The Portland Storytellers Guild stirs imaginations anew as it brings back the tradition to grown-ups
originally published in The Oregonian on 10/18/03
© 2003 MICHAEL McGREGOR
On a beautiful fall afternoon while others enjoy the last warmth of summer, Anne Rutherford stands where the pastor
once stood in an old wooden church on Northeast Prescott Street. She's telling the story of a girl who doesn't want to
grow up.
Without props or costumes, Rutherford uses expressive eyes behind dark-rimmed glasses, a few hand gestures and a
sense of urgent importance to bring a birthday party and the girl's conversation with an old woman to life.
As soon as she sits down, Rick Huddle steps up to recite Edward Lear's rhyming story "The Dong With a Luminous
Nose." The words belong to Lear but the telling is all Huddle, a mix of pantomime, vocal changes and silly faces that
make Lear's strange creature seem to appear.
The adults in the small audience at the recently opened Charlotte A. Cavatica Learning Center in Northeast Portland
watch both performers closely, as captivated as the children by the magic of story.
Rutherford, 41, and Huddle, 35, are two of a growing number of people across the U. S. breathing fresh life into
something people have been doing for thousands of years: telling stories. Watching them, you might think they
themselves have never grown up. But they will tell you that, throughout time, stories have never been just for children.
The two belong to the Portland Storytellers' Guild, a group that for several years has gathered each month to tell
stories in an old classroom at the Kennedy School in Northeast Portland. Their performances at the Cavatica Center
are part of the Guild's attempt to reach a larger audience by adding a second, more-colorful venue.
Named after the title character in "Charlotte's Web," the Charlotte A. Cavatica Center is awash in pillows, pews and
props such as a foot-high cow and a Buddha statue. Swings hang from exposed ceiling beams, and the bathroom has
Mickey Mouse soap. It is the perfect place to listen to a well-told story.
And the power of a well-told story is what the Portland Storytellers' Guild is all about. While some members first
encountered that power in their work as teachers or librarians, others came to it from less-expected directions. Guild
president Walt Schaefer, for example, first used stories to find common ground between workers and management as
a trainer at a large company.
Though little-known, the Guild has been around for 15 years. It began when a group of Portland-area librarians who met
informally each month to tell stories decided to establish something more formal.
"Basically it was the Old World idea of a guild," says Ken Iverson, who attended the librarians' first meeting and still
belongs to the Guild. "It was meant to be a place for mentoring and helping people develop as storytellers."
The Guild thrived in those early days, holding monthly storytelling events at an old Northwest Portland restaurant called
Ezekiel's Wheel that drew as many as 50 people. Members told stories on KBOO radio on Sunday mornings, too, and
for a year they had a cable access show.
But as the years passed, the Guild's fortunes declined until it was all but abandoned. For a year it didn't even meet.
Then, in the late 1990s, people began to join again. Four years ago, it became a legal nonprofit and the members
elected officers for the first time. Now it has 40 members.
Rutherford credits Garrison Keillor with fostering an appreciation for storytelling among the general public. In the past
two decades, storytelling events have grown in popularity across the country. The biggest, the National Storytelling
Festival in Jonesboro, Tenn., home of the International Storytelling Center, drew 4,500 people last year.
Every November, storytellers around the world participate in one great day of storytelling called Tellabration! Last year,
300 Tellabration! events were held in 42 states and 10 other countries.
The largest local festival is the Tapestry of Tales the Multnomah County Library puts on each November. Huddle and
Guild member Alton Chung will be two of the featured tellers this year.
Trained storytellers have become regular fixtures at schools, libraries and public celebrations. Some such as Chung,
who tells Hawaiian stories, come out of a specific tradition. Others combine traditions, using tales from different
countries. And some, such as Rutherford, tell their own stories.
Among the places Rutherford has performed are a solstice gathering, a 16th birthday party, a church fund-raising
event, a retreat for university professors, a salmon festival, a religious center and a Mother's Day tea, where the
elderly in the audience used their own family place settings, reminders of the stories they had to tell.
"We're all storytellers," Rutherford says. "Our minds are programmed to hear stories." In her previous work as a
mediator, she used stories to bring people together. Now, as a professional storyteller, she uses them to entertain and
help people deal with everyday stress.
"There's been some research on this," she says. "People go into a trance-like state when they're listening to a story.
They come out with their imaginations both sparked and soothed."
Guild president Schaefer agrees. "If you hear something, it comes into the brain differently," he says. "Our eyes are
trained to be discriminating but our ears are not, so with stories you can surprise the mind and reach a different level.
There's a saying: everyone's 5 years old when they listen to a story. That doesn't mean chronological age but in the
sense of openness and wonder."
used with permission of M. McGregor
omalleystory@yahoo.com
