Storytelling has power
Flatwater Tales Storytelling Festival is coming to the Historic Grove Theater on June 3 and 4, 2022. You don’t want to miss this amazing experience! Kay Brookshire gives us insight into the history of Flatwater Tales and excites us about the 2022 Festival.
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Besides stimulating the listener’s imagination without an electronic device in sight, storytelling has the power to teach, to bring communities together, to heal individuals and nations, according to its advocates.
“Storytelling has the power to promote peace and facilitate dialogue anywhere and everywhere in the world,” Kiran Singh Sirah, president of the International Storytelling Center (ISC) in Jonesborough, Tenn., said in a 2017 speech at the United Nations in Switzerland, where he was honored as a Champion of Peace. It’s always been a democratic art, accessible no matter a person’s wealth, status, or education, he has said.
“It can also be a great platform for empowering people, especially the voices of the marginalized,” Kiran said.
Storytelling experiences drove five Oak Ridge friends to create a festival for stories at home, one that would not only bring storytellers here but also provide community service.
As Emily Jernigan tells it, the festival was conceived in 2017 just outside the “mother church” of storytelling, Jonesborough’s International Storytelling Center. Emily and her husband Charlie had made a pilgrimage to the National Storytelling Festival every year since 2010.
“We were infected with the storytelling bug, and we had a bad case of it,” Emily said. “We keep going back every year and taking friends with us.”
In 2017, Oak Ridgers and fellow storytelling fanatics David and Martha Hobson happened to be with them, standing on Main Street in Jonesborough, when Emily said she and another Oak Ridger, Pat Postma, were interested in having a storytelling festival in Oak Ridge.
“You’re kidding!” was Martha’s first response, followed a little later with, “Why not?”
The five friends orchestrated the first storytelling festival in Oak Ridge in 2018, with the support of the three Oak Ridge Rotary Clubs, and remain on the Flatwater Tales Executive Board, which Emily chairs.
“Our other Executive Board members, Lydia Birk and Charles Crowe, along with Martha, David, Charlie, Pat and I, work year-round with our Event Committee to plan the festival. We’re a great team that has fun while working hard,” Emily said.
Today, Flatwater Tales is more than a storytelling festival. Besides inviting three nationally known storytellers to town for entertaining stories, the festival is a community service project of the three Oak Ridge Rotary Clubs. Flatwater Tales has leveraged and invested funds earned by the festival in improving the community, encouraging teachers and librarians to use storytelling in schools, and teaching students at the school district’s Secret City Academy to tell their own stories.
Scot Smith, Robertsville Middle School librarian, recognizes the power of storytelling. He was among teachers and librarians who attended storytelling training at the Jonesborough center, with support from the Flatwater Tales community service project.
“These trainings and storytelling in general have had a tremendous impact on my library programming and my development as a professional educator,” Scot said. “I use storytelling — either my own or those stories from professionals like Bil Lepp or Donald Davis that I am able to find online on YouTube — at least once a week with my classes. My students (and I) look forward to the stories every Friday.”
The support from Flatwater Tales, along with professional development hours from Oak Ridge Schools, made a dramatic difference for him, he said.
“I have grown in profound ways as a storyteller, thanks in part to the training at ISC,” Scot said.
Storytelling has been powerful for Grove Theater, which hosts Flatwater Tales.
“The Rotary Clubs of Oak Ridge and Flatwater Tales Festival volunteers and donors have helped transform and modernize the theater,” said John Storey, president of Friends of the Grove Theater.
“Specific projects have included contributions to updating the theater lighting to energy efficient LED lights, both for the stage and the common areas, modernizing the restroom facilities, and installation of the Westcott Wall of photos on the exterior of the theater,” John said. The Friends count on community partners to support the theater’s vision of providing arts, music and cultural experiences to Oak Ridge and surrounding communities, he said.
For the lighting update, Flatwater Tales received a $10,500 Rotary matching District Grant, along with $23,000 worth of volunteer labor from Friends of the Grove and High Places Community Church, located at the Grove, Emily explained.
Emily happened to drive by the Grove when an image of Ed Westcott’s 1940s-era photos on a blank exterior wall popped into her head. She proposed the project to Flatwater Tales, and the $5,500 project was completed with help from Friends of the Grove.
“Rotary is instrumental to our success and an intrinsic part of our organization,” Emily said. “We are a Rotary non-profit community service project.”
Flatwater Tales strives to raise Oak Ridge’s profile and attract a diverse audience to the city for the festival. It also aims to collaborate with other community organizations to preserve the compelling art of storytelling to entertain, connect people, and to enable others to effectively tell their own stories.
50 and 5
The National Storytelling Festival turns 50 this year, and Oak Ridge’s youthful Flatwater Tales Storytelling Festival observes the fifth year since its founding, a result of the Jonesborough festival captivating a few Oak Ridgers.
Storytellers Bil Lepp, Minton Sparks and Tim Lowry entertained an audience of 350 that first year, 2018, at the Oak Ridge Playhouse. It followed a riverfront Flatwater Festival, a Saturday fundraising event of the three Rotary Clubs, with the storytelling on Sunday.
In 2019, Flatwater Tales became an independent festival and moved to the larger Grove Theater. Attendance more than doubled to 750 people from eight states, with storytellers Bil Lepp, a crowd favorite, joined by Carmen Deedy and Bobby Norfolk. More than 100 volunteers, many of them Rotarians, helped with the event.
“It has been just magical — the right event at the right time,” Emily said.
The COVID-19 pandemic interfered with 2020 plans, when Andy Offutt Irwin, Kim Weitkamp and Bil, who had become the Tales mascot, were invited. The festival was postponed, and the same tellers were asked to return in 2021.
“But COVID still happened. We decided to make it a virtual festival rather than have no festival at all,” Emily explained.
The storytellers were taped at Bil’s church in South Charleston, W.Va. About 50 people were there, and another 120 watched virtually. The festival had the first Canadian attendee, making the Oak Ridge festival now an international one.
Unique Oak Ridge tale
This year, the Flatwater Festival returns to a live event at the Historic Grove Theater.
The Flatwater Tales Storytelling Festival on June 3 and 4 features the Tales’ first invitation to a storyteller to write and tell a story unique to Oak Ridge. Nationally acclaimed storyteller Sheila Arnold will headline the evening opening session on June 3, premiering the story of the "Scarboro 85" titled “The Secret City’s Secret City: Scarboro.” She will tell of the 85 teens who were the first African Americans to desegregate a public school system in the Southeast in 1955, when they entered Robertsville Junior High and Oak Ridge High School.
Ms. Sheila, as she is called, has visited Oak Ridge, talked with some of the "Scarboro 85," and toured with Oak Ridge Historian Ray Smith to learn some of Oak Ridge’s history. Charles Crow, on the Flatwater Tales Executive Committee, recommended her. He knew that Sheila had developed a creative story that documented his high school, Langston, the African American high school in Johnson City, Tenn., that was closed due to desegregation in 1965.
Ms. Sheila is described as “a professional Imaginator with a passion, vision and ministry of healing hearts, unifying communities and reminding people to share their stories.” She was awarded a McDowell Fellowship for her artistic excellence, giving her time at McDowell’s New Hampshire artists’ residency, where she worked on two stories, one about the "Scarboro 85."
Joining her that night and for three performances on Saturday, June 4, will be Bil Lepp, the award-winning West Virginia storyteller, who says he grew up in a family where “truth was fluid,” encouraging him to spin tales and exaggerate at an early age.
Kim Weitkamp, also a nationally acclaimed storyteller and singer-songwriter, was labeled as “high-spirited, uncooperative and too talkative” in school, but channeled those comments into her high energy, heartfelt and hilarious artistry as an adult.
On Saturday, June 4, the three storytellers will present a family show from 10 a.m. to noon, an afternoon show from 2 to 5 p.m. and an evening show from 7 to 10 p.m. The tellers will share different stories at each show.
Kim and Bil will join Sheila for the 7 p.m. June 3 performance. Those tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for children 5 and older. The June 4 morning family show tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for children 5 and older. The afternoon and evening performances are $25 for each show. Early bird pricing is currently available at $40 per ticket for both the afternoon and evening shows June 4 and will be good through Mother’s Day. For groups of 10 or more, tickets are $20 each for either afternoon or evening show.
Tickets are available from Eventbrite through the www.flatwatertales.com website by clicking on the “Buy Tickets!” red button, or purchasing them at The Ferrell Shop (cash or check only) in Jackson Square.
As the Flatwater Tales returns in person, another first-time event will be offered. City Historian Ray Smith will lead a tour of Oak Ridge historic sites at 1 p.m. June 3. The tour is free, but registration and tickets are available at Eventbrite. An optional visit to the Oak Ridge History Museum, with a $4 admission fee, will be included.
Besides telling stories, Bil Lepp will lead a workshop from 2 to 4 p.m. June 2 on “Bringing a Story to Life and Including Your Audience in the Experience.” Budding storytellers may join him at the UT Arboretum in Oak Ridge. Tickets for that are $50 and available at Eventbrite and The Ferrell Shop.
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Thank you, Kay! Readers, are you excited now? If not, then you have not been exposed to storytelling at its finest. Make your plans now to get your tickets and join in the fun and laughter. One of my favorite photographs of Fanny and me is the one that Emily Jernigan took showing us belly laughing at a recent storytelling festival. We had great fun and you can too. Join us for the 2022 Flatwater Tales!
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Storytelling has power
