STORYSPINNING

My business name comes from story-telling and yarn-spinning, and was a by-product of a phone conversation with a customer service representative, shortly after we moved to Atlanta in 1979.  When she asked about my work (I'd listed "storytelling" on the application), she responded to my explanation with "Oh!  YARNSPINNING!  I understand perfectly."

The first 23 years of my life I called Charleston Illinois home.  A "war baby" of World War II, I lived two blocks from the elementary school connected with Eastern Illinois University, where I graduated in 1965 with a B.A. in Piano Performance, and a mix of minors, including Theatre and French.  Two bouts with graduate study followed; the first at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville Kentucky, where I met my husband, and the second at Arizona State University, which led indirectly to my storytelling career.  Eventually, in 1994, I received an I.M.A. (Individualized Master of Arts) from Antioch University in Yellow Springs Ohio, with an emphasis in storytelling.
 
My storytelling career was launched in 1977, when my husband, Ed, and I were living in Casa Grande Arizona, and both out of work---a story in itself!   We're now in Pampa Texas, where, until April 2007, we owned for 12 years one of the town's historic homes, built in 1915 by a founding family of Pampa.  In between Casa Grande and Pampa, we lived in Richmond Virginia, Atlanta Georgia, and Anderson South Carolina, before coming to Texas....my husband's home state.  And I set up my storytelling studio in all those places.  And, "before storytelling," we were in Louisville (Crestwood) Kentucky, where we met and married in 1967, then to Monticello Indiana, Chattanooga Tennessese, and the Washington DC metro area (McLean Virginia).  In 1972, we moved to Arizona.
 
It was in 1982, in Georgia, where I served as primary founder of the Atlanta-based Southern Order of Storytellers, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2007.  In 1995, it hosted the annual National Storytelling Conference, which is sponsored by the National Storytelling Network.
 
I've told  in 23 states plus Washington DC, as well as in Scotland, Austria, and the Georgian Republic.  Music and poetry are frequently incorporated into my presentations, and the stories may be folktales, historical vignettes, original or family stories, and literary material.  Because we've lived in the South, the Midwest, Texas and Arizona, I have stories from all of those regions.  And my international interest is primarily Celtic, German (my personal heritage) as well as Georgian and the Balkans (from travels and international family connections), plus tales from the Bible (after all, I did grow up in the "Bible belt," and my husband is a Presbyterian minister.) 

Here's a quote from me in an interview in the May 9, 1985 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which may explain something of why I'm a storyteller.   "Storytelling is more than entertainment.  It can be a form of therapy, an expression of spiritual belief, a re-creation of a myth, or a method of teaching."  I went on to say that I had learned something interesting at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough Tennessee:  "In the Chippewa-Cree language, there are three words, which, although very different, can be used interchangeably.  They are (1) to live, (2) to dream, and (3) to 'story'."