Reviews

Have you read a storytelling book, or listened to a CD or tape, that you are particularly impressed with?

Share your impressions with the rest of us by sending a review of under 750 words to info@northstarstorytelling.org. Please include the name of the publisher, the ISBN number and a phone number to contact the publisher if provided.

Fearless Girls, Wise Women and Beloved Sisters:  Heroines in Folktales from Around the World
Edited by Kathleen Regan
Reviewed by Nan Montgomery

W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London, (c) 1998

It seems I’m drawn more and more to books and audio books that retell folktales from around the world.  I’ve a few books on the subject and held the opinion that I knew a lot of folktales already.   Well, I am humbled and beginning to “think again” as I re-read and read anew these marvelous stories of magic and power and surprising endings! 

I came across this book at my local library while researching some Irish tales.   Although I have not yet read every story in this book yet, I find that I look forward with anticipation to each new story.   In this volume I find myself in India, Ireland, Greece, Israel, Kenya, Senegal, Scotland, China, New Zealand, the Philippines…   Each story is tall and true, strange and wonderful.  These stories are about women like us, who routinely beat the odds, outwit the scoundrel, defeat kings and win love.   Like this one I’m reading now about a Cheyenne girl who saves her brother by riding into the midst of a great battle… 

Suddenly They Heard Footsteps: Storytelling for the Twenty First Century
By Dan Yashinsky
Reviewed by Ann Reay

University Press of Mississippi
ISBN 1-57806-927
601-432–6205

Dan Yashinksy is a teller for our time. In his rousing “manifesto for storytelling’s future and handbook of stories and inspiration,” recently published for US audiences by the University Press of Mississippi, this brilliant Canadian teller “effectively bridges the gap between oral tradition and the digital age.”

If the porch is the metaphor for the Southern tradition of storytelling, then Yashinksy introduces us to the “storm fool” – an apt metaphor for us Northerner narrators who are “just a little mad” braving storms and frigid temperatures to go out and tell stories .

Dan’s inspiration is Ruth Sawyer – whose work has inspired many tellers. In this book, he makes a strong case for us tellers and storytelling’s place in this time. He often resets using modern characters and themes– a greedy king becomes a corporate land developer, the devil sells computers which can remember every-thing for you. Filled with delightful surprises, this book is spring tonic for any-one worn down by struggles in building a storytelling business. It’s a true call to action for anyone involved in building community.

So, you storm fools out there: get this book. Read this book. Take heart and heed – we’re just beginning to get revived and get going.

From the Publisher http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/854

About this Book 

Canada’s best-known storyteller, Dan Yashinsky, lives his life as teller and listener, and shows how storytelling can and does create vital connections between individuals, communities and families.

In an age of instant messaging, entertainment systems and digital interaction, why is it that more and more people are being drawn to the art of oral storytelling? As Dan Yashinsky, one of Canada’s most well-known and beloved storytellers shows, an old tradition has become the new avant-garde. Storytelling is still very much alive in this digital age: it connects us to each other, to our communities and to our past. In fact, people are as hungry as they’ve ever been for the wisdom and solace of told stories. But they are also looking for stories that will speak to our post-modern, fractured, apocalyptic age.

Suddenly They Heard Footsteps is part memoir, part instruction, part cultural history, and includes tales that Dan has told to wide acclaim. By turns humorous, inspiring, instructive and philosophical, Dan shows us that, like love, stories mean the most the very moment we give them away.

Review Quotes 

“Yashinsky sows stories along the wayside as he explains how and why listeners are hooked, reveals the secrets of story hosts, and describes the extraordinary characters who have sparked the contemporary international revival of this most universal and durable of the arts. Yashinsky himself is one of those extraordinary characters. He gives us much to laugh at, provoke thought, wonder about, and remember and pass on. If the word awesome had not been rendered meaningless by trendiness, it would be the adjective for this book. As it is, spell-binding will do.”
—Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Dark Age Ahead

“If you can’t sit down for a cup of tea and a chat with Yashinsky, sitting down with this book is a close second.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“Suddenly They Heard Footsteps is at once a polemic for storytelling and a personal memoir, a handbook for prospective storytellers and an anthology of tales from which the reader may borrow. It is a passionate work of deeply held belief….Readers will come away from Suddenly They Heard Footsteps with all the basic tools and the inspiration they need to try storytelling for themselves.”
—Quill & Quire

“A melange of memoir, social history and how-to guide, Yashinsky’s love of the spoken word imbues the whole package with warm authority.”
—The Toronto Star

“In celebrating the storyteller’s art, Yashinsky has tapped into a motherlode of universal need, the thirst for a story that shows us what it is to be human.”
—Edmonton Journal