Saturday, September 1, 2012

Storytelling in the Ozarks

It's a familiar feeling for me.

I'm in a store, chatting amiably about nothing much with the checkout clerk.  And then I feel it.  That antsy, gotta get-away-feeling.  That sense of "ok, I don't have anything else to say, can I leave now?"

Maybe it's my Yankee upbringing.  Maybe I'm impatient, or even a little rude.  Or maybe I'm just not interesting enough to keep spontaneous conversation going for that amount of time.  I'm much better with a script, or a story with an ending I know by heart. 

At some point in my past, I remember being dubbed "the storyteller."  It might have been college, or late high school.  Regardless, it was not entirely a compliment.  There was a bit of eye-rolling inherent in that nickname, a bit of "oh, lord, here she goes again."  If you're stuck on a road trip with me, for example, you are guaranteed to hear your share of "hey, so a few years back, when I was...".  It's just a given. 

So it was with great anticipation that I learned we were going to have a session at the Arkansas Women Bloggers Unplugged conference about storytelling. The AWBU, for those who don't know, was a gathering of about 70 women in Mountain View Arkansas last weekend.  You can read more about my adventures at AWBU here.

Mary, the park interpreter at the Ozark Folk Center, told us stories for at least 30 minutes.  She did two stories, one in traditional dress and the other, after a slow transformation, in modern-day fishing gear.  She definitely hit her stride during the fish story, but her first story, about "collecting" the stories of women who used music to get through their lives, was the most poignant. For many of my fellow bloggers, including this one, it conjured memories of the strong women of their pasts.

For me, the storytelling started off as a typical artistic experience; I was examining and parsing Mary's technique, comparing it to the hundreds of stories I've seen presented live.  Like most live experiences, it took the audience (myself included) a while to settle down and really listen. But that's not the fault of the storyteller.  My mom once remarked, after going to a piano concert, that you really have to give your brain time to settle in to the focused, quiet activity of watching live performance, especially since it's so rare in our lives these days.  Mary, I noticed, gave us that time, starting her tale slowly, not revealing the meat of it until we'd stopped gabbing and really tuned in.

Mary's stories had the wandering, non-linear messiness of what I'm coming to discover is the storytelling style of these parts.  If the stories were people on a stroll, they would start on the main road, then stop for tea on a front porch, head back to the road, then veer off for an over-the-fence chat with a neighbor.  They zig-zag across the map, veering off for a side trip here, or a tangent there, until we often can't remember where they started.  But inevitably, they come back to the road and finish up, leaving us a little wiser than we were before.

My beautiful new handmade broom. I will
probably never sweep anything with it.
On Saturday, we had free time to explore the craft village at the Ozark Folk Center.  It was a charming place; I could have spent hours milling about marveling at the artistry of the crafters. In my short time there, I saw pottery, jewelry, printing, baskets and brooms being made.  In the print shop, the delightful volunteer managed to keep me in the store for quite some time, telling me about the presses and how she would drive hours every weekend to volunteer there.  In the broom shop, I learned that the broommaker likes to mess with telemarketers who try to help him "get more business" by telling them "I don't want any more business."  He also confessed that he manages 30 websites, and gave me recommendations on what blogging platform to use.

But it was Sherman, the spinning top maker, who brought it all full circle for me.

Sherman and I were walking down the same path, he in one direction, I in the other.  He gave me a cordial smile, I said hello, and he asked me how the blogging conference was going.  We stopped and began to chat.

I can't recall everything we talked about, but I wish I had recorded our conversation so I could share the marvelous, convoluted path we traveled. Of course, after just a few minutes, I started to get that antsy feeling.  I made subtle attempts to move on, but Sherman was having none of it; he kept asking me about me, my blog, my life (somehow we got to talking about how many languages the Swiss speak, prompted by a conversation about how I studied abroad in Geneva.  Don't ask me how we got there.  I have no clue.).  I discovered that he orders parts for his tops from Taiwan, that he has a relative (or maybe a relative-in-law) who is working for a choreographer in New York, and that his sister (or sister-in-law) has beat cancer three times, bless her heart. He told me his sales were good, and when I exclaimed, "That's great!" he replied, "Yes it is.  But for every top I sell, I have to make another one."

At some point in this dialogue, as I was shifting from foot to foot and eying the next shop as my escape route, something happened.  I stopped, mentally smacked myself and said "Jodi, you jerk. You have nowhere to go.  There's no reason you shouldn't stay and talk to this interesting man for as long as you can.  What's wrong with you?  Listen, really listen, and maybe you'll learn something." It wasn't easy for me to stay tuned in, but I did it, and I'm so glad I did.

Sherman, his fellow shop owners, and Mary the park interpreter did indeed teach me something.  They taught me that at some point in an interaction with a stranger, we will tip from small talk to storytelling.  I don't usually get there.  I usually run off and breathe a sigh of relief that I'm on my own again, or I head for a familiar face and we share our usual, safe conversation.   But if we get there, we will hear something we haven't heard before, or say something we've never said before.

I also learned that it's ok to be a storyteller.  It's ok if our stories wander; we'll bring them back eventually, and even if we don't, we'll have some fun along the way.  If our stories are too long, many in our audience will just leave, and that's fine.  Let them.  The ones who stick around, who hear it all the way through, will be the interesting ones.  They'll be the ones to tell us their own stories, the interesting ones, and we'll learn something from them. 

I'm not saying I'm going to magically become great at small talk.  But I think, thanks to this experience, I'll become more aware of when we cross that invisible line, and hopefully I'll pay more attention to what we discover out on that winding, meandering road. 

8 comments:

  1. Love this, Jody. I have this problem too. I think it might partially be inborn, but I think society has trained us to be hurry up and go types. Kudos to you for recognizing and retraining!

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    1. Right, because if we have to go somewhere, we're terribly important! :)

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  2. Stopping and talking with people has been THE hardest part of acclimating to the South. In Michigan, people don't even make eye contact as you pass by. And, speak? Unheard of, literally. Now when I go home to visit and I say hi to everyone I pass, I feel uncomfortable. I'm still not good with small talk but I'm a good listener.

    gina

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    1. I love saying hi to people as we pass, but it's having to do more than that that makes me edgy. :) I remember people in Wisconsin being pretty friendly, but in Boston and NY there's not a lot of eye contact, let alone the "nod and say hello" thing.

      It's a gift to be a good listener. I'm working on being a better one.

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  3. this is so good! Being a Yankee myself I totally understand that antsy feeling. We just weren't bred with the same small-talk skills as southern kids! What I love most about this though is how much you learned outside of the conference yet they were interactions that occurred because of the conference! Thanks for sharing!

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    1. How did I miss this comment? Where are you from, Julie, my fellow Yankee?

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  4. Good stuff, Jodi. I relate and certainly share yours and Fawn's thoughts. It's such a bad habit, and I'm really guilty of it as well. I've gotten better in recent months about slowing down with my kids or just sitting on the porch visiting with neighbors.

    Really enjoyed this post! And, I'm resubscribing - I was following you in my reader, but apparently am no longer getting your updates.

    Keep up the insightful writing!

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    1. Hey, thanks for resubscribing! And for the encouragement. I just noticed that my blogging has increased since AWBU. I guess that's a good thing. :)

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