A World in a Grain of Sand

Background: I’m taking my final course (I hope) for my MLS. There were two things I wanted from my program at Southern: their ILS course in database design and lots of courses from their Art of Oral Tradition. I began to worry a few months ago that I only had one year left to get my degree: What if the database course, never available to me before for a variety of reasons but supposedly scheduled for the spring was not offered, or offered at a time when I work, or was offered but then canceled because of insufficient enrollment? And not driving or writing on late Friday afternoons in winter or Saturdays made AOT courses impossible to take except in the summer. School and vacation schedules encouraged me to decide that the oral tradition course I wanted to take was Storytelling Art and Technique. Otherwise, I would have picked a class about folklore around the world so I could learn about it in a more formal setting than grabbing whatever looked interesting at book sales and libraries. I convinced myself, and maybe the powers that be in the department, that an experiential knowledge of storytelling would be useful if I wanted to learn more about folklore. I also figured that learning how to tell stories might make me a more effective reader of stories.

Before the course: The thought of getting up in front of fifty people (the maximum class size) was of some concern. I ordered the book from an Amazon merchant who promised that all proceeds went to a good cause; the merchant is the Friends of the Phoenix, Arizona Public Library. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten the book yet and the course is now 2/5 over. Fortunately, my local library actually had the book on the shelf as well as in its catalog and I have it in my possession.

First general impressions: I am not a morning person. Learning that the course was over around 3 pm each day sounded good, but I’ve come home the first two days exhausted. I considered staying on campus at the library until 5 each day, as Dr. Nolan suggested, but the library closes at 4:30.

There are only eight students in the course, not fifty. That’s a lot closer to my maximum number of people with whom I feel comfortable talking: five, including me. And we seem to break up into small groups of four or two—even better.

The awful buzzing in the hallway cannot be heard in the classroom. I’m glad I’ve dressed for a room that might be too warm as well as too cold. The chair backs recline a bit and the book rests are big and the room is wide enough that we can all be in the front row. The noise of the air conditioning is not overwhelming. All in all, this may well be the best on-campus environment I’ve come across.

First day: Jeri Burns and Barry Marshall are Storycrafters. They tell stories and teach workshops like this in tandem. This means they can comment on each other’s work as it is happening and talk over each other to create a very small crowd of characters. They have an immediate audience when they work on creating a story.

By the end of the day, as they informed us, we were no longer storytelling virgins. My first time was intimate—only one person listening and he listened well and with interest—so it felt safe and not terrifying and I found myself making things up spontaneously—character conversations and actions and motives.

I also took notes and learned a lot about the creation of a story.

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