I can sometimes be found telling stories at rituals, gatherums, folk festi
vals and just among friends. Some people are stand-up comics in the evenings. My
dark secret is that I've been telling stories since November 1992.
People often ask me how one begins storytelling... and I can't honestly say.
You just unhinge your mind, fix your audience with one of those looks and
let rip. Part performance, part monologue the real art of storytelling c
omes from adapting yourself to your audience. When I tell a story, or more likel
y, when I let whatever it is inside me take over and tell stories, of healing, o
f power, of magic and loss, it's like I don't exist, I'm just following what co
mes naturally.
Tanais and the Spirit Wolf
Tanais the Fox tells a story about Magda Wolf and her brothers - and how they avoid a conflict by calling on a spirit wolf. It's loosely based around an old Welsh folk tale I read as a child... but with the addition of some Norse mythology thrown in for good measure. This was the first story I wrote in the series, and written for Kim, who's net.persona Magda Wolf touched me so deeply, I had to write something about her!
The Fox and Old Lady Crow
This is a story about a young cub who meets Old Lady Crow and learns the joys of storytelling. This is a story about friendship and loss... and provides a little background to Old Lady Crow. I wrote this on my first tour of the USA and premiered it at the 1994 Chicago Folk Festival. Unwittingly cornered by 50 expectant mothers, fathers and, of course, a horde of excited children, wanting "the English storyteller" I had no choice but to tell this one, and the Spirit wolf story on both nights.
The Moon Spirit and Coyote Woman
I really wanted to write a myth, in the classic tradition of the early and native folk tales, but with the added bonus of being a love story. Now, this is more than the usual 'Coyote-woman meets Spirit, Coyote-woman loses Spirit and then Coyote-woman follows Spirit-type story, I also wanted it to be a story about a story, and that's how I managed to squeeze Tanais into this one - he's telling the story to the moon... kinda Jungian, but it went down well when I read this in England over pizza and juice for the Solstice.
The Fledgling and Grandfather Fox
Old Lady Crow tells this story from her past. Ironically Tanais doesn't get to directly hear the story as it is told, but I wanted to get across how storytelling can be a healing thing - how the process of telling the story can be interpreted and seen as a very real form of magic. The story is told to Tanais on his sick-bed directly after the events in the Moon Spirit and Coyote Woman.
Tanais and the Dragon Cub
This is the story of Tanais adopting (or is it being adopted by?) a dragon cub. I read the picture-book, The minstrel and the dragon pup by Rosemary Sutcliff, a favourite storyteller of mine (now sadly passed on) and I was
so touched by the story (and fascinated by the fact that someone would call a dragon a "pup"
that I decided to have a go with a story of my own...
Innkeeper Badger's Long Journey
After a lapse of about seven months, I got a flash of inspiration and put some flesh on an outline which had been lying around on my laptop computer for almost a year. After the initial write-edit-rewrite cycle, it was plain sailing - developing the story and putting it onto the net took just a few days. It's not been told at a storytelling circle yet, but I'm confident that it will be soon.
