“You are like family,” I said to Morgen Reynolds last year at the Florida Storytelling Festival in Mt Dora, Florida. “I see you once a year for a reunion.” That sounds a little odd at first, but I was expressing the comfort of seeing someone you know after such a long time. We have listened to each other’s stories, and that makes us like family. Storytelling has that gift of connecting people.
This January 23 – 26, 2020, Morgen Reynolds will be attending the festival for the fourth time, but this time as one of the five Featured Tellers sharing her stories from the main stage.
“Celebrating the art and craft of oral storytelling through community and connection.”
~ Florida Storytelling Festival
Storytelling in the oral tradition, person to person, face to face, is the art of connection. Each year the Florida storytelling community comes together as “family” to LISTEN to stories, LEARN in workshops, and TELL our own stories in the swaps. The stories range from folk tales to personal stories, from historical stories to tall tales, from humor to tears. All of human experience is represented in stories.
Storytelling in the Next Generation
Among the many events, one of the goals of the Florida Storytelling Association is to promote storytelling in the next generation. The McLin Foundation supports the program to send Storytellers into local schools during the week of our festival. Another program buses students to the festival as Field Trips for special Storytelling “concerts.”
Youthful Voices
The Youthful Voices program reaches out to local schools and communities to coach student storytellers and submit videos to the Florida Storytelling Association. Each year, between five and seven students are chosen to represent the Youthful Voices on the main stage of the festival and open the show for our Featured Tellers. This year, they will be performing on Saturday, January 25, 2020, at 7pm.
Here is Cade from the 2017 Youthful Voices at the Florida Storytelling Festival.
