“Okay, I’m going to tell you the story of how this happened.” That’s how Jimmy Neil Smith, the founder of the National Storytelling Festival and the President of the International Storytelling Center, began relating to me his narrative of the 36-year old festival itself, the result of a storytelling revival that he set in motion in the mid-‘70s.
It’s a phrase that began many of the events I attended in my weekend at the 2008 National Storytelling Festival as well as many conversations with its residents, visitors, and tellers. Perhaps Jonesborough, the Tennessee town which hosts the festivities, has a “Once upon a time” quality of its own that gets to people, or maybe I started noticing that real communication mostly happens in swapping stories.
My roommate/photographer companion, Isa, and I set foot in Jonesborough early on Saturday morning, October 4th, still groggy from the five-hour drive from Nashville and a cold night of camping—college-style travel. I was eager to get the day started, but it took some directing to get us to our press passes, which were at the media table in the log cabin on Main Street.
I was charmed by the anachronism of keeping contemporary news materials in a building that’s roughly as old as our country, but after exploring the four square blocks which held the tale-seeking multitudes for an historic weekend a year, I was persuaded by Jonesborough’s way of doing business. Traffic was closed for the annual celebration, and red brick sidewalks flanked stores ranging from an independent coffeehouse to a Christmas shop. On the old white courthouse was a plaque with the Ten Commandments.
It all recalled, if you’ll pardon the cliché, a simpler time, a concept which was more fiction than fact to a 21-year old Los Angeles native, anyhow. But I sensed a different atmosphere at the festival, and it took the whole weekend and innumerable stories—both scheduled and spontaneous—for me to understand the energy of the National Storytelling Festival. I felt an automatic community with everyone there, all of us one audience as the tellers performed.
The National Storytelling Festival features tellers of all sorts. Storytellers come as young as the children featured in the “Youthful Voices” presentation and as ancient as Kathryn Windham, 90 this year. They visit from Britain, or they come over from Africa. But I was astounded by the number of storytellers from small communities, places which seem to breed a level of entertainer and empathizer unlike any other. Tellers like Donald Davis, who spoke of his childhood in the Appalachian mountains, and Kevin Kling, who infused each story with his “dontcha know” voice and Midwestern humor, invited us into their hearts and homes.
No one explained this phenomenon better than the first teller I had the pleasure to hear, Elizabeth Ellis. Standing at her microphone in the packed conference-style tent, pursing her lips and stretching her neck like an old turtle, she opened with a joke and closed with a fairy tale. Somehow, because of everything in the middle, I was both smiling and crying by the end. I remember a line she’d repeated: “Working with people is a contact sport.” Storytelling acknowledges this, and engaging another person in one’s life or imagination acknowledges the link between any two people.
I spoke to tellers, administrators, and visitors, but every interview became a conversation, an exchange of thoughts and tales. I’m going to attribute this to the National Storytelling Festival. “We’re all storytellers, and we live our lives through a network of stories,” explained President Smith. “Storytelling is the most effective tool for powerful communication, and everybody has it.” I left Jonesborough with an awareness of the stories that unfold in each of our lives, alert both to the extraordinary experience I’d had and the newfound magic of the moment. If you see each person as a story, not a stranger, the world seems about as small as Jonesborough, Tennessee.
