One Friday night in 1979 fifth-grade teacher Jim May packed into a VW minibus with several other teachers and drove all night to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Located in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, the town was lined with cobblestone streets and antebellum houses where, May says, “you’d expect to see Tennessee Williams sitting on a porch any moment.
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“I walked into this tent, and there was an African-American woman, Jackie Torrence, a great granddaughter of a slave, telling mountain stories,” he says. “There was this old guy sitting on a hay bale someplace in town telling horse-trading stories. I just felt like it was something that was right in my bones–it just seemed so familiar to me.”
For May, the connection with the story and the audience is more important than performing. “Storytelling can be used in lots of healing ways,” he says. “It’s certainly entertainment, but it also heals in a way that our society needs right now. A lot of people–therapists, political activists, writers, and poets–are looking at storytelling as a healing medium.”
