FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What do you do?

I tell myths, epics, fairy tales, and stories of all kinds to live audiences, without a script. I memorize not the words but the events of these stories, so that each performance is completely unique.

What do you mean by "storytelling"?

For most of human history, storytelling has meant the spoken description of a series of events that did not happen to you and are often sacred in character. Though this word has more recently been taken up by film directors, writers, and public speakers of all kinds, the older definition is still the one I find most useful.2

Do you write these stories yourself?

The stories I tell have been told for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years. They are preserved by being constantly reinvented for new audiences, so that their insights and often sacred understandings can be understood. The task of a storyteller is to guide the audience in a journey into the story; to do so you must make an unseen world present and real, imagining details and scenes which may or may not be in the version preserved on the page. So while I mostly don't create new events for a story, I do imagine those events in my own way, just as different film directors might tell the same story in completely different ways. 

Question 3

The stories I tell have been told for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years. They are preserved by being constantly reinvented for new audiences, so that their insights and often sacred understandings can be understood. The task of a storyteller is to guide the audience in a journey into the story; to do so you must make an unseen world present and real, imagining details and scenes which may or may not be in the version preserved on the page. So while I mostly don't create new events for a story, I do imagine those events in my own way, just as different film directors might tell the same story in completely different ways.