Community Campfire Storytelling

I'm so proud and happy to finally be hosting a storytelling event! All my life I've been craving the fairy tales I'm now telling regularly. I'm grateful to substitute teaching for giving me opportunity to practice, practice, practice all the amazing stories I've been filling my head with. I'm grateful to all the children on my path that give me big love for telling them. They come up to me in the halls and say, "Oh Ms. Daniel I'll never forget that story you told." And I've started saying, "And did you tell it to anyone else?"

But the need for the stories to go on is only half the point. We are, each one of us, natural born storytellers. Yet many, if not most, of the children I encounter in the public schools have never heard a story orally told to them. Modern electronic media forms dominate storytelling, yet children in classrooms act like they're starving for the old fashioned kind. They're hungry for the content of the story, made real by the pictures in their own minds, and they're also hungry to tell stories. There is a whole set of skills that I've learned for doing this. I didn't grow up hearing and telling oral stories, like most of us in the modern era.

Learning to use our storytelling muscles is a joyful and powerful path. As we learn to effectively captivate an audience with a story vivid within us, we become confident, imaginative, articulate and powerful. I see the longing within each child I encounter to own these qualities.

So I want to encourage everyone, especially parents and teachers, to tell oral folk and fairy tales to their children. And I want them to encourage their children to tell stories too. There's so much value in the listening AND the telling. It's very simple: read the story until you know its details well. Then, fully imagine the sights, sounds, and emotions of the story as you tell it in your own words. Your telling doesn't have to be perfect. You'll get better as you keep working those muscles.

The Chico community is invited to Campfire Storytelling in early April. At the Campfire Council Ring in Bidwell Park, we'll gather to share the stories that we love. After that, the intention is to make it a family-friendly monthly event, free to everyone. I'm very much looking forward to hearing and sharing meaningful tales, circled around a blazing fire, just like in the old, old, old days of our earliest ancestors. May the stories be carried strongly into the future by this next generation!