Areas of Unrest

11 July 1999 - The National Storytelling Conference

I'm back from San Diego and I took a long enough nap that I am more or less recovered from the conference. Physically, that is - the mental effects of being around a couple of hundred other storytellers for four and a half days take longer to get over.

I debated writing a conference "blow-by-blow" but decided that wasn't all that interesting, so let me just hit a few highlights. It's always a delight to hear Gay Ducey and her keynote speech on Thursday morning was no exception. It set the tone for a membership meeting that was less vitriolic than the past ones have been. Although I do have to admit that the "new" National Storytelling Network (formerly the National Storytelling Membership Association, formerly the National Storytelling Association, formerly the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling) will have a certain amount of skepticism to overcome. I was disturbed that each of the board members talked about the need to listen to members - but talked so long there was no time for questions. And when affiliations with other organizations were mentioned, it was still largely the traditional school and library ones. Still, at least there is movement, which is always better than standing still.

I'd seen Ed Stivender perform but never gone to a workshop with him before. His workshop had to do with balancing "shtick" and "schmaltz" and was a thinly veiled plea for more of the performance tricks and less of the heart-wrenching. One thing he had us do was act out the play of the mechanicals from Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream and I got to be one of the hecklers, which was tremendous fun.

But the workshop where I really felt that I got my entire money's worth out of the conference was Loren Niemi's on plot structures. His emphasis was on ways of organizing a story beyond the traditional narrative and digressive styles. A lot of his material was completely new to me and, before the workshop, I would have been skeptical about some of these forms working with oral material. I left feeling like I've been given some new tools and I plan to write to him and ask about taking one of his 3-day intensives.

Beyond that were lots of other workshops, concerts, story swaps, conversations over meals, seeing old friends and making new ones and so on. I should also mention that a labyrinth was set up on Friday evening and I took the opportunity to walk it, largely out of curiousity. I'm about the least new-age person in the known universe (or at least in the state of California) and I have to admit to having found watching the other people doing the labyrinth more interesting than the actual walking meditation itself. Afterwards, Audrey asked me if anything happened and, while I was wise enough not to say it, I found myself thinking "uh, was something supposed to?" At least no minotaur lurked within.