The Women’s Storytelling Festival is nearly here! We’re nearly at the Thursday night virtual kickoff, followed by three days of terrific telling in fabulous city of Fairfax, VA.
All told there will be twenty-one amazing women sharing their wit, wisdom, skill and power during the fest. You can read all about them here!
Follow this link for festival tickets!
This is our fourth and final piece where we get a little more insight into some of the festival’s participants. They all answered these questions:
Question 1: What sort of stories do you usually tell, and for what audiences?
Question 2: What can you tell us about what you’ll be presenting at the festival?
Here’s what this group had to say…
Anne Rutherford
1. Stories where people discover something unexpected about themselves and one another. For audiences who like to be entertained, moved & inspired.
2. Original stories of personal adventure, true and fictional. Moving, inspiring and sometimes laugh out loud funny.
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Laura Simms
1. What I tell always depends on the audience, the focus of a festival, the moment we are living in and what I love to share. I combine traditional symbolic stories like fairytales, and myths with personal narrative. I have been doing that for 45 years. At first I did it because the little comments between old stories about my life were always enjoyed and then because as more and more life stories were considered that which was true and authentic, I wanted to open a bigger field of recognizing how the great traditional stories were deeply personal, and the memories were mythic.
2. I will be telling a variety of stories from memories of growing up as a girl in Brooklyn – knowing more about Pastrami sandwiches than my own body – to a retelling of one of the oldest mythic stories that we know – the Mystery of Mother and Daughter, through the tale of Demeter and Persephone. I am also delighted to weave three stories in one set: about my mother, hearing Nina Simone on my first date into Manhattan, and a very juicy Hawaiian myth.
Linda Yemoto
1. I tell pan-Asian folktales, nature-education stories, and a few personal stories. My most consistent audiences are school groups and families at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where we lead tours of the galleries, but use Asian folktales to bring the art to life. Since the pandemic I’ve done countless virtual programs for both kids and adults, and appeared in-person at various festivals.
2. Through the use of an old button, I’ll be telling the story of a Japanese picture bride — my baachan (grandmother) — and a look at her life upon arriving in California.
That’s it for our Teller Spotlight! Come join us in Fairfax or online for the fifth annual Women’s Storytelling Festival!
