where do you get your stories from?
A few years ago I heard my Welsh Storytelling friend Eirwen Malin, tell a story at a workshop, where she prefaced it with, 'When people ask me where do I get my stories from, I answer with this story.' And then she told the story. It was a story I immediately fell in love with, but at the time did not ask her the source of it, nor did we talk about it. I always thought of it as 'Eirwen's story' in the way that storytellers do when they hear another storyteller's version of a traditional tale and then contemplate how they would tell it themselves. But I didn't tell it in any public setting.
I thought about it over the years and now realise that it reflects my process of story selection. So now I am ready to share the story with others I wanted to find Eirwen's source, both out of curiosity and ethics. When I spoke with her I encountered one of the problems that can come when you have been storytelling for many years, have a wide repertoire and rely on memory to document sources...the source may not be on the tip of our tongue.
But, as Eirwen said, 'I'm sure it comes from the oral tradition, and if I recall, it is a Jewish tale'.
I put in the key words of the story into Google but no sources came up. Only when I put in 'Jewish' in combination with those words did the source appear; Jacob ben Wolf Kranz of Dubno, the Dubner Maggid, (circa 1740 - 1804), author of "Ohel Ya'aqob". He adopted the Midrash's method of explanation by telling parables and incidents of daily life. His most famous parable was called 'First I Shoot the Arrow.' Eirwen's story.
Which brings me to the notion of 'the oral tradition.' Given that Jacob Kranz told this story orally, it can be said it is from the oral tradition but, he also wrote it down. Does that change its status? Since the advent and proliferation of printing, folktales, parables and fables from different cultures and traditions have been written down and are more likely to be read by people themselves than passed on verbally, without any reference to a written text. Does this mean they are leaving the oral tradition? Is reading a text out loud part of the oral tradition by virtue of using the spoken word?
Although I say that storytelling is like theatre in its diversity and content, my bottom line is that although a written text maybe a source for a story, the story's presentation is not text based. Reader's theatre seems to be a popular way of working with traditional stories in the United States and Canada, and the general public seem familiar with the difference between it and storytelling.
In Australia storytellers and storytelling is still generally understood as literature based ie. reading from a book. I have often joked about having to be tautological and say 'oral storytelling' to differentiate between story reading and storytelling, and in the same context talk about the storyteller as the poor 2nd cousin of the author. 'Telling stories' is a phrase that often denotes untruthfulness and an author is an 'authority' by the very nature of the 'written word having authority.'
But to return to the storyteller and preacher Jacob ben Wolf Kranz; he did not have his works published until after he died. However, as a preacher he most often told his stories, and his wisdom was passed on orally. Because he was telling in a familiar storytelling genre, parables, even if he created the parables himself, they easily became part of the oral tradition because that was how they were transmitted. In the same way that many of Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales have been thought of as 'folktales', anonymously authored and passed on from one generation to the next.
So what is more important; the story or the storyteller? I love a good story, but I also place importance on the context in which it is told, which means, who told it, who was it told to and why. And as a writer I appreciate the creation as well as interpretation of a story. Eirwen's story was artfully constructed, and I would probably create a silmilar tale for oral presentation but for the purpose of this discussion I will briefly outline Jacob ben Wolf Kranz's telling.
One day a man walking in the woods saw that many trees had targets drawn on them. Each target had an arrow lodged firmly in it's centre. The man came across a young boy with a bow and arrow who, when asked, acknowledged that he had shot all the arrows. When further questioned on his remarkable skill and accuracy he answered the man, 'First I shoot the arrow, then I draw the target'.
book of dreams, mixed media on canvas, Roman W. Schatz
