Oral Storytelling

—storytelling that replicates how a storyteller speaks, an actual person telling a story, or story conventions which are derived from oral tradition.

IN the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel. All the fishes he could find in all the sea he ate with his mouth—so!

James Joyce—Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man 

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

*
Kafka's A Report to an Academy.
It's a speech.
"Honored Members of the Academy!
You have done me the honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape...."

—Tom King — 

-indigenous writer

-brilliant satirist, particularly in terms of playing with settler stereotypes of Indigenous people

-interesting in how stories and how they are told convey culture, identity and convey how we think of other culture, of power structures

who is this story for? who's POV? sensibility does it channel?

-this is a “trickster” tale. also a origin tales (cf. Genesis)
-it refers to its own storicity as authority.

I heard this story once…

-transitions, beginnings that show ostensible oral nature of this story. 

cf. Come Gather Round while I sing you a song.

or the beginning of Beowulf. “Hark.” 

“Alright. You know.” “So.” “Anyway.”

 “How about a story, that one says.” “Sure I says.” — the way someone reccounting something that happened to them might speak as opposed to a literary reccounting.

    add to pacing, are a rhetorical structure — control how you hear the story, its pacing. put you consciously in “storytelling” style rather than just short story

-lists, parallel structures—repetition. “Alright.” (vocal mannerisms.)

older oral story telling structure. Think of the Bible, or a sermon, or a speech.

“ We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender,

-tone — “slang”

-one good story that one

-slang terms, humour,—tense.  — it’s present not past

so I says to my buddy…

—length of sentences —- lots of fragments, or short sentences:

“All white.” “Too bad, those.”

often simpler tone and sentence structure in oral narratives.

—often folktales tell the origin story of something. How the Leopard got its spots.Why they call a certain place by a certain name.

—description—not a lot of description, more a reccounting of a plot, of what happened.

Meta — self awareness of this story

-do we believe this narrator? what shows us there’s an element of parody, and we perhaps shouldn’t believe the tone of the narrator

-self-aware/meta—-anthropologists with tape recorders & cameras, looking for an Indigenous story.

The Ending—“I clean up all the coyote tracks on the floor”

Riffing off another story

-this story retells the fall from the Garden of Eden. It make it Indigenous. It’s a speaking back to high culture. Oral story telling — variant versions, and also often told from the perspective and in the tone of the less powerful. “Myth & History” as opposed to “Folktale and story.”

Writing activity.

—imagine a stand-up comedian and how they tell stories.

what techniques they use.

—use a storytelling model. Idioms, slang, transitions, repetition, dialogue, plot

I’m going to tell you a story that happened to a friend of mine. 

A joke: a rabbi, a priest and a Lady Gaga walk into a bar…

The rabbi says….

This is the story of 

—my first day at school…the first time I….

 ______

If more needed: Guided Missiles story.

three terms to include in short story // three characters

ideas from class

(reference Calvino’s Castle of Cross Destiny.)

Dialogue.

A History of Awkward Silence.

Beth’s two client pocket dialing here. How does what they say convey who they are, what they are doing, and where they are. Write with minimum of details outside the dialogue.