Areas of Unrest

16 July 2001 - Providential Pondering

QOTD: "The way of the world is to praise dead saints and prosecute live ones." - Nathaniel Howe

Reading: Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert

Listening to: Hamza El Din, A Wish

I got back from the National Storytelling Conference in Providence late last night and it's going to take a little while to recover from the sleep deprivation. It was worth a little exhaustion to hang out with a few hundred other storytellers for four and a half days. It doesn't help that I have to make a day trip up to Sunnyvale tomorrow, but such is life.

I think I handled the conference better this time than some of the past times I've gone. I didn't stress out over wanting to go to several sessions that were scheduled simultaneously. I may have felt "I don't want to miss anything" but I didn't act on that feeling completely. Instead, I decided that I really just wanted to come home with a few new ideas and that was easy to satisfy.

There were some disappointments. Stephen Jay Gould was supposed to be the keynote speaker on Friday but he was in the hospital. They came up with a substitute program - a panel to revisit some of the issues from Gay Ducey's keynote in San Diego two years ago. I played hookey instead and went and did the Providence Volksmarch. (I also skipped out on the general session on Native American storytelling, since it's a subject I'm lukewarm towards at best. In general, few Native American stories resonate with me and I'm not tempted to tell them. So the whole ownership issue of whether or not it's okay for outsiders to do so has little interest for me.) Walking several miles the same day as our evening parade and contradance was probably not the wisest decision I could have made, but it was a lovely walk and the exercise defused a lot of undirected energy that would have made it hard for me to listen well at the story swap I went to later in the afternoon.

The best session was the Saturday morning panel on gay and lesbian stories, with an especially moving story by Pleasant De Spain. And, of course, just having a session on the subject is a sign of how much the National Storytelling Network has evolved from the folksy Southern roots of the old days. (The positive feelings at the membership meeting also reflected the big change in the NSN.) As far as workshops go, Linda Gorham's marketing workshop was outstanding though I can't say I learned anything I didn't already know. Patrick Ryan's talk on the ancient roots of stories was also notable, as he traced the roots of The Merchant of Venice and "The Princess and the Pea." I only went to one workshop I disliked, so the overall record was pretty good.

One of the events I was most looking forward to was the Storytell swap - a swap especially for people on the Storytell mailing list. It's always fun to put faces to the electrons. I'd put a lot of effort into deciding what to tell, so I was slightly nervous about how it would go. "Sam Short's Story" is a tricky one for me to tell, since it has to be letter perfect to work. But I want the focus to be on the story as well rather than the vocal pyrotechnics. All went well and I was able to keep the pacing the way I wanted to, so it was well-received. For the rest of the conference I kept getting asked how I had learned it, how long it took to memorize, how I kept it all straight in my head. I explained about practicing from different parts of the story, instead of always from the beginning. If you're going to have a stupid human trick, it's good to have a chance to show it off.

I also had a chance to meet Janet Egan and prove that we're not really the same person. Janet's partner lives in Providence and the three of us had a lovely luncheon with wide ranging conversation, including world music, travel to obscure places and the Red Sox. Both food and conversation fueled me well for the tedious journey home. The highlight of that was eavesdropping on a conversation on the plane from Pittsburgh to LAX. I figured out that these two men had been to some sort of conference but I was unable to determine whether they were talking about a multi-level marketing scheme or a religious cult.