Alan Hoal, chair of the Old North State Storytelling Festival Committee, has some advice for those interested in attending a storytelling festival for the first time.
“For folks that have never attended a storytelling festival, my first response is it’s not what you expect. People hear storytelling and they think of telling stories to children in a library or classroom, and that is an important part of storytelling, but the festivals that you attend, whether it’s the national festival or regional festivals like this one, while they’re family oriented stories, attendees are primarily 90 to 95% adults. The most consistent thing I hear from people who have come for the first time is, ‘Wow! I had no idea what storytelling was in this sense’, and they’re always surprised about how engaging it is, how entertaining it is, and how thought-provoking it is.”
The sixth annual Old North State Storytelling Festival is coming up on November 1 and 2 in Downtown Cary. The festival, which is taking place inside of The Cary Theater, offers attendees a chance to listen to and interact with some of the best storytellers in the country.
“As far as what to expect at the Old North State Storytelling Festival, we’ve got a pretty good variety of storytellers. There will be tall tales, we have the master of tall tales Bill Lepp coming. We have tellers that will be telling folktales like Megan Wells and Linda Gorham. Lipbone Redding is a phenomenal musician that incorporates stories into his music and imitates musical instruments with his voice. There will be literary tales as well and personal stories from Sam Pearsall. We don’t always know what to expect, because we don’t tell the storytellers the stories to tell. For the most part, we leave the tellers to their own devices with the understanding that they know that it’s a family-oriented event. It doesn’t get political and doesn’t get preachy, but the stories can be very thought provoking, especially personal stories where people share things that have occurred in their own lives.
“I look at storytelling as very interactive. You don’t think ‘interactive’ when you think of someone on stage telling stories, but the storyteller very much feeds off of the audience and vice versa. I’ve seen many of these tellers many times, and I’ve seen them adjust stories based on the reactions they are getting from the audience. It’s a very interactive thing, we don’t have fancy equipment, there’s no movie being shown, no big screen. It’s a person on stage with a microphone, maybe two, maybe a guitar or other musical instrument, just telling stories. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be inspired by some of the stories.”
Hoal’s love for storytelling began in 1990 when a coworker recommended he attend the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee.
“I love to read, I’m a big fan of short stories, sometimes I feel like I don’t have the attention span for a novel, but I love reading short stories so the idea of a storytelling festival interested me. I went to Jonesborough where thousands of people descended upon this little town to listen to stories. I sat down and the first story I heard was from Irish storyteller Eddie Lenihan, who told Irish folktales, and he’s also a folklorist in addition to a storyteller. I was just mesmerized, that day I went from one storyteller to another and was just blown away. It was so engaging, it was just one of those things where you come in for a short set, and you start listening, and the time is gone before you realize.”
From there he became involved with The North Carolina Storytelling Guild shortly after its formation in 1998. Hoal became more active in the Guild over the years and was eventually president in 2018. One of his main goals as president was to find a permanent home for the Old North State Storytelling Festival.
“We had been moving our festival around the state from place to place year after year, but it’s hard to build an audience that way. When I became president in 2018, I said we would like to plant our storytelling festival in one place, sort of centrally located, where we can build an audience year after year without having to move around. Living in Cary, I approached the manager of The Cary Theater, who at that time was Joy Ennis, and fully expected to have to give this pitch about what a storytelling festival was and that it’s not what you expect. I didn’t even get halfway through my pitch before she said, ‘We would love to do a storytelling festival. We incorporate storytelling into a lot of our programs, but we don’t have a storytelling festival as such because we never felt like we had the people and the skills to put one on.’ I told her we could take care of that!”
From that moment on, The Cary Theater has hosted the festival and ended up being an amazing fit.
“The Cary Theater is the perfect setting for a storytelling festival because it’s intimate. You don’t want to be at the Arts Center where there’s 450 people and those people are way back from the stage and so forth. Being at The Cary Theater, there’s not a bad seat in the place, and it’s perfect for the kind of interactive storytelling I’ve described. In fact, we don’t bring the lights down like you would in a movie because the tellers want to be able to see the audience’s reactions. It’s a perfect venue.”
According to Hoal, the festival has brought the art of storytelling to Downtown Cary, and contributes to Cary’s focus and support of the arts.
“As far as having it in Downtown Cary and what it brings to the downtown, there’s never been a storytelling festival in Cary before, so I think people are discovering what I call the art of storytelling. I’m blown away by the commitment that the town has to the arts. Whether it’s performing arts, fabric arts, pottery, dance, theater, anything, the town of Cary is so committed to promoting the arts, and it’s just a perfect fit for us. We are very pleased to have something going on from year to year in the same place and to have a budget where we can bring in these national tellers along with a couple of our guild storytellers as a part of the festival.”
Starting last year, the Old North State Storytelling Festival has dedicated their Saturday morning showcase to a specific outreach program. This year’s program will welcome individuals with developmental disabilities and their families to enjoy the Saturday morning showcase.
“We are working with a part of the Cary Parks and Recreation organization called Cary Specialized Recreation And Inclusion Services. They involve individuals that have special needs, developmental disabilities such as Down’s Syndrome and Autism, and incorporate them into programs that the town offers. This group comes in periodically to The Cary Theater for special films where the presentation of the films are in a sensory friendly environment, for instance the lights are not taken down all the way and the volume is turned down. We are going to be entertaining these families on Saturday morning and they will be attending free of charge. That will not be open to the public but the other three showcases will be. I’m really excited about that, and I think if it goes well it may become a permanent outreach for Saturday morning.”
Hoal believes storytelling is at the core of what it is to be a human and to interact with others. We are all storytellers in our day-to-day life. It is how we as people communicate with and understand each other.
“To me, storytelling is at the heart of everything we do and at the heart of every art form. Whether you’re talking about writing, painting, sculpting, cinema, even pottery and fabric arts, in my mind every artist is in some way telling a story with their art form. Storytelling is the oldest art form because it came before there were any other ways to communicate. Part of our mission is to promote not just the art of storytelling but the practice of it.
“One of the big things that you hear these days with social media and the internet is that we are not communicating directly face-to-face anymore. I see things said on Facebook that I know somebody wouldn’t say to my face if we were talking in person. To me, storytelling is not just entertainment, it’s fundamental to human interaction, to our relationships and to our understanding of each other. It’s how we communicate and pass along our personal values, family history and personal experiences. I mean some of the best stories you hear are people sharing something that happened that changed or impacted their life.
“When I speak to groups about storytelling I try to emphasize that we are all storytellers. I’ll speak to folks and I’ll say are you a lawyer, are you a preacher, are you a school teacher, are you a politician, are you a salesperson? You’re all storytellers. If you know how to tell a good story then you’re one up on the competition in your profession.”
If you are interested in attending the Old North State Storytelling Festival, you can purchase tickets at https://www.oldnorthstatestorytellingfestival.com/ticketsinfo. Every show will feature all five storytellers, and each show will be unique. You can also purchase the Festival Package, which includes tickets to the Friday evening, Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening showcase, each of which will be about an hour and a half to two hours long.
Tickets are on sale now. Individual showcase tickets are $18, and you can buy the three showcase package for $45. All shows sold out last year, so guests are encouraged to get their tickets while they can!
Storyteller Megan Wells will be hosting the How To Tell A Story Workshop at the Page-Walker on October 31 from 1 to 4 p.m. This isn’t a workshop for how to be a storyteller on a stage in front of 500 people, it’s a workshop on how to share stories with other people in your life, how to structure the story, and how to develop the story. You can register to attend that workshop here. For more information on the Old North State Storytelling festival, visit https://www.oldnorthstatestorytellingfestival.com/ and follow the festival on Facebook. To learn more about the North Carolina Storytelling Guild, visit https://ncstoryguild.org/.