Telling your story: Preserve Your History Through Storytelling

Telling your story: Preserve Your History Through Storytelling

From the winner of the 2014 Regional Emmy Award for A Farm Winter with Jerry AppsJerry Apps, renowned author and veteran storyteller, believes that storytelling is the key to maintaining our humanity, fostering connection, and preserving our common history. In Telling Your Story, he offers tips for people who are interested in telling their own stories. Readers will learn how to choose stories from their memories, how to journal, and find tips for writing and oral storytelling as well as Jerry's seasoned tips on speaking to a live radio or TV audience.Telling Your Story reveals how Jerry weaves together his stories and teaches how to transform experiences into cherished tales. Along the way, readers will learn about the value of storytelling and how this skill ties generations together, preserves local history, and much more. Jerry Apps taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 38 years. He has taught creative writing workshops, with an emphasis on telling stories, for 45 years. Apps is a full-time writer and part-time teacher and public speaker. He recently completed three hour-long television documentaries, all featuring storytelling, that PBS stations across the nation have aired. He is currently working on a fourth documentary. Connect with him on www.jerryapps.com Telling Your Story Preserve Your History Through Storytelling By Jerry Apps Fulcrum Pubslishing Copyright © 2016 Jerry Apps All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-938486-23-4 CHAPTER 1 Why Tell Your Story? My father and my uncles were storytellers, and so were several of the neighbors in the farming community where I grew up in central Wisconsin. Family members told stories when we gathered for celebrations, birthday parties, anniversaries, and at Christmas and Thanksgiving family affairs. Our farm neighbors told stories during threshing and wood sawing bees, while they waited at the grist mill for their cow feed to be ground, and when they came to town on Saturday nights and waited for their wives to grocery shop. These stories were always entertaining, as many of them had a humorous bent to them, but they also were filled with information — how the cattle were surviving during the summer drought, what price Sam got for his potato crop and how he managed to get that price. How the weather this year was not nearly as bad as the weather twenty years ago. Many of the stories were also sad, such as how Frank was making it on his poor farm since his wife died and left him with three kids to feed and care for. I heard some of these stories many times, each told a little differently when it was shared, but enjoyed as much as the time before. When I graduated from college in 1955, I began a long career as a teacher. I was soon telling stories as a teaching method. As the years passed, I discovered how much I enjoyed telling my stories, both in written form and spoken in front of an audience. I also discovered that people enjoyed my stories when I shared them on radio and television. In 1999, I was in New York City as part of an international group discussing the arts for people over age 50. The week-long session, sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and UNESCO, the educational arm of the United Nations, focused on developing suggestions for how middle-aged people and older could become more involved in the arts, and how they and the world might benefit from them doing so. We discussed sculpting and painting, dance and folk arts — and storytelling. I was in the storytelling group, and we discussed and made several suggestions about the importance of storytelling and how to encourage people to do it. Each sub-group was asked to select a spokesperson who would present the group's report to the United Nation's delegates at the end of the week. I was selected to give the storytelling group's report and I never forgot the experience. Here I was, at the podium in the beautiful United Nations building, looking out over a sea of delegates, many wearing headphones that provided them with a translation to their own language of what I had to say. Sitting close behind me was Kofi Annan, then Secretary General of the UN. I had fifteen minutes to deliver my message. I don't recall the exact words I used, but I tried to convey that storytelling and stories were as old as humankind and that they remained important and could make many valuable contributions. I couldn't tell by looking at the audience if they agreed with me, disagreed with me, or just didn't care. When I finished — mine was the last in a series of brief talks about the arts — I left the podium and stepped off to the side. I noticed that several delegates had lined up to talk with me. I expected to hear such things as: "You were talking about an earlier day when people had time to share stories. Today the events of the world move too rapidly for storytelling." I expected someone to say, "Today's world requires more modern ways of communicating, and storyte