Wild Imagination I
G.K. Chesterson wrote, Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. What is true may not be factual. I am now at the early stages of preparation for my podcast Wild Imagination. Quite a few years ago I created a podcast series called Dad’s Place Radio where I recorded a person’s memories of their fathers. Wild Imagination will be quite different. In each episode, I will record a full story from Andrew Lang’s collection of fairy tales. Lang’s huge story collection has been recorded before as part of a Lit2Gocollaboration between the Florida Department of Education and the University of South Florida College of Education. I think their goal was to get them recorded efficiently as possible. They are all on iTunes. You can listen now to The Silent Princess.
So how are my stories going to be different? A good storyteller invests something of themselves in their stories to bring them to life, more than simply reading the story. A good storyteller captures a listener's imagination as they travel together to the land make believe. A story is something precious, something shared between the teller and those who listen.
Storytelling has always been an important part of my life as a parent and professional. I had a children’s TV show with puppets called “Butterberry Hill” on our Topeka NBC affiliate, a monthly special for two years. I have conducted many storytelling concerts across the country, especially school assemblies. I have led workshops on storytelling and wrote From Wonder to Wisdom, a book about the importance of stories. Carolyn Foat and I wrote a book for parents called Once Upon a Mind.
In Wild Imagination, my stories will have something of my heart in them, highlighted with subtle threads of music. I will assemble each podcast in GarageBand on my Mac. My first story will be “Samba the Coward” from the Olive Fairy Book. In my next blog post, I will talk about the challenges of putting this all together.
