Burning Brightly: New Light on Old Tales Told Today

Lois Provost Turchetti is a professional children’s storyteller (in
English and Caribbean Creole), who also conducts educational workshops
in Toronto.

Stone’s initiation began with Grimm in 1947 and culminated with her
doctoral dissertation in 1974. Still captivated, she provides a detailed
exploration of this “ancient art” in North America.

From the coldly analytical wealth of material in response to research
questionnaires in Part 1 to the warm interviews with professional
tellers in Part 2, Burning Brightly defines the parameters of organized
telling in a range of styles, from “pure-telling” of the spoken word
to performance-oriented telling in which the teller’s persona is bound
up with “theatricality.” Even in today’s technologized society, a
teller initially finds her calling through a type of “conversion
experience.” Festivals provide the opportunity for self-definition
through promotion and the act of telling, but the primary power of the
art is subtly identified in “unity of the spirit” dynamics between
teller and tale, and between teller and listeners.

Though storytelling has been thought of in the 20th century as
belonging to the world of children, Stone sees the “paradigmatic”
work of the Storytellers School of Toronto as a catalyst for a
cross-cultural revival of a cross-generational genre across North
America. While touching on a Gaelic teller in translation, a
French–English teller, and the use of material from less common
sources such as Nanabush and Anansi tales, Stone identifies several
areas that are in need of further research and also comments briefly on
three problem areas: the conspicuous absence of Cajun, Métis,
Québécois, and other non–Anglo-Saxon tellers in this written work; a
subtle elitism among the educators at the movement’s grassroots; and
the transformation of horror endings to happy endings in the
visual–oral divide of Disneyesque commercialization.

For fellow tellers, librarians, teachers of language, and
anthropologists, Stone’s exploration provides insight into the psyche
of the teller. As modern-day prophets and priests of cultural tradition,
tellers seem to be leading the “invention of tradition” in an affair
with “romantic nationalism” that brings “self-definition”
full-circle from the “path into the woods” to the “union of inner
and outer realities.” In the end, it is remains clear that “the
story is more than the story.”