

Stories from all cultures portray the struggles, feelings, and aspira- 
tions of common people; stories depict the lives of the rich and poor; and 
stories reflect the moral values, social customs, superstitions, and humor 
of the times and societies in which they originated. There are stories 
from every culture that include appreciation for the beauty and mystery 
of life and belief in the power of the spirit to accomplish its will. Some 
stories are comedic, others tragic, but all reveal the depth of human val- 
ues. Anything is possible in stories as long as it is faithful to the truths of 
the heart. 

STORIES AND AUDIENCES 

If a teller tells tales from cultures that have a particular connection to 
a specific audience, listeners will come to the tales with certain expecta- 
tions and perhaps even a sense of possession, which the teller needs to 
honor. I grew up in an extended family. When my mother and father 
were married, my father had five children living with him ranging from an 
eight-year-old to several teenagers all his nieces and nephews. It was a 
time when many Jamaicans went abroad, either to England or the United 
States, in search of work. Once they got established, they would send for 
their families. My mother entered into the relationship with two younger 
sisters and a grandmother, my great-grandmother. Everyone affection- 
ately called my great grandmother "Granny." Granny was old from the 
day I was born, bless her soul, and she died at the ripe age of 92 in 1980. 
Granny was a storyteller. She told Anancy stories. I never knew how she 
came up with so many Anancy stories. These trickster tales always held 
our attention. Imagine my surprise when, many years later, my mother 
and I were at the Milwaukee Public Library's used book shop and there 
was a book of Anancy stories; from Africa, no less! I was in high school at 



BROWN/EVALUATING STORIES FOR DIVERSE AUDIENCES 57 

the time. I said to my mother, "I thought those were Granny's stories! 
Someone stole her stories and published them." And then my mother 
explained that Granny had heard them from her mother, who was a slave, 
and those stories were brought from Africa. These stories were both part 
of the culture of African storytelling and part of my culture as a listener to 
the point where I was shocked to see those tales outside of my family; the 
Anancy stories are so much "Granny's stories" to me that I still can't bring 
myself to tell them. 

Yet many tales and their cultural origins will be new and different to 
some audiences. Traditional folk literature, tales originally handed down 
through centuries of oral storytelling, offers an opportunity for an intro- 
duction to another culture in the form of stories that many listeners will 
enjoy. New listeners gain a respect for the creativity of the people who 
originated the stories, develop an understanding of the values of the origi- 
nators, and share enjoyable experiences that have entertained others in 
centuries past. 

We analyze folklore to make discoveries about the types of stories 
represented, as well as the cultural patterns, values, and beliefs reflected 
in tales. The teller and listener may notice how many values and beliefs 
are common to many cultures: the importance of maintaining friend- 
ship, a need for family loyalty, the desirability of genuine hospitality, the 
use of trickery, gratitude for help rendered, respect for courage, and awe 
of the supernatural. Storytellers are conservators of the memories of oral 
cultures. Knowing cultural significance and symbolic contents of artifacts 
can aid the teller in telling and imparting meaning. 

Research and background work help establish standards for selecting 
and evaluating stories for diverse audiences. The identification of high- 
quality stories helps to bring together the teller and the listener, in addi- 
tion to instilling in both a deeper understanding and appreciation for the 
tale's culture of origin. 

By studying a culture, we can discover which aspects of its stories are 
indeed part of the life of that group, and we can also select other cultur- 
ally relevant details to add to our retellings (Sierra and Kaminski viii). As 
we enjoy another culture's stories, we extend our knowledge of and sensi- 
tivity to the global community. 

Editor's Note: An additional annotated listing of Brown's reference tools is in- 
cluded in the appendix of this volume. 



WORKS CITED 

Aarne, Antti. The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography. 2 nd rev. Trans. Stith 

Thompson. Helsinki: Academia Scientarum Fennica, 1961. 
Bannerman, Helen. The Story of Little Babaji. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. 
. The Story of Little Black Sambo. London: Grant Richards, 1899. 



58 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Brown, Malore Ingrid. Multicultural Youth Materials Selection. Diss. U of Wisconsin, Mil- 
waukee, 1996. Ann Arbor, Mich: UMI, 1997. 9715455. 

Cuevas, Lou. In the Valley of the Ancients: A Book of Native American Legends. Albuquerque: 
Petroglyph National Monument, 1996. 

Eastman, Mary Huse. Index to Fairy Tales, Myths, and Legends. 2 nd ed. Boston: Faxon, 1926. 

Hearne, Betsy. "Cite the Source: Reducing Cultural Chaos in Picture Books, Part One." 
School Library Journal 39 (1993): 22-27. 

Ireland, Norma Olin. Index to Fairy Tales 1949-1972. Westwood: Faxon, 1973. 

Lester, Julius. Sam and the Tigers: A New Telling of Little Black Sambo. New York: Dial Books 
for Young Readers, 1996. 

Livo, Norma J. and Sandra A. Rietz. Storytelling Folklore Sourcebook. Englewood: Libraries 
Unlimited, 1991. 

MacDonald, Margaret Read. The Storyteller's Sourcebook: A Subject, Title, and Motif Index to 
Folklore Collections for Children. Detroit: Neal-Schuman/Gale Research, 1982. 

Pellowski, Anne. The World Of Storytelling. Bronx: Wilson, 1990. 

Sierra, Judy and Robert Kaminski. Multicultural Folktales: Stories to Tell Young Children. Phoe- 
nix: Oryx Press, 1991. 

WORKS CONSULTED 

Baker, Augusta and Ellin Greene. Storytelling: Art and Technique. 2nd ed. New York: Bowker, 
1987. 

Bauer, Caroline Feller. Caroline Feller Bauer's New Handbook for Storytellers: With Stories, Po- 
ems, Magic, and More. Chicago: American Library Association, 1993. 

Caduto, Michael J. and Joseph Bruchac. Keepers of the Earth: Native American Stories and 
Environmental Activities for Children. Golden: Fulcrum, 1988. 

MacDonald, Margaret Read. The Storyteller's Start-up Book: Finding, Learning, Performing, 
and Using Folktales Including Twelve Tellable Tales. Little Rock: August House, 1993. 

Once Upon A Folktale: Capturing The Folklore Process With Children. Ed. Gloria T. Blatt. New 
York: Teachers College Press, 1993. 

Ross, Ramon Royal. Storyteller. 2d ed. Columbus: Merrill, 1980. 

Shedlock, Marie. The Art of the Story-Teller. 3 rd ed. New York: Dover, 1951. 



Storytelling Concerts 



A storytelling conference of course needs storytelling, and the plan- 
ners of the 39th Allerton Conference made sure it had plenty. 
At the conclusion of the days' programming on both Sunday and 
Monday nights, a storytelling concert was held in the library of Allerton 
House. Conference participants gathered together in the genteel space, 
encompassed on three sides by vast floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and on 
the fourth side by floor-to-ceiling windows. 

On Sunday night, Janice Harrington and Dan Keding held the audi- 
ence with energy and humor. Harrington told traditional folktales, some- 
times engaging the audience in boisterous participation. Her awe-induc- 
ing delivery of "Tiger's Minister of State," (an African folktale in which 
Tiger asked each prospective minister if his breath was sweet or sour) had 
listeners longing for their mouthwash. Keding's Civil War ghost tale about 
a letter delivered after the death of the writer added a poignant chill to 
the evening, especially with his a cappella rendition of "Johnny, We Hardly 
Knew Ye" echoing off the library walls. 

For the Monday night concert, Harrington and Keding were joined 
by the impressive Susan Klein, who told personal tales of growing up on 
Martha's Vineyard. Keding told stories of his upbringing by his Croatian 
grandmother on the South Side of Chicago, interspersed with snatches of 
traditional and original song as he accompanied himself on guitar and 
banjo. When Harrington wasn't rocking the walls with a mirthful retell- 
ing of the African tale "Talk" relocated to the American South, she was 
wistfully evoking the sorrow of Mother Wind and her lost children. Klein's 
closing piece was a 30-minute tour de force, an especially moving tribute 
to a teacher who affected her life forever with his flamboyant flair and 
love of language. She imitated her erstwhile teacher uttering Keats' phrase 
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," in the round, resonant tones of a master of 
dramatic delivery. The printed page can only hint at the live experience 
that made the conclusion of each day seem like a new beginning 

JMD 



Section Three: Story as Literature 



Most of us at the Allerton conference were drawn not just by a 
love of storytelling, but also by a passion for books, the stories 
within them, and their relationship to our own stories. Three 
different speakers focused, in three very different ways, on these literary 
stories and their connection with the child audience. Book Links Editor 
Judy O'Malley's "Book Linking to Story" examined both the story connec- 
tion behind many books and the multitude of connections to other sto- 
ries that a book can provide, showing how a single title can be one crucial 
link in a chain of story knowledge. In "Narrative in Picture Books," Deborah 
Stevenson explored the methodology of telling a story in picture book 
form, discussing the characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of a 
story told in two media at the same time. And author-illustrator Arthur 
Geisert, with his storytelling about his adventures in house building and 
in storytelling in books, offered a vivid reminder of the relationship be- 
tween story and biography and the happy result when creativity and crafts- 
manship give the story a life of its own. 

DS 



JUDITH O'MALLEY 

Editor 

Book Links: Connecting Books, Libraries and Classsrooms 



Book Linking to Story 



We all have stories. For most of us, they start with family stories, 
oft told and fancifully embroidered. I grew up in a large, loud 
family where there were stories, but there were also "holes" 
where stories should have been. Things never talked about, around which 
stories couldn't grow. It bothered me. There were no stories about my 
father's side of the family, because some long-ago falling out with his 
brother closed down all conduits to stories, even the ones from his child- 
hood before the breach. It caused him to devalue the power and need for 
story. When my father's sister, the only relative we maintained contact 
with and only because she wouldn't let us lose the stories came to visit 
and shared her lore, my father left the room. 

Though my mother always referred to my father's love of history, I 
rarely saw him read; he often criticized me or my sisters for "wasting time" 
reading when we could be doing something "useful." The rest of us were 
and are a family of readers, passing books back and forth, sharing stories 
from school and bridge club. One person's interest linked to a related 
book that then dovetailed with another title, seemingly unrelated to the 
first impulse to "read up." Little did I know that this mesh of oral and 
written stories was really basic training for my future profession. 

There were other kinds of "holes" in the fabric of our stories, too 
frayed edges around what were perceived to be our "family matters." That 
they were not to be shared was implicit, but these memories were fre- 
quently off limits for discussion even in the family. Many years later, I 
understand a bit better. Reading Frank McCourt's Angela 's Ashes, I started 
to realize you can't stop story; you can only postpone it for a generation. 
Then the stories will out, producing not only readers and tellers, but writ- 
ers, educators, passionate advocates for story. We're all seeking to fill in 
the holes in our personal and our cultural histories through stories: writ- 
ten stories, told stories, stories in books, movies, even on the Web. 



62 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Of course, many of the stories and books I've always gravitated to 
have centered on the kinds of secrets that so long frustrated me. Secrets 
within families, governments, cultures, textbook accounts of history; secrets 
in our own psyches and souls. Whether poetry, mystery, memoir, biography, 
or autobiography, stories and books usually come down to telling secrets. 
And children love secrets, for to the youngest the world is full of them. 
Before adults successfully conspire to turn the thrill of discovery into work, 
children love to learn because it means deciphering coded messages, know- 
ing the secrets the adults know. Children love to share their secrets, too, 
to tell the stories they are learning. You can only imagine how much I 
worried my "keep it close to your chest" parents when I would go visiting 
in the neighborhood. Like most children, I was a storyteller, and what I 
knew, I told. Not always appropriate behavior, but very helpful in learn- 
ing to appreciate and even shape and surely embellish a good story. 

The need to know and the need to tell drives storytelling, drives learn- 
ing and fuels understanding. Whether formal or informal, oral or writ- 
ten, stories tell children they are included in the community. Books share 
with children the rich juicy secrets of life. 

Working with articles for Book Links often feels like weaving on a loom. 
A nonfiction book for middle-grade students, The Dead Sea Scrolls by Ilene 
Cooper, the author of many fiction and nonfiction books for children and 
the Children's Books Editor for Booklist, was the focus of a feature article 
(Cooper, "Dead Sea") . The author describes her fascination with the com- 
plex history and significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Her desire to tell 
the story of the scrolls in a way that children could not only understand 
but find as exciting and intriguing as a mystery or thriller led her to con- 
nections with books about archaeology, religion, the history and politics 
of the Middle East, and even computers, since technology made possible 
the ultimate reconstruction of the holes in the scrolls' secrets. In the 
article, Cooper uses the same connecting strands she used in writing The 
Dead Sea Scrolls to link it to books on those subjects for children. When an 
author shares the threads of facts and ideas that they untangled and wove 
into a gripping story, children appreciate the texture of that tapestry of 
story and, hopefully, will be motivated to weave their own stories. 

From the earliest years, our lives are filled with story threads. Some 
of the first stories children learn and hear, the traditional folktales of their 
particular culture, form the canvas into which other story threads are in- 
terwoven. George Shannon shows how one such tale has been the the- 
matic fabric over which other tales have been stitched in an article en- 
titled "The Pied Piper's New Melodies: Folktale Variations." The basic 
story elements of the Pied Piper have been adapted to suit various genres, 
settings, social issues, plot twists, and parodies in a range of books, plays, 
and short stories for adults and young adults, as well as for very young 
children. The original tale becomes a coded language through which 



O'MALLEY/BOOK LINKING TO STORY 63 

new understanding comes to light. As the article shows, using the "key" of 
this tale that children know well can be a way to help them appreciate 
differences in form and structure in various literary genres, in cultural 
references in other media, and in everyday language. Looking closely at 
how stories borrow from one another and elaborate on themes builds an 
appreciation for the ways in which "stories beget stories." 

Many of the most ancient myths and folktales were attempts to ex- 
plain the natural world around us. Children do this instinctively, and we 
can build on their understandings of the physical world by pairing their 
observations of science concepts with folktales, picture books, nonfiction, 
and poetry that explore similar principles from a literary point of view, 
enriching both experiences. Judy Sima's article, "Story-Enhancing Your 
Science Lessons," includes suggestions for expanding the impact of sci- 
ence, such as reading Joseph Bruchac's retelling of "Turtle's Race with 
Bear" in Iroquois Stories: Heroes and Heroines, Monsters and Magic to drama- 
tize an experiment with the surface tension of solids and liquid (47). In 
the story, Turtle wins the race across a frozen pond with the help of rela- 
tives who poke their heads up through holes in the ice. 

Children do need and want to know about the world, and stories that 
connect to their lives help them to learn and to care. Eliza Dresang, an 
associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Florida State 
University, in her article, "Developing Student Voices on the Internet," 
explores some of the many Web sites on which children and young adults 
are speaking out about what matters to them, finding their voices in re- 
sponse to global events and using those true voices to tell their stories. 
This article connects some of those sites with recent books for young people 
that also reflect children's voices and experiences. Among the books in- 
cluded are The Palm of My Heart: Poetry by African American Children, edited 
by Davida Adedjouma and gloriously illustrated by Gregory Christie, who 
received a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Award for this book. That 
title is an excellent example of how cultural understanding, sharing of 
secrets, and a foundation for building community can all be fostered 
through reading, as both the art and poetry of Palm of My Heart are im- 
bued with respect respect for the teller, respect for the listener, respect 
for the story. A Web site that resonates with this book is KidsCom, whose 
"Make New Friends" page features "graffiti walls" on which kids of various 
ages can add their thoughts, creating poetry, more story, more secrets to 
be shared and understood. 

Another way to nurture understanding about the world and about 
shared experiences and different heritages is by giving children access to 
accurate, realistic stories from and about a variety of cultures other than 
their own. Consistently encouraging children to read about other cul- 
tures helps them to break down artificial barriers and to gain compassion 
and understanding for all people as individuals, rather than drawing 



64 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

artificial borders between "us" and "others." The International Board on 
Books for Young People does an inspiring job of turning good books for 
children into bridges spanning chasms between peoples. "The World of 
IBBY," by Amy Kellman, provides a list of excellent books for children of 
all ages that reflect some aspects of the cultures of nations that have IBBY 
sections. 

Linking the stories in books to what children are learning and what 
they need to know about the world lets the secrets out and turns facts into 
story compelling, exciting, living story. Short books of historical fiction 
for students from kindergarten through the middle grades have the muscle 
to arouse self-professed nonreaders to the power of story (Sullivan) . Some 
are in picture book format, but with the involving plots and believable 
characters that older children, as well as young readers, will connect with; 
others are compact novels that will whet children's appetites for this genre 
and encourage them to try longer, more intricately plotted works. 

Author Deborah Hopkinson, on writing about creating her picture 
book Birdie's Lighthouse, follows the same tack of viewing history as com- 
pelling story and offers practical examples of ways to open those stories to 
children, using every tool at our and their disposal ("Shining Light"). 
Birdie tells her story through a journal kept during the year her family 
lives on Turtle Island, where her father, and later Birdie herself, keeps the 
lighthouse beaming brightly. Hopkinson found books and Internet sites 
dealing with lighthouses, weather predictions and storms, and journal 
writing all important elements in Birdie's story that teachers and li- 
brarians can use to link children to Birdie's experiences and the real pe- 
riod and situation in which they are set. 

Bringing stories to children and expanding the story's secret by open- 
ing doors to other secrets and new information are what teaching and 
librarianship are all about. Facts and chronologies begin to make sense, 
they become something to care about, when readers hear, see, and empa- 
thize with human beings much like those who made those events history. 
Family stories can give new meaning to history and historical fiction can 
inform family stories. Those oft-heard tales of great-greats echo with new 
importance when a child reads a gripping story of that ancestor's time 
and place, whether it is an immigration story or one of wartime life in the 
States or in Europe. 

Books provide connections to distant occurrences, whether those oc- 
currences are distant to readers' physical location or their emotional space; 
connections through books allow readers to empathize with characters, to 
superimpose human faces and feelings onto events that may be outside 
their personal experiences. These bridges of books act as links between 
the author and the reader, characters and the reader, ideas and the reader. 
The power of these links, and our commitment to making them, cannot 
be overestimated. 



O'MALLEY/BOOK LINKING TO STORY 65 
WORKS CITED 

Adedjouma, Davida. The Palm of My Heart: Poetry by African American Children. New York: 

Lee & Low, 1996. 
Bruchac, Joseph. "Turtle's Race with Bear." Iroquois Stories: Heroes and Heroines, Monsters 

and Magic. Trumansburg: Crossing Press, 1985. 51-53. 
Cooper, Ilene. "The Dead Sea Scrolls." Book Links 6 (May 1997): 16-20. 
. The Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Morrow Junior Books, 1997. 
Dresang, Eliza T. "Developing Student Voices on the Internet." Book Links 7 (Sept. 1997): 

10-15. 
Hopkinson, Deborah. Birdie's Lighthouse. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 

1997. 

. "Shining Light on History." Book Links 7 (Nov. 1997): 35-40. 
Kellman, Amy. "The World of IBBY." Book Links 7 (Sept. 1997): 31-34. 
KidsCom. "Make New Friends." 16 June 1998. <http://www.kidscom.com/orakc/Friends/ 

newfriends.html>. 

McCourt, Frank. Angela's Ashes. New York: Scribner, 1996. 
Shannon, George. "The Pied Piper's New Melodies: Folktale Variations." Book Links 7 

(Sept. 1997): 36-39. 

Sima.Judy. "Story-Enhancing Your Science Lessons." Book Links 1 (Jan. 1998): 46-53. 
Sullivan, Kathleen. "Short Historical Fiction to Get Children Reading." Book Links 1 (Nov. 

1997): 58-63. 



DEBORAH STEVENSON 

Associate Editor 

The Bulletin of the Center for Children 's Books 

Graduate School of Library and Information Science 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

Narrative in Picture Books 

or, The Paper That Should Have Had Slides 



I 



'm not sure my title is quite right while the product is a unified 
one, I think there are narratives in a picture book, not just one nar- 
rative. As Perry Nodelman says: 

[the picture book] is unique in its use of different forms of expres- 
sion that convey different sorts of information to form a whole differ- 
ent from the component parts but without those parts ever actually 
blending into one, as seems to happen in other mixed-media forms 
such as film and theater, so that someone reading a picture book 
must always be conscious of the differences of the different sorts of 
information. (21) 

The literary world is so verbally attuned that it's easy to consider nar- 
rative as words only, and therefore to consider a picture book as a narra- 
tive with pictures; the art world focuses on the pictures, considering the 
picture book as an art object with extended captions. These views both 
seem to me unfortunately limited if narrative were merely the words on 
a page, people wouldn't attend conferences and this side-taking also 
seems to me to overlook the nature of the picture book as synthesis of art 
and words. To read a picture book aloud, as most were intended, is to 
dramatize it. One might almost consider a picture book a variant of a 
play, one that carries its own set design with it. 

In this sense picture books resemble other combinative art forms, 
such as opera or musical theater, films, and ballet; older examples include 
the courtly masque and the emblem book. This resemblance is good for 
me, since I thrive on analogies (I was apparently permanently warped by 
that section of the SATs), and I therefore often find it useful to consider 
picture books along with those other media, without, of course, ignoring 
the fact that picture books also have their own individual charms and char- 
acteristics. I'd like to examine the aspects of the picture book the text, 
the art and other physical factors and then discuss how these narratives 
work together to affect each other and the final outcome. 



STEVENSON/ NARRATIVE IN PICTURE BOOKS 67 

TEXT: THE DOWNTRODDEN PARTNER 

Despite its primacy, the text is often the downtrodden partner in the 
picture book form. A picture book can, after all, be a picture book with- 
out a text; it can't be one without pictures. It's tempting to consider the 
relative responses to the term "textbook" and the term "picture book"; 
the former is dull, the term occasionally used pejoratively; the latter is 
pleasurable and imaginative. Because the text of a picture book is short 
(Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak contains 338 words in all), 
the writing of it can seem easy; because the text accompanies pictures, it 
may seem insignificant. This apparent insignificance can lead to underes- 
timation of the author's role. It's difficult, for instance, for the author of 
picture books to gain a reputation solely for that skill; many of the best 
known write for older readers or illustrate as well. The number of critical 
articles addressing picture book illustration far outweighs those dealing 
with picture book text, nor is it usual for the author of a picture book to 
win any writing award such as the Newbery (Nancy Willard's medal for A 
Visit to William Blake's Inn is an obvious exception, but one that was sup- 
ported by well-received illustrations that made the tide a Caldecott Honor 
book as well) . The late Margaret Wise Brown was one of the first picture 
book authors to gain wide repute; two of the currently most prominent 
are Eric Kimmel and Robert San Souci, both of whom specialize in folktale 
adaptation, a type of text that frequently draws more attention, because 
of cultural interests, than does an original story (Tony Johnston is one of 
the writers of original texts whose reputation is growing) . A likelier way to 
gain an authorial reputation is as a part of an author-illustrator team, such 
as Arthur Yorinks and Richard Egielski or Jon Scieszka with Lane Smith 
(Scieszka's one book with a different illustrator was nowhere near as suc- 
cessful); better still, create both text and art and allow the illustrator's 
fame to be the same as the author's. 

This deceptive simplicity of picture book texts may be one reason why 
it's so easy to find bad ones. It can become a vicious and self-fulfilling 
circle: since it seems so easy to write a picture book, it must mean that 
anyone can, and picture book texts are further cheapened. Picture book 
authors are also likelier than illustrators to think or be told to think in 
terms of education rather than art. The pressure on a picture book to be 
educational, whether pedagogically, politically, or socially, falls almost en- 
tirely on the text, so desirable subject matter or an important message can 
outrank good writing. I have no objection to narratives with lessons: most 
stories have a point, and didactic tales are alive and well and often absorb- 
ing and frequently well-received by children as well as adults, but a lesson 
in itself is not sufficient for a story. Some picture books seem quite content 
with the idea that pictures exist as sugarcoating for the textual pill, be- 
cause that arrangement relieves the text of the burden of being interesting; 



68 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

the result is artistically inferior and unappealing to most children and 
adults. 

Fortunately, however, many writers of picture books craft their work 
well, rising to the challenge of writing a text that will meet an illustrator at 
least halfway. The restraint involved in writing a picture book is a chal- 
lenge; authors of other kinds of books generally employ narrative to tell 
the "whole" story, but picture book text must leave some meaning to the 
illustrations while still possessing its own spirit. It is the text through which 
adults hope to shape children and inspire them, and the text that an adult 
will reread a multiplicity of times to an importunate child. 

The reading aloud is an important consideration, since most literary 
texts are designed with a different kind of reading experience in mind. 
It's odd that the otherwise perceptive Nodelman, in his Words About Pic- 
tures, a detailed examination of the operation and process of picture books, 
focuses almost entirely on silent reading of the written text; he finally 
suggests that the "ironies and rhythms" he analyzes may not be apparent 
if those texts are read aloud (263) . In practice, this seems incorrect. Most 
picture book creators seem attuned to the auditory aspects, since with 
most picture books those ironies and rhythms are generally most appar- 
ent when the book is read aloud as intended. Many picture book texts 
read quite blandly on the page, but their patterns of rhythm and energy 
appear with force when one speaks them aloud. 

There are a multiplicity of possibilities even in this compressed and 
focused genre that will change the narrative completely: the text prose or 
rhymed; present tense or past; first person, second person, or third per- 
son. From a formal point of view, a text can be visually end-stopped, to 
borrow a term from poetry, with sentences completed before every page 
turn, or there may be visual enjambment, with sentences continuing 
through page turns, as in Where the Wild Things Are when Max makes 
"mischief of one kind// and another." The text may be separated from 
the art (as in Wild Things), interspersed with it, or winding around it; or it 
may only appear in speech balloons (Raymond Briggs' Father Christmas). 
Every page may have text, or text and illustration pages may alternate; or 
illustration alone may carry many spreads ( Wild Things again) . Or it might 
be primarily a wordless book with only a small bit of text (Rathmann's 
Good Night, Gorilla). Even before you get to the myriad vagaries of indi- 
vidual style, there are narrative choices that will change a story completely. 

As there are, of course, with the illustrations. 

THE LANGUAGE OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

I've found it very challenging, at times, to write about picture books, 
because the critical vocabulary is geared to words. The term "text" in 
critical circles, meaning the thing that is contained within every edition of 
the book, that sense of a title that exists without regard to the physical 



STEVENSON/NARRATIVE IN PICTURE BOOKS 69 

objects, linguistically excludes illustration. In a larger sense, however, pic- 
ture book illustration is inarguably part of (and in wordless books, com- 
pletely) a picture book's text; it is read, it conveys intentional and unin- 
tentional meanings, it imparts the story. 

As someone whose skills lie entirely in the writing area of the equa- 
tion, I find myself overwhelmed with the technical side of illustration, 
with gouache versus watercolor, with color separations each painted in 
black and then photographed in a different color, with selecting two dif- 
ferent kinds of black inks to approximate the brown tones on an original 
(as happened for Tom Feelings' The Middle Passage). I find it hard to 
imagine making it beyond these technicalities to the creative sweep of 
artwork, but I suppose it's not that dissimilar to fierce preferences for 
certain wordprocessing software, an understanding of the different ef- 
fects between the passive and active voice, or the authenticity conferred 
by specificity. 

Yet every technical aspect of illustration is an aspect of the visual nar- 
rative. Oils tell a story differently from watercolor, photo collage from 
pastels. Black and white (Isadora's Ben's Trumpet} obviously differs from 
color (Ehlert's Circus), or even from sepia tones or other monochromatic 
palettes (Van Allsburg's The Sweetest Fig) and even other black and white 
(Van ARsburg'sJumanji); illustrators, like filmmakers, know that the picto- 
rial narrative changes if the colors are different. Look, for instance, at the 
stylistic and color differences between wordless books, which remove the 
additional possibility of textual difference (Anna's Journey and Raymond 
Briggs' The Snowman). 

Differences in the visual treatment make for a completely different 
narrative. Sometimes it's a matter of interpretation. We're all familiar 
with songs that have been covered by two different artists. The difference 
can be substantial (I'm particularly remembering the anecdote about 
music-hall legend Marie Lloyd performing a rendition of the innocent 
drawing-room song "Come into the Garden, Maud" that had critics of her 
morality blushing on account of what they allowed into their own homes) . 
That additional effect can be entirely the province of illustration. It's 
impossible that a story would be the same when illustrated by David 
Wisniewski as by Chris Van Allsburg, or by Ed Young and by Arthur Geisert. 

Even very small differences alter the construction of the visual narra- 
tive. Betsy Hearne has a nifty set of slides that she uses in teaching the 
artist Adrienne Adams redid her pictures for Priscilla and Otto Friedrich's 
The Easter Bunny That Overslept 20 years later, and the two sets of illustra- 
tions make a provocative contrast. The artist has clearly gained in skill 
and expertise over the years, and the changes are in keeping with the 
enhanced sophistication and subtlety of the genre and printing technology; 
the later illustrations have subtler hues compared to the primary colors of 
the earlier versions, and the compositions have gotten more diverse and 



70 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

less uninflected, and there's much more sensitivity to the sweep and drama 
of line. The text remains the same and the pictures are really only slightly 
altered. Yet, the result is not the same story. 

There is always the question of the necessity of such artistic achieve- 
ment when the young audience may well not notice. I go now for my 
analogy to the world of musicals for Oscar Hammerstein's metaphor he 
pointed out that when the Statue of Liberty was carved, Bartholdi took 
pains with the top of her head even though he had no reason to believe 
anyone was going to see it. Merit lies in careful craftsmanship of areas 
that few will notice as well as those that all will notice; Hammerstein was 
discussing underlying musical themes and verbal plays that may not be 
noticed as they go by quickly in live theatre, but are nonetheless there. 

And, of course, people do now see the top of the Statue of Liberty's 
head. Changing times mean different viewpoints and different sets of 
knowledge, and contemporary children are much more visually schooled 
than previous generations. Take, for example, the Cottingley fairy inci- 
dent, which is depicted in a movie called Fairy Tale in the U.S. For those 
who don't know the incident, a pair of young sisters, at the beginning of 
the century, claimed that fairies were visiting their garden and that those 
visitors had been captured on film and indeed, they had pictures of them- 
selves with fairies so convincing that Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance, 
believed them. Yet these photographs very obviously, to modern eyes, 
feature living girls and cardboard cutout fairies. Even without tackling 
the issue of our greater skepticism about such visitation, our visual sophis- 
tication makes differentiating between cardboard cutouts and real figures 
elementary . . . my dear Watson. 

Visuals, after all, have their own language; some of it is literal, but 
some of it, particularly in narrative, is not. Apparently, for instance, many 
small children have difficulty understanding the convention that sequen- 
tial pictures of the same object indicate the passage of time rather than 
just several similar objects at the same time. It's also possible that a child 
who has recently learned that the shimmers of green and yellow outside 
do constitute a tree will not be overjoyed at an Impressionist's careful 
return to the predistinguished vision. Nor is it fair to judge children's 
visual sophistication by their capability in production. Adults, after all, do 
not necessarily appreciate a mediocre violinist just because they are them- 
selves execrable musicians. Evelyn Goldsmith notes the difficulty chil- 
dren have in recognizing some theoretically "childlike" abstractions (150) . 
What we have here is a literary and artistic equivalent of what psychology 
terms the "fis phenomenon," wherein a child whose developing motor 
skills aren't yet up to the consonantal cluster pronounces "fish" "fis," but 
whose linguistic knowledge makes him insist that an adult's use of "fis" 
was incorrect; his ability to produce lags behind his ability to understand. 



STEVENSON/ NARRATIVE IN PICTURE BOOKS 71 

Children also react to pictures at a startlingly early age: Dorothy 
Butler's granddaughter Cushla, for instance, in one of the great longitu- 
dinal examinations of reading, responded to pictures and abstract sym- 
bols with fascination at nine months of age. Leonard Marcus argues that 
it can be appropriate to speak of "readers" of the picture, since a child's 
response to them is centered on words and names (35). In many books, 
especially alphabet books, art is simultaneously picture and language, as 
with Anna's Alphabet, Stephen Johnson's Alphabet City, and David Pelletier's 
The Graphic Alphabet. In a different vein, if you'll pardon the circulatory 
system pun, Ed Young's Voices of the Heart refigures the meaning of Chi- 
nese characters in new metaphoric images in these books, the pictures 
are about language. From the child's point of view, the experience is no 
less reading for involving pictures. A toddler on a parent's lap experienc- 
ing Wild Things may not be literate in the technical sense of the term, but 
she is reading in the broad sense; she is decoding messages and meanings 
from the volume in front of her in order to recreate a story. Whether 
young children are poring over a wordless book, sharing a picture book 
read aloud, or privately experiencing both text and pictures, they are in- 
creasing their visual literacy and their understanding of the breadth and 
diversity of narrative. 

FORMAT AND MORE 

We often break up our discussion of picture books into the two com- 
ponents of words and pictures, but a recent spate of variations in form 
and physical effects reminds me that those aspects of a book, which don't 
fit neatly into the categories of words or pictures, also affect a narrative. 
Even before children can read books, the sheer physicality of a volume is 
very important to them; they are little inclined to abstract "text" or "pic- 
tures" from the construct of the book. Various studies have made it clear 
that physical makeup of a book greatly affects a child's response to it, and 
that children, who don't worry about shelving constraints, can warm to 
books both oversized and undersized. Children pet books and wear them, 
taste them and listen to them, creating a material connection with books 
that adults rarely envision. In reviewing Nodelman's Words about Pictures, 
Juliet Dusinberre reasonably criticizes him for failing to consider as a fac- 
tor a book's smell (397); olfactory appeal rarely enters into critical dis- 
course, but it can play a large part in a child's reaction. Maurice Sendak 
describes his reaction to a book received as a child: 

The first thing I did was to set it up on the table and stare at it for a 
long time. Not because I was impressed with Mark Twain; it was just 
a beautiful object. Then came the smelling of it. I think the smelling 
of books began with The Prince and the Pauper, because it was printed 
on particularly fine paper, unlike the Disney Big Little Books I had 
gotten previously, which were printed on very poor paper and smelled 



72 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

poor. The Prince and the Pauper smelled good, and it also had a shiny 
cover, a laminated cover. I flipped over that. And it was solid. I mean, 
it was bound very tightly. I remember trying to bite it, which I don't 
imagine was what my sister had in mind when she bought the book 
for me. The last thing I did was to read it. It was all right. ("Notes" 173) 

Sometimes these forms are variations of books originally published in a 
more traditional arrangement. Picture books get reissued as big books, 
for instance, and more and more of late turn up again in board book 
form. Pop-up versions have been around for awhile, but a new (or per- 
haps resurrected) form, so far used for original books only, has been the 
foldout frieze (or pullout panorama, as I note a new one calls itself) , which 
accordion-folds neatly between the book covers but opens up into a single 
lengthy, connected page. Then, of course, there are the newer versions, 
the downloadable electronic text, or the book on CD-ROM. (There are 
also movies and television, but I'm speaking of forms in which the illustra- 
tive and the verbal text are the same as the original.) 

I don't mean to suggest some sort of purist hierarchy, whereby the 
sewn binding and paper pages are some holy literary grail. I like board 
books, and popups, and CD-ROMs. Nor do I think the conversion of any 
book into a different format is a recipe for disaster. But the medium is at 
least part of the message, and a book's narrative alters with its format and 
appearance. The very way readers interact with the book is changed, which 
Beatrix Potter so wisely noted in specifying the tiny trim size of her vol- 
umes. A book you can make a clubhouse out of is obviously going to 
demand different treatment than a book you can tuck under your pillow, 
or one which can only be handled occasionally and gently. In her excel- 
lent Horn Book article, Sarah Ellis discusses some of the advantages and 
disadvantages of the electronic format of Bjarne Renter's The End of the 
Rainbow, noting such important and overlookable details as the physical 
warmth of the laptop and its comparative unportability. [Editor's note: The 
electronic format cited no longer was available at the time this publication went to 
press.] A CD-ROM has its own momentum which can remove the onus 
from the reader. Scrolling is not the same as "the drama of the turning of 
the page," as Barbara Bader so eloquently puts it (1). This drama, too, is 
lost in the frieze, which offers a chance at a more sustained, less discretely 
episodic narrative, and indeed a more literally circular one. The story of 
snakes in The Snake Book would be a muted and lost one in a tiny format 
(though it might make a terrific frieze, with snakes all around). The fo- 
cused and hemmed intensity of Grandmother Bryant's Pocket would lose its 
impact in a large trim size. 

WORKING TOGETHER: SYNTHESIS OF ART FORMS 

But it's all got to come together somehow. Maurice Sendak, when 
discussing illustrating his own text, suggests that in order to attain this 



STEVENSON/ NARRATIVE IN PICTURE BOOKS 73 

synthesis of art forms, a picture book creator not only deliberately bal- 
ances the text and illustrations but "must not ever be doing the same 
thing, must not ever be illustrating exactly what you've written. You must 
leave a space in the text so the picture can do the work. Then you must 
come back to the word, and now the word does it best and the picture 
beats time. It's a funny kind of juggling act. It takes a lot of technique, a 
lot of experience, to really keep the rhythm going between word and pic- 
ture" ("Notes" 185-86). 

There's a story, for instance, about Katharine Hepburn and friends 
watching Charlie Chaplin's A Countess from Hong Kong, his big flop, and 
finding it awful. Then someone suggested turning the sound off, and they 
suddenly found it effective. Chaplin had written a successful visual narra- 
tive, as he had done so many times before, and then added superfluous 
words, creating an unsuccessful combination and an ultimately unsuccessful 
narrative. He had not performed what Sendak terms the balancing act. 

Linda Ellerbee, discussing television news, suggests that if the news 
report makes equal sense without looking at the visuals, the program's 
doing it wrong, and that pictures that are merely redundant are superflu- 
ous. Dramatically speaking, there are a multitude of differences between 
television and picture books, particularly television news. But as Nodelman 
notes, television like the picture book is "a medium dependent upon 
the interrelationship of words and pictures. In his attack on wordless 
books, Patrick Groff suggests that, given the predominance of television 
in their lives, children are '"prewired" to see plots in pictures, but not in 
writing.' Given the predominance of television, I suspect that children 
are actually 'prewired' to see plots in pictures accompanied by words" 
(Nodelman 186). And the principle of pointless redundancy applies as 
well to both media; pictures may reinforce the text, but if they do only 
that, they are not using the medium to its fullest. 

Text and pictures, in fact, can achieve remarkable effects in contra- 
dicting one another, expanding one another, or even limiting one an- 
other. Joseph Schwarcz speaks of Tomi lingerer's pictures as "spiting the 
text" (16), and Perry Nodelman mentions that they are both narratives of 
dramatic irony (221), each speaking about matters on which the other is 
silent. He also notes the effect of illustrations not only in expanding the 
text but in opposing expansion, in buffering imagination and allowing it 
to explore dangerous areas in safety: 

When I have read the text of Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are to 
adults who have not previously heard it, without showing them the 
pictures, many feel it to be a terrifying story, too frightening for young 
children. Without Sendak's particular Wild Things to look at, they 
conjure up wild things out of their own nightmares, and those they 
find scary indeed. When I then tell them the story accompanied by 
the pictures, they always change their minds. (197) 



74 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Nor are the authorities of text and illustration identical. (We believe 
what we see, not what characters say I just watched a show where we saw 
what the character did and then heard him deny it, which "means" that 
he's lying. How does that work? When did I learn this?) If, for instance, 
you see a television character saying one thing and pictures demonstrat- 
ing another, the picture is generally "the truth." This can also be true in 
picture books, as in Stoeke's Minerva Louise series or Hutchins' Rosie's 
Walk the pictures tell what really happened, and the text is just the con- 
cept the joke needs to contrast against. In Swiftian terms, the text is that 
which is not. 

Yet there is room also for the illustrations to be their own kind of non- 
literal truth, the truth, often, of the child protagonist. Whether you're 
talking about John Burningham's Come Away from the Water, Shirley, or Maggie 
Smith's There's a Witch Under the Stairs, the fact that the child's visions are 
pictured lends them credence. If Where the Wild Things Are pictured 
Max staring at the walls of his room or looking at a book of mythical beasts, 
it would be a book about the quaint imaginings of a thwarted child. In a 
genre, the picture book, where depiction of the legendary is common- 
place and integral to the logic of many books, illustrations walk that nar- 
row border between literal reality and imaginative reality, in a sense offer- 
ing an authenticity that may not match objective experience. 

It is partly out of the need for this balance that the best texts don't 
necessarily make the best picture book texts, and the best art doesn't nec- 
essarily make the best picture book illustration, just as the best poetry 
doesn't often make the best songs, and the Mona Lisa would have a hard 
time being an illustration of anything other than the Mona Lisa. When 
Christine Jenkins was describing the Graduate School of Library and In- 
formation Science's on-line classes, I was particularly intrigued by her ability 
to present picture books on the on-line environment with the text scrubbed 
out. And then I thought, with all the lovely neo-PhotoShop software avail- 
able, that she could probably even fill in the text spaces or crop the pic- 
tures to present them as art that hadn't anything to do with words, and 
then I thought maybe that's not quite fair? I'm reminded of Trina Schart 
Hyman, who responded to a gallery owner who lamented the empty blocks 
in the middle of her pictures, by stiffly pointing out that those empty 
blocks were the reason for the art. It's surprising, for instance, even in 
our small manipulation of images at the Bulletin (either selecting for the 
Web page or choosing art to include on our cover) how often impressive 
illustrations lose their thrill as mere art. I'm not suggesting that these 
separate elements must be deliberately bad in some way, but rather that 
works of art, whether literary or painterly, that are successful indepen- 
dently rarely have the skills, as it were, to be good partners. 

Those partnerships can take a variety of forms. When Stephen 
Sondheim first started learning about the writing of musicals under the 



STEVENSON/ NARRATIVE IN PICTURE BOOKS 75 

tutelage of Oscar Hammerstein, the master set his pupil certain tasks for 
his education. "For the first one," says Sondheim, "he told me to take a 
play I admired and turn it into a musical. . . . Next, he told me to take a 
play I didn't think was very good and could be improved and make a mu- 
sical out of it. ... For the third effort, Oscar told me to take something 
nondramatic, like a novel or a short story. . . . For the fourth and last in 
this series, he told me to write an original. . . " (Zadan 5). There are 
equivalents of those categories for picture books, too, and it's interesting 
to examine them when considering the relationship between the narra- 
tives. There are classic texts, such as Grimm and Perrault, that have been 
turned into picture books; there are not-so-classic texts that have been 
improved by their illustrations. Books such as James Michener's South 
Pacific are adaptations from another medium, and, of course, there is no 
lack of original books. Like musicals, picture books have components 
that are displayed independently and that sometimes are more successful 
separately than in their original setting. Yet together, the two aspects of 
those art forms are supposed to make something more than just the addi- 
tion of the two, something greater than the sum of the parts and where 
the parts are no longer truly extricable from the whole. And surprisingly 
enough, they often do. 

Like musicals, picture books almost always start with the text. This 
chronology is sufficiently established in the genre that books where the 
pictures have come first are rare indeed (though one cannot entirely be 
sure of the procedures of author-illustrators, whose prerogative it is to 
switch back and forth between the two). Often these art-first arrange- 
ments use pictures not to illustrate but to inspire, to take off frpm them as 
a starting point, such as Barbara Forte's riffs on Bill Traylor's art or Joan 
Aiken's stories from Jan Pienkowski's images. Sometimes, as in Walter 
Dean Myers' words for Jacob Lawrence's narrative paintings of the life of 
Toussaint L' Overture, the words undercut the carefully architected silent 
drama of the art when they are added to pictures made to be self-con- 
tained. Some of the most successful, such as Gwen Everett's Li'l Sis and 
Uncle Willie or Toyomi Igus' Going Back Home use the art not as expansion 
and illumination but as portraiture of people and situations within the 
story. Then there is the additional complication that, with some of these 
works, the art was originally designed to be substantially larger and hung 
on a wall; the collectiveness, intense focus, and smaller size of book art 
makes for an entirely different display situation, so even without the words, 
the art has become a different thing. These books demonstrate that even 
the chronology of words and pictures changes a narrative. 

Whether or not they employ the traditional hierarchy of words and 
pictures, many picture books manage an extraordinary fusion of narratives 
into a read-aloud drama that is, as critic Peter Hunt notes, the only liter- 
ary genre that children's literature contributes rather than borrows (175) . 



76 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Nodelman states: 

Hearing someone else read a book, we are able to look at each pic- 
ture during the whole time that the words printed with it are 
spoken. . . . Furthermore, hearing the words read aloud causes us to 
focus on them as a whole sequence to want to know what happens 
next rather than to be content to pause and look at a picture when, 
for instance, a sentence has not been completed on a page. Chil- 
dren, then, encounter picture books when that literature is closest to 
its traditional ideal, but in a way far removed from most adults' read- 
ing experience. (263) 

This is a unique effect. And to illustrate why it is worth taking pains 
to achieve, I go on one final borrowing mission, this time to Tom Stoppard's 
play The Real Thing. In the play, the character Henry, who is a writer, 
discusses the power of writing by using the metaphor of a cricket bat: 

This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several 
pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so 
that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting 
cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two 
hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock 
like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a 
trout taking a fly ... .What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, 
so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it 
might . . . travel. (53) 

While literary physics may be a highly inexact science, we all know 
that it exists, and that properly formed picture books comprise several 
pieces of cunningly combined narrative to send those with which they 
connect a great distance. This is craftsmanship, and that is its goal. When 
all those pieces are put in place and they hit children at the right speed 
. . . they travel. 



WORKS CITED 

Anno, Mitsumasa. Anna's Alphabet: An Adventure in Imagination. New York: HarperCollins, 

1975. 

. Anna's Journey. New York: Philomel, 1978. 
Bader, Barbara. American Picturebooks: Noah 's Ark to the Beast Within. New York: MacMillan, 

1976. 

Briggs, Raymond. Father Christmas. London: Puffin, 1973. 
. The Snowman. London: H. Hamilton, 1978. 

Burningham,John. Come Away from the Water, Shirley. New York: Crowell, 1977. 
Butler, Dorothy. Cushla and Her Books. Boston: Horn Book, 1980. 
A Countess from Hong Kong. Videocassette. Dir. Charlie Chaplin. MCA Universal Home 

Video, 1967. 108 min. 
Dusinberre, Juliet. "Review of Perry Nodelman 's Words about Pictures." Word ana 'Image 6 A 

(1990): 396-97. 

Elhert, Lois. Circus. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. 

Ellerbee, Linda. "And So It Goes:" Adventures in Television. New York: Putnam's, 1986. 
Ellis, Sarah. "Buster on the Screen." The Horn Book Magazine 73 (1997): 289-93. 
Everett, Gwen. Li'l Sis and Uncle Willie: A Story Based on the Life and Paintings of William H. 

Johnson. Washington: National Museum of American Arts, 1991. 



STEVENSON/ NARRATIVE IN PICTURE BOOKS 77 

Fairy Tale: A True Story. Dir. Charles Sturbridge. Paramount, 1997. 

Feelings, Tom. The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo. New York: Dial, 1995. 

Friedrich, Priscilla. The Easter Bunny that Overslept. New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 

1957. 

Goldsmith, Evelyn. Research into Illustration: An Approach and a Review. Cambridge: Cam- 
bridge U P, 1984. 
Croff, Patrick. "Children's Literature vs. Wordless 'Books.'" Top of the News (April 1974): 

294-303. 

Hunt, Peter. Criticism, Theory, & Children's Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 
Hutchins, Pat. Rosie's Walk. New York: Scholastic, 1968. 
Hyman, Trina Schart. "Zen and the Art of Children's Book Illustration." The Zena Sutherland 

Lectures, 1983-1992. Ed. Betsy Hearne. New York: Clarion, 1993. 186-205. 
Isadora, Rachel. Ben's Trumpet. New York: Greenwillow, 1979. 
Igus, Toyomi. Going Back Home: An Artist Returns to the South. San Francisco: Children's 

Book Press, 1996. 

Jenkins, Christine. Personal conversation. Undated. 
Ling, Mary, Mary Atkinson, Frank Greenaway, and Dave King. The Snake Book. New York: 

DK, 1997. 

Johnson, Stephen. Alphabet City. New York: Viking, 1995. 
Marcus, Leonard S. "The Artist's Other Eye: The Picture Books of Mitsumasa Anno." The 

Lion and the Unicorn 7-8 (1983-84): 34-46. 

Martin, Jacqueline Briggs. Grandmother Bryant's Pocket. Boston: Houghton, 1996. 
Michener, James. South Pacific. San Diego: Harcourt, 1992. 
Nodelman, Perry. Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children's Picture Books. Athens, 

GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1988. 

Pelletier, David. The Graphic Alphabet. New York: Orchard, 1996. 
Rathmann, Peggy. Good Night, Gorilla. New York: Scholastic, 1994. 
Renter, Bjarne. The End of the Rainbow. Trans. Althea Bell. New York: Dutton, 1999. 
Schwarcz, Joseph H. Ways of the Illustrator: Visual Communication in Children's Literature. 

Chicago: American Library Association, 1982. 
Sendak, Maurice. Caldecott & Co: Notes on Books and Pictures. New York: Noonday/ Farrar, 

Straus, Giroux, 1988. 

-. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. 

Smith, Maggie. There's a Witch Under the Stairs. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1991. 
Stoppard, Tom. The Real Thing. London: Faber and Faber, 1982. 
Van Allsburg, Chris. Jumanji. Boston: Houghton, 1981. 
. The Sweetest Fig. Boston: Houghton, 1993. 
Willard, Nancy. A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers. 

New York: Harcourt, 1981. 

Young, Ed. Voices of the Heart. New York: Scholastic, 1997. 
Zadan, Craig. Sondheim & Co. Rev. ed. New York: Da Capo, 1994. 



DEBORAH STEVENSON 

Associate Editor 

The Bulletin of the Center for Children 's Books 

Graduate School of Library and Information Science 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

Construction, Illustration, and a Plethora of Pigs: 
Reflections on a Lecture by Arthur Geisert* 

It's a measure of the power of storytelling, I suppose, or at least the 
power of Arthur Geisert's storytelling, that after two days of intense 
concentration on the topic of story we were still seduced into rapt 
attention by closed curtains, dimmed lights, and a well-turned tale. In 
this case, however, the tale was autobiographical and accompanied by slides, 
describing the Geiserts' Herculean labors in the construction of two charm- 
ing and almost entirely inaccessible homes as well as Mr. Geisert's work in 
picture books. 

Even without the literary connection, the Great Building Saga would 
have made a gripping narrative; one hopes the Geiserts found it as amus- 
ing at the time as they managed to make it seem in retrospect. Both the 
house constructed atop a forested and trackless hill (it looked like a moun- 
tain in the pictures, but we're not supposed to have mountains in Illinois) 
and the elegant yet appealingly Rube Goldbergesque structure in the old 
quarry were infinitely desirable artistic eyries and thrilling to contemplate, 
but perhaps even more thrilling was the safe distance between us in the 
audience and the labor of their building process. 

As Mr. Geisert's slides made clear, these were not merely significant 
and backbreaking aspects of his life, but experiences that were the source 
for much of his art. Obviously the man had peculiar insight into Noah's 
ark-building travails, for one thing; more important, however, was the re- 
alization that his literary pigs's bent for construction came from that of 
their maker. When the D pigs in Pigs from A to Z drag lumber, pulling 
together as a team and relaying around a pulley-tree, it isn't just a porcine 
way around the problem of hooves or a conveniently alliterative action, 
but an echo of a Geisert construction scene. When the pigs of Pigs from 1 
to 10 build a bridge across a gorge, they're simply following Geisert's real-life 

*Arthur Geisert's art is reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. 



STEVENSON/REFLECTIONS ON A LECTURE BY ARTHUR GEISERT 79 




D is for dragging the lumber. Dragging was drudgery. (Pigs from A to Z, p. 15 ) 



80 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 




STEVENSON/ REFLECTIONS ON A LECTURE BY ARTHUR GEISERT 81 

example (which leads one to wonder if there isn't somewhere a pig build- 
ing houses and illustrating books showing teams of laboring Geiserts) . 

The places Geisert made are, of course, not only the places in his art 
but the places wherein that art is created. This was made brutally clear by 
the photograph of a huge press being hauled up the hillside through the 
trees, looking like the scene from Burden of Dreams documenting the drag- 
ging of a Spanish-galleon replica through the Peruvian jungle. This is 
also reflected in his book The Etcher's Studio, which shows a workplace that, 
like etcher Geisert's studio, is chock-a-block with the tools of the trade 
and the fruits and the pigs of his labor. Fortunately both the construc- 
tion and artistic labor have been well worth the effort: Geisert is an artist 
who knows construction, whether it be of an etching or a house among 
the rocks, and who seemingly takes as much pleasure in the process as in 
the product. He lives in both kinds of creations, since slides of his studio 
show the illustrations he made lining the walls of this room in the house 
he made, and his stories about the one construction become the stories 
within the other. 

WORKS CITED 

Burden of Dreams. Videocassette. Dir. Les Blank. Flower Films, 1982. 94 min. 
Geisert, Arthur. The Etcher's Studio. Boston: Hough ton, 1997. 
. Pigs from A to Z. Boston: Houghton, 1986. 
. Pigs from 1 to 10. Boston: Houghton, 1992. 



82 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 




1*5 



Section Four: Story as Institutional Culture 

Both of the presentations that end this collection speak to concerns 
for the future of stories and storytelling. In the past, the only way 
to know a story was to hear it, to be connected to it by blood or 
proximity. As literacy evolved, traditional stories were captured, indeed 
rescued from oblivion, by the collectors and folklorists who gathered sto- 
ries in print form. Now stories span huge distances via many forms of 
media, and children in the U.S. can go to their local library or to the 
vast reaches of cyberspace and read and hear stories from Brazil or the 
Philippines, from Vietnam or Russia or Nigeria. The ones they love they 
may tell or enact or reread. Thus stories go from print to oral and back 
again. This an activity that has kept, and continues to keep, stories alive. 
And libraries provide the stories that fuel this interaction for current and 
future generations of children and of storytellers. Children's librarians 
are certainly not the only storytellers out there, but by virtue of their role 
in both the promotion of stories and of reading, their collections become 
the gateway through which the child can enter the world of story again 
and again. 

Christine Jenkins' essay reminds us that stories and storytelling are 
not only part of humankind's past and present, but part of our future as 
well. Stories whether ancient, modern, postmodern, or only a gleam in 
a storyteller's eye survive. Janice Del Negro's essay, actually a speech 
inspired by the 39th Allerton Conference (thus, included here) and given 
a week later as the keynote address at the Champaign Public Library 
Children's Literature Conference, reminds us of both the "how" and the 
"why" of helping children make this essential connection. 

CJ 



CHRISTINE JENKINS 

Assistant Professor 

Graduate School of Library and Information Science 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 



The Cycle of Story: From Fireplace to Marketplace 
or, "The Kids Keep Tearing Their Jeans" 

In considering the cycle of story from fireplace to marketplace, we 
begin a journey from the domestic to the commercial, from private 
to public space, from the priceless human interaction of the story 
and the listener to the commercial transaction of the product and the 
consumer. If stories are to reach a larger audience, a consideration of the 
stories of the fireplace must include a consideration of the marketplace. 

Those of us whose work includes stories will acknowledge that com- 
municating our stories to audiences beyond the sound of our voices in- 
volves publishing those stories. Publishing, however, requires money, which 
generally involves convincing an editor and a marketing department that 
their company will make money (i.e., a profit) from our product. Perhaps 
not a lot of money, but money nonetheless. And money, as both Karl 
Marx and Cyndi Lauper have so eloquently put it, changes everything. 

While stories are for all ages with some audiences and tellers receiv- 
ing more respect than others the specific focus in this paper is the path 
from fireplace to marketplace as it applies to telling and publishing sto- 
ries for a young audience i.e., for children. The path is a problematic 
one for many. Despite the fact that we know that money makes many 
worlds go round, there is something about story as commodity, about put- 
ting a price tag on imagination, about the juxtaposition of concerns of 
children and of money, that makes many people extremely uncomfort- 
able. This is true in the advanced capitalism of contemporary American 
society. This was equally true a century ago in the early years of American 
youth services librarianship. This is a profession with a long history of 
hostility toward the concept of story as commodity. 

Effie L. Power's textbook Library Service far Children was published in 
1930 by the American Library Association; the text (and its 1943 revision, 
Work with Children in Public Libraries) was considered "the" text in the train- 
ing of children's librarians throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Power de- 



JENKINS/THE CYCLE OF STORY 85 

voted several pages of the section on book selection to "fiction which fails 
to meet accepted standards," by which she meant the children's mass 
market series book (72). She condemned them as "books which cater to 
the lazy minded. . . . easily detected by their hackneyed plots, wooden 
style, and lifeless characters" (73) . Power illustrated these qualities with a 
critique of a representative book of the genre, TheBobbsey Twins and Their 
Schoolmates, noting that the book ("the 21st book of a mediocre series") 
contains an appendix that "calls attention to other titles in several long 
series" [emphasis in original] (73). While the story's ostensible purpose 
was clearly entertainment, Power stated "an ulterior purpose is suggested 
by specific reference to other books in the series" (74). The ulterior pur- 
pose was, of course, the promotion and sale of more books. And Power is 
adamant: "Obviously a book of this type has no place in children's read- 
ing" (75). Though the rhetoric has softened considerably since that time 
(one oft-cited anti-series salvo, Mary E.S. Root's 1929 article in Wilson Li- 
brary Bulletin, was titled simply "Not to Be Circulated"), condemnations of 
mass market series books have continued to appear in the literature of 
youth services librarianship from that day to this. The series' lack of liter- 
ary quality is the reason usually cited for librarians' negative view of series 
books, but along with that has been children's librarians' traditional re- 
jection of story as commodity, of made-to-order texts for children mar- 
keted as "product." This division is not limited to children's publishing 
but is found throughout the book industry in the ongoing tension be- 
tween culture and commerce, between texts as literature and texts as prod- 
uct (Coser). 

It is understandably galling to children's librarians to spend even a 
part of their inadequate book budgets on series books that they know are 
manufactured solely to make a profit, each with its extra pages devoted to 
advertising more of the same, plus (as with the Baby-Sitters Club series) 
board games, charm bracelets, calendars, dolls, videos, and fan club mem- 
bership. At the same time, the demand is certainly there. And reading 
research consistently identifies a strong positive correlation between 
children's series book reading and their later development into fluent 
adult readers (Carlsen 44-55; Carlsen and Sherrill 87-94) . And yet . . . the 
idea that a children's story is simply one more saleable commodity contin- 
ues to disturb those who are concerned with the preservation and per- 
petuation of story. And not just any story, but good stories, worthwhile 
stories, authentic stories, stories that nourish children's hearts and inspire 
their imaginations, the stories in the sort of books that Paul Hazard was 
referring to when he wrote, "'Give us books,' say the children, 'give us 
wings. You who are powerful and strong, help us to escape into the far- 
away. . . . We are willing to learn everything that we are taught at school, 
but, please, let us keep our dreams'" (4). While this cry may or may not 
be a notion more romantic than realistic, picturing a children's book as 



86 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

just another kind of widget to promote and sell, viewing young people as 
simply another group of consumers, their imaginations dulled by stories 
packaged and rewritten for the broadest audience appeal these are trou- 
bling images. 

When stories go to the marketplace is it possible for them not to slide 
down that very slippery slope to bland or garish commercialization, 
that place where it is impossible not to be blinded by the bottom line? 
What is "the integrity of a story"? If tellers and writers have one eye on the 
marketplace as they make a traditional story their own, have they sold 
out? These are vital questions for those of us whose work involves con- 
necting young people with stories. And because we are living in a present 
filled with media tie-ins and television shows that are nothing more than 
half-hour commercials for story-linked action figures, breakfast cereal and 
computer games, one may be forgiven for thinking that things could hardly 
get worse, that young people's minds will inevitably (and irrevocably) be 
corrupted by market forces. And what will our world look like when popular 
culture becomes the only culture, the only game in town? 

THE GRIMMS AT THE MARKETPLACE 

Despite the age-old feeling that present problems are far worse than 
past ones, there are useful parallels to be made between current struggles 
with the impact of capitalism on today's stories and past struggles along 
the road from the fireplace to the marketplace. One such struggle oc- 
curred in Germany during the late eighteenth century, a time when a 
great number of small independent states were in the process of unifying 
under a common government a process that came very late in compari- 
son to other European countries. This was a time marked by great politi- 
cal tension. There was tension between France and Germany, recently 
exacerbated by Napoleon's occupation of German land. There were also 
tensions between and among the many German-speaking jurisdictions as 
they moved, contentiously and reluctantly, toward unification. Not coin- 
cidentally, this was also the time of the Heidelberg Romantic Movement 
and its emphasis on German culture as a unique entity the product of a 
single Germanic Volk a movement that inspired the collecting of Ger- 
man folksongs, legends, and stories, as well as the birth and growth of 
German nationalism (Zipes, "Breaking" 70; Bottigheimer, "Bad Girls" 3-6). 

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were Germans born in 1785 and 1786, the 
two oldest sons of the six children of Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, a magis- 
trate who died in 1895, when Jacob and Wilhelm were eleven and ten 
years old. Their father's death reduced the family's resources and status, 
and Jacob and Wilhelm were well aware that their career success would be 
important to the welfare of their mother and siblings. They left home for 
school in Kassel in 1898 and from there went to the University of Marburg 
to study law. While in Marburg, they became increasingly interested in 



JENKINS/THE CYCLE OF STORY 87 

the study of old German literature and became involved in the Heidel- 
berg Romantic Movement. At the same time they wrote and sought to 
publish scholarly work that would contribute to the support of their fam- 
ily (Zipes, "Dreams" 206-213). In 1805-08, two Heidelberg scholars and 
writers, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, compiled, edited, and 
published one of the earliest collections of German folksongs, Des Knaben 
Wunderhorn (The Youth's Wonderhorn) (Ellis 7). The Grimm brothers as- 
sisted in this work, and four years later began compiling and editing a 
fairy tale collection that would be a record of German oral tradition for an 
adult and scholarly audience. With the help of Arnim, the Grimms pub- 
lished the first of two volumes of Kinder- und Haus-Mdrchen (Nursery and 
Household Tales) in 1812, the second volume in 1815 (Tatar 6). 

There is a common but mistaken image of the Grimms as anthro- 
pologists of sorts, traveling about the countryside, stopping in villages to 
hear the stories of German peasants. This, however, was not the case; the 
Grimms did not gather their stories "in the field" (or, more accurately, in 
that picturesque and imaginary rural field) but from lower-middle and 
middle class urban women (such as Dorothea Viehmann, Marie and 
Jeannette Hassenpflug, and Dorchen Wild) who were skilled storytellers 
(Scherf 183-189). Along with many others, the Grimms believed that 
folktales whether told in a hut or a drawing room revealed "the true 
heart of the Volk." As scholars of linguistics and philology, they consid- 
ered their work a scientific, rather than a popular, collection and included 
notes on sources and variants (Degh 68-70). 

The Grimms edited their tales (and continued to edit their tales) 
from the first publication in 1812 to the final 1857 edition. The reviews of 
that first, scholarly edition were mixed, as critics welcomed this expres- 
sion of the German volk spirit but deplored the tales' inappropriateness 
for children. Even friendly reviewers, such as Clemens Brentano, criti- 
cized the Grimms' adherence to oral tradition at the expense of reader 
comfort; Brentano wrote, "If you want to display children's clothing you 
can do that quite well without bringing out an outfit that has buttons torn 
off it, dirt smeared on it, and the shirt hanging out of the pants," while 
Arnim suggested that they add a subtitle that would be a "parental guid- 
ance" warning: "for parents, who can select stories for retelling" (Tatar 16) . 

There is no question that the Grimms were aware that the market- 
place value of their collection would increase considerably if the tales were 
made "suitable for children." At that time Jacob and Wilhelm were sup- 
porting two of their younger brothers. In addition, the financial incen- 
tive was considerable: projected royalties for the edition were 500 talers, a 
sum roughly equivalent to each of the brothers' yearly income. As literary 
scholar Maria Tatar noted, "the Grimms may never have made or even 
hoped to make a financial killing on the Nursery and Household Tales, but 
the profit motive was certainly not wholly absent from their calculations 



88 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

and to some extent must have guided their revisions [on the first edi- 
tion]" (14). Indeed, with an eye to their audience, the second edition's 
introduction stated: "we have thus eliminated in this edition any expres- 
sion that is not suitable for childhood" (Ward 95) . In this new expurgated 
(and certainly less authentic) edition, sexual references were eliminated 
and violence was confined to that which made sense in a moral world: the 
good were rewarded, the bad punished, with punishments growing pro- 
gressively harsher and more detailed as the editions continued to be ed- 
ited and published. Increasingly, the tales emphasized correct morals, 
manners, and behavior; the value of diligence and the value of hard work; 
beauty linked to virtue; and national pride (Tatar 28-33). 

Kinder- und Haus-Marchen went through a total of 1 7 editions from 
1812 to 1857, when the final edition was published. The first and second 
editions sold moderately well. In 1823, however, translator Edgar Taylor 
published an illustrated children's edition of a selection of Grimms' tales 
in English that was a popular and commercial success (Bottigheimer, "Bad 
Girls" 10, 19). Noting this success, Wilhelm Grimm compiled and edited 
an illustrated edition of 50 of the best-known tales that was published in 
1825. The text was illustrated (by their brother Ludwig) and further re- 
vised specifically for a young audience. It was this "Small Edition," which 
contained Snow White, The Frog King, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, 
Little Red Riding Hood, Rumplestiltskin and other now-familiar stories, 
that became a popular bestseller. In the years that followed, the Grimms 
published further editions of the tales and in 1850, the Grimms' tales 
became part of the Prussian elementary school curriculum. Grimms' tales 
went on to become part of curriculum of all German schools, where they 
were read and studied by every German school child through the end of 
the Second World War (Bottigheimer, "Bad Girls" 21). 

The Grimms made few public statements about their expurgation, 
consistently describing the changes they made as ones that brought the 
story "closer to the original." It is clear, however, that the Grimms were 
also editing with an awareness of the youth of their primary audience. As 
Grimms scholar Maria Tatar has pointed out, "Wilhelm Grimm rewrote 
the tales so extensively and went so far in the direction of eliminating off- 
color episodes that he can be credited with sanitizing folktales and thereby 
paving the way for the process that made them acceptable children's lit- 
erature in all cultures" (24). Indeed, the Grimms were among those who 
led the way to the cultural riches in the tales of the fireplace; and their 
interest in the actual riches to be had in refashioning the tales for young 
audiences led the way to the marketplace as well. 

MAKING STORIES SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN 

"Suitable for children" continues to be a key factor in turning a story 
into a product the seemingly inevitable transformation/transmo- 



89 

grification of figurative cultural capital to literal cultural capital. And it 
was into this complex process that Power and other children's librarians 
inserted themselves as arbiters in discerning and promoting "the rarest 
kind of best" in stories for young people. But acting in this role does not 
mean we are immune to the tension between the questions, "Is this story 
an authentic representation of a culture's narrative voice(s)?" and "Will 
this story sell? And, if not, can (should?) something (anything?) be done 
to transform the story, to give it more 'curb appeal'?" 

Sometimes these changes and transformations appear to be thought- 
less cultural erasures, as in William Sleator's The Angry Moon, a Caldecott 
Honor book that combines a Tlingit Indian tale with narrative conven- 
tions of European folklore, using three rather than four as a mythic num- 
ber. Someone apparently thought that this change was an improvement, 
but what was the original story? And what else might have been altered to 
make this a story for mainstream Western audiences? 

Sometimes these changes appear as deliberate expurgation, as with 
Charlotte Huck's text for Princess Furball, a variant of the Grimms tale 
"Allerleirauh" ("Thousandfurs"), the story of a king determined to marry 
his daughter, who responds by fleeing to a neighboring kingdom. Huck 
changed the story to eliminate any reference to incest (in her telling, the 
girl runs away because her father has ordered her to marry an ogre) . From 
this point, the story's plot proceeds more or less like the original, but 
Huck's editing has in fact changed the characters of both the girl and her 
father, which in turn changes the entire logic of the story. The tale be- 
comes more "suitable for children," but at what cost? 

Sometimes tellers (including ourselves) change stories to reflect the 
folk motifs that are an integral part of our own personal schema of "the 
way things ought to be." We do this not only with folklore from other 
cultures, but with our personal stories as well. We tell and retell our sto- 
ries, creating and recreating the meanings we have ascribed to the stories 
that are our lives. It is, after all, painfully disconcerting to feel that our 
life experiences are directed in part by chance, by the chaotic movement 
of people, by small and large events beyond our control, by wars and trea- 
ties, good and bad harvests, disease and health, poverty and wealth. And 
that these factors, whether random or preordained, have converged to 
put all of us here in this place at this present moment. 

We want roots, we want to feel like we are standing on solid ground. 
And our stories give us that foundation. There is a sense in which our 
stories, our individual narratives, are the most personal, the most inti- 
mate entities in our lives. Even in our dreams we turn what may be simply 
the random firing of neurons into a story. Regardless of how much or 
how little sense a dream makes, it is still a story, it is still our story, a story 
that only we will ever experience. 



90 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

There is a terrible indignation about the people who sell a culture's 
stories; who sell our stories; who sell our stories and get them wrong who 
sell our stories and get them wrong but because there are 10,000 print 
copies of their version and only a single oral version of our story, their 
story "wins" and becomes "the" story. And what could be more infuriating 
than to watch as an oral narrative a story that is owned by everyone and 
no one is claimed as one person's intellectual property, copyrighted, and 
sold. We get no money in this transaction, so we can only feel deprived. 
Do we lose when our stories are turned into commodities? And if so, what 
exactly is it that we have lost? 

STORIES IN THE MARKETPLACE 

In the chaos and glitz of the marketplace, we get stories, stories, and 
more stories, churned out like so many Franklin Mint collectibles, while 
the Opies' masterful children's folklore collection I Saw Esau (with illus- 
trations by Maurice Sendak!) sits on the remainder table at Borders. 
Multiple versions of the Grimms' tales continue to proliferate, but, as Betsy 
Hearne noted in her survey of in-print editions of Sleeping Beauty, most 
of the texts she examined display an indifference on the part of authors 
and illustrators to the tale's sources or internal logic evidently the pub- 
lishers' motivations "must have been marketing potential rather than aes- 
thetic or psychological appreciation of the story's value" (233) . And when 
young people ask for the "real" version of Snow White, what they are ask- 
ing for is not the Grimms' tale but Grumpy, Dopey, Sneezy, Happy, Sleepy, 
Bashful, and Doc. The Disney version has become "the real version." 

The monolith of popular culture embodied in mass market narra- 
tives like Goosebumps, Power Rangers, and Sweet Valley High seems so 
large and powerful and children so small and powerless. But what do 
children do with that mass market "real version" once they acquire it in 
print or in other media in comic, video, game, or action figure? The 
story of children and popular culture in print or plastic, audio or visual, 
doesn't end at the cash register. 

In his book, Understanding Popular Culture, cultural theoristjohn Fiske 
uses the image and the actuality of blue jeans to make some observations 
about the dynamic nature of popular mass market culture in his essay, 
"The Jeaning of America." Clothing has long been a signifier of various 
meanings to both the wearer and the observer. At one time jeans were an 
item of apparel that signified rebellion; now they are ubiquitous, worn by 
members of a range of classes and cultures. Despite the apparent com- 
monality, however, wearers of jeans particularly young people will of- 
ten purchase their ready-to-wear jeans and then immediately change them 
to create their own self-representation that may be decidedly different 
from the look that Ralph Lauren or Liz Claiborne had in mind. 

If today's jeans are to express oppositional meanings, or even to ges- 



JENKINS/THE CYCLE OF STORY 91 

ture toward such social resistance, they need to be disfigured in some 
way tie-dyed, irregularly bleached, or, particularly, torn. If "whole" jeans 
connote shared meanings of contemporary America, then disfiguring them 
becomes a way of distancing oneself from those values ... at the simplest 
level, this is an example of a user not simply consuming a commodity but 
reworking it, treating it not as a completed object to be accepted passively, 
but as a cultural resource to be used (Fiske 4, 10). 

The free market economy of the late twentieth century is character- 
ized by a seemingly endless cycle of manufactured commodities that are 
advertised and sold to consumers, whose money provides both paychecks 
and profit statements to workers and owners, respectively. But focusing 
solely on the process of supplying commodities to customers obscures the 
meanings of those commodities from the perspective of the consumer. 
And not simply consumers as subjects of market research, but consumers 
as creators of their own meanings. And much as producers would like to 
control the meanings their products have for their customers, the fact is, 
they cannot. In the case of jeans, when manufacturers saw that young 
people were washing, bleaching, and ripping their jeans, they began pro- 
ducing "factory-made tears, or by 'washing' or fading jeans in the factory 
before sale. This process of adopting the signs of resistance incorporates 
them into the dominant system and thus attempts to rob them of any 
oppositional meanings" (Fiske 18). But as soon as faded jeans appear on 
the clothing racks at the Gap or at Target, young jeans wearers begin to 
alter those jeans to create a new modification, a new Look. And so it goes. 

Popular culture always is part of power relations; it always bears traces 
of the constant struggle between domination and subordination, between 
power and various forms of resistance to it or evasions of it, between mili- 
tary strategy and guerrilla tactics. Evaluating the balance of power within 
this struggle is never easy: Who can say, at any one point, who is "winning" 
a guerilla war? The essence of guerilla warfare, as of popular culture, lies 
in not being defeatable. Despite nearly two centuries of capitalism, subor- 
dinated subcultures exist and intransigently refuse finally to be incorpo- 
rated people in these subcultures keep devising new ways of tearing their 
jeans (Fiske 19). 

It is common knowledge that a handful of giant corporations domi- 
nate the communications industry, both nationally and internationally. 
ABC is a subsidiary of Disney, which also owns theme parks, an oil and gas 
company, cable channels, magazines, newspapers, record companies, an 
insurance company, and even a hockey team. Time Warner owns Turner 
Broadcasting, parent company of CNN, as well as sports teams, cable com- 
panies, film studios, and retail stores. NBC is now owned by GE, while 
CBS belongs to Westinghouse. Fox Television is part of Rupert Murdoch's 
media empire, which also includes HarperCollins publishing, newspapers, 
magazines, and television stations. Not surprisingly, many observers worry 



92 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

about the impact of having so many channels of communication controlled 
by a small number of mega-corporations. 

It is difficult not to worry about the impact this "literary-industrial 
complex" will have on our democratic future (West 1-7) . As one of the 
many who are dedicated to the promotion of quality texts representing a 
diversity of viewpoints to young readers, this is certainly one of my wor- 
ries. But just when I think that corporations really are on the verge of 
success as they strive to turn people into consumer automatons, that they 
really have cracked the code for how to get us to want whatever it is they 
have to sell and reject anything not previously seen on television, I con- 
sider the folk culture that surrounds us. In the apprehension generated 
by the Big Picture, it is important to remember the Small Picture as well, 
by which I mean the folk culture that is part of our everyday lives and, for 
the purposes of this paper, the everyday lives of children. 

The image of traditional folk culture pictures the individual or the 
group fashioning meaningful objects from natural materials, meaningful 
stories from their observations of the heavens, the earth, the oceans, the 
weather, and other natural phenomena. But manufactured objects, ur- 
ban landscapes, and mass media can also be used by the individual and 
the group as raw materials from which to fashion their own meanings and 
culture that may or may not be quite different from those ascribed by the 
corporate creators of those objects or that media. Fiske describes this 
creation of popular culture as "necessarily the art of making do with what 
is available" (15). In earlier times, "what is available" might be leaves or 
pebbles or bamboo or animal skins. Contemporary folk artists may use 
bottle caps or broken china or discarded tires or styrofoam cups. In our 
throw-away culture, there is always something available. And who knows 
this better than children? 

CHILDREN, HALLOWEEN COSTUMES, AND THE FOLK PROCESS 

Ready-made Halloween costumes depicting the mass media charac- 
ters most popular with children in a given year are one example that is 
used as evidence of the deterioration of the pure and innocent ghosts and 
pirates, hobos and monsters, witches and princesses from when we were 
children. As one adult, a package designer for Hasbro Toys, stated, "What 
kids want and what they fantasize about is just a regurgitation of what 
they've seen on TV. It's scary, that their fantasies are so controlled by the 
media, and what adults think will sell to kids. And Halloween's just more 
of the same" (Jenkins 1). However, in my research into children's Hal- 
loween costume choices and aesthetics, I found that the plastic costumes 
off the rack at K-Mart are really not a threat to the folk process. If we take 
a close look at the lives of many young people in contemporary U.S. cul- 
ture during the final weeks of October, we will see that both figuratively 
and literally children continue to tear their jeans. 



JENKINS/THE CYCLE OF STORY 93 

I conducted my research among the 300-plus students, age 5 to 12, of 
a single elementary school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I conducted 
group and individual interviews during the week before Halloween. I 
asked children to describe their costumes for the current and for past 
years, their decision-making process for determining their costume choice, 
and their standards for what they thought constituted a good costume or 
a poor one. 

The answers I got fell into distinct patterns according to the age of 
the child. The children described by the Hasbro employee, who "just 
want to be what they see on TV," were the youngest: preschoolers, kinder- 
gartners, and some first-graders. They are great fans of television super- 
hero cartoon shows and their play often involved those characters. By the 
time most students were in first grade, however, many saw store-bought 
superhero costumes as babyish, with some even claiming to hate their old 
cartoon favorites. Many of them consulted their parents in choosing a 
costume, which might very well be an older sibling's former costume, but 
most felt that they themselves had final say on their choice. Children in 
first and second grade might have an adult/parent-created costume an 
E.T. with every line and wrinkle sewn in, for example, or a knight with 
elaborate cardboard armor, or a Cinderella in a miniature ball gown. But 
they were beginning to place greater importance on creating at least some 
part of their own costume themselves. By third grade, nearly all students 
viewed Halloween costumes as not simply a requirement for peer accep- 
tance or trick-or-treating, but as a self-created signifier of some aspect of 
their identity. This could be a weighty decision; one boy described his 
decision-making process: "Right now my mind is racing between a devil 
and a lumberjack" (Jenkins 4) . They were inspired by other costumes, by 
peers, by television shows, comics, books, favorite activities, or future aspi- 
rations. They might be a doctor, or a tennis star, or a character out of a 
favorite comic book, or one of the more traditional choices of pirate, hobo, 
witch, gypsy, ghost, etc. 

The oldest elementary students (fourth and fifth graders) placed 
great importance on making or putting their costume together themselves. 
They might ask for some small amount of help from parents, but only 
after they had already decided what they would be. They took particular 
delight in describing what I call collage objects, such as lion paws created 
out of gardening gloves and stick-on fingernails, or frog's eyes made from 
ping pong balls. All of these involved taking familiar objects and 
reconfiguring them to create something new. Borrowing an older sibling's 
hair mousse, a younger sibling's stuffed tiger, and becoming Calvin of 
"Calvin and Hobbes," was just exactly right to them. In fashioning their 
own costumes the older students, who were as avid as young students in 
their consumption of popular culture, consistently rejected the mass 
customization of a manufactured costume in favor of the "homemade" 



94 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

costume, that is, one designed and created by and for themselves. So 
what did these older children make of the off-the-rack versions of 
Spiderman, Pocahontas, Hercules, and the Little Mermaid? "Oh well, 
those are really for little kids" (Jenkins 9). 

Overall, the students placed a high value on personal choice in cos- 
tumes, no matter how rudimentary the result. Given this fact, it is hardly 
surprising that store-bought costumes are most popular with young chil- 
dren. They want some choice, but most are not old enough to be able to 
assemble a costume themselves. Their best compromise is a ready-to-wear 
costume that they pick out themselves from among a store display of other 
such costumes. Hence the brief but intense attraction of costumes from 
K-Mart for preschoolers and kindergartners. The folk process survives 
another onslaught from those who would turn everything they could sell 
into commodities. 

It is the same with story, whether it is an explanation of how the sun 
and moon came to live in the sky, or why mosquitoes buzz in people's ears, 
or how our great-grandparents came to America, or what Godzilla does 
when he's not terrorizing Tokyo, or who used to live in the house next 
door. Stories are pieced together from the old and the new, are created 
and recreated over and over again, and no matter how much Disney Stu- 
dios wants their version of Beauty and the Beast to be "the" version, no 
matter how many media tie-ins they license, the underlying story is not 
static. With or without permissions, we take it and use it; we act it out with 
Barbies and stuffed animals; we refashion it to tell to our children, our 
students, or our therapists; we take a piece of this version and a piece of 
that version, a piece of Jo March and Professor Bhaer, a piece of Daddy 
Longlegs, and perhaps even a piece of our own lives; we take it and change 
it and use it and make it ours. The children keep tearing their jeans. And 
so, I hope, will we. 

WORKS CITED 

Arnim, Ludwig Achim von and Clemens Brentano, comps. Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte 
Deutsche Lieder. 3 vols. Heidelberg: Mohr u. Zimmer, Breitkopf und Hartel, 1805-08. 

Bottigheimer, Ruth B., ed. Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm. Philadel- 
phia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1986. 

. Grimms ' Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales. New Haven: Yale 
U P, 1987. 

Carlsen, G. Robert. Books and the Teenage Reader: A Guide for Teachers, Librarians, and Par- 
ents. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Bantam, 1980. 

Carlsen, G. Robert and Anne Sherrill. Voices of Readers: How We Come to Love Books. Urbana: 
NCTE, 1988. 

Coser, Lewis, Charles Kadushin, and Walter W. Powell. Books: The Culture and Commerce of 
Publishing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Degh, Linda. "What Did the Grimm Brothers Give to and Take from the Folk?" The Broth- 
ers Grimm and Folktale. Ed. James M. McGlathery. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 66-90. 

Ellis, John M. One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales. Chicago: U of 
Chicago P, 1983. 

Fiske,John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1991. 



JENKINS/THE CYCLE OF STORY 95 



Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, comp. Kinder- und Haus-Marchen. 2 vols. Berlin: 

Realschulbuchhandlung, 1812/1815. 

Hazard, Paul. Books, Children, and Men. Boston: Horn Book, 1944. 
Hearne, Betsy. "Booking the Brothers Grimm: Art, Adaptations, and Economics." The 

Brothers Grimm and Folktale. Ed. James M. McGlathery. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 

220-33. 
Hope, Laura Lee. The Bobbsey Twins and Their Schoolmates. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 

1918. 

Huck, Charlotte S. Princess Furball. New York: Greenwillow, 1989. 

Jenkins, Christine. "Dressed to Fool: An Investigation into the Folklore of Children's Hal- 
loween Costumes." Unpublished paper, 1988. 

Lauper, Cyndi. "Money Changes Everything." She's So Unusual. Portrait, BFR 38930, 1983. 
Opie, lono Archibald and Peter Opie. I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild's Pocketbook. Cambridge: 

Candlewick, 1992. 

Power, Effie L. Library Service for Children. Chicago: ALA, 1930. 
. Work with Children in Public Libraries. Chicago: ALA, 1943. 
Root, Mary E.S. "Not to Be Circulated: A List, Prepared by Mrs. E.S. Root, of Books in 

Series Not Circulated by Standardized Libraries." Wilson Library Bulletin 3 (1929): 

446. 
Scherf, Walter. "Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: A Few Small Corrections to a Commonly 

Held Image." The Brothers Grimm and Folktale. Ed. James M. McGlathery. Urbana: U of 

Illinois P, 1988. 178-91. 

Sleator, William. The Angry Moon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. 

Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 1987. 
Ward, Donald. "New Misconceptions about Old Folktales: The Brothers Grimm." The 

Brothers Grimm and Folktale. Ed. James M. McGlathery. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 

91-100. 

West, Celeste. The Passionate Perils of Publishing. San Francisco: Booklegger Press, 1978. 
Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. Austin: U of 

Texas P, 1979. 
. "Dreams of a Better Bourgeois Life: The Psychosocial Origins of the Grimms' Tales." 

The Brothers Grimm and Folktale. Ed. James M. McGlathery. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 

1988. 205-19. 

WORKS CONSULTED 

Haugland, Ann. "The Crack in the Old Canon: Culture and Commerce in Children's 
Books." The Lion and the Unicorn 18 (June 1994): 48-59. 



JANICE M. DEL NEGRO 
Editor 

The Bulletin of the Center for Children 's Books 

Graduate School of Library and Information Science 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 



For Story's Sake: Reading as its Own Reward 

We live in a media-saturated society that, on a surface level at 
least, increasingly defines individuals by their outer trappings: 
how they look, the goods they have, the stuff they can afford to 
buy, the toys they play with. We live in an era that rewards the quick fix, 
the easy answer, and the software solution; in a time when the words "long 
term," "delayed gratification," and "whatever is worth doing is worth do- 
ing well" are considered anachronistic at best and laughable at worst. 
Michael Millken goes to jail for a white collar crime and comes out a mul- 
timillionaire; honesty is cynically equated with stupidity, and ethics are 
situational and malleable. Nobody does anything for nothing, if you don't 
take care of yourself no one else will, and it serves you right for being such 
a sentimental fool. The bottom line is all that matters, whether in budget 
or circulation figures if you can't measure it, it's not valuable and kids 
need to be paid off with bribes and incentives in order to participate in 
reading programs or other book-related activities. If they're not, reading 
program participation figures will go down, circulation figures will plum- 
met, and book-buying budgets will dwindle accordingly. 

How's that for a scenario? Nuclear winter is cozier. 

I love books. I have always loved them. I have no memory of a time 
when I did not know how to read. My first memory of actually reading a 
book is the poems in The Pocket Book of Verse. I think it belonged to my 
older brother. "Tyger, tyger burning bright,/ in the forests of the night;/ 
what immortal hand or eye,/ could frame thy fearful symmetry?" (Blake 
PI. 42). Or, "Take her up tenderly, lift her with care, fashioned so slen- 
derly, young and so fair" (Hood 274) . And, 'Young Lochinvar is come out 
of the West./Through all the wide Border his steed was the best. . . " 
(Scott 130). Did I know what they meant? I didn't have a clue. And it 
didn't matter. 

I inadvertently stumbled through the door of the public library and 



DEL NEGRO/FOR STORY'S SAKE 97 

found solace and sustenance in silence, in books, in language. The pub- 
lic library was an incredible haven, a respite from a world where I had a 
sick father, an overworked mother, and no place I belonged. The Throgs 
Neck Branch of The New York Public Library was a converted storefront, 
with a children's side and an adult side. It was warm, it smelled of books 
and dust and lemon wax, and there was always a place for me to sit. You 
could take out six books on a children's card then; when you turned 13 
you got an adult card, could check books out of the adult side, and could 
take as many as 12. I yearned to be 13. 

There were storytimes at the library, but I never went to them. I would 
see the screen up in the corner of the children's room, and hear the rise 
and fall of the storyteller's voice, sometimes followed by the rising and 
falling of children's voices but I never went behind the screen. 

Effie Power said in her book Library Service for Children that the pri- 
mary purpose of all storytimes is to interpret literature for children and to 
inspire them to read it for themselves (217) . I find that a difficult point to 
argue with. It is, perhaps, not the only reason for storytimes, but it is 
definitely up there with the top three. I, however, had a different source 
of inspiration. 

There was a librarian at the Throgs Neck Branch a formidable 
woman. She was tall, black, and imposing or maybe I found her impos- 
ing because I was none of those things. She was stern or maybe that was 
because I was young. I never knew her name, but she knew mine. Look- 
ing back on it from the perspective of a youth services librarian, I realize 
that she had a very odd way of doing reader advisory. I would come into 
the library to return my books and she would say "Good afternoon, Miss 
Del Negro." I would mumble something completely unintelligible. She 
would examine the titles I had returned, and, not really looking at me, 
not really giving it too much visible attention, she would wave her hand 
toward a table in the children's room and say, "There are some books over 
there you might like." I always looked. And I always liked them. I had 
some strange idea about reading through all the fiction in alphabetical 
order. I made a pretty good dent in it. And then one day she came over 
to me and said, "I think you should look at these," and she pointed me at 
the 398s, the folk and fairy tales. I read them all. Eleanor Farjeon, An- 
drew Lang, Joseph Jacobs, Harold Courlander. After the 398s came the 
292s, myths and legends Padraic Colum, Edith Hamilton and I was thor- 
oughly and firmly hooked. When I found out there were actually branch 
libraries what a novel idea and that I could get to them with a bus pass, 
I checked out the 398s and 292s in every branch library I could get to by 
bus or train. That was a pretty fair number of libraries. And a pretty fair 
number of 398s and 292s. 

Eileen Colwell once said that "the child's imagination must be stimu- 
lated from an early age if she is to develop as a person; without it she is 



98 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

locked into a narrow environment bounded by what she is able to see and 
touch" (4). In a converted storefront in the Bronx, I found not just a 
world, but a galaxy; not just a galaxy, but universes too numerous to count, 
but still close enough to touch. Years later I found myself in graduate li- 
brary school, another inadvertent stumble, planning on specializing in 
academic libraries. I got an assistantship in the department, and met the 
second librarian that shaped my life. Margaret Poarch had been an army 
librarian before becoming a professor of children's literature. She was 
from the American South two of her favorite phrases were "My country 
tis of thee!" and, "Honey, don't get me started." My job as Margaret's 
assistant consisted, among other, less important things, of pulling books 
for her classes. I pulled truckloads of them. And every time I did, I would 
say, "Gee, Margaret, I remember this book I read it when I was a kid." 
After about three weeks of this, Margaret finally turned to me and said 
"Honey, you don't want to be an academic librarian. Academic libraries 
are borin'. You are a children's librarian, through and through." My fate 
was sealed in that tiny office in the Genesee Valley. In a way, it was very 
like that old library storefront it was small, crowded, and full of books; it 
smelled of dust and lemon wax, and there was always someplace for me to 
sit, even when I had to move a stack of books off a chair in order to do it. 
It was Margaret who first introduced me to storytelling, and it was Marga- 
ret who told me it was the story that mattered, not the teller. "Know the 
story," she said. "If you know the story well enough, the rest will take care 
of itself. It's the story that matters, not the teller." That phrase has stayed 
with me all these years. It shaped the librarian, storyteller, and reviewer I 
was to become. 

The philosophy of youth services in libraries was shaped by profes- 
sional women with visionary ideals. A key element in that philosophy, a 
constant throughout a hundred years of public library history, was the 
notion that youth services in libraries existed in order to connect children 
to books, to the very best literature the profession could offer them. 
Carolyn Hewins, Anne Carroll Moore, Minerva Saunders, Effie Lee Power: 
we are, many of us, ignorant of their names and sometimes we forget their 
vision as well. Their vision included the awakening of the desire for knowl- 
edge in children who have little or no such stimulation in their personal 
lives; providing a connection, a bridge to powerful and beautiful litera- 
ture and language; and fostering a life-long love of reading. This was 
both a professional and moral vison, a vision with focus and impact. An- 
drew Carnegie thought of the public library as the poor man's university; 
author Mollie Hunter once said "If you can read, you can educate your- 
self" ( 75) . She also said "'If is a little word with a very big meaning" (80) . 

According to the U.S. Department of Education, the percentage of 
illiterate adults in the United States is on the rise. Public libraries and 
youth services in particular lack support (if they are not under downright 



DEL NEGRO/FOR STORY'S SAKE 99 

attack) from fiscally prudent if short-sighted private individuals and gov- 
ernment agencies. The quest for equal access to educational opportunity 
for all children travels a long and tortuous route, with obstacles in the 
shape of monolithic bureaucracies, hostile challenges, ignorance, and 
greed. Any quest worthy of the name requires a heroic figure, a hero, to 
meet and overcome all obstacles. 

The hero. That's you. Children's librarians, I mean. I've seen heroic 
deeds and miraculous accomplishments in the smallest storefronts. I've 
seen children's librarians coax non-readers into the world of books. I've 
seen smiling calm in the face of a roomful of adolescents bursting at the 
seams with an energy I only vaguely remember. I've seen libraries moved, 
rooms rearranged, computers installed, and new skills learned and ac- 
quired at lightning speed. I've seen quality services maintained in spite of 
budget and staff cuts that would cripple any corporate organization. I've 
seen literature-based programs created from tissue and glitter, story and 
song. I've seen children's rooms turned into rainforests with green con- 
struction paper and safety scissors. I've seen children's librarians stand 
their ground when a book is challenged, when a gang member gets bellig- 
erent, when their budget and staff are threatened. 

In folktales, the hero seldom accomplishes much by herself. There is 
always some convenient animal helper, magical old man, or mystical wise 
woman to help the hero out of wells, up glass mountains, or into towers 
with no doors. 

It's true for children's librarians as well. The best of us realize that we 
accomplish little on our own, that everything we do is connected to every- 
thing else. Whether we are talking about the volunteer who cuts out 
nametags in the thematically appropriate shape for storytime, the clerk 
who patiently explains for the two-hundredth time how a child gets her 
first library card, the page who actually displays books with attractive cov- 
ers instead of the ones that just got back from the bindery the library is 
a story within which all the characters are connected by blood, coinci- 
dence, or circumstance. 

WE HAVE SEEN THE POWER 

Ideally, every child you help has a supportive adult, a parent, a grand- 
parent, a teacher, standing behind him/her. And each of those adults is a 
possible ally in your journey to connect children and books, children and 
story. They are the magical helpers in your quest to communicate the 
importance of children, children's books, and storytelling to the unknow- 
ing in your community. Everybody knows somebody else, and that some- 
body else may be the person you need to know to more effectively deliver 
library services to children. 

And what about the child who doesn't have a supportive adult? The 
child who has no advocate? Well, we change roles within the story then. 



100 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

We shape-shift, if you will, from hero to convenient helper. Magic man or 
wise woman, we are there to open the door to books and story for those 
children who cannot easily access what we can provide. In order to serve 
them effectively, it becomes necessary for us to unite with all those 
"everybodies" who know somebody else, to work with parents and teach- 
ers, daycare centers and preschools, health care and other community 
agencies. 

I am familiar with the sinking feeling that providing access to litera- 
ture and story for all the youth in your community is an overwheming 
task the dragon is too fierce, the spell too strong, the wizard too power- 
ful to be conquered by ... what? A children's librarian disguised as a 
hero? Most of us did not become involved in children's services because it 
was going to be politically hazardous and fraught with difficult financial 
issues. Most of us became involved in children's work because we had an 
affinity for children, and for children's books. Ah, the books . . . "'Christ- 
mas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the 
hearth before the fireplace" (Alcott 3) . "We eat our night meal by candle- 
light, the four of us. Sarah has brought candles from town. And nastur- 
tium seeds for her garden, and a book of songs for us to sing. . . . Soon 
there will be a wedding" (McLaughlin 58) . "With a quick glance back Fox 
dashed toward the woods. 'The hound knows who I am!' he shouted. 
'But I'm not worried. I sure can out-smart and out-run one of Mr. J.W. 
McCutchin's miserable mutts any old time of the day, because like I told 
you, I am a fox! ' 'I know,' said Flossie. 'I know'" (McKissack) . The books, 
remember? Reading as its own reward? (Oh, look, she's back on topic. . . .) 

I would like to present you with a radical notion. These two affini- 
ties our affinity for children and our affinity for children's books are 
our strongest traits, the magic cloak, the seven-league boots, the water of 
life that will help us succeed in our quest to connect children and books, 
children and story. 

What is it that makes the public library unique? What is it that makes 
us different from any other community agency? Understanding that li- 
braries are more than books, as the professional literature is so fond of 
pointing out, I am standing here now to say to you that it is books that 
make us unique, and in the end, it is our knowledge of those books and 
our ability to connect them with readers that make us effective. The prob- 
lem of illiteracy in the United States is no secret. We are faced with the 
dumbing down of everything from signage that uses symbolic pictograms 
to cash registers that use pictures of food instead of numbers. 

How did this happen? What caused it? Who is to blame? Electronic 
media? Television? Computers? The Internet? As responsible adults in a 
responsible profession, we let it happen. And we are all to blame. We 
abdicated our responsibility to our clients and our collections the first 
time we kept silent when someone spoke denigratingly about "kiddie lit" 



DEL NEGRO/ FOR STORY' S SAKE 101 

and storytimes "Oh, isn't that cute. You read books to children (or your- 
self) all day." We abdicated our responsibility the first time we said, "Oh, 
it doesn't matter what they read as long as they read something." We 
abdicated our responsibility when we decided learning a story was too 
much trouble, we'd show a movie instead. 

Now, there's a digression waiting to happen. A century of storytelling 
in the library oral tradition is our heritage as youth services librarians. 
This heritage includes literary tales memorized with love and care; per- 
sonal tales from our own lives; folktales from oral and written sources; and 
anything that promotes a love of language and an appreciation of the 
power of the written and spoken word. Many librarians started collecting, 
promoting, and telling traditional stories because they heard a storyteller, 
felt a connection to the tale and the telling, and wanted to be a part of a 
remarkably resilient tradition. We know that using stories with children 
has a number of benefits, from the practical increase of attention spans to 
the lyrical soaring of the soul that occurs when art is experienced. We 
select books and tell stories in libraries for many reasons: to build bridges 
between children and books, between childhood and adulthood, between 
language and reading, between one culture and another. In the tradition 
of the library professionals who have gone before us, we tell stories to 
keep the art of library storytelling alive. 

Why do we do it? We have seen the power and authority of storytelling 
work its magic on the most reluctant listeners. The library literature on 
the promotion and use of traditional literature is based on the underlying 
certainty that stories will lead children to books, and that books will lead 
children to richer, fuller lives. Storytelling gives us heroes not robotic 
transformers and metamorphosing rangers but heroes and heroines who 
win with wit against the powerful, with humor against the self-satisfied, 
and with generosity of heart against evil self-interest. Storytelling creates 
a community of listeners out of a group divided by age, gender, race, and 
economics. Promoting and telling tales from many cultures raises aware- 
ness of those cultures, and promotes pride in the cultural heritage of indi- 
vidual listeners. Telling tales from many cultures provides listeners with a 
common culture, a unity created from the diversity of many. The answer 
to the question "where can I find more stories?" is books. End of digres- 
sion. 

We abdicated our professional responsibility when we became too 
involved with non-literature based programming, dog-and-pony shows for 
the sake of the numbers, flash and dash for the sake of a newspaper ar- 
ticle; when we replaced storytelling with videos; when we became too busy 
or too tired to keep up with the literature. 

Keep up with the literature. This is the pivotal issue in library services 
for children. You cannot effectively utilize your collection unless you know 
what's in it. You cannot effectively do reader advisory unless you know 



102 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

what is in your collection. You cannot effectively do juvenile reference 
unless you know what is in your collection. You cannot effectively direct 
other adults who work with children to the resources and materials they 
require unless you know your collection. You cannot effectively defend 
your book budget unless you know your collection. How do you know 
your collection? Big surprise. You read it. All of it. I know, there's no way. 
But try anyway. Read all the picture books. Read as much fiction as you 
can. Skim the non-fiction table of contents, photos, index. You cannot 
defend your collection if you do not know what's in it, and you cannot 
know what's in it if you don't read it. Knowledge of children's literature, 
its history and content, is critical when formulating a collection develop- 
ment policy. It is also critical in giving you a sound basis for selection. No 
one has so much money in their book budget that they can afford to buy 
mediocre materials, and there is a lot of mediocrity out there. Buy mul- 
tiple copies of quality, don't waste your money on mediocrity. How do you 
know what constitutes quality material? Read reviews, read journal ar- 
ticles, read the books and then use them with children. 

When people come to us, to children's librarians, they expect us to 
know the books, the children, and the ways to connect them. When 
daycare centers, schools, and other community agencies come to us, they 
want the knowledge and expertise they expect professional children's li- 
brarians to have, what books work with kids, and why. Parents come in 
and want to know how they can help their children become readers. Teach- 
ers come in and want books for a specific curriculum unit. Homeschooolers 
come in and want classic titles that reflect a certain value system. Chil- 
dren come in and want a good book, a funny book, a mystery, or a book 
"like the one I read last time." You can serve them because you know the 
books and can talk about them in a knowledgeable fashion that inspires 
confidence in your selection and belief in your professional integrity. 

Our second strength is our affinity for children. We like them. All of 
them, even the ones that drive us crazy. I always thought that what made 
youth service librarians so effective with children is that we are probably 
the only people they know who don't want anything from them. We're 
not their parents, so we have few expectations about their personalities or 
interests. We're not their teachers, so we don't pressure them about grades. 
We're not their coaches, so athletic prowess or lack thereof is not an issue 
for us. We're not their peers, so whether they are part of the right crowd 
is of little concern to us. We take them as they come, and as long as they 
are not defacing library property or engaging in obviously destructive be- 
havior, we take them as they are. Our only concern is to connect them to 
the books and materials they need, the books that will help them write a 
paper, develop a self-concept, and formulate a world view that is bigger 
than their backyard, their street, their side of the road. 

Children need access to libraries and information, to the knowledge 



DEL NEGRO/FOR STORY' S SAKE 103 

and enjoyment they can provide, and we are the ones who give it to them. 
But despite our best intentions, it seems we are sometimes less able than 
we should be to communicate our place in the big picture to the commu- 
nity at large. How do we reach the people we need to reach in order to 
confirm our place in the policy-making arena? Significant, lasting change 
comes from the grassroots level, and grassroots change comes from net- 
working. Being a good children's librarian gives you an instant opening 
with your most natural allies the parents of the children you serve. Put 
up your tent and pound your drum. Every child who has a positive library 
and book-related experience has a message for the adults around him; 
every adult you convince about the importance of connecting children 
and books is a missionary for your cause. Push the books. Base your 
programming on the literature. Talk about the importance of books and 
reading. Turn your library into a place where reading, readers, and books 
are valued. Challenge your service area to become a reading community, 
a place where reading, readers, and books are valued. Make it a team 
effort. Do not waste your time on programming or events that do not 
promote your collection and the other resources you offer. Do literature- 
based programs and coordinate literature-based events that focus on the 
goal of creating a reading community. 

GETTING THE JOB DONE 

I know what you're thinking. It's too much. The hero cannot possi- 
bly sort millet seed from sand. It's too big. The giant has seven heads and 
the hero only one. We can't do it. One cannot carry water in a sieve. 

Well, many hands make light work, the hero has a magic sword, and 
doing whatever is necessary to get the job done is the definition of a profes- 
sional. Keep the idea of the library connecting children to books and 
stories at the forefront of community events. Be aware. Be responsive. 
Love the children, the books, the stories, your work. Know the whys and 
wherefores of what you do why story times? why toddler programs? why 
book talks? why storytelling? why outreach? We must tell the story of the 
importance of connecting children and books. We must communicate the 
importance of postitive interaction with books and print. We must com- 
municate and nurture the spirit of discovery, the joy in story, and the 
intellectual curiosity that turns children into self-aware, powerful adult 
seekers of knowledge, on-line, off-line, and every place else. 

Am I advocating a return to dusty storefronts with crowded shelves, a 
smell of lemon wax, and no opacs or PCs? As much as I might be senti- 
mentally attached to the notion, I am not. I am very fond of computers. I 
would not give up my word processing program for love or money, and I 
am infinitely thrilled by The Bulletin Web site and the opportunities that it 
provides. I think cruising the information highway (remember that phrase? 
now relegated to yesterday's info-byte junkpile) is very handy for lots of 



104 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

stuff, but as a friend of mine once told me when I was learning to drive in 
Chicago, never get emotionally involved with traffic. 

The professional literature, the journals, the newspapers, are full of 
articles about technology and its impact; school and public library admin- 
istrators are frantically pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into tech- 
nology in a futile effort to be on the cutting edge; and computerized read- 
ing programs that give points for books read are dangerously close to be- 
coming selection tools instead of motivational tools. We have high gov- 
ernment officials who think we should pay kids a dollar or two for every 
book they read, parents who think reading certificates aren't enough of a 
reward for participating in the summer reading program, and school ad- 
ministrators who don't see the value of a well-equipped, on-site media- 
center. What's a librarian to do? 

Smile. Be enthusiastic. Be informed. Pick up a book, and make 
them an offer they can't refuse. "In the light of the moon, a little egg lay 
on a leaf. One Sunday morning the warm sun came up and pop! out 
of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar" (Carle). "My great- 
great-great-grandmother did great things. Elizabeth lived during the Revo- 
lutionary War, but she did not fight in it" (Hearne). "The first week of 
August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like 
the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning" (Babbitt 3) . 

Tell them a story. "Once there was and twice there wasn't," or "Most 
folks don't know it but the animals didn't always live on earth. Way back 
before Tn the beginning' and 'Once upon a time,' they lived next door to 
the moon" (Lester 1). Or, "When wishes were horses and beggars could 
ride, in a stone castle by the sea there lived a rich laird" (Del Negro), or 
"Once there lived a woman who had a son, a boy so round and fat, and so 
fond of good things to eat that everyone called him Buttercup" (Sierra 
and Kaminski 54) . 

Never underestimate the power of a story. Ruth Sawyer one of those 
professional women with vision that we don't talk about nearly enough 
tells in The Way of the Storyteller about an encounter she had with a child 
and a story. Sawyer was 16 and visiting Boston with her parents. She was 
babysitting for the seven-year-old daughter of their hosts. In the daytime 
all was well, but when night fell the child became frightened and uneasy 
until all the lamps were lit. At bedtime, she would not go to bed until 
Sawyer promised to stay with her and keep a light burning. Sawyer of- 
fered a story. The child resisted she hated stories as much as she hated 
the dark, especially stories with witches, giants, and ogres in them. "How 
about fairies?" Sawyer asked. "They're elegant." Then she told the story 
of the boy who gathered herbs by moonlight so his mother would be healed. 
"It will sound better if I put out the light." She told the story three times. 
The next night it was the same, and the next, until "dark came gently, 
with it the stars, the call of the screech owl, and all the little sounds of 



DEL NEGRO/ FOR STORY' S SAKE 105 

earth that came with spring. Together we felt the comfortable darkness 
fold us in." Years later Sawyer met the young girl in a cafeteria. Each was 
unsure of the other's identity at first, until the girl, now an eighth-grader, 
cried out: "I know who you are! You're the girl who made me like the 
dark" (Sawyer 83-84) . 

I think sometimes we have lost our focus, our sense of our profession's 
history and philosophy. It helps to return to that basic but irreplaceable 
premise: the right book for the right child at the right time. It helps to 
develop something of an attitude, as well. My friend Michael, a former 
children's librarian, had it down cold. When asked by a well-meaning but 
apparently uninformed parent what the reward was for reading a book in 
the summer reading program, Michael, a most elegant dresser, would let 
his reading glasses slide down to the end of his nose, peer disdainfully 
over them, and reply precisely and succinctly: "Madam, reading is its own 
reward." 

Ruth Sawyer would have approved. 



WORKS CITED 

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. New York: Crowell, 1955. 

Babbitt, Natalie. Tuck Everlasting. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1975. 

Blake, William. "The Tyger." Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary 

States of the Human Soul 1789-1794. London: Oxford U P, 1977. PI. 42. 
Carle, Eric. The Very Hungry Caterpillar. New York: Philomel, 1969. 
Cowell, Eileen. Storytelling. London: Bodley Head, 1980. 
Del Negro, Janice M. Lucy Dove. New York: DK Ink, 1998. 
Hearne, Betsy. Seven Brave Women. New York: Greenwillow, 1997. 
Hood, Thomas. "Bridge of Sighs." The Golden Treasury: Selected from the Best Songs and 

Lyrical Poems in the English Language. Ed. Francis Palgrave. Rev. ed. New York: 

MacMillan, 1966. 

Hunter, Mollie. The Pied Piper Syndrome, and Other Essays. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. 
Lester, Julius. The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit. New York: Dial, 1987. 
MacLachlan, Patricia. Sarah, Plain and Tall. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. 
McKissack, Patricia C. Flossie and the Fox. New York: Dial, 1986. 
Power, Effie L. Library Service for Children. Chicago: ALA, 1930. 
Sawyer, Ruth. The Way of the Storyteller. New York: Viking, 1942. 
Scott, Sir Walter. "Marmion." The Complete Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott. Boston: Houghton 

Mifflin, 1900. 130. 
Sierra, Judy and Robert Kaminski. Twice Upon a Time: Stories to Tell, Retell, Act Out and Write 

About. Bronx: H. W. Wilson, 1989. 
Speare, Morris Edmund. The Pocket Book of Verse: Great English and American Poems. New 

York: Pocket Books, 1940. 
United States Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics. 1992 

National Adult Literacy Survey. 23 June 1998. <http://nces.ed.gov/nadliLs/trends.html>. 



Concluding Our Story of Stories 



The final session of "Story: From Fireplace to Cyberspace" ended 
late on a sunny Tuesday morning with one last song and story 
from Joseph Sobol, and Janice Del Negro's welcome words to at- 
tendees, "Go forth. Eat lunch. Tell stories." And so they did. And so we 
have, in editing and shaping these proceedings, which is the story of sto- 
ries from fireplace to cyberspace. 

To some, stories and storytelling belong to a distant time of stone 
knives and petroglyphs. Hunter-gatherers had stories. Primitive societies 
had stories. And storytelling requires a wood fire and a dark night. But of 
course stories may be found not only at the family dinner table or with the 
last survivor of the Titanic. Stories are also in the next booth at a fast food 
restaurant, in the bleachers during the seventh-inning stretch, and in the 
classrooms (and in the teachers' lounge) of an elementary school. Sto- 
ries may even be heard while standing in the ticket line for the latest 
Disney animated feature. In our interest in child welfare, we often forget 
that children are not simply passive receptacles for whatever treasure or 
trash the adult world throws at them, but are lively agents who are con- 
tinually interacting with their environment. Children actively create mean- 
ing as readers, viewers, and listeners. And so, of course, do adults. To use 
one more technological image, stories appear to be hardwired into the 
human psyche. 

The traditional oral narrative, which reaches only those within the 
range of the storyteller's voice, can seem like an endangered species in 
the media-rich (and often content-poor) environment of contemporary 
U.S. society. The reverence we feel for traditional stories can cause us to 
try to preserve them just as they are, unchanged, a precious treasure to be 
kept secluded from the hustle and bustle of life in a technologically ad- 
vanced society that seems to worship the newest trend, the latest gizmo, 
the densest hard drive and the most capacious memory. This 



JENKINS/CONCLUDING OUR STORY OF STORIES 107 

enshrinement, however, can become a mindless dogmatism in the cause 
of the real Cinderella, the true Jack and the Beanstalk, the original Anansi 
that ignores the enduring and fluid nature of stories themselves. 

Paradoxically, stories are both as fragile as orchids and as hearty as 
dandelions. They call forth our protective urges, yet they spring up like 
the weeds we strive to eradicate. Stories endure and adapt and grow and 
flourish. Stories survive. 

CJ 



ANNE SHIMOJIMA 

School Library Media Specialist/IMC Teacher 

Braeside School 

Highland Park, Illinois 

Appendix A 

Storytelling in the School Library Media Center: 

Bibliography and Resources 

STORY BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bang, Molly. Wiley and the Hairy Man. New York: Macmillan, 1976. 
Chase, Richard, ed. "Old Fire Dragaman." The Jack Tales. Boston: 

Houghton, 1943. 106-13. 
, ed. "Like Meat Loves Salt." Grandfather Tales: American-English Folk 

Tales. Boston: Houghton, 1948. 124-28. 
, ed. "Soap, Soap, Soap." Grandfather Tales: American-English Folk Tales. 

Boston: Houghton, 1948. 130-35. 

Hardendorff, Jeanne. Slip! Slop! Gobble! Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970. 
Jacobs, Joseph. "Mr. Fox." English Folk and Fairy Tales. New York: Putnam, 

n.d. 153-58. 
Kimmel, Eric. The Three Sacks of Truth: A Story from France. New York: 

Holiday House, 1993. 
Leodhas, Sorche Nic. "Twelve Great Black Cats and the Red One." Twelve 

Black Cats, and Other Eerie Scottish Tales. New York: Button, 1971. 3-11. 

BOOKS ABOUT STORIES AND STORYTELLING: AN ANNOTATED LIST 
Barton, Bob. Stories in the Classroom: Storytelling, Reading Aloud and Roleplaying 
with Children. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1990. 

This inspiring book about the importance of "storying" with chil- 
dren interweaves storytelling and reading aloud. Many suggestions 
are given on helping students respond to stories. 

. Tell Me Another: Storytelling and Reading Aloud at Home, at School, and in 
the Community. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1986. 

Covers both storytelling and reading aloud with advice on how to 
select a story and make it your own. Includes activities for the class- 
room such as call and response stories, sound exploration, chanting, 
drama games, story theater, and round-robin storytelling. 



APPENDIX A/ SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER 109 

Bauer, Caroline Feller. Caroline Feller Bauer's New Handbook for Storytellers: 
With Stories, Poems, Magic, and More. Chicago: American Library Asso- 
ciation, 1993. 

Here is a wealth of suggestions on how to tell stories, including mul- 
timedia storytelling with music, puppets, flip cards, objects, flannel, 
felt, and magnetic boards, slides, filmstrips, film, and video. Includes 
a bibliography of stories by subject. 

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of 
Fairy Tales. New York: Knopf, 1976. 

Bettleheim's explanation of how and why fairy tales help children to 
understand themselves and their world, create meaning in their lives, 
and build an inner sense of security. 

Birch, Carol L. and Melissa A. Heckler, eds. Who Says? Essays in Pivotal 
Issues on Contemporary Storytelling. Little Rock: August House, 1996. 

Ten thoughtful and insightful essays comment on such issues as the 
storyteller as narrator, playing with the "fourth wall," misconceptions 
about folktales, Jewish models of storytelling, Native American 
storytelling, and the reciprocity between the teller and the listener. 

Breneman, Lucille and Bren Breneman. Once Upon a Time: A Storytelling 
Handbook. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983. 

Detailed guidance on storytelling: selecting a story, analyzing and 
adapting a story, achieving fluency, working with characters, working 
for visualization, body control, and polish. One chapter focuses on 
story biography. Includes an annotated bibliography of stories good 
for telling. 

Bruchac, Joseph. Tell Me a Tale: A Book About Storytelling. San Diego: 
Harcourt Brace, 1997. 

Aimed at younger readers, this book takes readers through the four 
cornerstones of storytelling: listening, observing, remembering, and 
sharing. Includes 14 stories from around the world and Bruchac's 
Native American background. 

Chinen, Allan B. In the Ever After: Fairy Tales and the Second Half of Life. 
Wilmette: Chiron Publications, 1989. 

A thoughtful and insightful book that looks at the psychological tasks 
of the mature adult and examines 15 elder tales which depict these 
tasks symbolically. 

. Once Upon a Midlife: Classic Stories and Mythic Tales to Illuminate the Middle 
Years. New York: Putnam's, 1992. 

A collection of 16 stories chosen for their ability to pinpoint the is- 
sues of midlife, along with commentaries drawn from Dr. Chinen's 
clinical experience and literature from around the world. 



110 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Collins, Rives and Pamela Cooper. The Power of Story: Teaching Through 
Storytelling. 2nd ed. Scottsdale: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, 1997. 

Excellent resource that covers the hows and whys of storytelling and 
also includes a chapter on story dramatization and lots of activities to 
use when teaching children storytelling. 

Dailey, Sheila. Putting the World in a Nutshell: The Art of the Formula Tale. 
Bronx: H. W. Wilson, 1994. 

Nine basic types of formula tales chain, cumulative, circle, endless, 
catch, compound triad, question, air castles, and good/bad are ex- 
amined and 38 stories are included. 

De Vos, Gail. Storytelling for Young Adults: Techniques and Treasury. 
Englewood: Libraries Unlimited, 1991. 

Excellent resource that discusses the value of telling to young adults 
(ages 13-1 8), reviews storytelling techniques, describes extensions in 
the classroom, and includes an annotated bibliography of about 250 
stories arranged by genre: folktales and fairy tales; myths and leg- 
ends; ghost, horror, and suspense stories; urban belief legends; love 
and romance stories; twists, satire, and exaggeration stories; and lit- 
erary stories. 

De Wit, Dorothy. Children 's Faces Looking Up: Program Building for the Story- 
teller. Chicago: American Library Association, 1979. 

The first half of the book is an excellent background in story selec- 
tion, sources, modifying stories, and tips for tellers. The second half 
gives six sample story programs with such themes as food, animal 
stories, magic, shoes and feet, journeys, and color. 

Gillard, Marni. Storyteller, Storyteacher: Discovering the Power of Storytelling for 
Teaching and Living. York: Stenhouse, 1996. 

Gillard describes how she brought storytelling into the lives and les- 
sons of her middle school students, but what she has learned about 
stories, storying, and storytelling in her life will speak to students 
and teachers of all ages. 

Greene, Ellin. Storytelling: Art and Technique. 3rd. ed. New Providence: R. 
R. Bowker, 1996. 

An excellent and practical introduction to storytelling with some em- 
phasis on librarians planning story programs. Includes chapters on 
children as storytellers, telling to young adults, special settings and 
needs, and lists of stories by age. Thirteen stories are included. 

Holt, David and Bill Mooney, eds. The Storyteller's Guide: Storytellers Share 
Advice for the Classroom, Boardroom, Showroom, Podium, Pulpit, and Center 
Stage. Little Rock: August House, 1996. 

More than 50 of the country's leading storytellers answer such ques- 
tions as: How do I get started? How do I find the right stories? How 



APPENDIX A/ SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER 111 

do I shape stories from the printed text? What performance tech- 
niques do I need to know? What mistakes are frequently made by 
beginning storytellers? What are the ethics of storytelling? How do I 
market myself? What is the life of a professional storyteller like? How 
can a teacher use storytelling in the classroom? How can a media 
specialist improve and expand storytelling in the library? What was 
your worst storytelling experience? Insight, practical guidance, and 
humor in an extremely valuable guide. 

Livo, Norma J. and Sandra A. Rietz. Storytelling: Process and Practice. 
Littleton: Libraries Unlimited, 1986. 

A very complete resource that explains the function of storytelling; 
how to develop story memory; how to prepare, develop, and deliver 
stories; and how to work with audiences. Includes an excellent dis- 
cussion of story structure and integrated units around the themes of 
frogs and rainbows. 

. Storytelling Activities. Littleton: Libraries Unlimited, 1987. 

A book of activities for storytellers and/or children to aid in find- 
ing, designing, presenting, and delivering stories. Ties each activity 
to Bloom's Taxonomy and a scale of educational skills. 

MacDonald, Margaret Read. The Storyteller's Start-Up Book: Finding, Learn- 
ing, Performing, and Using Folktales Including Twelve Tellable Tales. Little 
Rock: August House, 1993. 

Insightful guidance on how to get started telling stories, including 
how to look at stories critically and accepting the role of the story- 
teller. Extremely helpful bibliographies broken down by theme. 

Maguire,Jack. Creative Storytelling: Choosing, Inventing, and Sharing Tales for 
Children. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985. 

Includes helpful chapters on the history of storytelling, various types 
of stories, and creating your own stories. 

McAdams, Dan P. Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the 
Self. New York: W. Morrow, 1993. 

A theory of human identity that explains how we make sense of our 
lives by structuring our life episodes into the stories we tell about 
ourselves, creating a personal myth. 

Mellon, Nancy. Storytelling and the Art of Imagination. Rockport: Element, 
Inc., 1992. 

A guidebook to the symbolic elements of stories: beginnings, end- 
ings, movement, direction, natural elements of the earth, journeys, 
seasons, moods, story characters, and power symbols. 

Moore, Robin. Awakening the Hidden Storyteller: How to Build a Storytelling 
Tradition in Your Family. Boston: Shambhala, 1991. 



112 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Tips on telling stories with a look at the inner processes: voyaging 
through time, finding your voice, exploring the landscape of the 
imagination. 

National Storytelling Association. Many Voices: True Tales from America's 
Past. Jonesborough: National Storytelling Press, 1995. 

Thirty-six stories that put a human face onto American history, from 
1643 to the present, told by the storytellers of today. Also available: 
National Storytelling Association. Many Voices: Teacher's Guide. 
Jonesborough: National Storytelling Press, 1995. 

. Tales as Tools: The Power of Story in the Classroom. Jonesborough: Na- 
tional Storytelling Press, 1994. 

An outstanding resource on how to use storytelling to teach reading, 
writing, peace, the environment, history, science, math; to build com- 
munity; and to heal. 

Pellowski, Anne. The World of Storytelling. Exp. and rev. ed. Bronx: H. W. 
Wilson, 1990. 

A scholarly work describing storytelling traditions throughout the 
world and through history, including bardic, religious, folk, theatri- 
cal, library, institutional, and therapeutic storytelling. Also described 
are various styles, openings and closings, musical accompaniment, 
pictures and objects, and training of storytellers. An extensive bibli- 
ography is included. 

Rosen, Betty. And None of It Was Nonsense: The Power of Storytelling in School. 
Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1988. 

Rosen describes how she used storytelling, including Greek mythol- 
ogy, with groups of multicultural, multilanguage boys from 8 to!8 in 
an English school. 

Ross, Ramon. Storyteller: The Classic that Heralded America's Storytelling Re- 
vival. 3rd rev. ed. Little Rock: August House, 1996. 

A thoughtful treatment of storytelling. Includes chapters on choral 
reading, flannel boards, puppets, singing and dancing, and reading 
aloud. 

Sawyer, Ruth. The Way of the Storyteller. New York: Viking, 1962. 

First published in 1942, this chronicle of Sawyer's own development 
as a storyteller offers practical suggestions and insights along with 1 1 
of her stories. 

Schimmel, Nancy. Just Enough to Make a Story: A Sourcebook for Storytelling. 
3rd ed. Berkeley: Sister's Choice Press, 1992. 

Concise, clear, and very helpful. Gives many resources including lists 
of stories of active heroines, stories for peace, ecological stories, and 
stories for adults. 



APPENDIX A/ SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER 113 

Shedlock, Marie L. The Art of the Story-Teller. 3rd ed. New York: Dover, 
1951. 

First published in 1915, the thoughts and advice of a master story- 
teller who gave inspiration to the beginnings of the library storytelling 
tradition in the U.S. Includes 18 stories. 

Smith, Charles A. From Wonder to Wisdom: Using Stories to Help Children 
Grow. New York: New American Library, 1989. 

Summarizes the eight themes in stories that affect a child's self-worth: 
becoming a goal seeker, confronting challenges courageously, grow- 
ing closer to others, coming to terms with loss, offering kindness to 
others, preserving an openness to the world, becoming a social prob- 
lem-solver, and forming a positive self-image; and suggests books/ 
stories for each theme. 

Trousdale, Ann M. Give a Listen: Stories of Storytelling in School. Urbana: 
National Council of Teachers of English, 1994. 

Teachers in all grades tell how storytelling creates classrooms of lis- 
teners and learners. 

Yolen, Jane. Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie andFolklore in the Literature of Child- 
hood. New York: Philomel, 1981. 

Insightful essays about the importance of fairy tales and fantasy in 
nourishing our humanity. 

Zipes,Jack. Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives. New 
York: Routledge, 1995. 

Zipes, an expert on fairy tales and children's literature, shares his 
ideas on the use of storytelling with children. Creative activities are 
described that emphasize social issues and respect for children. 

BOOKS ABOUT FAMILY STORYTELLING 

Akeret, Robert. Family Tales, Family Wisdom: How to Gather the Stories of a 
Lifetime and Share Them with Your Family. New York: Morrow, 1991. 

Collins, Chase. Tell Me a Story: Creating Bedtime Tales Your Children WillDream 
On. Boston: Houghton, 1992. 

Davis, Donald. Telling Your Own Stories: For Family and Classroom Storytelling, 
Public Speaking, and Personal fournaling. Little Rock: August House, 
1993. 

Fletcher, William. Recording Your Family History: A Guide to Preserving Oral 
History with Videotape, Audiotape, Suggested Topics and Questions, Interview 
Techniques. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986. 

Greene, Bob and D. G. Fulford. To Our Children's Children: Preserving Fam- 
ily Histories for Generations to Come. New York: Doubleday, 1993. 



114 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Pellowski, Anne. The Family Storytelling Handbook: How to Use Stories, Anec- 
dotes, Rhymes, Handkerchiefs, Paper, and Other Objects to Enrich Your Family 
Traditions. New York: Macmillan, 1987. 

Stone, Elizabeth. Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories 
Shape Us. New York: Penguin, 1989. 

Weitzman, David. My Backyard History Book. Boston: Little, Brown & Com- 
pany, 1975. 

Zeitlin, Steven J. A Celebration of American Family Folklore: Tales and Tradi- 
tions from the Smithsonian Collection. New York: Pantheon, 1982. 

BOOKS ABOUT TEACHING STORYTELLING TO CHILDREN 

Hamilton, Martha. Children Tell Stories: A Teaching Guide. Katonah: Rich- 
ard C. Owen Publishers, 1990. 

Kinghorn, Harriet R. Every Child a Storyteller: A Handbook of Ideas. 
Englewood: Teacher Ideas Press, 1991. 

Lipman, Doug. Storytelling Games: Creative Activities for Language, Communi- 
cation, and Composition Across the Curriculum. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1995. 

Pellowski, Anne. The Storytelling Handbook: A Young People's Collection of 
Unusual Tales and Helpful Hints on How to Tell Them. New York: Simon 
& Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1995. 

BOOKS ABOUT URBAN LEGENDS 

Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Choking Doberman and Other "New" Urban Leg- 
ends. New York: W.W. Norton, 1984. 

. The Mexican Pet: More "New " Urban Legends and Some Old Favorites. New 
York: W.W. Norton, 1986. 

. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meaning. 
New York: W.W. Norton, 1981. 

GENERAL STORY COLLECTIONS 

Brody, Ed, ed. Spinning Tales, Weaving Hope: Stories of Peace, Justice, and the 
Environment. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992. 

Caduto, Michael J. and Joseph Bruchac. Keepers of the Earth: Native Ameri- 
can Stories and Environmental Activities for Children. Golden: Fulcrum, 
1988. 

Cole, Joanna and Jill K. Schwarz, eds. Best-Loved Folktales of the World. Gar- 
den City: Anchor -Doubleday, 1982. 

Davis, Donald. Jack Always Seeks His Fortune: Authentic Appalachian Jack Tales. 
Little Rock: August House, 1992. 

DeSpain, Pleasant. Thirty-Three Multicultural Tales to Tell. Little Rock: Au- 
gust House, 1993. 

Goss, Linda and Marian E. Barnes, eds. Talk That Talk: An Anthology of 
African-American Storytelling. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. 

Haley, Gail E. Mountainjack Tales. New York: Dutton Children's Books, 1992. 



APPENDIX A/ SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER 115 

Hearne, Betsy. Beauties and Beasts. Phoenix: Oryx, 1993. 

Holt, David and Bill Mooney, eds. Ready-To-Tell Tales. Little Rock: August 
House, 1994. 

MacDonald, Margaret Read. Peace Tales: World Folktales to Talk About. 
Hamden: Linnet Books, 1992. 

. Twenty Tellable Tales: Audience Participation Folktales for the Beginning Sto- 
ryteller. New York: Wilson, 1986. 

. When the Lights Go Out: Twenty Scary Tales to Tell. Bronx: H. W. Wilson, 1988. 

Miller, Teresa. Joining In: An Anthology of Audience Participation Stories & 
How to Tell Them. Cambridge: Yellow Moon Press, 1988. 

The National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of 
Storytelling. Best-Loved Stories Told at the National Storytelling Festival. 
Jonesborough: National Storytelling Press, 1991. 

. More Best-Loved Stories Told at the National Storytelling Festival. 
.Jonesborough: National Storytelling Press, 1992. 

Pellowski, Anne. Hidden Stories in Plant: Unusual and Easy-to-Tell Stories from 
Around the World Together with Creative Things to Do While Telling Them. 
New York: Macmillan, 1990. 

. The Story Vine: A Source Book of Unusual and Easy-to-Tell Stories from Around 
the World. New York: Macmillan, 1984. 

Shannon, George, comp. A Knock at the Door. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1992. 

Sierra, Judy, ed. Cinderella. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1992. 

Sierra, Judy and Robert Kaminski. Twice Upon a Time: Stories to Tell, Retell, 
Act Out, and Write About. Bronx: H.W. Wilson, 1989. 

Smith, Jimmy Neil, ed. Homespun: Tales from America's Favorite Storytellers. 
New York: Crown, 1988. 

Yolen,Jane, ed. Favorite Folktales From Around the World. New York: Pan- 
theon, 1986. 

INDEXES AND REFERENCES 

Ashliman, D. L. A Guide to Folktales in the English Language: Based on the 

Aarne-Thompson Classification System. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. 
Eastman, Mary. Index to Fairy Tales, Myths, and Legends. Boston: F. W. Faxon, 

1926. Also Index to Fairy Tales, Myths, and Legends. Supplement. F. W. 

Faxon: Boston, 1937; and Index to Fairy Tales, Myths, and Legends. 2 nd 

Supplement. F. W. Faxon: Boston, 1952. 
Ireland, Norma. Index to Fairy Tales, 1949-1972: Including Folklore, Legends, 

and Myths in Collections. Westwood: F. W. Faxon, 1973. 
Lima, Carolyn W. and John A. Lima. A to Zoo: Subject Access to Children 's 

Picture Books. 4th ed. New Providence: R.R. Bowker, 1993. 
MacDonald, Margaret Read. The Storyteller's Sourcebook. : A Subject, Title and 

Motif Index to Folklore Collections for Children. Detroit: Neal-Schuman 

Publishers Gale Research, 1982. 



116 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 
PERIODICALS 

National Association of Black Storytellers Newsletter 
P.O. Box 67722 
Baltimore, MD 21215 

Parabola Magazine: Myth and Tradition and the Search for Meaning 
Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition 
656 Broadway 
New York, NY 1001 2 

Jewish Storytelling Newsletter 
92 nd St. YM-YWHA Library 
1395 Lexington Ave. 
New York, NY 101 28 

Storytelling Magazine 

National Storytelling Association 

P.O. Box 309 

Jonesborough, TN 37659 

Storytelling World 

Dr. Flora Joy 

East Tennessee State University 

Box 70647 

Johnson City, TX 37614-0647 

ORGANIZATIONS AND EVENTS 

The Illinois Storytelling Festival is held in Spring Grove, Illinois, ev- 
ery year during the last weekend in July. This outdoor festival features 
workshops, a late-night ghost story program, hourly story sessions, and 
spiritual stories. 

Illinois Storytelling Festival 
P.O. Box 507 
Richmond, IL 60071 
(815) 344-0181 

NSA sponsors the National Storytelling Festival, held every October 
in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and various workshops and conferences 
around the country. It publishes Storytelling Magazine and The National 
Storytelling Directory, which lists storytellers, festivals, conferences, centers, 
organizations and guilds, newsletters, and educational opportunities 
($7.95, free to NSA members) . NSA also sells books, cassettes, and videos 
(call 1-800-525-4514 to order, or for a brochure). 



APPENDIX A/ SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER 117 

National Storytelling Association (NSA) 

(Formerly National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation 

of Storytelling, NAPPS) 
P.O. Box 309 
Jonesborough, TN 37659 
(800) 525-4514 

STORYTELLING RESOURCES ON THE INTERNET 

The Children's Literature Web. Ed. David K. Brown. 1 June 1998. <http:// 
www.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/index.html>. 

The Encyclopedia Mythica. Ed. M. F. Lindemans. 1 June 1998. <http:// 
www.pantheon.org/mythica/>. An encyclopedia on myth, folklore, 
and legend. 

Illinois Storytelling Festival. 29 June 1998. <http://www.storytelling.org/>. 

McWilliams, Barry. The Art of Storytelling. 1 June 1998. <http:// 
kirov.seanet.com/~eldrbarry/ roos/art.htm>. 

Myths and Legends. Ed. Christopher B. Siren, <http://pubpages.unh.edu/ 
~cbsiren/myth.html>. 

National Storytelling Association. Home page. 1 June 1998. <http:// 
www.storynet.org>. The website of the NSA includes a searchable di- 
rectory of 600 storytellers plus information on 200 organizations, 200 
events, 100 educational opportunities, The National Storytelling Cen- 
ter, The National Storytelling Conference, and Jonesborough, Ten- 
nessee, site of the National Storytelling Festival. 

Northern Appalachian Storytelling Festival. Ed. Mike Leiboff. <http:// 
wso.net/storyfest/>. Includes interviews with storytellers. 

Storyteller Net. Ed. Michael T. Abrams. 29 June 1998. <http:// 
www.storyteller.net> 

Storytelling FAQ. Ed. Tim Sheppard. 1 June 1998. <http:// 
www.lilliput.co.uk/faq.html>. 

STORYTELL This listserv provides a lively discussion on storytelling is- 
sues. When you subscribe, any message sent by any member is e-mailed to 
your mailbox. 

To subscribe: 

1. Send an e-mail message to: listserv@venus.twu.edu 

2. Leave the subject line blank 

3. In the message area write: subscribe storytell 

To go to the STORYTELL archives, searchable by keyword: Archives of 
TWU Discussion Lists. Texas Woman's University. 1 June 1998. <http:// 
www.twu.edu/lists/>. 



118 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

CINDERELLA VARIANTS 

Ceylon Tooze, Ruth. "A Girl and a Stepmother." The Wonderful Wooden 

Peacock Flying Machine and Other Tales of Ceylon. New York: Day, 

1969. 50-54. 
China Hume, Lotta. "A Chinese Cinderella." Favorite Children's Stories 

From China and Tibet. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1962. 15-22. 
Louie, Ai-Ling. Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China. New York: 

Philomel, 1982. 

Egypt Climo, Shirley. The Egyptian Cinderella. New York: Crowell, 1989. 
England Jacobs, Joseph. "Rushen Coatie." More English Fairy Tales. New 

York: Putnam's, n.d. 163-68. 
. "Tattercoats." More English Fairy Tales. New York: Putnam's, 

n.d. 67-72. 
Europe Jacobs, Joseph. "The Cinder-Maid." European Folk and Fairy Tales. 

New York: Putnam's, 1916. 1-12. 

Huck, Charlotte. Princess Furball. New York: Greenwillow, 1989. 
Finland Bowman, James C. and Margery Bianco. "Liisa and the Prince." 

Tales from a Finnish Tupa. Trans. Aili Kolehmainen. Chicago: 

Whitman, 1950. 187-198. 
France Galdone, Paul. Cinderella. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978. 

Perrault, Charles. The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. New 

York: Clarion, 1993. 
Germany Crane, Lucy, trans. "Aschenputtel." Household Stories from the 

Collection of the Brothers Grimm. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. 

118-25. 
Iceland Sperry, Margaret. "The Golden Shoe." Scandinavian Stories. New 

York: F. Watts, 1971. 277-88. 
Ireland Jacobs, Joseph. "Fair, Brown, and Trembling." Celtic Fairy Tales. 

New York: Putman's, n.d. 184-97. 
Italy Haviland, Virginia. "Cenerentola." Favorite Fairy Tales Told in Italy. 

Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. 3-18. 
Japan Seki, Keigo, ed. "Benizara and Kakezara." Folktales of Japan. 

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. 120-34. 
Korea Climo, Shirley. The Korean Cinderella. New York: HarperCollins, 

1993. 
Native American Arbuthnot, May Hill. "Little Burnt Face." Time for Old 

Magic. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1970. 258-61. 
Martin, Rafe. The Rough-Face Girl. New York: Putnam's, 1992. 
San Souci, Robert D. Sootface: An Ojibwa Cinderella Story. New York: 

Doubleday Books for Young Readers, 1994. 
Serbia Spicer, Dorothy. "The Enchanted Cow." Long Ago in Serbia. 

Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968. 47-69. 
U.S.A. Chase, Richard, ed. "Ashpet." Grandfather Tales: American-English 

Folk Tales. Boston: Houghton, 1948. 115-23. 



APPENDIX A/ SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER 119 

, ed. "Catskins." Grandfather Tales: American-English Folk Tales. Boston: 

Houghton, 1948. 106-14. 
Compton, Joanne. Ashpet: An Appalachian Tale. New York: 

HolidayHouse, 1994. 

Hooks, William. Moss Gown. New York: Clarion, 1987. 
Vietnam Graham, Gail. "The Jeweled Slipper." The Beggar in the Blanket 

and Other Vietnamese Tales. New York: Dial, 1970. 11-21. 
Vuong, Lynette Dyer. "The Brocaded Slipper." The Brocaded Slipper 

and Other Vietnamese Tales. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1982. 1-26. 
Modern-day and Animal Versions Jackson, Ellen. Cinder Edna. New York: 

Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1994. 

Minters, Frances. Cinder-Elly. New York: Viking, 1994. 
Myers, Bernice. Sidney Rella and the Glass Sneaker. New York: Macmillan, 

1985. 
Perlman, Janet. Cinderella Penguin, or, The Little Glass Flipper. New 

York: Viking, 1993. 
Collection Sierra, Judy. Cinderella. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1992. Contains 

25 Cinderella variations from around the world. 

STORIES ABOUT JACK 

Chase, Richard, ed. Grandfather Tales: American-English Folk Tales. Boston: 
Houghton, 1948. 

, ed. The Jack Tales. Boston: Houghton, 1943. 

Compton, Kenn and Joanne Compton. Jack the Giant Chaser: An Appala- 
chian Tale. New York: Holiday House, 1993. 

Davis, Donald. Jack Always Seeks His Fortune: Authentic Appalachian Jack Tales. 
Little Rock: August House, 1992. 

. Jack and the Animals: An Appalachian Folktale. Little Rock: August House, 
1995. 

Haley, Gail. Jack and the Fire Dragon. New York: Crown, 1988. 

. Mountain Jack Tales. New York: Dutton, 1992. 

McCarthy, William Bernard. Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North Ameri- 
can Tales and Their Tellers. Chapel Hill: The University of North Caro- 
lina Press, 1994. 

STORIES TO REWRITE 

Bruchac, Joseph. The First Strawberries: A Cherokee Story. New York: Dial 
Books for Young Readers, 1993. 

Chase, Richard, ed. "Old One-Eye." The Grandfather Tales: American-En- 
glish Folk Tales. Boston: Houghton, 1948. 205-07. 

Demi. The Empty Pot. New York: Henry Holt, 1990. 

Grimm, Jacob. "The Hare and the Hedgehog." The Complete Grimm's Fairy 
Tales. New York: Pantheon, 1972. 760-64. 



120 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Hong, Lily Toy. How Ox Star Fell from Heaven. Morton Grove: Albert 

Whitman, 1991. 
. Two of Everything: A Chinese Folk Tale. Morton Grove: Albert Whitman, 

1992. 
Montgomerie, Norah. "The Gold Dust that Turned to Sand." Twenty-Five 

Fables. London: Abelard-Schuman, 1961. 58-59. 

. "The Monkey and the Shark." Twenty-Five Fables. London: Abelard- 
Schuman, 1961. 26-27. 
Schwartz, Howard. "Moving a Mountain." The Diamond Tree: Jewish Tales 

from Around the World. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 85-92. 
Simms, Laura. "A Single Grain of Rice." Stories Old as the World, Fresh as the 

Rain. Weston: Weston Woods, WW-712, 1981. 
Singer, Isaac. "The Snow in Chelm." Zlateh the Goat, and Other Stories. New 

York: HarperCollins, 1966. 29-34. 
Wyndham, Lee. "How the Sons Filled the Hut." Tales the People Tell in 

Russia. New York: J. Messner, 1970. 13-15. 

A GOOD STORY FOR CHILDREN TO WRITE AN ENDING 
Credle, Ellis. "The Pudding that Broke up the Preaching." Tall Tales from 
the High Hills, and Other Stories. New York: T. Nelson, 1957. 21-26. 

STORYTELLING AND CREATIVE DRAMA 

Chase, Richard, ed. "Sody Salleratus." Grandfather Tales: American-English 
Folk Tales. Boston: Hough ton, 1948. 75-79. 

Chinen, Allan. "The Man with the Bump." In the Ever After: Fairy Tales and 
the Second Half of Life. Wilmette: Chiron Publications, 1989. 75-78. 

DeSpain, Pleasant. "The Extraordinary Cat." Twenty-Two Splendid Tales to 
Tell from Around the World, Vol. 2. 3 rd ed. Little Rock: August House, 
1994. (A variation of this story is Kimmel, Eric. The Greatest of All: A 
Japanese Folktale. Little Rock: Holiday House, 1991.) 

Flack, Marjorie. Ask Mr. Bear. New York: Macmillan, 1932. 

Galdone, Paul. Henny Penny. New Yo rk: Seabury, 1968. 

. The Greedy Old Fat Man. New York: Clarion, 1983. 

Simms, Laura. The Squeaky Door. New York: Crown, 1990. 

Tolstoy, Aleksey. The Great Big Enormous Turnip. New York: F. Watts, 1968. 

FOLKTALE UNIT: SECOND GRADE 

Read Aloud/TellFairy Tales 

Read: 

Rogasky, Barbara. The Water of Life: A Tale from the Brothers Grimm. New 
York: Holiday House, 1986. 

Tell: 

Mayer, Marianna. The Twelve Dancing Princesses. New York: William Mor- 
row, 1989. 



APPENDIX A/ SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER 121 

Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm. "Goose Girl." The Complete Grimm's 
Fairy Tales. New York: Pantheon, 1972. 404-11. 

. "King Thrushbeard." The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. New York: Pan- 
theon, 1972. 244-48. 

. "Little Briar Rose." The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. New York: Pan- 
theon, 1972. 237-41. 

. "Mother Holle." The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. New York: Pantheon, 
1972. 133-36. 

. "One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes." The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. 
New York: Pantheon, 1972. 585-92. 

. "The Queen Bee." The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. New York: Pan- 
theon, 1972. 317-19. 

. "Rapunzel." The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. New York: Pantheon, 
1972. 73-77. 

. "The Six Swans." The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. New York: Pan- 
theon, 1972. 232-37. 

Read Aloud/Tell Cinderella Variations 
Tell: 

Egypt Climo, Shirley. The Egyptian Cinderella. New York: Crowell, 1989. 

Germany Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. "Cinderella." The Com- 
plete Grimm's Fairy Tales. New York: Pantheon, 1972. 121-28. 

Korea Climo, Shirley. The Korean Cinderella. New York: HarperCollins, 
1993. 

Native American Martin, Rafe. The Rough-Face Girl. New York: Putnam's, 
1992. 

U.S.A. Compton, Joanne. Ashpet: An Appalachian Tale. New York: Holi- 
day House, 1994. 

Read Aloud Folktales 

Africa Paterson, Katherine. The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks. New York: 

Lodestar, 1990. 
Europe DePaola, Tomie. Fin M'Coul: The Giant ofKnockmany Hill. New 

York: Holiday House, 1981. 
South America Flora. Feathers Like a Rainbow: An Amazon Indian Tale. 

New York: Harper & Row, 1989. 
North America Stevens, Janet. Tops and Bottoms. San Diego: Harcourt 

Brace, 1995. 

Storytelling and Activities 

England De la Mare, Walter. Molly Whuppie. New York: Farrar, Straus, 
Giroux, 1983. Draw a picture and write a sentence. 

China Hong, Lily Toy. "Two of Everything." Two of Everything: A Chinese 
Folk Tale. Morton Grove: Albert Whitman, 1992." Retell the story, 
dictating into the computer. 



122 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Japan Uchida, Yoshiko. "The Terrible Black Snake's Revenge." The Sea 

of Gold and Other Tales from Japan. New York: Scribner, 1965. 112- 

20. Sequence strips. 
England Hewitt, Kathryn. The Three Sillies. San Diego: Harcourt, 1986. 

Draw pictures of the beginning, middle, and end of the story. 
France Kimmel, Eric. The Three Sacks of Truth: A Story from France. New 

York: Holiday House, 1993. Mapping activity. 

Choose a Folktale (one whole class session) 

1. Make index cards with call number, author, title-398.2 single edition 

folktales (see database list). 

2. Whole class in IMC. Bring something quiet to work on. 

3. Explain 398.2, author letter, location in IMC. 

4. Each child picks a card. 

5. Each table goes to 398.2 in turn and children look for books from 

card. 

6. If they don't like first choice, may choose one other. 

7. Child signs out book for use in classroom. 

Create a Picture Book (Gag, Wanda. Gone is Gone. New York: Coward, 

1935; or Bang, Molly. Wiley and the Hairy Man. New York: Macmillan, 
1976.) 

1. In the IMC: Tell the story. Divide the story into scenes. Assign each 

scene to a student 

2. In the classroom: Students write the narration for their scene 

3. In the IMC: Go through narrations, checking to see that nothing is 

omitted or put in twice. 

4. In the classroom: Edit and write a final copy. 

5. In the IMC: Type up the pages. 

6. In the classroom: Draw pictures for the pages. 

7. In the IMC: Duplicate the book for each student. 

Battle of the Folktales 

Class battles. Then choose six representatives from each room. 

Final battle in the IMC. Three teams with two students from each room 

on each team. 



MALORE I. BROWN 

Assistant Professor 

School of Library and Information Science 

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 

Appendix B 

Evaluating Stories for Diverse Audiences: 

Annotated Bibliography of Research Tools 

Aarne, Antti. The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography. 2 nd 
rev. Trans. Stith Thompson. Helsinki: Academia Scientarum Fennica, 
1961. 

A comprehensive classification and internationally accepted method 
of classifying tales. Tale types are given numbers and categorized. 

Eastman, Mary Huse. Index to Fairy Tales, Myths, and Legends. 2 nd ed. Bos- 
ton: Faxon, 1926. 

One of the earliest of all title indices to fairy tales for children. Cross- 
references are given from one story to another, title, and subject. 

Ireland, Norma Olin. Index to Fairy Tales 1949-1972. Westwood: Faxon, 
1973. 

The second supplement to the Eastman Index did not list any tales 
printed after 1948. A new index was issued by Ireland for tales pub- 
lished between 1949 and 1972. 

Ireland, Norma Olin and Joseph W. Sprug. Index to Fairy Tales 1978-1986: 
Including Folklore, Legends, and Myths in Collections. 5 th Supplement. 
Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1989. 

This series originated as Index to Fairy Tales, Myths, and Legendsby Mary 
Huse Eastman. These indexes were begun in 1926 by Eastman and 
updated periodically by Ireland. 

MacDonald, Margaret Read. The Storyteller's Sourcebook: A Subject, Title, and 
Motif Index to Folklore Collections for Children. Detroit: Neal-Schuman/ 
Gale Research, 1982. 

Allows searching by title, subject, and geographical location. 
Arranged by categories from the Stith Thompson Motif-Index of Folk- 
Literature. 



124 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Thompson, Stith. The Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. 6 vols. Rev. ed. 
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955-58. 

A six-volume encyclopedic work which specifically deals with motifs, 
not tales. Motif, defined by Thompson as "the smallest element of 
the tales," can be an element, concept, activity, or any detail found in 
folktales. 

Ziegler, Elsie. Folklore: An Annotated Bibliography and Index to Single Editions. 
Westwood, MA: Faxon, 1973. 

Because the Ireland index did not include books consisting of only 
one tale, this index was prepared by Zeigler to fill the void. 



COMPILED BY JANICE M. DEL NEGRO 

Editor, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 
Graduate School of Library and Information Science 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

Appendix C 

Allerton Institute 1997 

Discography 

JANICE HARRINGTON 

Janice Harrington, Storyteller. Audiotape. Janice Harrington, 1996. 

Contact: Janice Harrington 
802 S. Prairie 
Champaign, IL 61 820 

DAN KEDING 

Dragons, Giants & the Devil's Hide. Audiotape. Turtle Creek Recordings, 

1992. 
Promises Kept, Promises Broken. Audiotape. Turtle Creek Recordings, TC 

1007, 1995. 

South Side Stones. Audiotape. Turtle Creek Recordings, TC 1006, 1993. 
Stories from the Other Side. Audiotape. Dan Keding, 1990. 

Contact: Dan Keding 

Turtle Creek Recordings 
P.O. Box 1701 
Springfield, IL 62705 

SUSAN KLEIN 

Old Standby s. Audiotape. Susan Klein, 1994. 

Through a Ruby Window: A Martha's Vineyard Childhood. Audiotape. Susan 

Klein, 1993. 
Wisdom's Tribute. Audiotape. Susan Klein, 1997. 

Contact: Susan Klein 
P.O. Box 214 
Oak Bluffs, MA 02557 
Phone: (508) 693-4140 
Fax: (508) 693-6693 
Web: http://www.susanklein.com 



ANNOTATED BY LORETTA GAFFNEY, M.S. 

Graduate School of Library and Information Science 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 



Appendix D 

Resources For Storytellers: 

An Annotated Bibliography 

Allison, Christine. /'// Tell You a Story, I'll Sing You a Song: A Parents' Guide to 
theFairy Tales, Fables, Songs and Rhymes of Childhood. New York: Delacorte, 
1987. 216pp. 

A collection of nursery rhymes, fables and songs for use with chil- 
dren. Includes tips about audience, the uses of rhyme in child devel- 
opment, historical background, selection, and performance. A great 
resource for teachers and librarians, as well as parents. 

Baker, Augusta and Ellin Greene. Storytelling: Art and Technique. 2 nd ed. 
New York: Bowker, 1987. 182pp. 

Includes background on the history and theory of storytelling and 
its purpose in our culture. Reviews steps for the teller in preparing 
and presenting a story. Includes appendices for planning and pro- 
moting festivals and workshops, as well as a bibliography of stories 
for telling. 

Bauer, Caroline Feller. Caroline Feller Bauer's New Handbook for Storytellers: 
With Stories, Poems, Magic, and More. Chicago: ALA, 1993. 550 pp. 

A highly comprehensive sourcebook especially useful for creating 
storytelling programming includes tips on promotion, preparing 
stories, program planning, and incorporating film, music, magic, and 
word games into programs. 

Birch, Carol and Melissa Heckler, eds. Who Says ?: Essays on Pivotal Issues in 
Contemporary Storytelling. Little Rock: August House, 1996. 221 pp. 

A collection of essays by prominent storytellers, educators and folk- 
lorists addressing key issues in the field of storytelling. Includes es- 
says addressing the problem of "ownership" and folktales, copyright 
and fair use issues, folktale adaptation, and the role of stories in com- 
munity life. 



APPENDIX D/RESOURCES FOR STORYTELLERS 127 

Bruchac, Joseph. Tell Me a Tale: A Book About Storytelling. San Diego: 
Harcourt, 1997. 117pp. 

Veteran storyteller Joseph Bruchac incorporates many of his favorite 
tales into a discussion of the four basic components of storytelling 
listening, observing, remembering, and sharing. Includes a bibliog- 
raphy of resources for the teller. 

Dailey, Sheila. Putting the World in a Nutshell: The Art of the Formula Tale. 
Bronx: H.W. Wilson, 1994. 118 pp. 

Tips for choosing and analyzing tales based on their "tale type" or 
formula, including cumulative tales, chain stories, circle stories, ques- 
tion stories, and more. Also includes notes for researching popular 
folktale sources and their variants. 

De Wit, Dorothy. Children 's Faces Looking Up: Program Building For the Story- 
teller. Chicago: ALA, 1979. 156 pp. 

Tips for building storyhours with suggestions for tales, sample story 
programs, and tips for effective programming. Includes a bibliogra- 
phy of both professional resources and tales for telling. 

Geisler, Harlynne. Storytelling Professionally: The Nuts and Bolts of a Working 
Performer. Englewood: Libraries Unlimited, 1997. 151 pp. 

An invaluable resource for anyone wishing to explore the possibili- 
ties of professional telling. Includes tips for promotion, research, 
dealing with copyright issues and more. Emphasizes dealing with 
potential problems before they occur, including space management, 
stage fright, and censorship. 

Hayes, Joe. Here Comes the Storyteller. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 1996. 79 pp. 

Veteran children's storyteller Joe Hayes gives advice about telling 
using his favorite tales as examples. Special emphasis is given to tone, 
body language, and engagement with an audience of children. 

MacDonald, Margaret Read. The Storyteller's Start-Up Book: Finding, Learn- 
ing, Performing, and Using Folktales, Including Twelve Tellable Tales. Little 
Rock: August House, 1993. 215 pp. 

This source book begins with an invitation to tell stories, then pro- 
ceeds to guide the beginning teller through the stages of selecting 
and learning stories, performance techniques, and sharing tips with 
other tellers. Includes "twelve tellable tales" that audiences are likely 
to love, with tips for effective telling. A valuable resource for any 
storyteller. 

Mooney, William and David Holt. The Storyteller's Guide: Storytellers Share 
Advice for the Classroom, Boardroom, Showroom, Podium, Pulpit and Center 
Stage. Little Rock: August House, 1996. 208 pp. 



128 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Includes storytelling tips from some of America's most prominent 
tellers, including choosing and learning stories, performance tech- 
niques, promotion and overcoming stage fright. Readers will enjoy 
the funny anecdotes both successes and failures that the tellers 
share. Includes a bibliography of resources for tellers. 

Painter, William M. Musical Story Hours: Using Music with Storytelling and 
Puppetry. Hamden: Library Professional Publications, 1989. 158 pp. 

Tips for incorporating music into storytimes, including a case study, 
matching music with characters, melodies, holiday programming "off 
the wall" stories and music and contemporary children's literature, 
fables, and folktales. Includes a quick reference sections of both 
tales and music. 

Pellowski, Anne. The Family Storytelling Handbook : How to Use Stories, Anec- 
dotes, Rhymes, Handkerchiefs, Paper, and Other Objects to Enrich Your Family 
Traditions. New York: MacMillan, 1987. 150pp. 

Geared toward parents, but useful for anyone who works with 
storytelling for children. Includes suggestions for storytelling occa- 
sions, kinds of stories to tell, tips for telling, and ways to use paper 
and handkerchiefs in storycrafting. Includes a bibliography of sources 
and stories for telling, as well as an appendix of storytelling events. 

. The World of Storytelling. New York: Bowker, 1977. 296pp. 

Examines the different types of storytelling traditions and their char- 
acteristics, including bardic, folk, library, religious, and theatrical tra- 
ditions. Gives tips for telling based on the style of the tale or 
storytelling tradition, and an overview of training methods. Includes 
multilingual dictionary of terms and extensive bibliography of re- 
sources and tales for telling. 

Sawyer, Ruth. The Way of the Storyteller. New York: Viking, 1976. 356 pp. 

A classic of storytelling literature. Sawyer provides an account of her 
development as a teller and the joys and pitfalls she experienced 
along the way. Includes some of her favorite stories for telling, as well 
as bibliography of both stories and professional resources. 

Sierra, Judy. The Storyteller's Research Guide: Folktales, Myths, and Legends. 
Eugene: Folkprint, 1996. 90 pp. 

An invaluable resource for researching popular folktales and their 
variants. Is also especially useful for tracing the development of myths 
and legends common to more than one culture. 

Shedlock, Marie L. The Art of the Story-Teller. 3 rd ed. Dover, 1951. 290pp. 

An historical landmark of storytelling, with tips for preparing and 
telling stories for children. Uses many examples of traditional tales 



APPENDIX D/RESOURCES FOR STORYTELLERS 129 

in her advice, and includes a section of questions asked by teachers. 
Also includes a bibliography of story sources, amplified by Eulalie 
Steinmetz. 

Ziskind, Sylvia. Telling Stories to Children. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1976. 
162 pp. 

One of the classics of "how to" storytelling manuals walks the teller 
through all the stages of working up a story, including selection, learn- 
ing the story, performance, and programming tips. Includes a bibli- 
ography of stories for telling. 



JANICE M. DEL NEGRO 

Editor, The Bulletin of the Center for Children 's Books 
Graduate School of Library and Information Science 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

Appendix E 

Storycrafting: Retelling Old Tales 

A Bibliography 

Aldana, Patricia. Jade and Iron: Latin American Tales from Two Cultures. 
Toronto: Groundwood-Douglas & Mclntyre, 1996. 

Bailey, Carolyn. For the Story Teller: Story Telling and Stories to Tell. Detroit: 
Gale, 1975. 

Baker, Augusta and Ellin Greene. Storytelling: Art and Technique. 2 nd ed. 
New York: Bowker, 1987. 

Baltuck, Naomi. Apples from Heaven: Multicultural Folktales About Stories and 
Storytellers. North Haven: Linnet, 1995. 

Barton, Bob. Stories in the Classroom: Storytelling, Reading Aloud, and 
Roleplaying with Children. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1990. 

. Tell Me Another: Storytelling and Reading Aloud at Home, at School, and in 
the Community. Markham: Pembroke, 1986. 

Bauer, Caroline Feller. Handbook for Storytellers. Chicago: ALA, 1977. 

Bauman, Richard. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights: Waveland, 
1984. 

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of 
Fairy Tales. New York: Knopf, 1976. 

Birch, Carol and Melissa Heckler, eds. Who Says?: Essays on Pivotal Issues in 
Contemporary Storytelling. Little Rock: August House, 1996. 

Bottigheimer, Ruth. Grimms ' Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social 
Vision of the Tales. New Haven: Yale U P, 1987. 

Breneman, Lucille. Once Upon A Time: A Storytelling Handbook. Chicago: 
Nelson-Hall, 1983. 



APPENDIX E/STORYCRAFTING 131 

Bruchac, Joseph. Tell Me a Tale: A Book About Storytelling. San Diego: 
Harcourt, 1997. 

Bruchac, Joseph and Gayle Ross. The Girl who Married the Moon: Tales from 
Native North America. Mahwah: BridgeWater, 1994. 

Bryant, Sara Cone. How to Tell Stories to Children. Boston: Houghton, 1979. 

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton 
U P, 1949. 

Cassady, Marsh. Storytelling Step By Step. San Jose: Resource Publications, 
1990. 

Cathon, Laura, ed. Stories to Tell Children: A Selected List. Pittsburgh: U of 
Pittsburgh P, 1974. 

Clarkson, Atelia and Gilbert B. Cross, eds. World Folktales. New York: 
Scribner, 1980. 

Cole, Joanna and Jill Karla Schwarz, eds. Best-Loved Folktales from Around 
the World. Anchor-Doubleday, 1983. 

Cooper, Pamela and Rives Collins. Look What Happened to Frog: Storytelling 
in Education. Scottsdale: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, 1992. 

Colwell, Eileen. Storytelling. London: Bodley Head, 1980. 

Cook, Elizabeth. The Ordinary and the Fabulous: An Introduction to Myths, 
Legends and Fairytales. 2 nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1976. 

Dailey, Sheila. Putting the World in a Nutshell: The Art of the Formula Tale. 
Bronx: H. W. Wilson, 1994. 

De Wit, Dorothy. Children 's Faces Looking Up: Program Building for the Story- 
teller. Chicago: ALA, 1979. 

Dieckmann, Hans. Twice-Told Tales: The Pyschological Use of Fairy Tales. 
Wilmette: Chiron, 1986. 

Eastman, Mary. Index to Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends. Boston: Boston 
Books, 1915. 

. Index to Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends, Second Supplement. Boston: Faxon, 
1952. 

Farrell, Catherine. Effects of Storytelling: An Ancient Art for Modern Class- 
rooms. San Francisco: Word Weaving, 1982. 

. Storytelling: A Guide for Teachers. New York: Scholastic, 1991. 

. Word Weaving: A Guide to Storytelling. San Francisco: Zellerbach Family 
Fund, 1983. 



132 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Forest, Heather. Wisdom Tales from Around the World. Little Rock: August 
House, 1996. 

Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. San 
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984. 

Hamilton, Martha. Children Tell Stories: A Teaching Guide. Katonah: R. C. 
Owen, 1990. 

Hamilton, Martha and Mitch Weiss. Stories in My Pocket: Tales Kids Can Tell. 
Golden: Fulcrum, 1996. 

Harrell, John. The Man on a Dolphin: The Storyteller and His Tales. 
Kensington: York House, 1983. 

. Origins and Early Traditions of Storytelling. Kensington: York House, 
1983. 

Harrell, John and Mary Harrell, comp. A Storyteller's Treasury. Berkeley: 
Harrell, 1977. 

. To Tell of Gideon: The Art of Storytelling. Audiotape. Berkeley: Harrell, 
1975. 

Ireland, Norma. Index to Fairy Tales, 1949-1972: Including Folklore, Legends, 
and Myths in Collections. Westwood: Faxon, 1973. 

. Index to Fairy Tales, 1973-1977: Including Folklore, Legends, and Myths in 
Collections. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1985. 

Lipman, Doug. The Storytelling Coach: How to Listen, Praise, and Bring Out 
People's Best. Little Rock: August House, 1995. 

Livo, Norma. Story telling Activities. Englewood: Libraries Unlimited, 1987. 
. Storytelling Folklore Sourcebook. Englewood: Libraries Unlimited, 1991. 
. Storytelling: Process and Practice. Littleton: Libraries Unlimited, 1986. 

. Troubadour's Storybag: Musical Folktales of the World. Golden: Fulcrum, 
1996. 

Livo, Norma and Dia Cha. Folk Stories oftheHmong: People of Laos, Thailand, 
and Vietnam. Englewood: Libraries Unlimited, 1991. 

Luthi, Max. Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales. Bloomington: 
Indiana U P, 1976. 

. The European Folktale: Form and Nature. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 
1986. 

. The Fairytale as Art Form and Portrait of Man. Bloomington: Indiana U 
P, 1987. 



APPENDIX E/STORYCRAFTING 133 

MacDonald, Margaret Read. Look Back and See: Twenty Lively Tales for Gentle 
Tellers. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1991. 

. The Parent's Guide to Storytelling: How to Make Up New Stories and Retell 
Old Favorites. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. 

. The Storyteller's Sourcebook: A Subject, Title, and Motif Index to Folklore 
Collections for Children. Detroit: Gale, 1982. 

. The Storyteller's Start-Up Book: Finding, Learning, Performing, and Using 
Folktales, Including Twelve Tellable Tales. Little Rock: August House, 1993. 

. Twenty Tellable Tales: Audience Participation Folktales for the Beginning Sto- 
ryteller. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1988. 

. When the Lights Go Out: Twenty Scary Tales to Tell. Bronx: H.W. Wilson, 
1988. 

Maguire,Jack. Creative Storytelling: Choosing, Inventing, and Sharing Tales for 
Children. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985. 

Martin, Rafe. The Hungry Tigress: Buddhist Legends andjataka Tales. Berke- 
ley: Parallax, 1990. 

. Mysterious Tales of Japan. New York: Putnam's, 1996. 

Mason, Harriet. Every One a Storyteller: Integrating Storytelling into the Cur- 
riculum. Portland: Lariat, 1991. 

May, Rollo. The Cry for Myth. New York: Norton, 1991. 

Mayo, Margaret. Mythical Birds and Beasts from. Many Lands. New York: 
Dutton, 1997. 

. Magical Tales from Many Lands. New York: Dutton, 1993. 

McCaughrean, Geraldine. The Silver Treasure: Myths and Legends of the World. 
New York: M. K. McElderry, 1997. 

. The Golden Hoard: Myths and Legends. New York: M. K, McElderry, 
1996. 

Moore, Robin. Awakening the Hidden Storyteller. Boston: Shambhala, 1991. 

Opie, lona Archibald and Peter Opie, comp. The Classic Fairy Tales. Lon- 
don: Oxford U P, 1974. 

Pellowski, Anne. The World of Storytelling. New York: Bowker, 1977. 

Powers, Effie. Bag O' Tales: A Source Book for Story-Tellers. New York: Dutton, 
1934. 

Propp, Vladimir. Theory and History of Folklore. Minneapolis: U of Minne- 
sota P, 1984. 



134 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Ross, Ramon Royal. Storyteller: The Classic that Heralded America's Storytelling 
Revival. 3 rd rev. ed. Little Rock: August House, 1996. 

Rugoff, Milton, ed. A Harvest of World Folk Tales. New York: Viking, 1949. 

San Souci, Robert. Cut from the Same Cloth: American Women of Myth, Legend, 
and Tall Tale. New York: Philomel, 1993. 

Sawyer, Ruth. The Way of the Storyteller: New York: Viking, 1942. 

Schimmel, Nancy. Just Enough to Make a Story: A Sourcebook for Storytelling. 
3 rd ed. Berkeley: Sister's Choice, 1992. 

Scott, Edna Lyman. Story Telling: What to Tell and How to Tell It. Detroit: 
Singing Tree Press, 1971. 

Shedlock, Marie. The Art of the Story-Teller. New York: Dover, 1951. 

Sherman, Josepha. Trickster Tales: Forty Folk Stories from Around the World. 
Little Rock: August House, 1996. 

Sierra, Judy. Twice Upon A Time: Stories to Tell, Retell, Act Out, and Write 
About. Bronx: H.W. Wilson, 1989. 

Thompson, Stith. One Hundred Favorite Folktales. Bloomington: Indiana 
University Press, 1968. 

Tooze, Ruth. Storytelling. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1959. 

Vivian, Francis. Story-Weaving: A Text-Book on the Craft of Story-Writing. Lon- 
don: Hutchinson's Scientific & Technical Pub., 1940. 

Wilson, Jane. The Story Experience. Me tuchen: Scarecrow, 1979. 

Yolen, Jane, ed. Favorite Folktales from Around the World. New York: Pan- 
theon, 1986. 

Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. 
New York: Methuen, 1984. 

. Don 't Bet On the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America 
and England. New York: Methuen, 1986. 

. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and 
the Process of Civilization. New York: Wildman, 1983. 

. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in 
Sociocultural Context. South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey, 1983. 

Ziskind, Sylvia. Telling Stories to Children. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1976. 



About the Contributors 



MALORE I. BROWN is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Li- 
brary and Information Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 
where she teachers courses in multicultural literature for youth, school 
library media services, and children's and young adult materials and ser- 
vices. She is past president of the Wisconsin Black Librarians Network, 
and has served on the Association for Library Services to Children Selec- 
tion of Children's Books and Materials from Various Cultures Committee 
for the American Library Association. Brown's articles have appeared in 
Culture Keepers II: Proceedings of the 2nd National Conference of African Ameri- 
can Librarians (Faxon 1995), and In Our Own Voices: The Changing Face of 
Librarianship (Scarecrow 1996). 

JANICE M. DEL NEGRO is the editor of the The Bulletin of the Center for Children 's 
Books at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Univer- 
sity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to coming to The Bulletin she 
was a consultant for children's and public library services for the State 
Library of North Carolina, and she worked for 14 years as a children's 
librarian for the Chicago Public Library, including five years as assistant 
director of Systemwide Children's Services. Del Negro has taught 
storytelling at Dominican College and the University of Illinois. She has 
also taught children's library services at Dominican College; presented 
workshops on storytelling nationally; and been a reviewer for Booklist, School 
Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews. An active member of the American 
Library Association, Del Negro has served on both the Newbery and 
Caldecott committees. She is the author of Lucy Dove, published by DK 
Ink in Fall 1998. 

JANICE HARRINGTON is the head of Youth Services for the Champaign Public 
Library in Champaign, Illinois. An accomplished storyteller, Harrington 
has been a featured teller at the Illinois Storytelling Festival, the National 



136 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennesee, and the National Festival 
of Black Storytelling. She is a member of the American Library Associa- 
tion and served on the 1999 Caldecott Committee for the Association for 
Library Services to Children. Harrington has been a guest reviewer for 
The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, and has given workshops on 
storytelling and multicultural literature. Her first audiotape, Janice 
Harrington, Storyteller, was produced in 1996. 

BETSY HEARNE teaches children's literature and storytelling in the Gradu- 
ate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illi- 
nois, Urbana-Champaign. A former children's book review editor for 
Booklist and The Bulletin of the Center for Childrens Books, she has lectured 
and written widely on children's books and folklore. Hearne's articles 
include "Patterns of Sound, Sight, and Story: From Literature to Literacy," 
and "Disney Revisited: Or Jiminy Cricket, It's Musty Down Here!" She is 
the author of Choosing Books for Children: A Commonsense Guide and Beauty 
and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale, and the editor of several 
other books. In addition, Hearne has published five novels for children, 
two collections of poetry for young adults, and the critically acclaimed 
picture book Seven Brave Women. 

CHRISTINE JENKINS is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Library 
and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where 
she teaches courses in youth services, young adult literature, gender issues, 
and LIS foundations and history. Her work has appeared in Library Quarterly, 
Libraries and Culture, Journal of Youth Services in Libraries, Booklist, Feminist Collec- 
tions, and Reclaiming the American Library Past: Writing the Women In (Ablex 
1996) . She is an active member of the American Library Association in the 
area of youth services and intellectual freedom, having served on the 1989 
Caldecott Committee and as a director of the Intellectual Freedom Round 
Table and chair of the ALSC Intellectual Freedom Committee. 

DAN KEDING is an internationally recognized storyteller and balladeer who 
has been a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival in 
Jonesborough, Tennessee; the Sidmouth International Folk Arts Festival 
in Sidmouth, England; and the Illinois Storytelling Festival, to name just a 
few. His love for stories goes beyond performance and into research, 
resulting in a master's degree from the University of Illinois at Springfield 
in the history and performance of traditional storytelling and ballads. His 
audiotape, Stories from the Other Side, was selected for the American Library 
Association's publication, Best of the Best for Children. 

SUSAN KLEIN is a freelance storyteller from Martha's Vineyard, Massachu- 
setts. She is the founding director and current artistic director of the 
Festival of Storytelling on Martha's Vineyard, and the author of the auto- 



CONTRIBUTORS 137 

biographical title, Through a Ruby Window. A powerful speaker, Klein is 
noted for her keynote and inspirational speeches, and her groundbreaking 
work with adolescents and storytelling. She has been the featured teller 
at more than 50 storytelling festivals, and three of her audio-cassettes have 
been award-winners. Her new cassette of rites of passage stories, Forbidden, 
is available in fall 1998; see the Web site www.susanklein.com for more 
information. 

KAREN MORGAN is an instructor at the Graduate School of Library and In- 
formation Studies at Texas Woman's University, where she teaches courses 
in storytelling, library materials for children, and juvenile literature. She 
is founder of Texas Woman's University STORYTELL listserv, president of 
the Tejas Storytelling Association, and director of the 1998 Texas 
Storytelling Festival. Morgan chaired the panel on "Effective Outreach 
Programming for Young Adults" at the American Library Association's 1996 
Annual Conference, and has presented widely at state and regional li- 
brary and reading conferences. Morgan has reviewed for The ALAN Re- 
view and is currently a reviewer for Booklist Books for Youth. 

JUDITH O'MALLEY is the editor of Book Links: Connecting Books, Libraries, and 
Classrooms, a journal intended for school library media specialists, teach- 
ers, public children's librarians, and parents who are concerned about 
connecting high quality trade children's books with the education cur- 
riculum. Before assuming the position of Book Links editor in November 
1996, she worked for seven years as associate editor for The H.W. Wilson 
Company, where she handled acquisitions and editorial development of 
all professional books for children's librarians and teachers. Among the 
books O'Malley worked on in that capacity is the forthcoming Radical 
Change: Literature for Youth in an Electronic Age by Eliza T. Dresang. O'Malley 
has also written articles for professional and trade journals, including Wil- 
son Library Bulletin and Booklist. 

ANNE SHIMOJIMA is the school library media specialist at Braeside School in 
Highland Park, Illinois, and brings 25 years of professional experience to 
the Allerton conference. She has delighted audiences of all ages with her 
graceful and spirited tellings of folktales from around the world Asian 
stories, Jack tales, stories of humor, and stories of the heart. Shimojima 
has taught storytelling courses for National-Louis University, was on the 
board of directors of The Wild Onion Storytelling Celebration, and is one 
of a panel of reviewers for The Bulletin Storytelling Review, to be published 
by the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information 
Science in 1998. 

JOSEPH DANIEL SOBOL has worked as a professional storyteller, musician, 
and folklorist since 1981; he received a master's degree in folklore from 



138 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 

the University of North Carolina and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from 
Northwestern University. Sobol's writing on traditional and contempo- 
rary storytelling has been published in such journals as Oral Tradition, Jour- 
nal of American Folklore, and the National Story telling Journal. From 1994 to 
1998, he toured the United States with "In the Deep Heart's Core," an 
award-winning original musical theater piece based on the life and poetry 
of William Butler Yeats. Sobol currently teaches storytelling and folklore 
at DePaul University School for New Learning. His most recent book, The 
Storyteller's Journey: An American Revival, is to be published by the Univer- 
sity of Illinois Press in 1999. 

DEBORAH STEVENSON has been with The Bulletin of the Center for Children 's 
Books since 1989 and currently holds the position of associate editor. She 
is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department of the University of Chi- 
cago, where she is currently completing her dissertation on children's lit- 
erature and contemporary culture. She has taught the history of children's 
literature at the University of Illinois, and children's literature at Indiana 
University Northwest and in the continuing education program at the 
University of Chicago. Stevenson has presented at national and interna- 
tional conferences on children's literature, including The International 
Research Society for Children's Literature Congress, and her articles have 
appeared in the Horn Book Magazine, the Lion and the Unicorn, and the 
Children 's Literature Association Quarterly. 



BY JENNIFER YOUNG, M. s. 

Graduate School of Library and Information Science 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 



Index 



Aarne, Antti, 54 

Adedjouma, Davida, 63 

African tales, 55, 57, 59 

Alderson, Brian, 46 

Alphabet books, 71 

Anancy tales, 56-57 

Angela's Ashes, 61 

Angry Moon, The, 89 

Animals: as tricksters, 55 

AskEric InfoGuide: Folk and Fairy Tales 

(website), 16; URL, 18 
Audiotapes, 125 

Baker, Augusta, 47 

Ballard, Martha, 37-39, 41-42, 48 

Bannerman, Helen, 53 

"Battle of the Folktales," 9 

Becoming Rosemary, 39, 48 

Bettelheim, Bruno, 46 

Bobbsey Twins and Their Schoolmates, 

The, 85 

Brentano, Clemens, 87 
Brothers Grimm, The, 86-88 
Brown, Malore, 1, 22; biography, 135 
Brown, Margaret Wise, 67 
Bruchac, Joseph, 63 
Bryant, Sara Cone, 47 
Burden of Dreams, 81 
Butler, Dorothy, 71 



Campbell, Joseph, 24 

Cantwell, Robert, 32 

Changeover, The, 39 

Chaplin, Charlie, 73 

Chester Inn, 29 

Children's librarianship, 45-49, 84- 
86, 98-105 

Children's literature, 44-46, 48; 
knowledge of, 102-104; market- 
ing of, 85-86, 88, 90; popular 
culture, 90-91; series, 85, 90 

Children's Literature Web Guide, The 
(website), 16; URL, 18 

Chodorow, Nancy, 48 

Christie, Gregory, 63 

Christopher Taylor cabin, 29 

Cinderella: classroom activities, 8; 
variants, 16, 118-119 

Civic Trust. S^Jonesborough Civic 
Trust 

Classroom activities: Cinderella, 8; 
fairy tales, 8; family stories, 17; 
folktales, 8, 120-122; mythol- 
ogy/astronomy, 9; Native Ameri- 
cans, 9-10; video stories, 9 

Collins, Meghari, 40 

Colwell, Eileen, 47,97 

Cooper, Ilene, 62 

Corporate mergers, 91-92 



140 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 



Cottingley fairy incident, 70 
Countess from Hong Kong, A, 73 
Creed, Robert, 31 
Cuevas, Lou, 52 
Cultural heritage, 7 

Damessae, Selashe, 31 

Das Baul, Purna, 31 

Davis, Don: Smithsonian Magazine 
(website), 11 

Davis, Mary Gould, 47 

Dead Sea Scrolls, The, 62 

Del Negro, Janice, 1-2, 83, 106; bi- 
ography, 135; website, 17; work- 
shop, 20 

"Developing Student Voices on the 
Internet," 63 

Doyle, Arthur Conan, 70 

Dresang, Eliza, 63 

Dusinberre, Juliet, 71 

Easter Bunny That Overslept, The, 69 
Eastman, Mary Huse, 54 
Egielski, Richard, 67 
Elderbarry's Storytelling Home Page 

(website), 17; URL , 19 
Ellerbee, Linda, 73 
Ellis, Sarah, 72 
Encyclopedia Mythica, The (website), 

16; URL, 19 

End of the Rainbow, The, 72 
English Boy 's Magazine, The, 46 
Etcher's Studio, The, 81; illustration, 82 
European tales, 55 
Everett, Gwen, 75 

Family secrets, 61-62 

Family storytelling: bibliography, 

113-114 

Family tales, 61-62, 64; websites, 17 
"fis phenomenon," 70 
Fiskejohn, 90,92 
FOLKLORE (listserv), 12 
Folklorists: respect of, 47-48 



Folktales: altering of, 89; classroom 
activities, 8, 120-122; mythology, 
55; nationalistic traditions, 87 

Forest, Heather, 32 

Friedrich, Otto, 69 

Friedrich, Priscilla, 69 

Furlong, Monica, 39 

Geisert, Arthur, 1-2, 60, 78, 81; illus- 
trations, 79-80, 82 
Gender and the Academic Experience, 48 
Ghost tales, 34, 59 
Gilligan, Carol, 48 
Gillman, Jackson, 32 
Going Back Home, 75 
Goldsmith, Evelyn, 70 
Grandmother Bryant's Pocket, 72 
Gray, Spalding, 31 
Great Building Saga, 78 
"Green Woman, The," 40 
Greene, Ellin, 5 
Grimm Brothers, 86-88 
Grimm, Jacob, 86-88 
Grimm, Wilhelm, 86-88 
Groff, Patrick, 73 

Halloween costumes, 92-94 

Hammerstein, Oscar, 70, 75 

Hannigan, Jane Anne, 45 

Harrington, Janice, 1, 59; audio- 
tapes, 125; biography, 135-136 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 43 

Hazard, Paul, 85 

Hearne, Betsy, 1, 22, 54; biography, 
135; Sleeping Beauty, 90; slides, 
69 

Hepburn, Katharine, 73 

Hero^journey cycle, 44-45 

Hicks, Ray, 32-33 

Hicks, Rosa, 32-33 

"How to Get Your Ph.D. in Children's 
Literature," 46 

Huck, Charlotte, 89 

Hyman, Trina Schart, 74 



INDEX 141 



Igus, Toyomi, 75 

Index to Fairy Tales, 54 

Indexes, 123-124 

Internet resources: listervs, 11-15; 
search engines, 15-16; URLs, 
18-19, 117; Usenet newsgroups, 
12; websites, 11-17,63 

Ireland, Norma Olin, 54 

Jack tales, 9, 32-33; bibliography, 1 19 

"Jeaning of America, The," 90 

Jenkins, Christine, 1, 45, 74, 83; bi- 
ography, 136 

"Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye," 59 

Johnston, Tony, 67 

Jonesborough, Tennessee, 23; 
Chester Inn, 29; Christopher 
Taylor cabin, 29-30 ; Swappin' 
Grounds, 29-30, 32 

Jonesborough Civic Trust, 23 

Kane, Alice, 31 

Keding, Dan, 1, 59; audiotapes, 125; 

biography, 136 

KidsCom (website), 63; URL, 65 
Kimmel, Eric, 67 
KISS (Keep it simple, stupid), 20 
Klein, Susan, 1, 59; audiotapes, 125; 

biography, 136-137; workshop, 

20-21 

Language skills: improvement, 6 
Larkin, Chuck, 17 
Lauper, Cyndi, 84 
Legends: traditional telling of, 52 
Lester, Julius, 53 
Library advocacy, 98-105 
Library Services for Children, 84, 97 
Li 7 Sis and Uncle Willie, 75 
Lipman, Doug (website), 17; URL, 19 
Listening skills: improvement, 6 
Lundin, Anne, 45 

MacDonald, Margaret Read, 54 



Magic Circle, The, 39 

Mahy, Margaret, 39 

Marcellino, Fred, 53 

Marcus, Leonard, 71 

Martin, Connie, 31 

Martin, Rafe, 28 

Marx, Karl, 84 

McConnell, Doc, 29-30, 33; and 
Crazy Jim, 30 

McCourt, Frank, 61 

McWilliam, Barry (website), 17; 
URL, 19 

Michelet, Jules, 38 

Midwife's Apprentice, The, 39, 48 

Midwife's Tale, A, 37 

Midwives: archetypes, 39; commu- 
nity of, 48; diaries, 37-38; as heal- 
ers, 40-42; history, 37-38; and 
magic, 41, 44; as mentors, 39-40; 
perceptions, 38; sexuality, 40; 
spinning/weaving, 41 

Minnich, Elizabeth, 48 

Morgan, Karen: 1, 3; biography, 137 

Most Popular Web Sites: The Best of the 
Net from A2Z, 16 

"Mr. Fox" (story), 6-7 

"Multicultural Literature for Chil- 
dren and Young Adults," 52 

Myths, 24, 55 

Mythology/ Astronomy: classroom 
activities, 9 

Nadel, Miriam, 17 

Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, 
Sus, and Other Stories, 4 

National Storytelling Festival: 116- 
117; analysis, 23-26; programs, 
31-32; the experience, 26-35; 
travel to, 27-30; workshops, 31- 
32 

Native Americans: classroom activi- 
ties, 9-10; tales, 55 

Nickerson, Ken, 18 

Nodelman, Perry, 66, 68, 71, 73, 76 



142 STORY: FROM FIREPLACE TO CYBERSPACE 



Nursery and Household Tales (Kinder- 
und Haus-Marchen), 87-88 

O'Malley, Judith, 1, 60; biography, 

137 

Olio, 31 

Organizations, 116-117 
Ortiz, Simon, 31 

Palm of My Heart: Poetry by African 
American Children, The, 63 

Periodicals: bibliography, 116 

Picture books: adaptations, 75; au- 
thors, 67; book smells, 71; 
children's reactions, 71; cre- 
ation of, 8-9; illustrations, 68-69; 
impact, 72; narratives, 66-70; 
online environment, 74; physi- 
cal format, 71-72; synthesis of 
forms, 72-76; technical aspects, 
69; text, 67-68 

Pigs From 1 to 10, 78; illustration, 79 

Pigs From A to Z, 78; illustration, 80 

"Pied Piper's New Melodies: 
Folktale Variations, The," 62-63 

Pinkney, Jerry, 53 

Poarch, Margaret, 98 

Pocket Book of Verse, The, 96 

Potter, Beatrix, 72 

Pourquoi tales. See African tales 

Power, Effie L., 84-85, 97, 98 

Presser, Harriet, 48 

Princess Furball, 89 

Propp, Vladmir, 24 

Publishing: involvement of women, 
42-44 

Purkiss, Diane, 44 

Reader's theater, 17 

Real Thing, The, 76 

"Recent Storytelling Titles" 

(website), 17 

Resources, 54; bibliography, 126-129 
Reuter, Bjarne, 72 



Revival story, 25 
Root, Mary E.S., 85 
Rubright, Lynn, 31 

Sacred tales, 35 

Sam and the Tigers, 53 

San Souci, Robert, 67 

Sawyer, Ruth, 47, 104-105 

School library media centers, 4-10; 
bibliography, 108-122 

Schram, Penninah, 31 

Schwarcz, Joseph, 73 

Scieszka, Jon, 67 

Sendak, Maurice, 67, 71-73 

Shannon, George, 23-24, 62 

Shedlock, Marie, 47 

Shimojima, Anne: 1, 3; biography, 137 

Sima, Judy, 63 

Simms, Laura, 32 

Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 4 

Sixties, The (website), 17; URL, 19 

Sleator, William, 89 

Smith, Jimmy Neil, 23 

Smith, Lane, 67 

Smith, Mary Carter, 31 

Smithsonian Magazine, website, 11; 
URL, 19 

Snake Book, The, 72 

Snow White; 90; website, 16; URL, 19 

Sobol, Joseph Daniel, 1-2, 22, 106; 
biography, 137-138 

Sondheim, Stephen, 74-75 

Southern Folklife Collection (website), 
16; URL, 19 

Speare, Elizabeth, 39 

Spelman, Jon, 32 

Spiritual nurturing, 5 

Statue of Liberty, 70 

Stevenson, Deborah, 1, 60; biogra- 
. phy, 138 

Stoppard, Tom, 76 

"Story-Enhancing Your Science Les- 
sons," 63 

Story of Little Babaji, The, 53 



INDEX 143 



Story of Little Black Sambo, The: 22; dis- 
cussion of, 52-53; variants, 53-54 
Story sources: 53-54, 57; evaluation 

of, 55; websites, 16-19 
Storycrafting, 130-134 
"Storycrafting: Retelling Traditional 

Tales," 20 

STORYTELL: archives, 18; discus- 
sions, 13-15; listserv, 11-12, 14; 
makeup, 13; subscription infor- 
mation, 117 

Storytelling: Art & Technique, 5 
Storytelling community, 25 
Storytelling: exclusion of women, 

42-43; future of, 83, 106-107 
Storytelling patterns, 24 
Storytelling practice, 3, 7-10; 20 
Storytelling ring (webring), 17-18 
Storytelling Sourcebook, The, 54 
"Suitable for children," 88-90 
Sutcliff, Rosemary, 39 

"Talk," 59 
Tall tales, 55 
Tatar, Maria, 87-88 
Taylor, Edgar, 88 

Teacher-student relationships, 5-6 
Teaching: bibliography, 114; using 

stories, 8-9, 17, 52-57 
"Telling Family Stories" (website), 

17; URL, 19 

"Tiger's Minister of State," 59 
Thompson, Stith, 57 
Thorne-Thompsen, Gudrun, 47 
Throgs Neck Branch (NYPL), 97 
Tooze, Ruth, 47 
Torrence, Jackie, 34 
Turner, Victor, 24, 26 
"Turtle's Race with Bear," 63 
Tyler, Anna Cogswell, 47 
Types of the Folktale, The, 54 

Ulrich, Laurel, 37, 39, 42 
Understanding Popular Culture, 90 



Ungerer, Tomi, 73 
Urban legends: bibliography, 114 
Uses of Enchantment, The, 47 
Usenet newsgroups, 12 

Vandergrift, Kay, 16, 45 

Van Gennep, Arnold, 26 

Vietnam War History Page, The 

(website), 17; URL, 19 
Visit to Williem Blake's Inn, A, 67 

Way of the Storyteller, The, 104-105 

Web resources. See Internet re- 
sources. 

Where the Wild Things Are, 67-68, 71, 
73-74 

Whuppie, Molly, 47 

Why tales. See African tales 

Willard, Nancy, 67 

Witch of Blackbird Pond, The, 39, 48 

Witch's Brat, The, 39 

Witches: and midwives, 38-40, 44-45 

Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Superstition, 38 

Women's studies programs, 48 

Wonder tales, 24, 33 

Words About Pictures, 68, 71 

Workshops, 20-21 

Yarnspinner, The, 23 
Yorinks, Arthur, 67 
"Young Adults, Storytelling, and 

Rites of Passage," 20 
Youth Services librarianship. See 

Children's librarianship. 
Youth 's Wonderhorn, The (Des Knaben 

Wunderhorn), 87 

Zipes, Jack, 46-47 



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\ 



UNIVERSITY OF ILLJNOI9-URBANA 

To some, stories and storytelli | |Q| 
3 0112 040545193 
ries. Primitive societies had stories. And storytelling re- 
quires a wood fire and a dark night. But of course stories may be 
found not only at the family dinner table or with the last survivor 
of the Titanic. Stories are also in the next booth at a fast food 
restaurant, in the bleachers during the seventh-inning stretch, and 
in the classrooms (and in the teachers' lounge) of an elementary 
school. In our interest in children's welfare, we often forget that 
children are not simply passive receptacles for whatever treasure 
or trash the adult world throws at them, but are lively agents who 
are continually interacting with their environment. Children ac- 
tively create meaning as readers, viewers, and listeners. The 39 th 
Allerton Park Institute papers emphasize the critical need to con- 
,riect children and narrative as a way to affect their development as 
fisteners, readers, viewers, and evaluators of literature and infor- 
mation in all forms. 





780878 451050