National Storytelling Conference
2012 Conference Workshops
Listed alphabetically by title.
*Subject to change.
All Together Now: Crafting and Telling Audience Participation Tales
Mary Hamilton
You’ve seen audiences join in -- chanting, singing, helping tell the story. But how does it work? Learn how to adapt stories to increase participation, how to invite participation, and how to smoothly control participation. If you’ve been afraid to try audience participation storytelling, or if you like telling audience participation style but use only the tales you’ve heard from other storytellers, this workshop will help you learn to create your own audience participation retellings.
Always Say ‘Yes”: Improv for Storytellers
Rick Huddle
Improvisation can bring spontaneity to your performances, help you deal with interruptions, and make you more comfortable on-stage (and in the rest of your life). In this “hands-on” workshop, we’ll play, play, play improv games and discuss how they can help in real-life, on-stage situations. Learn how to say “yes” to challenges, create a story from scratch, give depth to characters, and connect more closely with your audience.
Beyond Words: Wake Up Your Expressive Potential
Noa Baum
It’s not just what you say, but how you say it that creates a memorable story.
Raise your performance skills to a new level. Join this interactive workshop to expand your creative potential and explore performance skills that release the power of stories. Use your physical presence, body and voice, to bring a wider range of expression to your storytelling skills and deepen connections with your listeners. Come ready to move, play and have fun!
Chinese Teahouse Telling: history, a sampling of styles and genre
Cathryn Fairlee
Even Chinese Americans usually tell folk tales and do not use classical storytelling techniques from China as it is a tradition that did not cross the ocean.
This session will be an inspiration of exposure to different performance skills for all levels of storyteller, as well as increasing telling authenticity and understanding of another culture. Listening to these months-long classical tales told while the listeners sip tea for two hours each day was a way of life for 400 years in China. Cathryn, who has been studying In China since 1977 will give history, share slides, and tell a story to compare with a DVD of a Chinese master performing the same story.
Forget Memory - Try Imagination! Timeslips™ Storytelling for Memory Loss
Liz Nichols
The TimeSlips™ creative storytelling method opens storytelling to everyone, by replacing the pressure to remember with encouragement to imagine. Come learn an easy, comfortable way to share your love of story with people whose cognitive challenges don’t allow them to enjoy performances, “reminiscence,” or other more traditional forms of storytelling. Tips to communicate, encourage, affirm, and weave a loved one’s or a group’s responses to a stimulating photograph into a poetic story collage.
Free Hugs at 12,000 Feet: Sharing Joy through Story
Kristin Pedemonti
From Free Hugs to Bubbles on the Subway, Pedemonti shares tips for finding joyful stories in a sometimes worried world. Pedemonti recipient of NSN 2011 International StoryBridge Award shares her journey toward joy through storytelling. Often story is used to tackle tough issues, important, absolutely, although sometimes we forget the joy story can elicit in others. Discover your Inner Joy through stories in your life and learn how to help others accentuate the positive.
Hard Times Don’t Scare Me None: Remembering Gamble Rogers
Willy Claflin
Gamble Rogers (1937-1991) was a national treasure, dearly beloved in the storytelling world. He died at age 54, trying to save a drowning man, but his work lives on. There’s hardly a national teller alive today who hasn’t been influenced, consciously or not, by his humor, inflections, and amazing use of language. Come hear some of Gamble’s most hilarious tales, listen to his songs, and learn more about this extraordinary southern gentleman.
Hero’s Journey: The Cancer Stories Project
Joseph Sobol, Kenny Tedford, and Saundra Kelley
This demonstration performance/workshop will show you how to use the Hero’s Journey model to craft compelling stories from the universal experience of illness. Based on a seven-year collaborative study between the ETSU Storytelling Graduate Program, Medical School and Department of Clinical Oncology, we have employed Campbell’s model as a template, conducting extensive interviews with patient volunteers and shaping the transcripts into oral history performances to convey the heart of the Cancer Journey.
How to Pack Your Event without Using the Internet
Slash Coleman
Does the idea of using Facebook, Twitter, and sending out endless emails to fill your next event frustrate you? Learn how to design an effective marketing plan based on word-of-mouth that is guaranteed to pack your next event. Using time-tested traditional methods, you’lll discover how to fill every seat in the house, keep audience members coming back again and again and best of all - leave your computer turned off.
Jackie Torrence: One of Our Heroes Still Lives On
Diane Ferlatte and Bobby Norfolk
“I want to be like Jackie Torrence” was – and still should be – a common phrase among storytellers. Her style, her wit, her voice, her expressive hands and face; her relationship to the audience and to her stories – we should ALL aspire to be like Jackie!
In this performance / discussion / reminiscence / celebration of Jackie’s work, Diane and Bobby will honor one of the most beloved and important inspirational forces in the rejuvenation of storytelling.
Kathryn and Me: The Art of Conversation as Performance
MaryGay Ducey
Kathryn Windham was interviewed before an audience five times at five National Storytelling Festivals. The sessions celebrated an extraordinary woman and storyteller. The conversational interview can result in a faceted portrait, unstaged and immediate. Not an oral history, but a distant cousin, the artist’s interview offers a fresh approach in programming. Join in and learn the fundamentals of good interviewing and get some practice. No harm in having little fun either . Kathryn did.
Learn to Fish Successfully in Today’s Funding Streams
The NSN Grants Committee
Where is funding for storytellers, and how can we get it? This interactive workshop will explore the ever-changing stream, addressing where to find appropriate grants and other funding, how to do effective research, and how to match your project with funders’ questions and requirements. Also provided: top tips for writing proposals, and an insider’s view of NSN funding possibilities. We will provide not only fish, but also fishing lessons.
Let Your Books Be Your Dining Table: Cooking Up Stories from Books
Carol Birch
A quote from the 1st century attributed to St. Ephrem is:
“Let books be your dining table,
And you shall be full of delights.
Let them be your mattress,
And you shall sleep restful nights.”
Books offer up the world’s finest stories in folktales, biographies, histories and fictions. How can storytellers effectively prepare aurally satisfying stories from written texts? This workshop offers information on clearing copyright through an examination of editing and ethical issues.
On the Shoulders of Giants: Finding Meaning in Storytelling Mentorships
Adam Booth with mentor, Dovie Thomason and panel
Sit, watch, listen, think, and learn! So often people enter the world of ‘professional’ storytelling without the slightest consideration of the importance of storytelling heritage. This panel will serve as a platform for pairs of storytelling mentors and protégés to share their ongoing work in passing storytelling traditions and heritage. Time will be devoted to prepared questions about pairing practices and mentorship focus as well as to answering audience questions about the act of mentorship.
Opening Adult Learning Spaces: Storytelling in Classrooms of All Types
Jo Tyler
Classrooms don’t stop being natural venues for storytelling when the participants are adults instead of children. Too often, though, in organizational and higher education settings the stories only flow in one direction. We know the richest grist for learning lies in the participants’ stories, but how do we elicit them? This workshop explores practical techniques to converting classrooms to safe storytelling spaces, fostering even very difficult stories, to deepen participants’ learning on any topic.
Opening the Doors: Effective Advocacy for the Art of Storytelling
The NSN ART Force
Learn how to be a better advocate for our art form and enhance the image of storytelling to serve yourself and your colleagues. The members of this panel have succeeded in promoting storytelling in such settings as schools, libraries, workplaces, medical facilities, government agencies, grant-making organizations, and performance venues. They will share techniques you can use to advance your own career and promote the art of storytelling to benefit the whole profession.
Passion, Creativity, Politics: The Journey of the American Storytelling Renaissance
Connie Regan-Blake and panel
Come hear the tale of our modern storytelling movement. From the first National Storytelling Festival in 1973, to this moment, who are the icons that inspired America to re-discover storytelling? As a passionate, creative organization, where have we been, why have we stumbled, how have we grown? By reflecting back, our vision for the future is informed and illuminated. Led by Connie Regan-Blake and a panel of respected national tellers and leaders.
Producing Storytelling Now: Festivals
Judith Heineman and The Timpanogos Storytelling Institute
Whether big or small, a first timer or an old hand, there are some basics every Festival producer deals with. This workshop will take you through the check list of what to do to make your festival a success.
Raising the Bar of Leadership: Storytelling in Businesses and Organizations
Judith Black
Storytelling is an enormously effective tool for raising the bar of leadership, community building, problem solving, and creating consensus. Because it engages the head, heart, and mind simultaneously, stories enables us to address issues and pose possibilities that a linear approach could not offer. This general session introduces participants to the power and possibilities of using storytelling as a tool for communication and inspiration in the work place.
Raising Voices: Creating Youth Storytelling Groups and Troupes
Judy Sima
Based upon seventeen years directing a non-competitive, community service oriented student storytelling troupe and her award-winning book, Judy’s interactive workshop presents practical ideas for helping young people become confident storytellers. Learn how to organize your group and encourage young storytellers through games, activities, chants, a structured story-learning process, and how to take them on the road. Come away with a story, a string, an extensive handout and ideas you can use tomorrow.
Self-Coaching: Explorations in Beginnings, Endings and Dialogue
Rona Leventhal
So...you have this story that you really like…… now what?! Let’s play with some of those “sticky” places when working up a story for telling with a focus on techniques for starting and ending a story, and getting beyond “he said, she said”! Let’s dig in and get our hands dirty in an atmosphere of supportive exploration! Bring a story you want to work with or use a story I will bring. (intensive)
Selling Stories, NOT Snake Oil
Karen Chace, Elizabeth Ellis, Linda Gorham, with Greg Weiss, moderator
Though we tell tall tales, we shouldn’t run our business like one. A successful storyteller runs a savvy, smart and ethical operation. Yet, we sometimes fall prey to practices that undermine our professional presence. Karen Chace, Elizabeth Ellis and Linda Gorham will speak on the topics —embracing new media/technology in your marketing, who is your “staff”, and honesty/integrity in your business practices. Join us for what will surely be a lively, informative discussion.
Standing the Tests of Time: Storytelling Traditions of Scottish Gypsies
Ruth Canonico
Once in a lifetime, we meet someone who lives entirely in the world of narratives; stories and songs that nourish the teller more than food. The Scottish (Gypsy) Travelers Duncan Williamson and Stanley Robertson generously shared with the world their family’s most precious inheritance. Ruth Canonico shares those meetings and memories in story and song with you, eye to eye, mind to mind, and heart to heart.
So You Want to Slam?
Norah Dooley, massmouth
massmouth is dedicated to promoting storytelling in everyday life. Our story slam events in Boston, Massachusetts smashed off-putting misperceptions about the art of storytelling and filled venues while bringing many new people to the art. A story slam encourages a teller to practice, focus and tell something that is paying—audience—worthy. And themed events encourage people with interesting life experience to learn to represent themselves. We’ll cover the process, technical aspects and best practices of story slams.
Take Home Stories from the Ohio River Valley
Margaret Read MacDonald
Hands-on learning of four folktales with Ohio River country roots. You leave ready-to-tell these delightful audience-participation tales. Great for beginning storytellers!
Taking it on the Road without becoming Road Kill!
Kevin Kling and Loren Niemi
Join storyteller, Kevin Kling and PRO-SIG Chair, Loren Niemi, as they go through the check-list of the before, during and after do's and don'ts for a successful storytelling tour from the artist and the producer's point of view.
Telling the Stories of the Heroes among Us
Sara Armstrong
Let's focus on the good news: heroes and heroism--stories that need to be told and shared. We will explore good acts and the people who make them, along with places to share those stories, and curriculum ideas for the classroom. The MY HERO Project will be featured, which offers free materials and resources, and is a repository of stories, short films, and artwork created by a global community of children and adults.
The Wisdom Path: The Future of Folk Tales and Tellers
Dovie Thomason and Rafe Martin, with panel
Are folk tales simply the collective wisdom of the Past? Researched, reclaimed and revived? In this Present, are stories being told drawn more heavily from personal narrative, presented as a new evolution of story? Are present “folks” creating a new generation of tales that will instruct, guide and shape communities of the Future? Will folk tales and folk-tellers endure? Will personal narratives endure beyond the present teller? What legacy shall we leave for the Future?
