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The bones of story.

Article Excerpt
"Silence was the older and better part of custom still."

House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday

Long ago there lived, in the classroom where I used to teach storytelling, a skeleton. It was a real skeleton--this is a true story. No one knew where it came from or why it was there, but I assumed it had to do with the adjacent department of speech and hearing. In any case, I lectured to that skeleton extensively on folklore, and in turn it taught me two life-and-death lessons. The first was about bones, and the second was about the space between bones. At first, I applied these lessons to storytelling in a technical sense, but as my concept of story broadened, the lessons have deepened in importance and meaning. The story I am telling here traces that journey of understanding, from the classroom to the wider world. The story also tracks my movement as a folklorist from one theoretical perspective to another--from structural to contextual analysis--and shows yet again how much teachers can learn in the process of teaching.

In the beginning was the word bones, which suggested to me the term bones of story. The bones of a story are its basic elements, as identified informally by the storyteller. Once she has absorbed the bones of a story, she can improvise its details and bring it to life in response to, or rather in partnership with, a variety of listeners on a range of occasions. The formal equivalent of bones in a structural study of folklore would be motifs and tale types--and folktales are a good starting point for a storyteller exactly because their vertebrate structure is so strong. But whether the telling is of a traditional or an original tale, every oral account is an individual re-creation both appropriating and elaborating basic elements, a delicate balance of retention and invention.

Many start-up storytellers labor under the misapprehension that they must memorize stories, an idea sometimes perpetrated in earlier, more formal eras of library education for youth services and unfortunately still prevalent enough to frighten some children's librarians away from what is arguably the most important, creative, and gratifying aspect of programming. Rote memorization is the antithesis of oral flexibility, which allows the shaping of stories in a creative intersection of text and context, of story and audience. Struggling to remember someone else's words often leads to forgetting the story, inhibiting expression, losing the listener, and generating concern about failure. Storytelling is different in this way from performances of memorized music or play scripts, though it does bear some resemblance to improvisational theater.

To teach a course in storytelling is to discover that every person has tales to tell, in one way or another, to a world that waits to hear, in one way or another. The students and I were getting to be ever-better storytellers, but we were also discovering how important the narrative process is, from birth to burial. We could not explore storytelling without going down the garden path of folklore, including personal narratives and oral history....

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