In Maine: Storytellers Cast Their Ancient Spell

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It would be too much of a storyteller's exaggeration to suggest that in the middle of an electronic giant's bunk—presto! —the art of the storyteller is about to recapture the castle. But certainly more things are happening on the stage of the Rockport Opera House, and elsewhere, than the programmers of the age of television ever dreamed of. This year of the First Annual North Atlantic Festival is also the year of the First Storytelling Festival in New York City, the Second Annual Storytelling Festival in St. Louis and the Third Annual New Mexico Storytelling Festival in Albuquerque. Something called the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling in Jonesboro, Term., numbers over 800 members. Storytelling has become a respectable course in the college curriculum, without its old academic euphemism, the "Oral Literary Tradition."

Ten years ago, a storyteller was somebody who sat cross-legged on a classroom floor with a copy of The Brothers Grimm, locked in a losing battle with the attention span of first-graders. Under the ceiling fans in Rockport, 404 adults perch on folding wooden chairs for 12½ hours, charmed by every possible kind of story from every possible kind of storyteller.

Bob Barton, from Toronto, favors contemporary fantasies, steeped in rue and irony, like The Porcelain Man by Richard Kennedy. With his bemused schoolboy's face, Barton roams the stage, bending at the waist to beseech from his listeners the sympathy due this magically animated figure of China who—would you believe it?—falls in love but, alas, keeps smashing himself into pieces and being reassembled as a porcelain horse or, worse, a dinner set just before he can properly go awooing.

Jackie Torrence, originally out of Granite Quarry, N.C., gives Appalachian Mountain tales her own Earth Mother Afro twist. Eyes rolling, hands fluttering, laughter spilling up and over, she can jolly an audience as nobody else. But watch out for the little sting afterward! Uncle Remus is not safe in her company. When she turns into a frog, warning of the approach of Br'er Rabbit, lily pads a mile away tremble at Torrence's harrumph.

If there is a genius among the storytellers of 1981, it is J. O'Callahan, from Marshfield, Mass., a man of such poetry, wit and elegance that, even in a rugby shirt, he seems Elizabethan. O'Callahan writes his own superb stories. The Herring Shed, told from the point of view of a 14-year-old girl learning the mysteries of her first job in Nova Scotia during the darkest days of World War II, is a minor masterpiece of coming-of-age literature. As she strings up her fish to dry, O'Callahan's young narrator is still a charming child, playing at a new game. When she learns, with her I, hands smelling of herring, of the death of her brother on a European battlefield. O'Callahan in one exquisitely touching moment transforms the girl into a woman.