The fourth annual Possum Town Storytelling Festival begins this evening, with seven events over four days, concluding Sunday afternoon.
The festival offers everything from performances from a trio of professional storytellers to storytelling with children (featuring Mother Goose, naturally), family storytelling, storytelling through music and a seminar/workshop (tonight at 6:30 at Rosenzweig Arts Center) for those who want to pick up some tips on how they can make their own storytelling more compelling.
While the festival is four years old, storytelling has been around as long as people began living in groups and sharing a common language.
In some cultures, including many Native American tribes where there was no written language, storytelling was far more than a source of entertainment. It was a way to preserve culture, history, even methods for survival. Through stories, younger generations learned farming, hunting, medicine — the essential information.
Even in modern culture, the importance of storytelling can not be overestimated. The literary greats of our time are, essentially, storytellers, and while the nature of storytelling may have evolved over the generations, we find that storytelling remains a powerful tool. Today, storytelling helps shape public opinion like little else.
That’s hardly a new idea, though.
In his time, Jesus used the art of storytelling like few others, before or since. Parables they were called, stories filled with allegory used to make relevant what, for the audience of his day, may have otherwise seemed abstract ideas.
Like all great storytellers, those parables were filled with people and situations the audience could relate to. The stories were also rich in unexpected twists and turns that kept the audience hanging on every word, waiting to see what would happen next, how it would all turn out. Some undoubtedly understood the larger message to be taken from the simple story. Others may have missed it.
That, too, remains an aspect of storytelling that continues into modern culture: To an adult reader at the time of its publication, “Huckleberry Finn” was immediately recognized as a tale of subversion, a powerful political commentary. For the child, it was simply a captivating adventure story.
Obviously, not all storytelling is quite that ambitious, nor should it be. If crafted well and told well, even a simple story with a simple message touches us in some way.
In our family, the great storyteller was my cousin Frankie, a baggage handler at the Memphis airport, who never went to college, took a creative writing class or was even much of a reader.
Every July 4, my father’s large family gathered in Ripley for our family reunion, a day-long orgy of food — catfish and hushpuppies fried in a big cast-iron pot under the shade of the pines, gallons of lemonade in a big galvanized wash pan, chilled by big blocks of ice, an endless array of homemade cakes, pies, vegetables and casseroles prepared by large, boisterous aunts who knew a thing or two about country cooking.
But the highlight of those celebrations was Frankie. He always arrived late, as if to build anticipation. Without fanfare, he would mingle and greet everyone before eventually wandering over to an empty lawn chair in the shade and begin.
It was as though he was merely wondering out loud rather than delivering performance. The stories would tumble out, most of them about the people who were gathered there under the pines. He had a way of recognizing the quirks and foibles, obsessions and blind spots of his large family. His stories were always good-natured, kind, even sweet and always fall-out-of-your-chair funny. It was a special thrill to find yourself a subject of one of his stories.
The annual reunion is long gone now. We no longer gather under those pine trees to stuff ourselves with food, catch up with family members and, above all else, listen to Frankie’s stories.
But the memories of those gatherings still resonate, and, for both personal and professional reasons, I find Frankie’s stories to be far more important than I could have imagined all those years ago.
Today, much of what I can recall about my extended family — most of whom I haven’t seen in two decades or more, many of them dead for years — is a result of listening to Frankie’s stories.
Maybe there is a “Frankie” in your family, too. I certainly hope so.
If not, this week’s storytelling festival might be a good substitute.
I know it’s the kind of event Frankie would have loved. He would be in his natural element, even without the catfish and lemonade.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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