In Maine: Storytellers Cast Their Ancient Spell

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At intermission the audience streams out of the Opera House into afternoon sunlight. If you stroll through the center of the village, past the New Leaf Bookshop, over the bridge above Goose River, you come to a gray colonial across the street from Enos Ingraham's general store. This is the home of David Outerbridge, an independent publisher and organizer of the festival. In the Outerbridge living room, half a dozen off-duty storytellers talk about their calling with nearly the same pleasure that they tell stories.

Barton has a confession to make: "Sometimes I control a story too tightly.

I sit on it. I'm holding it back. Then the moment comes when it flies—when it pulls you along behind it. That's a wonderful feeling. The story tells you."

There are polite disagreements about technique. Some encourage improvisation. Some stick strictly to their text. Some argue that the first law of storytelling is to keep up a flow of words. O'Callahan, who believes that storytelling is a kind of music, with the storyteller as the instrument, has advised in print: "Be brave enough to use silence."

But the one thing they all agree on is that storyteller and audience somehow constitute a single being, as inseparable as two lovers. One goes nowhere without the other. Either storyteller and audience are borne up together, like Parents' eagle and thrush, or else they are left earth-bound together, stranded, waiting for the small miracle to happen.

It is in the tradition of storytellers to be paid by food and lodging. The storyteller of the 1980s does better, though as yet baseball players need not worry. Torrence, with a repertoire of some 450 stories, makes a living by giving as many as 600 performances a year. (Storytellers get paid anywhere from $100 to $750 a day.) Most of the storytellers have to hold down a job. Barton works for the Ontario Ministry of Education. Even O'Callahan keeps a base on the faculty of the Lesley Graduate School of Cambridge, Mass. But the shoptalk is less about any collective or individual success of the storyteller in the near future than it is about the price of such success. "I remember what happened to folk music in the 1950s," Barton reminds everybody soberly.

Pure is a word used with some regularity. Outerbridge plans to produce a pilot series for television, but he is wary of gimmicks. "We won't have an enactment," he promises. The rules of the game are clearly understood. No antic chorus, no laugh track—not even an introduction by Alistair Cooke—can really make Parents' eagle soar. Parents sums up the ancient contract: "A live person is looking at you and telling a story. That's a pretty arresting thing." Outside, the late afternoon shadows are beginning to lengthen.

Somewhere an eagle flies. Somewhere a thrush sings. It is time to get back to the Stories.

—By Melvin Maddocks