But what do you hear?

‘The question is not what you look at but what you see.’ This is a quote I read recently by Henry David Thoreau. I would go further as a storyteller and add: ‘It is not what you listen to but what you hear!’

I’ve been to many storytelling sessions and listened to amazing tellers from around the world, and heard untold number of stories. Along with the rest of the audience, I take away so much from these events in terms parts of stories, questions about the tales, the characters, the meaning, the origins etc. And every story I have heard will have been interpreted differently by each listener. Some will not be remembered, some partially, and some will be held in the heart forever. And that is why storytelling is so important to me. Because, if a story can just make us think about ourselves and our place in the world a little differently, if we can question a choice, a path or a ‘norm’ just for a second before we make a decision, then storytelling has been effective.

I remember listening to some music many years ago. It was a piece of traditional folk music from an unfamiliar culture that had captured my emotions and imagination. (I still love it by the way.) As I listened to it, I was transported somewhere else - not necessarily to its’ place of origin, but somewhere unfamiliar. But that was shattered suddenly by a voice saying, “what in world is that caterwauling you’re listening to?” I laughed at the time, and still do when I think about it. It was so different from what many people thought of as my ‘usual’ choice of music. We listened to the same thing but heard it very differently. I head pure voices, pared back instruments and long, soaring notes. They heard squalling, screeching, undecipherable words without recognisable tunes. But there was no right of wrong, just perceptions.

Recently, I spent an amazing weekend in Oxford at the Ashmolean Museum with storyteller and historian Dave Tonge, ‘Transforming Traditional Tales. Participatants (not all storytellers), were guided through a selection of medieval tales and historic museum artifacts, learning to explore and try to understand the different perspectives of the stories being told, the times they were coming from and who had interpreted them. It was obvious from our discussions and the stories we then worked on, how what we all looked at, held and listened to was not necessarily what we actually saw, felt and heard. I will never look at a museum display in the same light again - in a good way. And similarly I have a new perspective on the stories I read and hear. I will be taking more time to appreciate and think about my source materials before working on a new telling. This will be my own version and therefore, a new generation of the same tale with acknowledgement to its ancestry or history.

Stories are living things. They have their own voices. It’s what you hear when you listen to that story that keeps it alive.

My current reading list:

The Fables of Ivan Krylov

The Eerie Book edited by Margaret Armour

Medieval Folk Tales for Children by Dave Tonge

MAL goes to War by Edward Ashton

The Long Song by Andrea Levy

The Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver