When people think of storytelling, they often think of community leaders, well seasoned by time, sharing myths and legends and anecdotes by the campfire. They imagine tents in a circle. They imagine children running around. They imagine s'mores, and starlight, and the sound of crickets on a summer night. When people think of storytelling, they think of traditions passed down, generation to generation. They think of a world being painted by hands scarred by decades of hard labor.
In many cases, the people envisioning this form of storytelling are correct (as they have been for eons), but this perception, this expectation of the aged storyteller has dark implications for this folk industry.
In centuries prior, seated around that campfire, listening to the mature teller were future tellers, young adults who would take the stories home to their children and tell those stories again and again to lull the little ones to sleep. Children would play out the battles of epic heroes the next day. Travelers would share the stories with their hosts. By the time any person had the look of the archetypal teller, they had been exposed to thousands of stories and hundreds of tellers.
The world has changed. Storytellers are far from a dying breed, but the time to train them has shortened and the pool of exposed persons is shrinking.
It is rare now for someone to enter the traditional telling industry before reaching the age of retirement. There are a few reasons for this.
First, in a world dominated by Google SEO, there are many barriers to young people discovering that the traditional telling industry exists at all. Taylor Swift has an album called Folklore, Everyone with a camera calls themselves a “digital storyteller”, and anyone searching for likeminded people who want to tell folk stories must click past the 8th, 9th, 10th pages of Google search results before they stumble on the ISC or on the page of a traditional teller. The Grammy Award category that once celebrated storytellers now pits them against spoken word poets and celebrity audiobook readers. The young people who do manage to stumble upon the world of storytelling encounter, not traditional telling, but personal telling first (a beautiful art form, albeit tangential). It is often not until the years when a person is able to visit libraries on a Tuesday morning that they discover this beautiful world.
The second reason young people rarely find their way into traditional telling is the economic landscape of the United States. In a world where healthcare access is tied to employment, traditional telling makes little sense to those unable to draw pension or Social Security. The life of a gig worker is difficult. It is hard on the pocketbook, and it gives little comfort to those concerned about the future. So, today's storytelling festivals mostly feature performers either of middle age or of more advanced years, and their audiences look much the same.
Now, there are still many tellers going into elementary schools on Wednesday mornings or spending Saturdays in libraries with wide-eyed youths who will revel in the hilarity of a trickster tale, who will treasure the message of a fable, who will find strength in the hero of a myth, but who will also forget by the time they reach adulthood that the teller who told those stories was not themselves a fictional narrative.
The storytelling industry today relies heavily on the presence of children and those of advanced age, but that does not mean that others are not welcome. At the age of 31, I may be a bit old for some people's ideas of a ballet dancer or a contortionist (ideas that too should be challenged), but I am far younger than what many imagine a storyteller to be.
When the general public learns about my career, they are shocked. They hesitate before asking, “Is that still a thing?”
However, when I walk into a festival, a storytelling open mic, a workshop, an audition, I am not greeted with any hesitation. I am immediately embraced, sometimes to the detriment of my lung function.
Other tellers are ecstatic to see someone considered a “young performer” walking into the room: I do not have to ask for a seat at the table because there are many already prepared; I do not have to fight to be seen because there are mentors ready to lift me up.
I recently performed at a festival headlined by award-winning tellers whose albums I have been listening to for years, and they graciously welcomed me and talked with me like an equal. I was invited to perform there by a gem of a teller who had gone out of her way to make sure I could audition despite my hectic two-full-time-careers schedule. This festival also invited other young performers, and the organizers made sure we all had time to talk and connect and build a network for the next generation.
So, to any person in their twenties or thirties scared or nervous about entering this noble profession, know that, while your concerns about the economic downsides to this career are legitimate, your fears of being accepted by established tellers will be squeezed away the moment you walk in the room.
With love,
Ursa Miles
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