Forget book clubs – now it’s all about

From a writer who’s just bagged her first publishing deal...

STORYTELLING found me quite by chance. One of those rural touring shows had come to our village.

The storyteller had us all entranced with her bawdy medieval tales. Laughter filled the entire hall. She held us, the audience, in the palm of her hand, like a clever magician pausing to reveal his latest lifethreatening trick. I thought, ‘What if I could do that?’

After the event we chatted and she told me about storytelling clubs, which are a bit like book clubs. Except, instead of a small group of people chatting about novels over a glass of wine, about 50 to 60 people get together in pubs, village halls, museums and cafes to share stories.

It’s a huge movement — there are storytelling groups all over Ireland — with ages ranging from students to pensioners. Storytelling festivals attract thousands of people, keen to keep alive an ancient tradition — that of the seancaithe and scéalaí, who kept people enthralled with ancient lore and tales of wisdom, long before TV was invented.

All the stories are traditional oral stories (not read from books, nor made up by the teller), fairy tales and folk tales retold for a modern audience. You have no script, just the stories filling your head. You live on your wits.

So, just after my 40th birthday, at a point when I was going quietly mad with boredom, having given up my job as an accountant to be a stay-athome mum-of-three, I found myself sitting in a room carved into the rocks under Nottingham Castle in England, where storytelling clubs are popping up all over the country.

I perched on a wooden bench at the back and sipped my drink, prepared to merge in with the crowd and just listen. A slip of paper was passed around the room, asking for names of anyone wanting to ‘tell’. Some mischievous spirit in me made add mine to the list.

Was I mad? While I’d wanted to be a writer since the age of nine, my memory had always been atrocious, and the very idea of learning a script reduced me to tears, let alone standing under a spotlight in front of an audience. And this was more scary — because there was no script, not even a book, only images in my head and the vague idea of a storyline.

Don’t go on too long, they said. Don’t forget to smile. Don’t sit on the storyteller’s chair, it’ll make you pregnant! (God, the thought of getting pregnant again . . . ) The MC shushed the room and warned the patrons that if a phone went off that was a tenner in the charity box. It was all deadly serious. Then, after a particularly impressive story featuring a ghostly village in the Australian Outback, someone gave me a nudge. I clambered through the forest of three-legged stools to the allotted space and started to tell my story.

It was a long-winded, corny tale about a lazy pirate and a seagull. I could feel the sweat trickling down my back and my cheeks burning hot. I rattled through it far too fast and belted out the punchline way too loud, then waited for the mortifying silence.

But what came was a generously extended burst of applause. I dived to the edge of storytelling the room as various people whispered ‘well done’, and one of the more experienced tellers said, ‘Can we put you down for another in the second half?’

I came home that night on a high. My two stories had gone down a treat, and the sound of that applause and the sight of those smiling faces bounced about in my head.

There was something addictive about the response of an audience. Maybe it was the thrill of pushing myself with a new challenge or the realisation I’d had something interesting to say — I’d refound the voice I’d lost since giving up work.

But it was more than that. It was something to do with the atmosphere in the room, a warmth between strangers, that little bubble of community and making new friends. I wasn’t the exhausted mum dealing with young children. I was the woman who’d made them all laugh in the first half and sigh in the second, who’d told a story that had been told thousands of times before, finding in it something new, connecting that audience with people from generations ago.

OF COURSE, I came down with a bump at my next storytelling event. I fumbled my words and lost my train of thought half-way through the story. I bombed. But I kept on going and, when I finally got to the end, the audience still whooped and clapped — all the more so than before — storytelling club audiences are incredibly kind and supportive.

I became part of a small group of regular tellers, people from all walks of life who love stories.

There was a sense of belonging, the buzz of creativity, the exhilaration of entertaining others, and a renewed sense of me.

Over the next four years, I trained with different storytellers, developing my own style and repertoire, and I travelled to venues across the country.

I now do a lot of work in schools, historic buildings and community groups. Storytelling is not just entertainment, it’s used in therapy and education, but at its heart is the simple pleasure of a story told, a moment away from the bustle of real life. In a world dominated by the internet, it’s an absorbing and connecting experience.

Aged 45, I became a professional storyteller, a job I could fit around looking after the family. But it didn’t stop there. I’d got the bug for words. That voice thing turned into writing. I had this idea of a woman, a children’s illustrator, working on a set of fairy tales that torment her. And a weird folk tale about two sisters who discover a box they can only open if they do something bad. Those ideas merged into a story, and my first novel, Cuckoo, was published last month. At the age of 50 plus, I am a writer. The nineyear-old me is thrilled to bits.

CUCKOO by Sophie Draper is out now, €9.99. See storytellersofireland.org.