National Storytelling Festival

What the day is

The National Storytelling Festival is held in early October in Jonesborough, Tennessee. It runs across a weekend in tents around the town, with tellers performing to audiences who have come specifically to sit and listen to someone talk.

Origin and background

The festival began in 1973, and the founding story is well worn locally: a small gathering, an audience of a few dozen, and tellers performing from a hay wagon. It grew from that into the event generally credited with reviving storytelling as a public performing art in the United States, and it drew a national network of tellers, teachers and folklorists after it.

What the revival recovered was a distinction that print obscures. Oral storytelling is not recitation of a written text. The teller works from a remembered structure rather than a script, adjusts pace and detail to the room, and depends on timing, voice and the audience's reactions. The same story told twice is not the same performance.

The material ranges widely: Appalachian mountain tales, immigrant family history, ghost stories, West African and Caribbean traditions, personal narrative and outright invention. The ghost story sessions held after dark are the festival's best-known feature.

The broader tradition is older than any festival and belongs to every culture with a spoken language. What early October in Tennessee provided was a place where it could be taken seriously again as craft.

How to take part

• Listen to a teller properly, without a screen in your hand. The form does not survive divided attention.
• Find a local storytelling circle or open mic. Most regions have them and they are almost always open to newcomers.
• Tell a family story out loud to someone younger. That is where most family history is actually transmitted, and where it is lost.
• Record an older relative telling one. Five minutes of audio will outlast any written summary.
• Try telling rather than reading at bedtime. Children notice the difference immediately.