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What Personal Storytellers can learn from Folk and Fairytales
By Corey Rosen and Brandon Spars
Several months ago, when I started collecting my thoughts on storytelling and related ideas (AI, active listening, and improvisation among them), I put out a call of sorts. “What are you interested in hearing about?” What topics, ideas, or techniques are you curious to learn more about or deepen your own knowledge of?
One of the first I received was from a Bay Area storyteller I respect and admire deeply, Brandon Spars. I first encountered Brandon on stage at The Moth. His stories were rich with visual detail, expressed with great enthusiasm, and painted pictures of his experiences at home and abroad with the same kind of palette you might hear in a folk story.
It’s no wonder that his stories were instantly loved by audiences, and that he became a frequent winner of our regular Story Slams and Grand Slams.
Brandon asked if I might include something on my blog about what personal (moth-style or “creative non-fiction”) storytellers could learn from folk and fairytale tellers.
I have been a semi-regular attendee at Storytelling Association of California (SAC) events in person and online and have always appreciated the blend of first person and re-told stories from local and national voices like Vicky Ness, Megomi Grace Fleming and Claire Castell.
But when I did some navel gazing on what I would say on the topic, I realized this was a task better suited for those in my sphere that are actual practitioners of it!
So without further ado, I am delighted to present my first co-authored blog post, written by and with my good friend Brandon Spars.
The story below includes links to hear his re-tellings of each of the stories he cites. I strongly recommend giving them a listen as you read. His telling of both stories is honestly as integral a part of the learning about how and why they work as the analysis.
Thank you Brandon for your beautiful storytelling and writing.
Enjoy!
What Personal Storytellers can learn from Folk and Fairytales
by Brandon Spars
Introduction
Over the years, there has been a divide between personal stories and folktales. Events like the Moth have generally drawn a younger audience, very sensitive to cultural appropriation and privilege, who might be reticent to tell or even listen to traditional stories told by tellers whose connection to those traditions is unclear. Storytelling festivals and swaps – once the venues largely dedicated to traditional stories – have been inundated with personal stories, and, at least at the Bay Area Storytelling Festival there has been a conscious effort to be sure to include a teller or two who perform folk and fairytales.
At the same time, some tellers are weaving personal stories into folktales. Mo Reynolds is a great example of a teller who weaves her own personal truths with the timeless universals that have endured the wear of centuries and somehow persisted. She rivets her audience every time with her rendition of Sleeping Beauty woven with the account of her own marriage.
Perhaps woven or braided tales will become even more prevalent as tellers seek to bridge or even close what they perceive as an ever widening gap between traditional and personal.
One thing is clear. Those traditional stories have stood the test of time, and there is a reason for this. There are many reasons, in fact. In this brief article I will explore just one of them, and hopefully, in so doing, help bridge the gap between the two genres in an alternative way to the braided tale.
I tell personal stories on the stage, but, as a former ancient history teacher, I told many folktales and legends in my classrooms. I thought I was keeping the two genres quite separate: ensuring that I shared my personal truths with my public audience, and trying to bring Ancient Greece and India to life for my high school students with “The Minotaur” or “The Tale of Ahalya.” What I didn’t realize is that the traditional stories were bleeding into my personal storytelling, influencing my stories at a very foundational level.
One of the most powerful influences that traditional stories have had over me is the use of repeated sequences. We can see these immediately in children’s stories such as Goodnight Moon, which contains a list of attributes belonging to “the great green room,” including a brush, a bowlful of mush, and a quiet old lady whispering hush. The book lists a catalog of items before repeating the list, addressing the items directly with “Goodnight.” Goodnight, brush. Goodnight, old lady whispering hush. A story like “The Three Bears,” does something similar when Goldilocks tries porridge, chairs, and beds belonging to Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and the Baby Bear, always finding Baby Bear’s to her liking.
The power of the listed sequence is both in the unity it creates through similarity, and, paradoxically, in the development, or even tension, that is invoked through difference. The Goodnight Moon example divides the story neatly into two halves. The second half, a repeated sequence of items, marks the progression of a finished day turning into bedtime. The room presumably becomes a gateway into the realm of sleep for the listener. One item appears in the second list that was not included in the first, and that was the moon itself. It’s sudden appearance breaks the sequence, announcing the opening of the gateway into the realm of sleep beyond so that the narrator can finally dismiss any fear or worry as they leave the confines of the room: “Goodnight, noises everywhere.”
An Indonesian Fairytale
One of the stories I told in my classroom was a traditional story from Indonesia titled “Bawang Merah dan Bawang Putih.” I told the story as part of a ninth grade curriculum in which we examined the arrival of agriculture in Indonesia during the third millennium BC. The tale features its two main characters, a young woman named Bawang Putih, which means garlic, and her stepsister, named after shallots. The two plants are always grown together, and the reason is that garlic, with its slow release of sulfur, helps protect the nearby shallots from succumbing to pests and fungus. The story illustrates the one-way relationship between garlic and shallot. Just as growing garlic near shallots protects the shallots, Bawang Putih (garlic) is always made to serve her step sister, Bawang Merah (shallot).
The story, like Goodnight Moon, is made of two halves, each featuring a repeated sequence. In the first sequence, a red scarf belonging to her stepsister gets swept away from Bawang Putih by the current while she is doing the family’s laundry in the river. It is her stepsister’s favorite scarf, and Bawang Putih is worried she will be furious, and her stepmother will punish her for her carelessness. She begins to scramble along the bank chasing the scarf. She comes upon a rice farmer, and she politely asks if he happened to see the scarf floating down the river. He tells her he just saw it, and she thanks him and excuses herself.
Next she comes upon a woman cutting grass for her cow. She politely asks the woman if she happened to see a red scarf float by, and the woman says the same thing. She just saw it. Finally, at a big bend in the river, Bawang Putih finds an old woman doing her laundry. She respectfully addresses the woman and asks about the scarf. In fact, not only did the old woman see the scarf, she caught hold of it and laid it out to dry on her fence.
The old woman invites Bawang Putih to share a meal with her while they wait for the scarf to dry.
First, Bawang Putih finishes the old woman’s laundry, and then, while they wait for the pot of rice to simmer, Bawang Putih does exactly what she does at her stepmother’s home: she sweeps the dust out of the house and the fallen leaves from the yard. She impresses the old woman with her selfless diligence and solicitous respect for others. The old woman rewards her with the gift of a pumpkin, which she is not to open until she reaches her house.
Of course, Bawang Putih does as she is told, and inside the pumpkin are jewels
and coins – a treasure – which Bawang Putih graciously shares with the family. However, Bawang Merah claims that the treasure belongs to her because it was her red scarf that led to the treasure. The stepmother agrees, and, of course Bawang Putih complies. Her selflessness knows no bounds.
The pattern is repeated when the stepmother instructs the selfish stepsister, Bawang Merah, to go to the river with her scarf and see if she can get another pumpkin from the old woman. It is the same thing, but… there are some differences.
Bawang Merah hurls her scarf in the river and stomps along the bank after it. She rudely dismisses the rice farmer, who helpfully says he has just seen her scarf, and the woman, who doesn’t even get a word out before Bawang Putih silences her. At the bend in the river, she finds the old woman. The red scarf is drying on the fence as it was the day before. Does Bawang Merah help the old woman with her laundry? Does she cook for the old woman? Sweep her house and yard?
Of course not.
She informs the old woman that she would like her scarf back immediately, which the old woman gives to her. But when Bawang Merah doesn’t leave immediately, the old woman chuckles as she realizes that she is expecting a gift as well. The old woman gives her a pumpkin, an even bigger one than she gave to Bawang Putih the day before, and she warns her that she is not to cut open the pumpkin until she is safely home. Does Bawang Merah listen to the old woman? Of course not! Delighted by the size of the pumpkin and its promise of even more riches, Bawang Merah stops after a short distance and cracks the pumpkin open on a rock. Are there coins and jewels inside?
Of course not.
There are snakes, spiders, and harmful insects, and they attack Bawang Merah.
At home, the stepmother can’t understand what is keeping her daughter. So she goes in search of Bawang Merah.
Neither is ever seen again. With the riches in the first pumpkin, Bawang Putih lives happily ever after.
Of course the story illustrates the ecological dependence of shallots on garlic. Without the presence of garlic, shallots are destroyed just as Bawang Merah the character was in her selfish neglect of her stepsister, Bawang Putih. The rehearsal of the journey down the river past the rice farmer, the woman cutting grass, and finally the arrival at the old woman’s house illustrates the tremendous difference in their characters while creating physical distance between the two, which, far from leading to abundant riches for Bawang Merah, actually removes her from the protection of Bawang Putih and, therefore vulnerable to attack by dangerous pests.
Upon a bit of further research, I discovered that garlic only releases this sulfur when it is cut or damaged. This might undercut the agricultural interpretation of this story somewhat unless we reevaluate the abuse of Bawang Putih (garlic) by the family as necessary for Bawang Merah’s protection. Once the stepmother and her daughter are gone, it would appear both that the abuse of Bawang Putih ends and that this coincides with an end of her preoccupation solely with others and the beginning of her own selfcare as she embarks on a life of riches and happiness.
Those that point out that the sulfur release does not occur naturally, take an alternative, culinary angle on the story, pointing to the fact that shallots and garlic are always cooked together, and that without the full bodied flavor of garlic, shallots would be too sharp and unbalanced. It would appear that in the world of the story, at least, cooking never happens without Bawang Putih’s presence. She cooks for the old woman, and Bawang Merah seems incapable of cooking for herself and her mother.
The pumpkin (or gourd) can be likened to a womb. The gift of the pumpkin is not only the flesh, but, even more so, the hollow center, whose space, like the earth itself, mirrors the quality of the person tending or harvesting it. In Bawang Putih’s case, her selfless care for others, dramatized by her respect for the rice farmer and the woman with her cow, would be the kind of farming that would result in bounty and abundance; Bawang Merah’s selfish disrespect for the farmer and the herdsman on the other hand, in suffering and ruin. The two rehearsals of the river bank journey by Bawang Putih and then Bawang Merah thus illustrate the two extreme possibilities of the farm to table sequence.
A Personal Story
Many of my personal stories I tell for swaps, festivals, and story slams are about the experiences I had during the summers I spent with my grandparents at their cabin on the Gasconade River in Missouri. I love juxtaposing my experiences as a young boy with the experiences I have had as a father when I brought my own children to the cabin. Discussed below is the first of a two-part story set on the Gasconade River. This part of the story is about my childhood.
The river had always seemed safe, inviting, and friendly to me. The thought of anything scary or tragic had never even occurred to me as I child, and I was permitted total freedom between the hours of breakfast and dinner, as I explored, fished, swam, ran trotlines and limb lines on the banks of the Gasconade. My younger brother and I were completely unsupervised! We were more often than not a mile upstream in our canoe or motorboat, and we were not wearing lifejackets.
Looking back now, I associate the river with my grandparents. My grandmother
hummed and sighed and bubbled as she spent her days next to the stove where she fried things in her iron skillet and tended to my grandfather, who sat in the same rocking chair on the screen porch and smoked his Winston cigarettes. My grandmother’s love of the river had shaped the way my brother and I saw it as a safe haven, a secret garden of our own. It was her belief that the river was purely positive, as gentle as the river otters that played along its banks, and its mineral rich waters as soothing as the bull frog chorus that lulled us to sleep every night.
The world that was our river stretched downstream about a half a mile, and, conversely, upstream for the same distance. At the downstream end was the Big Eddy, a wide, deep portion of the river that churned in what was truly a slow, steady circle before the water dumped out the back and headed on to the Missouri River. At the upper end of our river was a long gravel bar opposite high clay banks.
The gravel bar sparkled in the sun, and was one of our main bases from which we explored the shores and tiny creeks along our river. In between, moving downstream from the gravel bar was the mouth of Brush Creek, which led to a dark forested world, the setting for other stories I tell.
And then there was our little wooden dock, where we often spent entire afternoons jumping into the green water over and over until our hands and feet were wrinkled. Just below our dock was the Highway 89 Bridge. Cars would often slow so the occupants could enjoy the view of the river as it lay before them twinkling in the sunlight. Then there was the Rollins Ferry River Access.
When I was little, this was a quiet little cemented area where local farmers would put their boats in for the summer and fall and then take them out come winter. Nowadays, it is a point from which residents from as far away as St. Louis bring their enormous Shoalrunners and Gator Boats, which rocket up and down the once quiet, sleepy river. And then there is a deep, swift rapid until finally the gravel bottom of the river gives way to the muddy depths of the Big Eddy.
The story (linked here) is about the summer when two boys from a local technical college borrowed a boat, put it in the river at the Rollins Ferry Access and motored past the 89 Bridge, past our dock, past the mouth of Brush Creek to the gravel bar. There they each drank half a beer, and then tried swimming in the beautiful, cool green water. Unlike my brother and me, these two young men couldn’t swim, and they both drowned in the water right in front of the gravel bar. One of the bodies was found immediately, but the other, in spite of three days of searching, was never recovered.
The world of our friendly green river was shattered, and we slowly came to accept that in spite of its peaceful, inviting surface, the river could be a very dangerous place. It was this summer that my grandfather’s view of the river became more prominent.
My grandfather was a gruff, former soldier – a colonel, in fact. He called the gravel bar opposite the clay banks “Sonova Beach,” and it wasn’t years later that I understood his play on words.This particular summer, as we stayed in the cabin with him while the sheriff and several other unmarked but official boats dragged for the second body, my grandfather introduced us to the mysterious lore surrounding the river, in particular the Big Eddy, which he said was actually “a goddamn cemetery.”
This was the summer that we learned that there were two rivers: the beautiful, inviting one of my grandmother, and the mysterious and sometimes treacherous one of my grandfather.
In a manner that is similar to the Indonesian fairytale discussed above, this story about the river features a repeated sequence. Just as the two stepsisters journey past a rice farmer, a woman tending her cow, and arrive at the house at the bend where the magical old woman lives, my personal story features a pathway beginning as far upstream as Sonova Beach, then passing Brush Creek, our dock, the 89 Bridge, the Rollins Ferry Access, and finally terminating in the Big Eddy.
Each journey down the river is different. In one scene, as I stare at the world of the river from the hill, I witness the sparkling, inviting, soothing world of my grandmother from Sonova Beach down to the Big Eddy. The story ends, however, with a reimagining of the second tech student’s body, and how it must have drifted, unseen beneath that green inviting surface, to the dark depths of the Big Eddy where it came to rest, leaning among the other corpses said to lie in the mud and ooze, preserved by the minerals in the water.
Repeating the sequence, like in the fairytale, gives the story, at least I hope, unity and symmetry. Repeating the sequence in the telling allows me to linger in the power of the setting, and lets me build narrative energy. Repeating the sequence allows the audience to float the river twice: once relaxed and held in the arms in the gentle current, and then again, lurching through the gloom along the gravel towards the dark abyss.
Conclusion
So here is my charge to you, the reader.
In the next personal story that you tell, try to add a repeated sequence. It can be a series of places or actions. If you are getting in and out of an airplane seat, mention laboriously stowing the tray table, unbuckling the seatbelt, then stepping over the sleeping grandmother next to you. If you are taking a hike, mention a series of landmarks that are reincorporated at the end of you story. Keep some details the same each time it is repeated, but play with small differences. If you want to convey how weary this makes you, mention your leg stiffening as you try to lift it over the woman in subsequent repetitions (Karin Amano tells a hilarious story about bringing her baby on a flight to Japan – link here).
If you want to convey how late it got during the hike, describe the features of the landmarks as having taken on the appearance of sinister silhouettes whereas they were bright and friendly as you headed out for your adventure. The best thing about this technique is that it taps into some of the magic in the world of fairytales, but it does so without sacrificing the truth or factuality of your personal story.
One additional benefit of using repeated sequences in stories is that you can expand them or contract them as needed. A ten-minute story that contains a repeated sequence can easily be cut down to seven minutes by removing the sequence, and, of course, vice versa. This is useful for a teller who needs to fill a ten-minute slot one night, and a five-to-seven minute slot the next while using the same story.
If interested in the personal story about my childhood on the Gasconade River, here is the link to the second part of the story. Big Eddy part 2.
For thirty years, as both high instructor and college lecturer, Brandon Spars has brought storytelling into his classrooms. He has published four books on the intersection between storytelling, ancient history, and pedagogy, including “Setting a Plot: the Impact of Geography on Culture, Myth and Storytelling.” Brandon is a regular Bay Area storyteller as well as a TEDx speaker and a five-time champion of the Moth StorySLAM (including two GrandSLAMS). He had the honor of performing at the Exchange Place as part of the 2022 National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and has been a featured teller at both the Bay Area and San Diego Storytelling Festivals.
For more about Brandon, see his website at brandonspars.com
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