"The Harvest of Language"

"Language, for children as for the rest of us, is a chief pleasure giver. The riddle of human destiny, who we are and whither we go, may absorb our waking hours and cause us to sleep fitfully at night, but the story and the song help us, young and old, to live with the riddle. Those language happenings take us away from our musing and deliver us into another space and hour, while with the same breath they provide a commentary on the questions we ask: What is my self? Where is my self taking me?'

--Ramon R. Ross in Storyteller.

A Good Story

"In the main a good story should appeal to those emotions that are felt to be both true and desirable in childhood: humor, love of adventure, desire for courage, compassion, a sense of good fellowship, joyfulness, and fresh untrammeled imagination. It is of such substance that good stories are made." -Ruth Sawyer, in "How to tell a story".

Dinner out

The lights are lit... above a table of storytellers

Tales flow along with the wine...

how easily the time goes

when accompanied

with stories.

The Heirloom Story

"Family stories are tales about people, places, and events related to the members of our immediate family or their ancestors. Family stories casually chatted about at the dinner table, or regaled again and again at family gatherings can parallel great epics or notable short stories. The memorable stories of our lives and of others in our family take on special importance because they are true, even if everyone tells different versions of the same event. These tales are family heirlooms held in the heart not the hand. They are a gift to each generation that preserves them by remembering them and passing them on. " This quote is from an excellent post on "Collecting Family Stories at: http://www.storyarts.org/classroom/roots/family.html

The told story

"Storytelling is the oldest and surely one of the loveliest of the arts, and when the world was younger, lustier and, in not a few ways, better, than today, it was necessarily one of the most prized, so largely did all the peoples depend on it for their nightly entertainment....

The read story never did, never will come near the benefiting quality of the told story. Two of the essential good qualities of the latter, the former never can capture. The read story may be said to be a dead story, prone on the printed page, entombed between boards, while the told story is a very much alive story, glowing, appealing and dancing with energetic vitality -- the personality and inspiration that the good storyteller can always command into the tale he tells. While the read story may possess the value of the story alone, the told story carries, superimposed on it, the golden worth of a good storyteller's captivating art and enhancing personality -- trebling its wealth."

--from "About Storytelling" by Seumas MacManus.

We are all storytellers

"We all have stories: stories that are handed down in our families, stories and jokes that we hear and retell with small changes, and stories about things that happen to us...

Some of us are professional storytellers, some of us are amateurs, some tell out of choice and some out of necessity,

but we are all storytellers, even if the only stories we tell are stories about why we were late to work this morning."

--Nancy Schimmel, in "Just Enough to Make a Story".

2011 Wintertelling

What a fantastic variety of stories we heard at this year's Wintertelling!



You will be able to hear them too on CATS TV. Check the Channel 3 schedule for times and dates.

Our guests were welcomed by ladies from the library foundation, the sponsor of the program.

Before the stories began we had to figure out new microphones.

Various tellers warmed up in various ways.
Some with considerable energy.

Some sat in the back watching the audience gather and quietly letting their stories simmer in their minds.

And then it was time for tales...

and your photographer was so intrigued with the wonderful stories that she did not get ANY pictures at all of the telling!