My Folktale Journey
© 2021 Sara deBeer
Once upon a time (back in 1977) when I was a freshman in college, I took a Children’s Literature class and first learned about storytelling. That summer (as well as the next one), I went home to Albany, NY and rode around the greater Albany area in a bright yellow van called “The Bookie Lookie”; there were four of us who made 35 stops a week in city parks and housing projects, reading books to kids. However, I set a goal of TELLING a story at each stop every week and by the end of each summer, my repertoire of stories had grown. The summer between my junior and senior year, I received a traveling fellowship which allowed me to explore the folk traditions of the West Coast of Ireland, recording anyone who would share a story with me. My senior year, I took a class from a man who’d spent 5 years in Kenya collecting the stories he shared with his students. During my time at college, I would beg my way into coffeehouses and open mics but nobody quite knew what to make of me. I’d fallen in love with folktales, but I hadn’t met anyone who shared my enthusiasm.
When I graduated in 1981, I moved to Boston and discovered others of my kind. A whole storysharing circle full of them! We reveled in the idea that we were reviving the oral tradition; we delighted in the sheer shared familiarity of seemingly infinite variants of tales from different folk traditions. “That’s from Italy? I know a similar version from Thailand.” Finally, I felt I’d found the community I’d been searching for.
But it turned out I only was in Boston for a year. Just enough to be wowed by the first “Sharing the Fire” conference. Then I moved with my new husband to New Haven, where he was starting graduate school. However, I was fortunate that Barbara Reed held the first Connecticut Storytelling Festival the spring of 1982 and I plunged into the newly forming world of Connecticut storytelling. Not only did Barbara Reed and I start a storysharing group in the New Haven area, but we bonded over the twin challenges of assuring the world that everyone was a storyteller AND convincing everyone that they would fall in love with listening to folktales as soon as they’d heard their first story.
All these years later, I have never wavered in my love of being a teller of folktales. I delight in matching story to listener, offering the chosen tale as a gift that lights up my listeners’ eyes and settles deep in my listeners’ souls. I can feel it happening from my place inside the story I am telling. Many listeners have shared their powerful responses to the folktales they’ve just heard, but nothing matches the observation shared by a man who made his way to me after I had finished presenting stories to a group in a program for people with long-term mental illness. “You don’t know what you just gave me,” he said quietly. “I hear voices continually. They never stop. But while you were telling those stories, the voices were quiet.”
Over the years, I’ve reflected on how listening to folktales quieted those voices, and I think perhaps the voices and experiences of characters from unknown worlds, characters who struggled with and overcame challenges, were able to supersede the incessant voices in his head. And I, as a teller of traditional folktales, have come to realize that I get a somewhat similar satisfaction from the stories I tell. Folktales allow me to enter lives which are radically different from my own and yet my own life resonates with the life of each character as we travel our journey together.
Since 1978, Sara deBeer has been presenting programs of multicultural myths, legends, and folktales to audiences of all ages. Audiences discover the richness of each individual culture while also appreciating the universality of human experiences. Sara deBeer is also a poet and for 10 years, multiple times per year, she has taught poetry-writing classes for Beat of The Street (BOTS), a program for people who have experienced homelessness.
