The Story Sack Story Telling and Story Making with Young Children

This book is primarily aimed at adults who wish to share stories with young children. It is a collection of ideas, tales, props, histories and theories based on my experience as a performance storyteller and arts educator for early childhood, and my love of stories.

Writing a book about oral storytelling may appear to be a contradiction. Not that the written and the spoken word are at odds with each other - their relationship is more akin to both the generative and sometimes fractious aspects of family. I like to think of oral storytelling as the great-great-grandparent of written language, which in turn gives birth to new oral forms: a great big story cycle, where words alight on a page and solidify, only to be melted back down in the cauldron of cadences. And so the story continues.

This book is the third of a loose trilogy, which has drawn upon my teaching practices and passions. The first was Imagined Worlds - A journey through the expressive arts in early childhood, the second, Dance Upon a Time - Movement Stories for the Feet & Tongue and now the third, The Story Sack - Story Telling and Story Making with Young Children. Anyone who has read the earlier books will know that storytelling is a pervasive aspect of my work. I am a self-confessed story-o-phile, born with a story spoon in my mouth. In agreement with the American poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) who said, "The world is made up of stories, not atoms'" I would advocate that human beings have a 'narrative drive'. We construct ourselves as individuals, families, communities, societies and as a species through stories. We live dream, engage and remember in stories. We make sense of the world we live in through stories. We become, in effect, the stories that we tell ourselves. They both serve us and hold us in slavery.

So in reflecting, I wonder whether I have written this 'trilogy' back to front; maybe I should have started with the book about storytelling. But in the great story cycle there is no absolute beginning and no real end, it's a circle of sharing. There is a Jewish proverb which goes: "When you listen to a story it helps to listen in circles rather than in straight lines, then listening to a story is easy as finding your way home. But in order to find our way home, first we must get lost, but getting lost is good. Because only when we are really lost do we stop and truly listen."

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