September 2001
September
is here. The steering committee has
been hard at work planning the 2001-2002 year.
Our goal was to set up an exciting series of topics to energize and
nurture our storytelling selves at our monthly gatherings. Here’s the schedule:
September 19th:
Have you ever been on the Fairy Tale Road in Germany? It’s a Grimm trip you’ll never forget! Join us as Edna and Jeff Price share the
wonders of their summer adventure to discover everything they could about the
folktales of the Brothers Grimm. This
will be a great way to get geared up for the Grimm Festival planned for the
upcoming year. Join us and get
involved! (If you can’t make it and are interested in the Festival, give Edna a
call, and she’ll fill you in)
October 17th:
“Finding and Learning the Story for You” We’ll be sharing all sorts of
storytelling resources. Books,
audiotapes, videos. . .our favorite tools for finding the stories that speak to
us and beg to be told. Bring along your
tried and true sources and introduce them to others!
November 14th: “Getting Into It” An evening of story
games and imagination exercises that will help you make your stories come alive.
December 19th:
Join us for a Winter Holiday Party; a joyful celebration of the season
and stories.
January 16th:
Doing Your Part: Finding and
telling audience participation stories.
Each meeting, we’ll spend part of our time on the scheduled topic,
then spend time sharing tales. Feel
free to bring stories at any stage, be they new ones you’d like to try out in a
supportive group or old favorites you’d like to polish.
This year, we are trying out a new meeting place and time. We’ll be meeting the 3rd
Wednesday of the month from 6-8 PM at McLane Elementary School. Please let us
know if you need help getting there.
We’d be glad to help set up carpooling if folks need
transportation. There may be times when
the 3rd Wednesday is unavailable at McLane (during school holidays,
for example). We’ll make sure to print
the schedule in the newsletter and note when a date is not the regular one.
Over the past year, the OSG has gone through a number of
changes. Aside from finding a new day,
time, and place to meet, we now have a steering committee to take care of
business. We’ve come up with a different
format for meetings, and we’ve even tweaked the guild’s mission statement. I was able to include paper copies of the
new guild flyer with newsletters send out by snail mail. You can take a look at this new document at
the next guild meeting, or send me a message and I can mail one out to you!
We on the steering committee hope that by taking care of
business-like details such as these, we are allowing other members to enjoy the
guild without being weighed down with large amounts of time-consuming
decision-making. However, we want everyone
to know that we are here for you! Do
you have comments, questions, concerns or ideas? Do you like the decisions we’ve been making? Please let us know. We want to make sure that the guild is
meeting the needs of all of its members, and we cannot do that without your
feedback.
Pat Mendoza will be visiting the area and providing a workshop
through the Storytelling Guild in Tacoma on Saturday September 22nd. Here’s the information Pat sent to the
Tacoma guild concerning the event:
This multicultural presentation is about the power of story, in
all its forms: oral traditions, song, music, dance, art and poetry to cross
cultural barriers, including people at risk. This
program will include segments on how to collect, create stories and collaborate
with others in an environment of learning. This presentation also deals with
the ups and downs in all of our lives and how story has the ability to
transform potentially volatile circumstance into one of peace (my eight years
experience as a police officer and 25 years as a full time professional
storyteller has given me a unique insight to at risk and violent persons). Participants will be taught how to be more
spontaneous (not actually an oxymoron) and how to create stories out of
anything. Participants will be included in a variety of exercises and
storytelling. The end result is that the teacher/ storyteller can now take
curriculum and transform it into story.
I will be performing part of the time to show how and where my
stories come from and how they are translated into song, music and dance (four
pieces I have composed have been choreographed into dance by the David Taylor
Dance Theatre of Denver and the Robert Ivy Ballet Company out of Charleston,
SC). Video will be used to show how I
have interviewed people, particularly the elderly. To be an effective
interviewer, one must learn to be patient and be a listener. Recordings and
music of other cultures i.e. Native American (Cheyenne, Lakota, Navajo,
Tlingit), Latino (Mexican, Cuban and South American), Celtic, Norse, African,
African American will be used to show that as different as we all are we are
the same. Also included is the business
of Storytelling. Fees, block booking, audition tapes and studio time.
The cost for this all day
workshop is $100. However, if more than
15 people sign up, the cost may go down.
If you are interested, please contact Pam Thompson at 253-572-8880.
November will be here before we know it, and with it comes our
yearly celebration of storytelling for grownups! Tellebration this year is scheduled for Friday November 9th
at Traditions Café in downtown Olympia.
We need lots of help to produce this wonderful event. We need people willing to work on the
following tasks:
Creating flyers, posters, and press
releases
Distributing publicity
We also need people who want to:
Tell stories at the event
Be the MC for the event
Collect money at the door
Please let us know what you can do to help! Give one of the Steering Committee a call or
better yet, come to the September meeting and tell us in person!
This year’s Stories In The Park was a great success. Thank you to everyone who helped make it
possible. I believe we counted around
180 people for the family tales, and slightly fewer for the spooky
stories. I’ve received quite a few
compliments on the evening from audience members as well as from the parks and
recreation staff. Again, many many
thanks to all for such a positive contribution to our community.
A couple of weeks ago, my computer was struck by a nasty
virus. I spent many days with a
tremendous knot in my stomach thinking about all the files that had been
destroyed. My computer is once again
working, but all of my files were lost.
As I was combing through various guild files to recompile a mailing
list, I came across a number names I didn’t recognize from my lost computer
file. I came to realize that it is very
likely that when I took over the newsletter duty last year, that I managed to
overlook people who should have been getting newsletters all along. If there are any such folks out there,
please accept my apologies. It is hard
to be thankful for a computer virus, but if it has led me to people who have
been inadvertently out of the storytelling loop for the past year, I’m
glad. However, there is also the
chance that some addresses are now lost somewhere in cyberspace. I’d really appreciate it if everyone could
check in with friends who are guild members to make sure they received their
newsletter. Hopefully, this sort of
thing won’t happen again any time soon, and if it does, I’ve learned my lesson
and will have my files backed up regularly!
September is the time to renew your guild membership!
With your membership, you will continue to receive the monthly
newsletter and you will have the option of being listed on our 2001-2002
resource list of tellers. This year’s
list will be widely distributed to schools, libraries, etc. The list will also be prominently displayed
on our new website. But remember, these
benefits are only for members in good standing! The cost to join the guild is $10 for an individual, $15 for a
family. At the end of this e-mail,
you’ll find a membership form. Please
fill it out and send it off to Rebecca Hom, our treasurer (the address is on
the form). We’ll be reworking our
active members list and our resource list of tellers at the beginning of
November, so get your dues in by October 31!
Are you hooked up to the Internet? If so, check out www.angelfire.com/folk/osg. Blayne has been adding all sorts of guild
info to the site. It is still under
construction, so feel free to let us know what you’d like to see!
Please get in touch with one (or more) of us with any questions,
ideas, concerns, etc. that you may have!
Also, if you know of folks who would like to receive the Resource List
of Tellers by mail, all of these folks have copies to send out.
Blayne Borden: 570-0944
Rebecca Hom: 866-6308
Mari Nowitz: 705-8054
Edna and Jeff Price:
754-8796
