the story tellers

They constitute a major chunk of every culture, religion, socioeconomic class, era and corner of the world.

"Story Teller" by Eunice LaFate

"Give me a subject. Everything depends on that.

Once the subject is given, it is easy to embroider."

-from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

"The Boyhood of Raleigh" by Sir John Everett Millais

An excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath:

"The migrant people, scuttling for work, scrabbling to live, looked always for pleasure, and they were hungry for amusement. Sometimes amusement lay in speech, and they climbed up their their lives with jokes.

Image via here

"And it came about in the camps along the roads, on the ditch banks beside the streams, under the sycamores, that the story teller grew into being, so that the people gathered in low firelight to hear the gifted ones.

"And they listened while the tales were told, and their participation made the stories great [...] and their faces were quiet with listening. The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words because the tales were great, and the listeners were great through them."
-John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

"Jesus the Story Teller" from Angel Studio

I work with a little boy whose very being generates too much energy for his small body to handle. The energy has nowhere to go but out, and so he is always moving, touching, squirming, running, destroying, laughing, yelling, crying, talking and engaged in full-fledged acrobatics every possible moment.

Until a picture book is brought forth, the pages opened, and the story begun.
Then, he suddenly becomes very still and quiet like a nesting bird, chin in hands, eyes locked on the page, aware of nothing but the story unfolding before him.

The story enraptures and transforms.

Some Related Sites:

The National Storytelling Network
A listing of Storytelling Festivals, these are mostly USA festivals but there is one listing in Graz, Austria