It's how you tell it

When storyteller Julie Duane sets down her cushions for a storytelling session to young library goers, she lays down some rules too.



"You have to be kind on the outside and kind on the inside," she tells her audience. "Kind on the outside means no pushing, pinching, shoving, pulling, whining, or ..." she pauses, trying to remember.

"Biting!" calls a little boy helpfully, and with some glee.

"That's right, no biting," Julie says with a smile of thanks. "And also staying on your cushion. Then being kind on the inside means that we put up our hand if we want to say something, and we take turns. And we laugh with people, and not at them, so that feelings don't get hurt."

The little ones in Kilcullen Library for the first of two Saturday morning sessions from Julie agreed to her terms happily enough. Sure, it would be hard not to agree with this comfortable, even cuddly lady whose tone of voice alone promised wonders to come. She looked the part, too, in a bright patchwork of dress and hat, straight out of a storybook itself. With a shopping bag that might hold goodies of its own.

She said she would start with stories for the youngest, because that was only fair. "And if you're only learning to read, that's OK too," she added. "Because you can always read the pictures."

But first, of course, Julie wanted to get to know her audience. So she asked them whether they were in little school or big school, and if they had learned how to hang their own coats on hooks. And she was suitably impressed when one little fellow, the one who had reminded her about no biting, reeled off his 'haon, do, tri' all the way to the end. "Maith an fear," she exclaimed. "Well done."

Anyway, it was time to get on with the stories. But Julie doesn't just do it in one direction. Nope, it's a two way thing. So it was a case of teaching everybody involved how to tell the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears in two minutes.

"There's a thing about Goldilocks that has always puzzled me," she mused as she got herself together. "I mean, was she polite? Did she wipe her feet on the mat when she went into the three bears' house? Did she knock on the door?" She shook her head then, not because she didn't believe that Goldilocks wasn't polite, but because we'll never know as it wasn't told in the story.

Anyhow, she got all the little ones involved in the story, going through the actions and, indeed, telling the tale in two minutes. "Now," she said, "you'll be able to tell that story yourselves for ever more."

Afterwards it was the turn of the older ones, with the tale of Chicken Little and how he thought the sky was falling and how much trouble he made for everyone he met. And lots of other stories, which meant that when Julie left Kilcullen Library, the jungle drums were already beating to tell those who hadn't come along that they'd have another chance the next week.

It wasn't so much the stories themselves, as it was how she, and her audience, told them.

The iPod and Xbox haven't won yet ...