National Tell A Story Day

What the day is

National Tell a Story Day is observed on October 30. The emphasis is on telling rather than reading: a story delivered from memory, adjusted to the listener, without a book in hand.

It sits near the National Storytelling Festival in Tennessee, which is a formal performance event, but this day is domestic. The intended venue is a kitchen table or the end of a bed.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented.

The family story is the form most at risk. Research on family narrative has found that children who know more about their family's history, including its difficulties and how they were overcome, tend to show greater resilience and a stronger sense of identity. The mechanism appears to be the shape of the stories rather than their content: accounts that acknowledge hardship and recovery do more than accounts of unbroken success.

Those stories are also unusually fragile. Family history typically survives two generations of oral transmission and then vanishes, because the people who remember the details assume someone else has written them down. Nobody has.

Telling differs from reading in ways worth knowing. A told story can be paused, questioned and redirected; the teller watches the listener and adjusts length, detail and pace. Children ask questions of a told story that they will not ask of a printed one, which is much of why it works.

How to take part

• Tell one without a book. Make it up, or tell something that happened to you.
• Record an older relative telling a family story. Five minutes of audio outlasts any summary, and phones make it trivial.
• Ask a specific question rather than a general one: not what was it like, but what happened the day you arrived.
• Let children retell it back to you, badly and with additions.
• Write down the three family stories you would not want lost, tonight, while you still know the details.