Response to Prompt #36
On the Other Side of
the Door: A Storyteller
In the spring of 1986, Jim and I took our first trip out
west: New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona.
We were already collectors of Native American art, but found ourselves
surprised by the prevalence of a type of pottery we weren’t really familiar
with: The Storyteller. This
pottery art come primarily from the Cochiti Pueblo, located in Sandoval County,
New Mexico.
In the Pueblo Indian tradition, the storyteller is the elder
who preserves the oral tradition.
The artistic representation always features children climbing on the
storyteller, and the price of the art is determined by how many children are on
the elder: about $100 for each child at that time.
As we visited a variety of stores in Old Town Albuquerque,
Santa Fe, and Sedona, I fell more and more in love with the storyteller. Finally, at the Pueblo Indian Cultural
Center, I found one that captured me fully, created by Martha Arquero, and was somewhat more
affordable (at $450) than many of the storytellers we had seen.
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| My precious storyteller made by Martha Aquero (Cochiti) |
***
As a child, I didn’t play with dolls. They held no interest for me. My friend Veronica had every kind of
Barbie and related paraphernalia, but we didn’t play with them together. On my First Communion, my grandmother
gave me a Barbie doll. All I remember is that my mother was furious, and I was
not encouraged to play with the item.
But Veronica and I did have another game we played. It was totally imaginary. We both created “families,” and we were
the mothers. We would divide up
the yard into our two homes. We
knew exactly where every room in the house was, and we would go about our day
as mothers, doing what we imagined mothers do, and talking to each other about
our children. I was Joan. Veronica was Peg.
When our family moved to the suburbs, Veronica and I wrote
letters to each other. And along
with those letters, we would include letters between Peg and Joan, still
discussing their children and their married lives.
About a year into this, on a summer day, I received a letter
from Veronica and Peg. They were
together in one envelope, which I read, and then inadvertently left on a table
in the family room when I went out to play.
When I came back in, it became clear that my mother had read
the letters – and she mocked me for it.
She humiliated and shamed me over this “fake” exchange with my friend,
and caused me to feel that I had done something horrible and wrong.
My response was not to get angry with her for invading my
privacy, but instead I stopped. You might say the door to storytelling slammed
shut. I never had Joan write back
to Peg. I ended the game. I never told Veronica why, and I don’t
think she ever asked. I did not
even acknowledge this happened until about thirty years later.
***
When I was a member of Toastmasters, I completed the first
ten speeches, and then was seeking to expand my skills through other types of
speeches. These speeches would be gathered in advanced manuals by themes. One of the themes was “Storytelling,”
and I found myself reacting strongly to it. I would say to myself, “Who would want to do that? How trite!” A member of our group started working through the
storytelling manual, and I had to admit that it didn’t seem all bad. In fact,
he seemed to be having a lot of fun.
I also had to finally face the fact that my strong reaction to it
probably meant that was the way I was supposed to go.
So I did it. I
became a storyteller. Not only
that, I became an advocate for storytelling, and as Education Director for my
group, often encouraged other members to try the speeches in that manual. I began to attend storytelling events
(with Iris, of course, also a storyteller) and we even attended the National
Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee in October 1995.
It wasn’t until I was having coffee one morning with a
friend in December, 1998, I uncovered what had happened with my mother that
summer day in the late 1960’s. It
was the first time I acknowledged that she had shut me down as a creative
writer and imaginative storyteller.
I recall going through the day feeling like something had crashed down
around me, at the same time something had been built up over the past few years
that held me strong.
You see, behind the door I was always that storyteller. It was represented in the artwork I had
purchased in 1986. It was
represented by my willingness to punch through my comfort zone and start to
tell stories. I put together a
wonderful storytelling program for my high school alma mater’s Arts Festival. I wrote grants with a teacher I knew to
teach storytelling skills to her 7th grade students, which they
performed for the elementary school kids.
Even when I moved to Florida, storytelling connected me to kids at the
Sanibel School, where I would often sub, and the Language Arts teacher there
welcomed me in to do the program there.
In college when I had to write an analysis for my Shakespeare class, I
zeroed in on how Horatio was the teller of the story of Hamlet. Understanding
story brought the world more fully into focus.
The storyteller lived inside of me all those years, even
after being shamed and shut down.
Finding her again was an incredible process. Storytelling helped make me
a teacher, gave me new confidence, caused me to connect more fully as a writer,
and opened my world to the power of narrative and how it is alive everywhere.
Finding that door I was hiding behind freed the storyteller
in me. And what can be better than that?
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| Artist: Pamela Quintana (Cochiti) |
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