Different—But Oh How Like!

Different--But Oh How Like! By Kevin Crossley-Holland. London: Daylight Press, 1998. 40 pp. 3.50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 1 898878 05 6

The three booklets reviewed here were produced for the Society of Storytelling, founded in 1993, which aims to encourage and provide information on storytelling.

Simon Heywood's pamphlet provides the historical background to the storytelling movement. He acknowledges the help of many colleagues, but the strength of his thesis--on the development of storytelling as a contemporary art--is the determined drive of a young enthusiast to inform those who are professionally or personally interested. This contemporary art he justifies more through its presence in today's society than through tenuous links with the past. He lists and examines the roots of the storytelling movement, including literature, folklore scholarship, mythology, psychoanalysis, psychology and therapy, counter-culture and the spiritualities of the 1960s. Then the theatre, traditional storytelling and folk music are followed by the effect of mass media.

Heywood credits North American pioneers of storytelling who furthered their work with both children and adults in schools and libraries. In England, the librarian Eileen Colwell, and Elizabeth Cook, the author of "The Ordinary and the Fabulous" (1976), are singled out for their work in encouraging the use of stories as a teaching tool. The author chronicles the waxing and waning of a number of storytelling groups, such as the College of Storytellers, which was founded in 1980 "to revive the ancient art of storytelling" and ran successfully until it was disbanded in 1991. There are now, according to the author, about thirty storytelling clubs and, despite difficulties of funding and debates over standards and degrees of professionalism, there is no doubt that storytelling as a performance skill is being studied and developed.

The second booklet is based on a lecture given by Kevin Crossley Holland in November 1997. A discussion of the storyteller's responsibilities is the core of this work. Crossley-Holland sets out strategies to help the creative storyteller or writer evolve fresh material, such as the use of "old" story structures reclad in contemporary or familiar features to which listeners can readily relate. As a storyteller is in a role akin to a parent or teacher, it is essential that there is "a reconciliation of tale and audience" (p. 14) so that the storyteller becomes a go-between for the audience and the traditional tale. It is this essential relationship with the story which is so important for the developing sensitivity of young people and the author makes a persuasive case for the continuing place of storytelling in education.

The use of traditional tales in the intense patient/therapist relationship is dealt with by Dick Leith in the last pamphlet reviewed here. Although he never suggests that fairytales reflect narrative archetypes or are in the collective unconscious, he suggests that the structure of the fairytale, with its tableaux, motifs and stereotyped scenes, provides familiar elements which can be significantly appealing or disturbing to particular patients. The author concludes with the most convincing of ideas--that it is as a source of metaphor which gives the fairytale its continuing power in our society.

Ruth Glass, Canterbury

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