Stories… March 27, 2008

Folk Tales is a monthly evening of story, music and other random acts which I discovered a few months ago and has substantially added to the already copious amounts of joy in my life. Last night there was a lovely French man making a wall of sound with the aid of us all clapping (fairly) rhythmically, a lovely guy who’d recently been on the TV show ‘Upstaged’ who did a lovely musical piece telling the life story of someone he’d met on a train, celebrating the ‘ordinary’ which is always nice…

There was a gorgeous story about a levitating princess and an amazing guitarist or two. It’s such a lovely atmospheric venue and great mixture of music, stories, songs, joy, moving moments and there’s also chocolate biscuits. Check out their site on MySpace.

We were so inspired that a few of us are re-waking the Bristol Storytelling Cafe open mic night at La Ruca from its dormancy, due to restart May 15th so please do come…

We’re also organising a fundraiser for the Precious Drops breast milk for neonatal babies fundraising appeal – a Celebration of Life evening of music, stories and comedy and there’s an adult Pirate Night in the offing (June 12th at the Landsdown) – evening of sea shanties, stories and music, pirate dress optional.

ABC of your locality – an idea for kids March 2, 2008

   

If you haven’t been badgered by me to visit England in Particular’s site or it’s sister site Common Ground, go visit it! It’s all about your locality and celebrating the vernacular. I’ve just finished a booklet on storytelling and landscape / locality and the author put forward the idea that part of the imminent environmental catastrophe is that we’ve forgotten how to hold the land in any sort of reverance. From their website:
When you have lived or worked in a place for a long time you may cease to notice it unless something happens to jolt you. It might be the sun glinting on a stone wall revealing the fossils in it, discovering that the street name cheap indicates a market place which explains the wide pavements, the felling of an ancient and much loved tree which makes you look more closely at the remaining mature trees in the place.

Understanding what makes our place different from the next, what accumulations of story upon history upon natural history give it its uniqueness may help us to maintain a relationship which ensures a future for local distinctiveness. Attachment to place is a prerequisite to endeavour on its behalf.

Creating an ABC liberates us from classifying things as rare or beautiful to demonstrate what we care about in the everyday. It is useful in that it levels everything, it reshuffles things and juxtaposes them in ways that surprise and make you think. This can change what we see, disperse our complacency, make things we take for granted seem new to us and encourage us to action.

Competition answer… February 1, 2008

Yes it was in fact the answer is…. Lord of the Rings, the story which contains all 7 basic plots (and it’s more complicated than that with subplots completing some of these and yes, many of you may in fact be right in saying that Sleeping Beauty and several other fair tales seem to incorporate these plots too…) But I’m going with Lord of the Rings ’cause that’s what it said in the book… Well done Jules of Horfield, Bristol. Here was her thinking…
1. Overcoming the monster – the evil Sauron.
2. Rags to riches – Aragon becomes the king.
3. The Quest – Travelling across Middle Earth to destroy the ring.
4. Voyage and return – As above really. I think the hobbits get back to Hobbiton in the end don’t they?
5. Comedy – Not sure about this. Do funny characters count. If so Merry and Pippin are fairly amusing at times. Oh and Gimli too.
6. Tragedy – Death of various characters. Unrequited love of Aragon and Arwen etc
7. Rebirth – Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White after meeting a Balrog.

Competition! January 25, 2008

I’d like to share one of my Christmas presents with you (well not literally of course because it’s mine, mine, mine) – a book called ‘The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories’*

Long ago, before children, when Nige and I used to talk about profound things like the universe and stuff rather the regularity of the children’s bowels and such like, we used to ponder the question of the so-called ‘42 stories’ – that there were only 42 plots or stories in the world we used to wonder what they might be. Try as I might I couldn’t find anything on this until I found this book which has narrowed down the plots still further and they are:

1. Overcoming the Monster
2. Rags to Riches
3. The Quest
4. Voyage and Return
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth

The author struggled for a while with a whole bunch of stories that didn’t fit until he’d realised they were within the basic plot of ‘Voyage and Return’. The interesting points (so far, I’m on the first chapter of a very fat and daunting book).

• That the plots in stories from 1000s of years ago to the modern day and in totally different cultures are scarily similar – Cinderella alone is retold in over 2000 different ways in cultures from the frozen north to Ancient Egypt. This he seems to be attributing to a Jungian style ’sea of consciousness’ type idea, that we all have certain processes in our psyches which mean we would all share similar needs and therefore tell stories in similar ways
• he, uniquely draws on modern popular stories such as Jaws (which mirrors the classic Beowulf very closely) as well as literary greats, generally studies of this kind have only dealt with so-called classics
• and the scary bit is that in the last 100 years or so stories have started to ‘go wrong’ or literally ‘lose the plot’, the twists and turns which have featured in the different genres have gone and the stories ‘jar’. He explains this later on in the book but hey, I’m a slow reader and not there yet but it sounds a bit sinister and apocalyptic to me… I’ll keep you informed

And now for the competition! Which story has all 7 of the basic plots within it? Answers on an email… (please do, so many of you say you read this blog but you don’t feel shy about posting). The prize is a copy of Barefoot Books‘ version of Lafontaine’s (the inventor of the fable?) Hare and the Tortoise AND a packet of very posh hare and tortoise shaped organic kids biscuits – fancy eh? I’m also doing a second prize of Barefoot’s Tales of Odysseus which is fab (that’s not the answer by the way).

*incidentally if you buy from Amazon via my links here I stand to make about 5p per book so please do bear it in mind, every little helps as the nice people at Tesco like to say…

Dates for your diary January 21, 2008

         

• National Storytelling Week begins – 26 January – in Bristol this has manifested itself as the Bristol Storytelling Festival
  
• Shrove Tuesday (Barefoot Book recommendation: Mama Panya’s Pancakes is a great book with a Kenyan pancake recipe!) – 7 Feb

• Chinese New Year – 7 Feb (recommends Great Race)

• World Book Day – 6 March
• St Patrick’s Day – 17 March (Paula recommends Barefoot’s Tales of Old Ireland)
• Vegetarian Week – 19 May (Barefoot’s Herb The Vegetarian Dragon!)

Stories December 12, 2007

So I used to love stories about big events and important people – historical figures, myths and the like. Now that I’ve become a mum I love the stories of everday people, of seemingly trivial events which actual affect everyday life more than we know. I walked back from school today, a routine and mundane task.

I passed mums with stories of their own: battles to find meaningful work they can feel passionate about; struggles to get the attention their child with special needs requires; marital problems; traumatic births; those suffering with grief of many kinds; dealing with issues raised from their own childhoods; those with partners from far off lands with stories of their own; stories of forgotten loves; of travels and adventures both past and to come; women and men with talents, secrets, desires and dreams.

So when you next feel your life as a parent is mundane, try looking for the stories.

Synchronicity: Buttons November 7, 2007

I love it when you think of something then there seem to be a series of serendipitous (oh hark at me with my long words!) events on the same topic. So here’s my latest one.

I met a friend, fellow Barefoot Books lover and semi-professional storyteller for a drink and she was telling me that she was going to be doing the story of the Blue Coat in assembly the next day – a Jewish story from The Story Tree by Hugh Lupton, a Barefoot anthology of 7 gorgeously illustrated stories with an amazing audio CD read by Hugh (well-known storyteller). The Blue Coat is about a mother who makes her son a blue coat and he loves it, runs and skips and jumps and plays in it but when it wears out she makes a waistcoat, a button and a series of increasingly small items from it, I won’t spoil the ending if you don’t know it (though you can buy the book here of course!).

The next day I went to see Hugh Lupton at the Bath Children’s Literature festival and of all the stories he could have done, he did this story. Well I Googled stories about buttons when I got home as I felt a bit of an affinity with that button and found a storyteller who used buttons as a way to get ideas for stories – by asking children which, of a pot of vintage and usual buttons, they liked and why and if they reminded the children of anything.

I planned to use my friend’s idea of having a piece of blue card cut in the shape of a coat and actually cut the card during the story so I set about ebaying vintage buttons for the story prompt idea and a big blue button for that part of the Blue Coat story. I ordered buttons from a woman who I then got virtually friendly with who loved the idea of the use of the buttons, had a 5 year old and set about investigating my Barefoot Books site.

The next day my friend emailed me to see if I wanted to take our kids to the theatre to see… The War of the Buttons, an old story about a school where children were involved in gang fighting etc.

And visiting the school office I was reminded that our school secretary is called… Mrs Button.

What’s your story? October 16, 2007

So I’m reading ‘Secrets of Happy Parents: How to have kids and stay in love’ by Steve Buddulph, quite a title! I’m a bit of a self-help / non-fiction junky, partly because I become too damned embroiled in fiction and can’t quite extract it from my daily life (I’m the type who cried in Home and Away when whatever her name was finally died of leukemia all those years ago). Anyway here are his valuable lessons (so far):

Lesson 1: we all have 3 parts to our personality (according to some psychologist or other) – Child, Parent and Adult. Child would delight at the pudding trolley at a restaurant (do they still have such things?), Parent would worry over calories and nutrition, Adult would rationalise and say a little won’t hurt. Each of us have all 3 but in different measures – some of us are more playful, others overly sensible, others nagging and authoritarian. When we meet partners and friends they all interplay and ruts develop where you might ‘Parent’ a partners ‘Child’, changing which one you lead with can help get out of these ruts.

Lesson 2: Recyling – all of us recycle our parents ’stuff’ and all their sayings reactions etc come out when we have kids (surprise surprise) but what was interesting was that it is triggered at the ages it happened to us so that a man who had got on with his kids for many years saw them all run away, in turn, at 14. When asked by a counsellor why he ran away at 14, he was shocked, but the family counsellor knew that this might well have been the case and that the boys reaching this age triggered this issue in the family. Knowing at what age certain feelings or events arose is very helpful, something reiterated by Oliver James who wrote ‘They F*** You Up’, also geared towards finding out as much about your childhood as you can so you can work through it and be free to bring up your kids as you actually wish to, not are programmed to.

Which brings me neatly to Family Storytelling Day, a lighter look at families and their stories! I’m reading Neil Griffiths ‘Are you Sitting Comfortably, Then I shall Begin’, a guide to storytelling from the inventor of Storysacks (sacks of books, games, activities, DVDs and puppets to bring stories alive for young children). It occurred to me, while reading it, that the stories my kids love best of all (bearing in mind that I sell the gorgeous Barefoot Books and that we have groaning shelves of amazing stories) are those about our family. The most popular of these include, but are not limited to:

• the time Nana (my mum) left the goose fat cooking on the hob and nearly burnt down the house with my sister (then a baby) in it
• the time Nige drove over Grandpa’s foot with a tractor
• the time I ate a piece out of 45 chocolate Easter eggs while staying on a ranch with my family in Canada (age 4) when I got up early one morning to see this amazing display
• the time Nige and I got snowed in to a tiny village in Alaska that was only accessible by plane
• the time I slept in a log cabin in Canada and saw a brown bear through the window
• the time I went with Dats (my dad) and caught a rabbit on the prairie outside our house
• the time i lost Gabe in a supermarket / car boot sale / park / festival (if you have a ‘runner’ you’ll understand that I’m not a rubbish parent

etc etc

So here’s my challenge: find a nice notebook and start taking notes. Interview your parents, siblings, whoever. Get dates, timelines, stories and family jokes. I started this with my parents but have got to both of them being about 35 (my age interestingly) but am aware that I want to get on with it before I can’t. I always wish I’d listened more carefully when I heard my grandmother talk about her sisters both dying of heartbreak (the first as her fiancee died and the second because her beloved sister died).

So record it or remember it before it’s too late!

Storytelling clothes July 29, 2007

I wanted to share with you my find! I’m doing some storytelling at Babington House, a swanky hotel in Somerset which is very family friendly and wanted a cool outfit. I was going to sew something but since the days, as a child, when I tacked my clothes together and they fell off rather promptly, my sewing has won no prizes. So I found this top, a story of its own!