Tale Spinners : Pupils Weave Yarns at Storytelling Festival in Oxnard

Kyle Pinkard likes to tell tales.

Not fibs, but stories. And not simple stories, but drawn-out, complicated tales, such as the saga about a lazy boy named Jack that Kyle told this week during the annual storytelling festival at Oxnard’s Fred Williams School.

“It’s really a good way to get attention,” the bespectacled 8-year-old said. “You get to sit up front in a chair and be listened to by other people.”

Many of the youngsters who told stories in this year’s festival approached the event with a bit more trepidation than Kyle. But they did it anyway.

Now in its third year, the Fred Williams School storytelling festival drew 400 participants--half of the school’s kindergarten through sixth-grade students. It is the largest event of its kind at any Ventura County school.

In an age of Nintendo and video arcades, the ancient art of storytelling still appeals to children because it fills a basic human need, said Ladell Bohn, a speech therapist at Fred Williams School who founded the storytelling festival.

“We’re all storytellers, really,” said Bohn, who will give a talk about her school’s program at a national storytelling convention in Texas next month. “It’s pretty much the most natural form of communication and of passing things down.”

But, she said, “We don’t sit around on the porch and listen to stories like we used to. We’re so busy, we’re so technologically advanced that that kind of personal thing is missing in our society. And I think kids still hunger for it.”

During the two-week festival that ended this week, about 30 children at a time got out of their regular classes to take turns telling and hearing each others’ stories.

They had gleaned their tales from books, from yarns told by parents or grandparents, or even from some of the professional storytellers who perform occasionally at the school.

Some of the stories had a moral, such as the yarn titled “A Friend in Need.” Stressing the importance of loyalty, it told the tale of a fox that slyly prevented a leopard from killing a turtle.

Many stories were merely fanciful, such as Kyle Pinkard’s folk tale about the misadventures of Lazy Jack.

As Kyle told the story, poor Jack was not so much lazy as witless, always applying his mother’s advice a day too late.

One day, for instance, Jack’s mother told him to always use a leash on the family dog. The next day, as Jack was bringing home a slab of beef, he wondered: “Now what did mother tell me?” as Kyle recounted it. “Ah, yes. Use a leash.” And so Jack dragged the meat home on a leash.

Although Kyle said he chose his story because it was long, some of his classmates seemed less comfortable in the spotlight.

Many sat on the edge of their chairs and spoke so softly they could barely be heard, even with a microphone. Others rushed through their tales as if eager to reach the end.

Bohn said she is careful not to emphasize how well the children perform. “There’s no better way to turn kids off to something than to make it have to be too perfect,” she said.

But some students, she acknowledged, seem to be naturals.

A first-grader, 6-year-old Alex Nerayan had never participated in any previous storytelling festivals.

When he had his turn at the microphone this week, however, Alex spoke clearly, gestured with his hands and skillfully embellished his African American folk tale of why dogs hate cats.

“Dogs and cats used to love each other,” Alex said. But one day a cat stole a piece of ham from a dog, and not just any ham, but “the juiciest, the biggest hunk of ham,” he said.

Although the story had come from a book, the words were Alex’s own. He had heeded Bohn’s warning not to memorize.

“The kids who memorize, if they miss one word, they’re lost,” Bohn said. “If you tell it in your own words, you can add, you can subtract.”

It is this ability of storytellers to make tales their own that gives the oral tradition an edge over Nintendo-like games with their ready-made plots.

Even more important, Bohn said, is the confidence that children gain from telling their tales in front of audiences.

“It’s hard for these kids,” she said. “They’re scared. It’s hard for a first-grader to speak in front of a sixth-grader. But they love it so much and they get such self-esteem from it that they are willing to do it.”