A-Z April Daily Blogging Challenge 2015 – Diving in Again!

Theme: Story Slams & Traditional Storytelling – Bridging the Distance

I’m still quite new to story slams, and they are still new to me – I’ve been to four.

(See previous blog posts about my introduction to this increasingly-popular kind of storytelling event: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)

I am exploring – in real life, in my work, and in this A-Z April Daily Blog – various aspects and elements and practices of both story slams and more “traditional” kinds of storytelling. This A-Z will compare and contrast them with the hopeful goal of (what storyteller Laura Packer calls “cross-pollinating”) bridging the distance between these often rather separate forms, venues, audiences, and expressions of storytelling.

There are plenty of people who embrace story slams as fun entertainment, yet are unfamiliar with…

• wonderful storytelling house concerts or traditional storytelling programming at local libraries, community centers, churches, etc.
• storytelling conferences where skills are learned and honed
• storytelling festivals with multiple performances by greatly-skilled storytellers of folktales, myths, personal stories, historical tales, and fairy tales for adults…and more.

And, there are people who relish the well-told folktales and fairy tales and myths…

…the epics told by individuals or groups, the well-crafted long-form personal narratives and researched historical tales told by storytellers committed to researching and crafting their stories and programs…who are unfamiliar with, and even turned-off by the notion of (and even the name of!) competitive story slams.

Each day this April I’ll use a different letter of the alphabet as a prompt for a short musing on an aspect or two of story slams and/or more-traditional storytelling, and/or the distance between them.

Some of the daily musings will be much more about that distance and less about bridging; other musings will be noting characteristics that are shared and which connect the two.  My hope is that the A-Z month of blog postings as a whole, combining the various daily explorations and notes, will contribute to bridging the distance!  I’d love your comments along the way.

Thanks for reading – Pam

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” – Muriel Rukeyser

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” – Albert Einstein