|
Papa
Joe ~ Travel
Notes
From: Lois J. Sprengnether <lois-sez@juno.com>
To: STORYTELL
Subject: Re: Tour Notes #15
Date: Monday, July 28, 1997 11:49 PM
Telling times have ended in a heap now that Summer Reading
Club madness is over.
I'm beginning to recuperate from asstd. hassles & we have
decided to restructure for next summer. It only takes a few
people to leave you feeling drained. Fortunately Papa Joe was
the delightful reward in all of this for the children's librarians as
well as the children.
Papa Joe claims our group was wonderful, yet admits to running
on instinct. I'm here to say listen to this man when he says "If you
want to be a storyteller, tell stories. If you want to be a better
storyteller, tell more stories." We had 3 & a 1/2 boys in that
group who definitely would have taken over & destroyed the
program of someone less capable of dealing with them.
Sometimes he included their input in his very interactive style of
telling & sometimes ignored them, letting his strong use of
audience response carry the tale like a wave refusing to be
stopped by anybody in its path. He gently teased 1 boy who was
unstoppable to the point where you could feel the other kids
cheering. This could have easily have become mean -- it wasn't.
After the party that boy & his family eagerly talked a long time
with Papa Joe. I think there's the glimmer of a future teller in him
& darned if Papa Joe wasn't saying the same thing.
This boy's younger brother was the 1/2 problem mentioned
above, as he tried, but Papa Joe played off of him easily. (I
discovered, as the party ended, that the other 2 would-be
problems included 1 who crashed the party by arriving late with
his brother, the remaining problem.) I could have flashed a
"cool-it" look at these guys, but it was worth seeing the many
variations on the way Papa Joe handled them, without ever
damaging the fun for everyone. May we all "run on instinct" so
well.
So now I'm checking into starting a monthly meeting with local
teachers & others interested in telling, incl. teachers at a local
preschool where Papa Joe had a workshop mentioned in an
earlier note. I also would like to see a separate option for young
tellers, as I've worked with some & know of others interested
from our annual tall-tale telling contest for kids. I've tried blending
them with adult tellers & they became too shy. Maybe the next
time Papa Joe swings through this area we can have a program
for all those people who saw the vardo & wanted to come. Then
there's all those teachers who still haven't been bitten by the
storytelling bug. . . YET!
LoiS(cheming, dreaming, & starting to revive)
Speaking for myself, not necessarily for the Mount Clemens
Public Library
Papa
Joe ~ Travel
Notes
|