Storytelling has been the subject of numerous manuals and textbooks for American readers. Early works include The Art of the Storyteller by Marie Shedlock (1915), The Manual of Stories by William Forbush (1915), Story-telling for Upper Grade Teachers by Allen Cross and Nellie Margaret Statler (1918), and The Way of the Storyteller by Ruth Sawyer (1942). The last thirty years has seen a reinvigoration of storytelling in the United States, this time as a professional movement, and this “renaissance” has been accompanied by another surge in storytelling manual publication, including Caroline Feller Bauer’s Handbook for Storytellers (1977), Augusta Baker and Ellin Greene’s Storytelling: Art and Technique (1977), Jack Maguire’s Creative Storytelling (1985), Gail de Vos’ Storytelling for Young Adults: Techniques and Treasury (1991), Margaret Read MacDonald’s The Story-teller’s Start-up Book (1993), Doug Lipman’s Improving Your Storytelling (1999), and R. Craig Roney’s The Story Performance Handbook (2001). This list is by no means exhaustive, and the market for storytelling manuals is fairly saturated; new titles, therefore, must find a special niche or offer a unique perspective if they wish to avoid being considered superfluous.
Emily Chasse’s 2009 title, Telling Tales: A Guidebook and DVD, is “intended to provide an introduction to the world of telling tales” and is “designed for both novices and experienced tellers” (xvii-xviii). Like many European folktales, her book is divided into three main parts: chapters 1-3 cover the fundamentals of story structure and finding, learning, and performing stories; chapters 4-8 cover a variety of story forms, including classical mythology, personal narrative, legends and epics, ballads, and folktales; and chapters 9-13 address issues in storytelling, including digital formats, classroom issues, puppetry, drama, and props, and university course teaching. In the 269 pages of this book, Chasse covers a lot of territory, so much, in fact, that her treatment of any particular issue remains very superficial. Many subsections of the book are no more than 2-3 pages, and her treatment of Vladimir Propp’s morphology of Russian folktales is reduced to “[he] analyzed many of his country’s folktales, of szazka, and identified common themes within them” (16). Similarly, Bruno Bettelheim’s Freudian analysis of the role of folktales in children’s lives is summarized with a quote from his book, “difficult developments must be undergone, hardships suffered, dangers met, victories won. Only in this way can one become master of one’s kingdom” (11). While doing justice to each of these scholars – and many others – would make her book considerably longer, Chasse needs to develop these seminal ideas to the point that novice storytellers, who most likely have not encountered them, will be able to make sense of them. She does offer extensive bibliographies of resources, one of the real strengths of her work, so readers may track down ideas they wish to pursue, but this lack of substance will at best leave readers wanting more, and, at worst, it may leave them deeply frustrated.
This superficial treatment is evident throughout the book. In chapter 2, “Locating and Selecting Tales,” Chasse mentions that “the type of physical space and the actual location are extremely important when preparing for a storytelling performance” (37), but she never explains how location might affect the performance (the dynamics of sound, storyteller visibility, distractions, etc.). While she does address children’s age levels and suggest appropriate stories for each (38-40), her approach does not address human developmental theories (physical, emotional, or cognitive) and their impact on story selection and performance. Instead, she claims that as children age, tellers can offer longer and more complex tales! While this is true, it barely touches the surface of the problem of finding the right story for the right person at the right time. Issues of the story character’s age (identification), the emotional intensity of the story (over-stimulation and/or fright), or age-appropriate feelings and story events are not addressed.
Similarly, in chapter 3, “Preparing and Performing Tales,” Chasse discusses the storyteller’s clothing, saying, “Tellers want their audiences to be drawn to them, and one way to accomplish this is by wearing bright, exciting clothing and styles. Colorful beads, belts, scarves, and so forth are fun and useful, too” (49). While colorful costumes do attract visual attention, there is no caution against the potential for costumes and bangles to draw attention away from the story. The sub-section on voice offers storytellers no advice about how to use the voice as their primary communicative instrument. Instead the reader finds, “A teller’s voice can reflect the strong and scary growling of the troll in ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’…the kind, sweet, caring voice of Joshua’s mother in ‘Joshua and the Genie’…or the wise and funny sound of Pandora in Barbara McBride-Smith’s new version of the Greek tale by that name” (49-50). The sub-section on Lighting is also reduced to the equivalent of “don’t shine the light in your face or the faces of your listeners.”
There are also factual inaccuracies that call the work into question. For example, Chasse mentions on page 3 that the oldest tale is “Tale of Two Brothers” from the Egyptian Papyrus D’Orbiney (circa 1185 BCE). Later, on page 106, she claims that the Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2150 BCE) is “perhaps the oldest written story on earth.” More extensive research would have revealed that the Sumerian epic of Lugalbanda pre-dates the earliest known text of Gilgamesh by nearly 300 years. Perhaps of more pertinence to a storytelling manual would be the earliest known written descriptions of an action resembling storytelling in the Egyptian Westcar Papyrus (2000-1300 BCE) and the Golenischeff Papyrus of a similar time period (Pellowski 1990).
The DVD included with the book contains several stories told by Chasse as well as three by other storytellers. These provide useful performances from which to learn, and they also provide an opportunity for students to critique storytelling styles, vocal techniques, pacing, gestures, and other performance issues.
The last chapter, entitled “Final Considerations,” is where this book finally offers something utterly new: the description of a university-level storytelling course, complete with learning objectives, syllabus, assignments, and further class ideas. While syllabi exist on the Internet, this is the first time – to my knowledge – that a syllabus has appeared in a print storytelling manual. This is an immensely useful resource for teachers at all levels, for it provides a template for thinking about the content, pacing, and delivery of storytelling instruction.
In short, by trying to cover a bit of everything, Chasse has offered readers the equivalent of a stone skipping across the surface of a vast pond. The two-and-a-half page “Brief History of Storytelling” on the final pages of the book is emblematic of the fundamental problem with this book. While these information bytes might peak the reader’s curiosity, they will certainly not satisfy any real thirst for information on storytelling.
WORKS CITED
Baker, Augusta, and Ellin Greene. 1977. Storytelling: Art and Technique. New York: Bowker.
Bauer, Caroline Feller. 1977. Handbook for Storytellers. Chicago: American Library Association.
Cross, Allen, and Nellie Margaret Statler. 1918. Story-telling for Upper Grade Teachers. Chicago: Row, Peterson, and Co.
De Vos, Gail. 1991. Storytelling for Young Adults: Techniques and Treasury. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.
Forbush, William Byron. 1915. A Manual of Stories. Philadelphia: American Institute of Child Life.
Lipman, Doug. 1999. Improving Your Storytelling: Beyond the Basics for All Who Tell Stories in Work or Play. Little Rock, AR: August House.
MacDonald, Margaret Read. 1993. The Story-teller’s Start-up Book. Little Rock, AR: August House.
Maguire, Jack. 1985. Creative Storytelling: Choosing, Inventing, and Sharing Tales for Children. Cambridge, MA: Yellow Moon Press.
Pellowski, Anne. 1990. The World of Storytelling: A Practical Guide to the Origins, Development, and Applications of Storytelling. New York: H. W. Wilson.
Roney, R. Craig. 2001. The Story Performance Handbook. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Sawyer, Ruth. 1942. The Way of the Storyteller. New York: Viking.
Shedlock, Marie. 1915. The Art of the Storyteller. New York: Dover.
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[Review length: 1318 words • Review posted on December 5, 2011]