More National Storytelling Festival Wrap Up

Yvonne posts five days of her trip to Jonesborough at http://agreatstorytellingadventure.blogspot.com/

Jaine Treadwell writes a column in the Troy (Alabama) Messenger: "You Have to Experience Jonesborough"

Other blog entries from:

Laurel Winter, "Tell Me a Story --and make it a good one"

Wendy Edey, "Pilgrimage to Jonesborough"

Karen Kennedy, "Once Upon a Time"

One thing I notice about the blog entries on the Festival is how many of them don't focus on the storytelling, but on "making the pilgrimage." Part of it is that some bloggers are simply posting a diary, they're not out to review a performance. But part of this phenomenon is the mystique and lore surrounding the festival (a culture that is both organic to the event and a carefully cultivated (as documented by Sobol and Gneiting), which, for some people, makes writing about the experience moot.

Case in point, over the past weekend, I caught up with a friend who reminded me of his own pilgrimage to Jonesborough in 1993, and --beaming the whole while as he recounted it-- he can still remember what stories he heard from Jim May, and Ray Hicks, and Jackie Torrance, and how much his family loved making the trip, and how profoundly he felt "the presence of truth" in the storytelling, a clarity he hadn't felt since his combat days in Vietnam, albeit this time without the horror. His enthusiasm was so unbridled as so refreshingly uncynical that he nearly sold me on packing up my own kids and jetting across the country for next year's festival.