Beyond the Printed Page: Telling Literary Stories

© 2022 Maria LoBiondo

When you read a story that touches you deeply, it’s hard to let go of that first rush of “I want to tell this!” That’s how I felt early in my storytelling journey when I read Tomie dePaola’s picture book, “The Clown of God.”

Inspired by a French religious legend dating back to the Middle Ages, “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame” follows a street entertainer who performs before a Madonna on Christmas eve. The tale has been committed to print, opera, film, radio show and dance. My first encounter was dePaola’s version, and true to my training as a newspaper reporter at that time, I went to the source for permission to tell the story for no payment at a local church. What a shock when I learned that the author wanted a fee. It was only $25, but it was my entre into the snares and cold realities of copyright with literary stories.

To be fair, dePaola changed the legend significantly and made it his own— just what we storytellers do when we adapt folk and fairy tales based on oral tradition that we find in books. Literary translators render works from one written language to another, and we storytellers are translators, too, moving from one medium — the word on the page — to the auditory telling. Literary stories, created and written from an author’s imagination, often need adaptation from print to spoken word to explain expressions or details to a modern audience or to make the words and story flow. And like literary translators, our responsibility is to be true to the author’s voice and intent.

Tomie dePaola insisted that I memorize and tell the story exactly as it was on the page. But to do that with every literary tale robs the spontaneity of the oral telling. I try to adhere to advice I heard from Milbre Burch: “Remember, the author’s language choices are part of what drew you to a story, so be sure that’s an element in your telling.”

My friend Jonathan Kruk, a longtime teller of literary tales including Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” sums up the challenge eloquently. He always lets people know storytelling is a different art form, a dramatic retelling rather than a recitation or verbatim piece: “You have to step back, taking a literary tale and turning it into something that’s going to convey the spirit, the magic, the meaning of the literary tale … to make sure that this beautiful piece of literature rings out when you go to tell it.”

The dilemma, then, is securing permission from living writers or the estate of a writer whose works are under copyright. For living authors, Burch advises being bold and asking permission; in all her years of asking she’s only been turned down twice. She has told and recorded several works by Jane Yolen, the author of many folktale-like literary tales, who has granted her, Kruk, and others permission but asks tellers not to change her stories’ endings.

Since that encounter with “The Clown of God,” I have not shied away from literary stories, but I have been more careful. When I approached Joseph Bruchac for permission to tell “Gluskabe and the Four Wishes” from his picture book, he graciously granted it with no strings attached — and I always mention his picture book is my source as a professional courtesy.

While I tell primarily folk and fairy tales, when my children studied the Civil War in fifth grade, I dabbled in the literary realm again, this time with a retelling based on the escape narrative of William and Ellen Craft. To “convey the spirit,” as Kruk advises, of the couple’s daring journey from Georgia to Philadelphia, arriving safely on Christmas morning 1848, I adapted the dialogue and condensed the plot for my elementary school audience. While it is available in book form, “Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom” is posted on Project Gutenberg, an online library of free eBooks.

Project Gutenberg’s offerings are clearly in the public domain, and the safest route for working with literary stories is to choose public domain material published at least 95 years ago. This made a program to tell stories from “The Thousand and One Nights” to accompany a concert of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” hassle free for me as far as permissions, as well as to create oral versions based on Lafcadio Hearn’s “The Burning of the Rice Fields” and Henry van Dyke’s “The Story of the Other Wise Man.” Public domain opens up possibilities for adapting pieces from Hans Christian Anderson to Mark Twain to Lucy Maud Montgomery.

But care is still needed. Willa Cather’s “O Pioneers,” published in 1913 is safe but not “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” published in 1927 and not yet hitting the 95-year mark in the U.S. (although available in Canada and Australia).

Recording literary stories is another level I have not ventured into, and doing so opens a whole new area of negotiation for permissions. That will have to be someone else’s blog post. In the meantime, here are some links I have found helpful.

Researching the Folktale by Aaron Shepard. Shepard posted this first in 1996 but renewed the copyrighted material as recently as 2013. Basic, good information.

http://www.aaronshep.com/storytelling/A65.html

The University of Texas at San Antonio pages on Public Domain. Under U.S. law, works published in 1925 entered the public domain on January 1, 2021. UTSA offers helpful resources for finding material.

https://libguides.utsa.edu/publicdomain/finding

The U.S. Copyright Office. For a fee, copyright office staff can search online for copyright registrations made and documents recorded from 1978 to date; for material prior to that date a manual search by staff is necessary.

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html#permission

Maria LoBiondo believes sharing a story is a heart-to-heart gift between teller and listener: “Stories create a world of their own — one that my listeners and I invent together in a particular moment. They connect us to each other and to the generations before us who have listened and told these tales over and over.” A writer and editor, she has shared multicultural folk and fairy tales, as well as literary tales, at schools, libraries, churches, and festivals for more than 25 years.