"Retelling Stories" by Mike Moldeven

My friend Mike published a collection of stories called Grandpa Stories. For many years he volunteered time at elementary schools reading stories, telling stories to kids. He believes that not only is it a bonding experience but it's a good way to pass down culture, heritage and lessons for life. I quite agree with him. Here is his blog on the art of retelling stories and why it's good for the storyteller too.
Thanks Mike

How Storytelling Came to Be.

One way to get into storytelling is by giving your own version of a
well- known folk tale, a popular myth, or even one of Aesop’s fables.
The plots, characters, and structures of these stories have been
handed down from one generation to the next for centuries, and they have
passed the test of time. The very moment that you start your story you
join the ongoing procession of storytellers from the past and you join the wondrous world of the imagination.

Storytellers are occasionally asked how a story came to be.

Here is my retelling (my version) of an old West African folk tale about where the source of where all stories came from and how they spread from one continent to another.

In the well-known myth about “Spider and the Box of Stories”, Nyami, the Lord
of the Sky, kept a box close to himself in which he kept all the world’s stories. (Anansi) Spider man asked Nyami for the box so that he could release the stories. Nyami agreed to give him the box if he would first bring a python, leopard, hornet, and a creature that no one could see, to him. Spider man did so by first misleading his victims (the leopard, hornet etc) but then explained to them how they could make the world better for all living creatres.

Nyami, true to his word, gave (Anansi) Spider man the box of stories and Spider man freed them all over the world.

Soon the stories were all gone from the box. Now the stories could go wherever they wished, and to be (for all time) among the peoples of the world.

When people saw the stories, they took them in and gave them the food
and shelter that stories needed to be strong. In return the stories gave
pleasure and knowledge and, at once in a while even sadness, to the peoples of the
world. Stories try to give those who listen carefully, an understanding
of how the Lord of the Sky means the world to be.

What did the released stories look like? They looked like everything and anything:
trolls and elves, trees and clouds, birds and people, horses and
barns, airplanes and boats and spaceships and stars in the sky, and
all the things that are or ever were, and also things that are not and
never could be. Stories look like anything that has ever happened and
which might yet happen in years and centuries to come. And stories are
whatever people might wish them to be, and maybe things of which they are afraid.

Sometimes, the stories from Nyami’s box did not change, and at other
times, they were changed by new storytellers to give them other meanings. However they are changed, all stories remain gifts.

”The people of Planet Earth,’ he would say at the end, ‘must deserve
this great gift from the Lord of the Sky.”



This myth, told this way, shows how a noble gift from the Lord of the Sky was given to the people of the world by dishonesty and trickery but in my version, I reduce 'deception' and 'trickery' and put in 'respect' for life everywhere.

Pick a myth or story that has been handed down for generations and try retelling it in your own words. Kids can learn from new versions of old stories and you learn to be a myth maker.