The 2007 Texas Storytelling Festival weaves an assortment of fascinating tales.

nce upon a time … on a dark and stormy night … long, long ago …. Whatever your favorite tale, story lovers young, old and every age in between will be captivated with the sundry collection of fables, poems, songs, and yarns that are spun at the 2007 Texas Storytelling Festival, March 29 through April 1 at the Denton Civic Center Park.

A favorite with locals and visitors alike, the event is dishing out a sumptuous buffet of storytelling delicacies, as well as enriching workshops and master classes. From hair-raising to heart-warming, truth to fiction, cowboy poetry to Native American tales, sacred to just plain silly, the 2007 event offers something for everyone.

“It’s impossible to know where you’re going to go in life if you don’t know where you’ve been,” says storyteller, author, and ballad singer Dan Keding of Urbana, Ill., a featured national teller at this year’s event. “That’s what storytelling does. It tells us where we’ve been. It tells us who we are. It makes the road to the future a lot easier,” Keding says.

Listener Favorites
Hosted by the Tejas Storytelling Association (TSA), this 22nd annual festival celebrates storytelling because it encourages reading, teaches the art of storytelling, and entertains audiences of all ages with a variety of genres. This year’s festival promises to offer the best of audience favorites.
Cristin Thomas, executive director of the TSA, says organizers are excited about expanding the festival back to four days to include the popular Ghost Tales on Thursday evening.
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday will be packed with storytelling concerts by national, regional, local, and up-and-coming youth storytellers. Expect plenty of workshops for artists, educators, and librarians, as well as family activities, food vendors, and live music.

Co-Creative Art
The Texas Storytelling Festival celebrates both the art of storytelling and the community. “There’s no feeling of us and them at the festival. It’s us,” Keding says, explaining that sometimes festivals sequester performers away from the crowd. “At this festival, the performers and the people are all there together. I remember when I was there last time, I sat in the tent for an hour teaching kids how to play spoons. It was during the dinner break. Then some old-timers came in with guitars and banjos, and we started singing and playing. There was a real feel of sharing, a real feel of making the stories together.”

Keding performs a mix of traditional and personal stories. A guitar and banjo player, he is known to sing a few songs, too. He grew up learning stories from his Croatian grandmother—stories passed down for generations. “So storytelling for me is being another link in the chain. I feel an obligation to keep things alive,” he says.

In a time of instant messages and chat rooms, live storytelling is a unique experience. “To be in the physical presence of someone and to go on that journey with them when they tell you a story and your imagination opens up and suddenly you see that story in your mind, that’s an amazing thing for a lot of people,” Keding says.

Storytelling is co-creative, and the audience is essential. “Without that audience visualizing what you’re saying, without them using their imagination to go to the places you want them to go, you’re just rehearsing at home,” Keding says.

And the Denton festival has a reputation for great audiences. “I think the Denton festival is one of those jewels where the audience and the tellers come together at the right time, at the right moment, and I think everyone’s ready for it,” he adds.

In the Know
The 2007 festival includes a host of other talented tellers, including internationally known deaf performing artist Peter S. Cook and nationally recognized bilingual storyteller Olga Loya from San Jose, Calif., known for her family and personal stories and Latin-American folklore.
Regional tellers include the multiple award-winning British teller Bernadette Nason; storyteller, author, and workshop presenter Eldrena Douma, who shares from her American Indian heritage; and Don Sanders, who for more than 20 years has shown kids of all ages fun ways to boost listening skills and expand musical perspectives.

The festival also features the talents of up-and-coming performers, including students from recent Tejas Storytelling workshops.

If you’re itching to spin a yarn of your own, there are plenty of ways to get involved with the 22nd annual festival or one of TSA’s other storytelling events or classes. Just visit www.tejasstorytelling .com or call (940) 387-8336.