iBelin

I love good conversation. Not the surface, polite, obligatory, formulaic crap you get from too many people, but deep, meaningful, substantive conversation filled with passion, wisdom, sarcasm, truth, wit, hyperbole and even ridiculously believable lies. So, my trip to Jonesborough, Tennessee for the 37th Annual National Storytelling Festival was an awfully good use of my time.

I stayed in Johnson City so I didn’t get to see Jonesborough until the next day. I wanted to get there early because I didn’t know what to expect and I’d heard there has been 10,000 people attending during the course of the weekend prior. I got in and got registered and started walking and scoping out the city. Jonesborough is really a beautiful city.

I learned it is the oldest city in Tennessee. Got lots to say about the city and shops and restaurants but this post is about storytelling…

The telling takes place under huge tents. Since I’m not big on waiting, standing in line or sitting in the back, I got to the tents as early as I could. Surrounded by veterans of the Festival, I settled in with my moleskine, favorite pen, water and ginger cranberry biscotti with white chocolate (made fresh by a women who looked to be in her early 60s who stayed up all night to do so. I learned this when she informed a young man that she would not be making the sandwiches to be sold at lunch).

Donald Davis, “born in a Southern Appalachian mountain world rich in stories, was the first teller I heard. Well-known and very entertaining, he shared about his childhood and his loving torture of his little brother.

Niall de Burca from Ireland was good, if not theatrical in his telling. He was even more dramatic in the Ghost Story concert in Mill Spring Park.

Gay Ducey was great. I heard she shared about her experiences living through a breast cancer diagnosis in another tent in a very compelling and moving story.

Jennifer Armstrong (above) was amazing. I’m not sure how to describe her telling. It was a weaving together of what sounded like an ancient song with stories and poems that evoked pathos and hope. Her telling situated the listener in the tension of a powerful past and an expectant future. It had an otherworldly quality that was simultaneously familiar.

Baba Jamal Koram is like a part of the family. He is the uncle who looks into your heart and loves firmly and corrects warmly. Seeing school children in the audience, he told a story suitable for them and us. Any sound they made, he seized and effortlessly pulled it into his telling. They were captivated and afterward they flocked to him like he was passing out money to his nieces and nephews.

Roslyn Bresnick-Perry shared with us her experiences of working in the garment district in New York and how she overcame dyslexia to become earn a college degree as an older student. She is an inspiration.

John McCutcheon is a friggin wizard. He plays every instrument I the world, I guess. He sings beautifully. His humor is sharp and incisive. His political commentary is biting. McCutcheon is the business. I go to bed at 11. He didn’t start until 10:30 but I wouldn’t have missed this man. He is simply a masterful teacher, poet, musician and teller.

Charlotte Blake Alston (not pictured) was awesome in the Ghost Story Concert. The timbre of her voice and her delivery of the story set on a slave plantation was chilling. I would love to hear her tell Biblical stories. I’m going to stalk her and hear her again.

Kathryn Windham is the grande dame of storytelling. Her telling is enthralling. I heard her on Saturday morning. In her 90s, she stood onstage next to a stool just in front of a mic like an elegant and diminutive statue like those you’d expect to find in an antique store standing alone on a two-lane highway somewhere in the south. I was not even under the tent but was standing in the sunlight on account of my uncharacteristic tardiness so if she moved at all it was imperceptible to me. She just stood there telling stories about her aunt and family members as though there were only two or three of us in her kitchen. She told us about her coffin she had made when she turned 70 figuring it was time since she was only promised “three-score and ten.” It rests in her garage filled with unused china where it has been waiting for her for 20-some years.

Ms. Windham told us that she would be buried within 24 hours of her death and be wrapped in a simple quilt made by someone, she said, who “made every stitch in love.” She invited all of us who were available to come to her funeral and join the others in singing “I’ll Fly Away.” At this, she led us in singing this old song and made her exit off the stage. We were mesmerized. People stood and cheered with tears streaming down their faces, I among them, for a good while before the mad dash to other tents and the treacherous stop at the nuclear waste site a.k.a. port-o-potties.

My emotions ran from soup to nuts during my time in Jonesborough. I’ve never had another experience like it. It is empowering as it demonstrates for us how just the telling of our own stories elevates our experience to the divine. My sermon the following Sunday was titled, “Tell Your Story.” I’ll tell you about that in another post. In the meantime, it is important to tell our stories because they not only give us life, they give life to the hearer.

(This is a pic of twitter friends who came together for a tweetup. Sadly, the Festival organizers are stuck in a timewarp concerning the taking of pictures in the tents. This circumstance prevented us from sharing pics which could have more vividly conveyed the wonderful experiences we shared. Hopefully, this policy will change before next year.)

Posted on: October 19th, 2009 in: storytelling