Storytelling – Story Story Podcast

Tell it to the Trees (with Host Simon Brooks): Jenni Cargill Strong, Anne Shimojima

April 20, 2021 No Comments

Jenni Cargill-Strong

Jenni Cargill-Strong is an enchanting award-winning Australian storyteller and Owner Operator of ‘The Story Tree Company’ and ‘Stories on Foot: Tales of Byron Bay and the Rainbow Region‘. Jenni has twenty-eight years experience as a professional storyteller, four award-winning story albums, seventeen years experience teaching storytelling and several years experience teaching online. She is Australian, and lives with her two nearly grown children in the seaside town of Ballina on the east coast, just south of Byron Bay. Discover testimonials and details of preschool and school shows on Jenni’s Performance page, see a gallery of images or watch videos.

Anne Shimojima

Anne Shimojima is a third generation Japanese American, born and
raised in Chicago, Illinois. An award-winning elementary school library
media specialist of 35 years, she first discovered the power of story
with her students, using storytelling to enrich and expand the
curriculum and develop a deep emotional connection with her listeners.

Some highlights in her storytelling career include a week as Teller-in-Residence at the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, TN and performing at such venues as the National Storytelling Festival, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the 1st Asian-American Storytelling Festival, the Illinois Storytelling Festival, the Talk Story Storytelling Festival in Honolulu, Storytelling Arts of Indiana, the Hans Christian Andersen Statue in Central Park, and the Stories Connect Us All Online Storytelling Festival.

Guest Host – Simon Brooks

Simon Brooks is an award-winning British storyteller living in America – actually, New London, New Hampshire, New England, New World! He also uses his voice to record audio books. He is also a poet, writer, photographer, and educator.

Order his new book Under The Oaken Bough and listen to his new podcast Conversations with Storytellers to hear what it is like to perform storytelling for a living from some living legends!

Surprising Discoveries (with Host Isabelle Hauser): Vaishali Raithatha, Cindy Rivka Marshall

April 14, 2021 No Comments

Vaishali Raithatha

Vaishali Raithatha is a professional Story Teller & a Certified & Trained Yoga teacher, originally from India , currently living in the UK.

She is passionate and committed to working with children & adults through the medium of Storytelling to enhance learning and listening skills & to bring a Sunshine Smile on faces through Stories & Yoga .

She loves every opportunity to narrate stories to children & adults in schools , museums , libraries , other events & through her stories & story videos reaching out to children & adults wherever possible.She also shares stories on Talking Stories , East London Radio , UK .

She enjoys colouring Mandalas , Dance & cooking.

Cindy Rivka Marshall

Whether she is performing, teaching, facilitating or consulting, Cindy Rivka Marshall is guided by her value of respect for all.

Cindy tells multicultural and Jewish stories with universal lessons that resonate with her sense of wonder. She teaches storytelling, communication, interviewing and listening skills, and story-based approaches to teaching. Cindy creates safe environments for participants to speak and be heard. As a consultant, Cindy facilitates groups to articulate their values and message and build a sense of community.

Cindy has performed stories and presented workshops since 1989 throughout New England, nationally and in England, at festivals, conferences, schools, libraries, synagogues, churches and community groups. She studied acting, movement improvisation and storytelling with Julie Portman, Daena Giardella, Marsha Hiller, Elisa Pearmain, Peninnah Schram and others.

Host – Isabelle Hauser

You have heard these stories before, just not like this!Join Isabelle Hauser as she explores mysterious shops in Zug while sharing stories, with Ed Stivender telling "Red Ridding Hood Improv" and Priscilla Howe telling "The Small Tooth Dog".

A fairy tale believer since the beginning of her time, Isabelle Hauser discovered the path of storytelling training with professional storyteller Liz Weir in Northern Ireland. When Isabelle is not telling tales or playing the harp on various stages in Switzerland and abroad, you can find her talking to the swans on the shore of her hometown lake, looking for four leaf clover, or chasing rainbows in the surrounding forests. As a storyteller and harpist, she wants to create a space for her audience to see that reality, too. Or to just provide them with a break from everyday life! Whisking people of all ages and origins to long ago and far away with music and story is her greatest passion in life.

Did you know the Story Story Podcast was featured Feedspots Top 30 Fairy Tale Podcasts? There are a lot of great podcasts on this list and we are thrilled to be included!

Marvelous Mischief: Rachel Ann Harding, Rachael Harrington

April 7, 2021 No Comments

Rachael Harrington

Rachael Harrington is a storyteller whose work has taken her around the globe, presenting imagination infused performances and workshops for all ages in theater and arts spaces, community groups, schools, preschools, and as a guest lecturer at Rutgers University. She was the recipient of the NYC Department of Education Arts and Family Engagement Grant and has presented workshops at New Jersey Association of School Libraries, New Jersey TESOL Conference, and the American Association of School Libraries National Conference, and has been published in Voices, the New Jersey TESOL quarterly journal. She performs at festivals including The Uptown Arts Stroll, Gotham Arts Festival, and The Day of Water Festival on Governor’s Island. She is a member of National Storytelling Network.

Rachel Ann Harding

Traditional Storyteller and Musician, Rachel Ann Harding is passionate about telling the most beautiful folk, myth, and traditional tales.

Rachel Ann weaves story and song together to create unique and entertaining storytelling events, keynotes and workshops that display the relevance of storytelling in our lives. She believes that fairytales are not just for children and mesmerizes audiences with old tales woven into new adventures. As the producer of the Story Story Podcast she brings traditional stories to people around the world who also are in love with fairytales.

Rachel Ann Harding began singing and playing a variety of instruments in her early twenties, crafting lyrics laced with tenderness and humor. She blends harmonies on the ukulele and looper to create melodies that connect to the heart and the ear. Her music has been called, “delightful, folksy, avant garde.”

The Magic Well (with host Simon Brooks): The Devils Violin

March 31, 2021 No Comments

The Devils Violin

The Devil’s Violin creates and performs music and storytelling shows that receive standing ovations and evoke passionate responses from its diverse audience and positive reviews from arts professionals.

DV’s unique blend of words and music has proven powerful in reaching a diverse audience aged from 12 upwards. It has charmed, chilled and thrilled audiences in urban, socially deprived and rural areas. It has been popular with both pensioners and teenagers and those who enjoy storytelling, literature and theatre and folk, world or classical music.

DV’s ongoing success and popularity is down to the individual talents and reputation of its artists; Multi award-winning Welsh storyteller Daniel Morden (winner of the Welsh Books Council Tir Na Nog award and two Welsh Assembly Government Author Advance Awards, author for Gomer Press and two outstanding musicians: violinist Oliver Wilson-Dickson (musician in ALAWand Jamie Smith’s Mabon), and cellist Sarah Moody, composer for theatre companies such as Tobacco Factory, Bristol, Travelling Light Theatre Co and Invisible Ink (in association with Theatr Iolo) and as musician for companies such as Kneehigh and Wildworks.

Guest Host – Simon Brooks

Simon Brooks is an award-winning British storyteller living in America – actually, New London, New Hampshire, New England, New World! He also uses his voice to record audio books. He is also a poet, writer, photographer, and educator.

Order his new book Under The Oaken Bough and listen to his new podcast Conversations with Storytellers to hear what it is like to perform storytelling for a living from some living legends!

Podcast, Storytelling, Uncategorized

Bouquet of Stories IV (with Host Isabelle Hauser): Jane Dorfman, Priscilla Howe, Cathryne Fairlee, Lyn Ford

March 27, 2021 No Comments

Jane Dorfman

Jane Ogburn Dorfman tells tales of dutiful daughters and wise women, faithful sons and wicked kings, of magic skipping ropes and Irish heroes, of the angel Elijah and the fools of Chelm, of tricky animals and clever kids. She tells personal stories about her New Orleans childhood and her Maryland neighbors, her favorite being “Daddy’s on the Roof and He’s Got the Ax.”

She tells stories for children and adults at festivals and in libraries and in the schools. She loves stories that carry the listener away. The world has an amazing heritage of stories and she wants to pass them on.

Jane has performed at the Hans Christian Andersen Statue in Central Park. She has told at Speak! a storytelling series in Shepardstown WVa, The Stone Soup Festival in S.C., and the Rose Valley storytelling series in Media, PA. She’s shared personal stories at ‘Better Said than Done’ in VA.

She has crafted a program of lesser known Arabian Nights stories as part of a grant, Muslim Journeys, at Montgomery College, and performed them at the NSN Conference Fringe in 2016.

She has told at the Smithsonian Institution and on television Channel 32’s holiday storytelling program and on ‘Stories in Focus” local television. She is a repeat teller at the Washington Folk Festival and Voices-in-the-Glen Festival and to storytelling classes at The University of Maryland and Catholic University. She’s told stories at the Virginia Celtic Festival, Rockville Festival of the Arts, The Elva Van Winkle Memorial Storytelling Festival and others. She has also conducted a workshop on how to get started storytelling for the Maryland Library Association.

Priscilla Howe

“I live in my head. A lot. I make stuff up, I borrow from old tales, I reinterpret new stories. As a storyteller, I’m a tour guide to that space in my brain. I work without a script, without costumes, without props. When I’m doing it right, listeners laugh, smile, sigh and breathe together, connected in the space of stories. I perform at schools, libraries, festivals, special events, and in my own backyard, literally. My mouthy hand puppets come along to shows for young children. I tell more grownup stories to, well, grownups and older kids. We play together. Apart from being the oldest educational method in the world, storytelling is just plain fun.”

Join Priscilla Howe for online story time or join her Patreon to get stories directly from her!!

Cathryn Fairlee

Cathryn passed away in October 2019 and will be deeply missed as a friend and a storyteller. In her own words about her storytelling from an interview last year with edex live –

I started storytelling 35 years ago. I have travelled around the world gathering epics, myths, legends, histories, and folk and fairy tales from the folk. I work with other storytellers whenever I travel; even in Chennai and Kanchipuram, I’ve worked with a few of them. I have travelled and learnt about different cultures and I’ve gone back to the US to share them with others. I like the fact that one can give people therapy and teach them how to listen and enjoy the entire experience. It’s not lecturing or commanding them to agree with you. It’s about helping them enjoy and learn something.

Lyn Ford

A fourth-generation, nationally recognized, Affrilachian storyteller. A teaching artist with the Ohio Alliance for Arts Education, and workshop facilitator with both OAAE and the Ohio State-Based Collaborative Initiative of the Kennedy Center. A Thurber House mentor. A writer, published in storytelling magazines and newsletters, as well as teachers’ enrichment books and story anthologies, and her own books. A recording artist with award-winning CDs. A Laughter Yoga Teacher and breath mechanic. Go to my new page, Laughter, Breath, Joy!, for more information! A happy partner-in-life, mama, grandmama, great-grandmama, and good cook!

Host – Isabelle Hauser

A fairy tale believer since the beginning of her time, Isabelle Hauser discovered the path of storytelling training with professional storyteller Liz Weir in Northern Ireland. When Isabelle is not telling tales or playing the harp on various stages in Switzerland and abroad, you can find her talking to the swans on the shore of her hometown lake, looking for four leaf clover, or chasing rainbows in the surrounding forests. As a storyteller and harpist, she wants to create a space for her audience to see that reality, too. Or to just provide them with a break from everyday life! Whisking people of all ages and origins to long ago and far away with music and story is her greatest passion in life.

Did you know the Story Story Podcast was featured Feedspots Top 30 Fairy Tale Podcasts? There are a lot of great podcasts on this list and we are thrilled to be included!

Tales from Ireland

March 17, 2021 No Comments

Norah Dooley

Norah Dooley,storyteller, critically acclaimed children’s author and educator, performs in schools, libraries, conferences and festivals. She specializes in teaching people of all ages how important their stories are and how to tell them. In 2013, Norah was a featured performer at the Exchange Place of the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough,TN. She has performed at the Clearwater Festival, the Newport Folk Festival and several Cambridge Revels. Norah specializes in Irish and Italian folklore and is on the roster of Young Audiences at yamass.org. For the past 21 summers she has told stories to 1000s of children through ReadBoston.org. These past 4 years she appeared as a historical storyteller for SaveThe Harbor.org twice supported by MassHumanities.org grant. She teaches storytelling at Lesley University’s graduate school of Education and has taught storytelling to undergraduates at Lesley, Tufts, Boston and Suffolk Universities. Internationally she has lectured teachers of English and graduate students in Tokyo, Japan on the role of storytelling in language acquisition. In summer of 2017 she taught storytelling in Arsuha, to Tanzanian Secondary school teachers as part of the African Storytelling initiative of http://www.worlded.org Norah has an MEd in Creative Arts and Learning and has been a full time classroom teacher and an instructor in visual and performing arts in elementary and middle schools. Her 4 published picture books are available at LernerBooks.com and all titles; Everybody Cooks Rice, Everybody Bakes Bread, Everybody Serves Soup, Everybody Brings Noodles are about her family and their former Cambridge neighbors. Norah has 6 spoken word CDs: The Music of Angels ( 1999) Italian Folk Tales (2002) Stories from the Neighborhood (2002) Rabbitails (2006) My Bad,Bad Dog and Other Neighbors (2006) and Irish Tales (2007) all produced by Seat of Her Pants Productions and available at CDBaby.com. Her latest book, My Bad Bad Dog (SeatofHerPants, 2016) is the first in a series of picture books about her childhood.

Liz Weir

Liz Weir is a storyteller and writer from Northern Ireland. She was the first winner of the International Story Bridge Award from the National Storytelling Network, USA, which cited her “exemplary work promoting the art of storytelling”.

Liz Weir has told her stories to people of all ages on five continents. She has performed in pubs and prisons and hospital rooms. She worked on stages in the mighty Vanderbilt Hall of New York’s Grand Central Station and in the Royal Albert Hall.

Liz Weir has worked for people with very different cultural backgrounds – for children from Israel and Palestine, at universities in Germany and Wales, on TV between South-Africa and Canada. And she appeared at major events, such as the National Storytelling Festival in Tennessee and the Australian National Storytelling Festival.

Her voice can be heard on CDs like “The Wailing Of The Wind”, together with the Mavron String Quartet. Liz Weir has also written more than 20 books. For instance ‘When Dad Was Away’, which is a picture-book about a child whose father is in jail. Or ‘Tales of the Road’, a children’s book about Irish Traveller life.

Did you know the Story Story Podcast was featured Feedspots Top 30 Fairy Tale Podcasts? There are a lot of great podcasts on this list and we are thrilled to be included!

Luck vs Wisdom (with Host Simon Brooks): Joel Ben Izzy, Jenni Cargill-Strong

March 17, 2021 No Comments

Joel Ben Izzy

It was back in 1983 that he graduated from Stanford with a self-designed degree in English, Creative Writing and Storytelling, and set off to travel the world, gathering and telling stories. Since then he has told stories and taught storytelling in some 36 countries throughout North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

With every stop on his itinerary, his repertoire of stories has grown. Some are tales from people he meets on the road, and others he finds are traditional tales from the places he’s traveled. Then there are the stories that seem to find him – and stick. These are true stories, more or less, and what he’s come to love over the years is the blend of all these stories together.

Jenni Cargill Strong

Jenni Cargill-Strong is an enchanting award-winning Australian storyteller and Owner Operator of ‘The Story Tree Company’ and ‘Stories on Foot: Tales of Byron Bay and the Rainbow Region‘. Jenni has twenty-eight years experience as a professional storyteller, four award-winning story albums, seventeen years experience teaching storytelling and several years experience teaching online. She is Australian, and lives with her two nearly grown children in the seaside town of Ballina on the east coast, just south of Byron Bay. Discover testimonials and details of preschool and school shows on Jenni’s Performance page, see a gallery of images or watch videos.

Guest Host – Simon Brooks

Simon Brooks is an award-winning British storyteller living in America – actually, New London, New Hampshire, New England, New World! He also uses his voice to record audio books. He is also a poet, writer, photographer, and educator.

Order his new book Under The Oaken Bough and listen to his new podcast Conversations with Storytellers to hear what it is like to perform storytelling for a living from some living legends!

In Disguise (with Host Isabelle Hauser): Jennifer Armstrong, True Thomas

March 3, 2021 No Comments

Jennifer Armstrong

Jennifer Armstrong has spent her life writing, singing and making music with fiddle, bagpipe, banjo and words. She is a storyteller, singer, instrumentalist, poet and published author with humor, warmth and grace. She works as an artist-in-residence in folk arts, storytelling and writing as well as a private teacher and a performer across the country. Jennifer was a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival in 1998 and 2010, has been heard on NPR and has music recordings and published books to her credit. She lives and works on Gypsy Rose Farm in Belfast, Maine. They have chickens, ducks, turkeys, milk goats, one horse and a barn cat. She sometimes feels she has stepped into the folk songs she learned from her parents when she is milking the goats or herding the turkeys into the pen.

True Thomas

True Thomas the Storyteller (aka Robert Seutter) has been storytelling for many years. He comes by it naturally. When he was in kindergarten, his teacher asked him why he put a big black blob of paint on the paper in finger painting. His reply: “It’s a cave… full of bats!”

True is an avid proponent of storytelling. He teaches the art, creates events, and has performed in a wide variety of places from campfires to battlefields. His personal storytelling philosophy is that a good storyteller should be able to tell to anyone, anywhere it’s physically possible. Anyone can and should tell stories, and to become a master of the craft can take a lifetime. He’s also a big believer in the spiritual side of storytelling. He believes in the power of stories and that the right story, in the right time and place can change the world.

Host – Isabelle Hauser

A fairy tale believer since the beginning of her time, Isabelle Hauser discovered the path of storytelling training with professional storyteller Liz Weir in Northern Ireland. When Isabelle is not telling tales or playing the harp on various stages in Switzerland and abroad, you can find her talking to the swans on the shore of her hometown lake, looking for four leaf clover, or chasing rainbows in the surrounding forests. As a storyteller and harpist, she wants to create a space for her audience to see that reality, too. Or to just provide them with a break from everyday life! Whisking people of all ages and origins to long ago and far away with music and story is her greatest passion in life.

Did you know the Story Story Podcast was featured Feedspots Top 30 Fairy Tale Podcasts? There are a lot of great podcasts on this list and we are thrilled to be included!

Two Friends and a Dragon: Morgan Reynolds

March 3, 2021 No Comments

Mo Reynolds

Mo Reynolds has been telling stories for many years, just ask her parents! She has been performing for audiences since 2016. She was a librarian for two years, delighting students weekly with folk tales, myths, stories from literature, and inspiring records from real life. She has performed in schools, festivals, backyards, and living rooms across Montana, Idaho, Washington, Utah, and all the way to Florida. After being a showcase teller for two years, she was invited to be a featured storyteller at the Florida Storytelling Festival in 2020. Mo recently earned the Diamonds in the Dust Diamond Award Scholarship in 2020 to help build her YouTube channel, where she posts storytelling episodes to spread the art to a broad audience around the world.