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Captivating the audience
Professional storyteller Tony Marr weaves a tale that has the audience hanging on every word at the 2019 Stone Soup Storytelling Festival.
Photo by Andrew Haworth
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Home-grown talent
South Carolina native Yasu Ishida, one of the 2019 “New Voices,” talks about his childhood, time machines and magic during his turn on stage at the Stone Soup Storytelling Festival.
Photo by Andrew Haworth
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It’s different out loud
Writer Hastings Hensel won the Amateur Open Mic event with a true childhood story of being swept down a Columbia storm drain with his friends—and living to tell the tale.
Photo by Andrew Haworth
Let me tell you a story. It is a story about, of all things, stories and storytellers, and it begins in the early 1980s, in a car making its way home to Woodruff, South Carolina, from the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tennessee.
Inside the car are Woodruff residents Dixie Page and Judy Wyatt, two lovers of oral storytelling, and they’ve had such a great time in Jonesboro that they are chattering away. The talk turns to their hometown, Woodruff, an Upstate textile town in the midst of a decline. Textile mills are closing as the work is being shipped to other places. Jobs are being lost. Community spirit isn’t what it used to be.
But, they ask, what if? What if we start a little storytelling festival here in Woodruff? Could that be something to breathe a little life back into the community? To bring the community together? What if we name it after a story? How about the folk story where the townspeople are encouraged to share a little bit of their own ingredients to make a larger meal?
In 1985, Page and Wyatt hold the first annual Stone Soup Storytelling Festival, a little half-day festival with local storytellers. The next year, after assembling a board of directors, they hold a full-day festival, and from there, as the story goes, things take off. They begin bringing in professional storytellers who tell stories on stage in the heart of town.
For many years, the festival flourishes. But then, as stories go, complications happen. Health and family concerns lead to leadership changes, which lead to new directions, then a two-year hiatus.
Enter Woodruff native and active community member Karyn Page-Davies.
Growing up, Page-Davies’ mom was an insurance agent who took her daughter with her on work visits, where they would sit and listen to people’s stories.
“I remember then, as a child, enjoying those stories,” Page-Davies says. “And you get connected that way, and you love it for the rest of your life.”
So, Page-Davies convinces everyone that she can become the chairperson and director of the Stone Soup Storytelling Festival. It won’t be easy work—the festival is a nonprofit run by volunteers, and you need money and people and time to put it on—but what’s a story if it’s one of easy work?
So, the story goes on.
The art of the story
A dozen years later, and the Stone Soup Storytelling Festival is once again making a name for itself. As in, it literally has changed its name to the Stone Soup Storytelling Institute. Now the Institute encompasses the festival, but it also has expanded its outreach to include a performance space called Muse 134, and programs like Speaking Down Barriers, which encourages young women of color to tell their stories.
“Storytelling connects people to other people,” says board member and festival emcee Nicole Hazard. “It’s connected to our humanity, our shared vulnerabilities and shared humor. Having that human experience together builds community.”
On a bright weekend in late April, I come to the 2019 festival never having been to a storytelling festival in my life. I sit down in the Woodruff Community Center with 50 other spectators who, remarkably in the Age of Inattention, do not stare at cell phones but instead are all ears. Like many people, I suppose my first thoughts are that a storytelling festival might be something like reading a book aloud to children.
At first, it almost feels like being at the movies—the room is dark, and we’re all watching the entertainment—yet it’s not the silver screen that has us rapt. We’re listening to one of the festival’s four professional Featured Tellers, Jeff Doyle, tell a wild childhood tale of a road trip with his grandparents out West. The story moves along in a series of outrageous situations, including a station wagon that transforms into a spaceship, two grandparents intent on filling the car with Coors beer, and a bear.
Doyle punctuates his story with hand gestures, sound effects and body language. At one point, when he begins shivering to describe the cold, it occurs to me that, amidst the laugh lines, this is like stand-up comedy, but Hazard later is quick to correct me.
“Storytellers replace all the snark with heart,” she says. “Comedy is anecdotal. These are fully-developed stories.”
If not movies, if not comedy, then maybe it’s like music? After all, these changes of intonation, if you listen without considering the words’ meaning, sound nearly symphonic in crescendos and decrescendos.
But as soon as I’m thinking of that, Doyle connects with his audience by asking us, “Who among you remembers potted meat?” Hands shoot up. This isn’t music. This is connective storytelling, and when you get down to the heart of the story, there’s nothing like it.
“I try to relate to the human condition,” Doyle tells me later, over coffee at the nearby Humble Grounds. “Those things that happened to you that happened to everybody else. It usually starts with some kind of seed from something that happened in my life. A lot of people struggle with this—you say, ‘I have nothing funny in my life,’ but you’re looking at too big a swath. Really what you’re looking for is that little seed, that one event that happened, and you just build around that.”
He also understands the pure entertainment factor of storytelling. After all, he got his start telling a story the old-fashioned way—beside a campfire at a father-child campout. A self-described “frustrated theater guy” who works as a contractor, he joined a storyteller’s guild in his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and began obsessively crafting his stories.
Like a good storyteller, he builds up to the delivery. “Here a storyteller’s secret,” he says. “You struggle with ‘Oh my God, that’s not really true, and then you get to a point where that doesn’t really matter.”
Step up to the mic
He’s telling me this, in part, because I have come to the festival to try my hand—well, my mouth—at the Amateur Open Mic competition, which is held in the morning before the New Voices (a dozen invited up-and-coming storytellers from all over the country) and Say What? Tall Tales, Whoppers and Lies (a contest to see who can spin the best yarn).
You can learn a lot at these “telling sessions.” The best of the New Voices will be invited back as Featured Storytellers the following year, and their stories are obviously well-crafted and intensely rehearsed. Amateur storytellers have a tight time limit—5 minutes. This prevents unnecessary tangents. I’ll be judged on presentation (5 points), stage presence (5 points), knowledge of material (5 points), originality (5 points) and creativity (5 points).
My story is called “The Drain Pipe,” and as I freely admit, it’s a story I’ve told many times, though never over coffee at a storytelling festival. It’s also true. As in: it’s not a whopper nor a lie nor a myth nor a tall tale nor a fabrication nor a taradiddle, which have all been described to me as a way of “ratcheting up the impossible,” or “seeing how far you can string them along.”
However, after listening to the professional storytellers the previous evening, I’ve stayed up half the night thinking about ways to improve my story with sound effects, audience interaction, returns to detail, and a positive moral message at the end.
My little story is about the time, as a child, I got washed down a storm drainpipe while exploring it with four friends (“Remember The Goonies?” I ask the audience). It was the summer of 1996 in Columbia, South Carolina, when an afternoon thunderstorm can come on you as quick as that (snap of fingers), and we twisted through the storm drain like we were at a Myrtle Beach waterpark (“Ever been to Wild Water & Wheels?”) except for the fear of death by drowning (pause for nervous laughter).
Finally, we washed out into a creek where we scrambled, wet and bloody and screaming, into a breakfast restaurant, where astonished retirees put down forkloads of grits (mimic the act of interrupted grit-eating). Soon, ambulances and cops descended upon us (sound effect of sirens) and pronounced us all safe. We went our own separate ways into life with nicknames like Drain-Boy and Drain-O (pause for laughter) until (sigh) two of the boys, in separate accidents in their 20s, passed away.
But (dramatic pause) the moral of this story is that, when I think back on my friends who are no longer with me, I think of it as a descent into darkness and a coming back again into light (pause for sniffles), and that stories—like this story—are what will always connect us.
To make a long story shorter, I’ll spoil the ending: I win the amateur hour.
But the bigger story is not about me. It’s how my one little story is one ingredient in the bigger soup bowl of stories I hear over the weekend. Stories in the voices of Greek queens. Japanese fairy tales. Hilarious beach vacation stories. Heroic journeys. Animal fables. Time machine invention tales (complete with magic tricks). Celtic myths. Family legends. Allegorical stories set in the mythical town of Big Fib.
Together, these are the voices that tell the larger story of the Stone Soup Storytelling Institute.
Or, in the words of its director, Page-Davies: “People recognize the utility of sharing your story or your experiences with somebody. The connection you make when you get personal. It brings community together.”
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Get There
The 2020 Stone Soup Storytelling Festival will take place April 17–19 at Project Muse, 134 South Main Street, Woodruff, SC 29388
For more information about the festival, visit stonesoupsc.org or email stonesoupkp@aol.com.