Of trolls

Photo: Closeup of a Troll, by Jotulloch, used under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license

I recently had the honor of being one of three storytellers asked to tell a story about a piece of local folklore: the troll that guarded the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge for 24 years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, on display at a local museum.

One of the other storytellers, Kirk Waller, asked me if I had ever created a story around an object before, and I said no. I had certainly told stories in museums before, but always fairy tales and folk tales that aligned with the exhibits on display, no originally created work. But then, upon further reflection, I had to admit:

The very first story I ever told when I began my storytelling journey was, in fact, an original tale about a troll. 

When I was introduced to the art of storytelling in a literature class in college, my professor asked us to learn a story to tell at a local elementary school. Though most of my fellow students learned folktales to tell, I happened to have my own troll, and when I showed it to my teacher she immediately said, "you have to bring your troll and tell the children a story about him."

Why did I have a troll? I had spent much of my free time in dormitory with one of my buddies who had a how-to book on building monsters out of papier mâché. With coat hangers, newspaper, white glue, a discarded tablecloth, some modeling clay, and paint, he and I created a three-foot tall blue troll. We named him Floyd, and he promptly ended up having his own adventures at college. (Lesson learned: if you leave a three-foot tall blue troll out where other college students can interact with it, they will. And he might be gone for days or weeks at a time)

For my class assignment, I crafted a tale about a lonely monster who lived under a bridge (in fact, the Golden Gate Bridge). I don't recall exactly how the story went, although I recall using Ray Bradbury's 1951 short story "The Fog Horn" (aka "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms") as inspiration, but had a happy ending when the lonely troll found community with the monsters in residence at Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects house then located in Marin County, just north of the bridge.

  Over the next few years I created a handful of other trolls, using the same paper and cloth mâché technique. Some I gave away as gifts. Two smaller ones, have stayed with me, and currently keep watch over my basement. (It may not be the most practical way to keep goats away... but it works! We've never had billy goats enter our house).

Sadly, Floyd and I parted about twenty years ago. I was out of the country, participating in North America's oldest and largest Fringe Festival, and upon my return, Floyd was gone.

The large dumpster outside of my rented house might have had something to do with it (I'd been evicted), but though I dove in and recovered many personal items from the dumpster, Floyd was not among them. I like to think he wandered off in search of a new home, and that he found a new bridge to call his own.

Storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham on Alabama's Ghost Trail

While combing through YouTube for video of storytellers, I found a terrific interview with Alabama storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham, recorded for the Alabama Ghost Trail (a project of Southwest Alabama Tourism). She's mostly not telling stories in the interview (though there are a few), but talking about storytelling, so I thought I'd let her do the talking. (Interview in three parts, about 30 minutes total)

Part 1, she talks about ghost stories, and a little about her own ghost, Jeffrey.


Part 2: More about Jeffrey, the importance of storytelling in the Southern United States and her part of Alabama, blue bottle trees, and family storytelling.


Part 3: telling ghost stories to children, why ghosts come back, collecting and preserving ghost stories.


These videos were produced by Matt Wilson in association with the University of Alabama Fellows Experience and Southwest Alabama Tourism. You can find more videos from the Alabama Ghost Trail at: http://www.youtube.com/user/AlabamasGhostTrail

Shout Out: Dale Jarvis, the Real Deal

I first got to know Dale Jarvis by his online presence. He's one of the few storytellers with stories on YouTube. He's one of the even rarer storytellers who has ventured into the virtual world of Second Life. I admired his choice of repertoire (at least via what I could hear on his podcast)-- in fact, a Corsican ghost story ("Goldenhair") had me and my six year old son spellbound in the car convinced me that I would have to hear Dale live and in person someday. However, seeing as Dale lives some 3,476 miles away from me in St. John's, Newfoundland, I didn't see this as very likely.

As luck would have it, Dale and I chose to attend the very same storytelling conference in Green Lake, Wisconsin, this year (Strange to think that Reykjavík, Iceland, would have been a shorter trip for Dale. And hah! I win the prize for longest distance traveled... Berkeley to Green Lake is farther than St. John's to Green Lake by just 23 miles! (and I flew via Phoenix)).

At the Northlands Storytelling Conference, I finally got to hear Dale Jarvis in person, both at a Friday night performance and at his Fringe concert Saturday.

On Friday night he told a Newfoundland Jack tale which delighted the crowd. It was at once a novelty (none of us in the room had heard Newfoundland folklore before) and familiar (the story had familiar motifs of Irish and English wonder tales), and told with aplomb. Dale's telling style was masterful-- confident on stage, with a strong, clear voice, thoughtfully placed gestures, rhetorical flourishes that harkened back to an earlier era, a playful attitude toward the audience, and a deferential one toward the story.

His fringe show the next night introduced not only more Jack tales, but put them in context (after all, he's a professional folklorist): Newfoundland and Labrador has had European settlers for more than four hundred years. So the stories from their home countries like Ireland and England (and France, Portugal, Spain, etc.) have had time to be passed down through generations, evolving, slowly changing. And in a traditional economy based on fishing, with isolated communities, the oral tradition lasted well into the twentieth century. In Dale's telling, he leaves in the rhetorical phrases that old tellers would use (e.g. "and he walked and he walked and he walked and he walked") that you rarely hear anymore from modern storytellers who by and large are not oral/aural craftsmen, and build their stories from images and sentiment.

Dale told a Jack tale that he himself had heard from a elderly Newfoundland woman, who heard it from her grandmother. He's the real deal-- a folklorist who's passing along the oral tradition (instead of assigning it a number and filing it away in a dissertation somewhere). He can tell us stories collected in Newfoundland, he can tell us about how the story was collected, where and when it was collected (whether by himself or by folklorists from earlier times), and by whom.
When was the last time you got to hear a storyteller do that? It has become all too rare.

Dale also tells local ghost stories in St. John's, on haunted hikes, and he's still collecting them... he's even got a column in the local paper sharing supernatural folklore.

You can listen to Dale on this recent interview with three storytellers at the Toronto International Storytelling Festival: (link)

And here, to end this mash note, if you'd like to learn more about Dale-- check out Brother Wolf's interview with him on collecting ghost stories at The Art of Storytelling with Children (link), subscribe to Dale's podcast via iTunes or this page, or visit Dale's very own storytelling blog.