Follow the Dirt Road In Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Taos Storytelling Festival For the Ninth Time

By Carol Mell, 10-15-08

	Jay O'Callahan performed in the Taos Storytelling Festival a few years back. Here he tells a story about being a kid running around the neighborhood, a theme most storytellers touch on.

Storytellers aren’t cool and that’s one of my favorite things about them. They don’t make truckloads of money and they aren’t considered sexy. With the exception of Garrison Keillor they aren’t famous either. In the end they work for blessings, ours and theirs, because in the act of storytelling there is a connection and communication between teller and audience that leaves us both craving more.

I got the craving early from my grandpa, Frank Bell, a storyteller with a big ego. According to him he was, like Forrest Gump, present at every pivotal event in history. My favorite was Safari Bell, about the time his elephant hunt in Africa went awry, but I also liked Blackbeard Bell, Bat Bell, Bell Bunyan and Wild Bell Hickock. I would sit on his knee for hours and though I’d heard the stories many times I always worried through the difficult parts and rejoiced at the triumphal parts.

Every year I get excited about the main event of one of the last literary groups left standing in Taos. Society of the Muse of the Southwest or S.O.M.O.S., presents a storytelling festival, a full weekend of invited and local storytellers including concerts of stories, workshops, story swaps, children’s stories all during the most beautiful time of the year in Taos.

Storytellers have no props, no costumes, no backdrop, but with bodies and voices create a whole world to inhabit, taking us back to when we were five and we could do that anytime, anywhere we wanted. Storytellers in my book are better than magicians. They create a space that envelopes and forgives, even heals sometimes. They do most of their work with children in schools, libraries and community events. They entertain, yes, but more importantly they teach, always wanting to leave listeners with a bit of wisdom, a spark of transcendence that points to the best parts of our shared humanity. They make us laugh, but unlike stand up comedians, there is no meanness in the jokes, only the kind of self-deprecation that allows us to look at ourselves and see the folly of all human nature.

The last storytelling concert I attended here left me so inspired I came home, sat down and started writing. I don’t remember the names and anyway you wouldn’t know them but I remember their stories.

The first up was a tall man, a guy whose grey dreadlocks flowed down past his waist. This strong but playful man could be a one-eyed cat one second and a raging river the next. He told stories from his childhood, about how he and another kid were on bicycles, their mouths hanging open watching a guy cruising past in a car, a man so big that when he hung his arm out of the car window his knuckles dragged on the ground, his rings throwing off sparks as they scraped the pavement.

The second man up told the story of a bat trapped in his bedroom. This story grew so improbable and hilarious that my husband let out that guffaw I mostly hear only when he is talking to his beloved sister on the phone. It was good to hear that sound coming out of him.

We had planned to go out for a nice but not too expensive dinner afterward but forgot that Taos restaurants close up by nine. We ended up at the Pizza Outback, not what we were looking for, but the waitress was so warm and friendly, you’d have thought we’d been friends forever.

I asked about the daily special with portobello mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes and gorgonzola sauce.

“All I can say,” the waitress said, throwing her head back in praise, “is oh my God.”

She was right.

Sitting next to us in the corner booth was the second storyteller. Even at his tiny table I couldn’t miss his outsized enthusiasm. We talked, thanked him for his performance. His wife seemed like a quiet but happy type. Their host was a fellow writer from town who might remember how badly I had behaved at several writing groups we both attended. I apologized again for my behavior but the storyteller chimed in and said he couldn’t handle writer’s groups either because his junior high competitive streak kicked in and he couldn’t stand not being the center of attention.

Exactly. He had a big ego the size of my grandfather. No wonder he treasured center stage. I’d found a kindred spirit even if I did have to admit that though I loved the dark hair I got from grandpa I might have gotten more of his ego than I liked.

I’m looking for ways to tell more stories. I hope, now and again, to recreate that childhood sense of wonder, the awe before creation, almost as awesome as the pizza and anyway, you know my philosophy—you’re danged if you do and you’re danged if you don’t so you might just as well. It’s time I started living it. Grandpa would be proud.

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