The heat sat heavy, as it always does during a Kentucky September. More Tales programs waved back and forth in people’s hands, offering a slight breeze to cool the sweat on our necks as we sat. If you glanced across the Dan Glass Pavilion, you would see every color of hair, from brown to aged white to dyed pink. College students and retirees sat with their cross stitch and crocheting on their laps – listening.
“We got sugar in our blood,” career storyteller Tim Lowry elongated each consonant with his southern drawl. South Carolina, Lowry’s home state, is the birthplace of sweet tea. “You’re welcome,” he said.
If it weren’t so hot on the 90-degree Saturday, Lowry might have had his jacket on, displaying his pale blue pin-striped suit in its entirety. Instead, he stood in his white dress shirt, pink paisley bow tie and a cardstock fan in one hand.
As one might imagine, career storytellers are an eclectic bunch. The seventh annual More Tales festival brought storytellers from West Virginia, South Carolina, New York and the host state of Kentucky. Along with Lowry, More Tales welcomed Dr. Heather Forrest, whose retellings of classic fairytales move smoothly from song to poetry to prose. Her guitar and lilting voice carried on the tone of Friday night’s “tales of mystery and surprise” with the song “Shine On Harvest Moon” as the sky grew dark for her set.
Ed Bryson, co-founder and committee chair of the More Tales Storytelling Festival, opened up the weekend with the kinds of stories you hear passed between family members on the back porch in late summer. The youngest of this year’s band of storytellers was Adam Booth, returning to More Tales from West Virginia. He brought his own unique tone (and sound effects) through everything from his stories of West Virginia little league games and Pooh contests to his bone-chilling folk tales of hags and stew. His spookier stories elicited plenty of jumps from the audience and we all walked a little faster to our cars after he closed out the Friday night session.
This year’s festival brought in new inclusions, like the first annual Tall Tales Contest. These contests, more commonly known as “liars contests,” are popular throughout much of the South and the Midwest. The event was emceed by Booth, who has four West Virginia Liars’ Contest wins himself. The very first More Tales Tall Tale Contest winner was Asbury screenwriting professor Sean Gaffney. He told his tall tale of flying reindeer and Etch a Sketches as if it happened yesterday.
Many jokes were cracked throughout the weekend about how good methodists might respond to receiving the title of “best liar” but it was somewhat of an in-joke amongst the career storytellers. They seemed to be unshaken and sure: storytelling is different.
After Booth’s final storytelling session on Saturday, More Tales committee member Anna Bryson thanked him, “whether [the story] was true or not.” To which, Booth shouted out across the crowd, “All stories are true, some actually happen.” Likely a reference to a book by Sheila Otto of that name, this quote expressed the unspoken foundation of each story told throughout the weekend. Just because something is fictional doesn’t mean that it is untrue.
“As human beings, we have this built-in need for stories that express the way we wish things were,” Lowry told me as we enjoyed the air conditioning between the morning and afternoon sessions. “In our core, we long for order,” he says. He tells me how fiction can fulfill this longing “even if it’s not a happily ever after story.”
Beyond the longing “in our core,” as Lowry put it, storytelling is a connecting force to the past. When asked why the kind of storytelling that More Tales offers is important for the general public, Booth told me an idea he had heard from Loyal Jones. Jones, who passed away last year, was one of the fathers of Appalachian studies. “What folklorists and musicologists did for us,” Booth said, “was give credence to things that we thought we should leave behind.”
Booth’s work surrounds the concept of what he describes as “forward-thinking story artistry.” So, while an essential part of these stories is connecting young people to generational narratives that came before them, Booth continues to highlight contemporary stories as well. He told me about the potential that he sees in “bi-directional generational storytelling.” In Booth’s view, there is power to stories coming down from older generations, but he tells me that “If we can empower [younger generations] to tell their stories so that it is bi-directional, I think that some great change could happen.”
There’s something striking about the scene of a crowd with folks sixty years apart listening to the same story while working on their respective fiber arts crafts. As More Tales continues to grow and seeks new ways to invite younger storytellers into these spaces, the festival is pushing for the kind of bi-directional generational stories that Booth and others in the field find essential. “I’m on the younger side of this business, and I’ve been doing this for 20 years,” Booth explained. “One thing that I’ve always had in mind is what stories of my region I think should be perpetuated, like folk tales and traditional stories. But also, where is this art form going?”
More Tales 2025 is already on the books for Sept. 19 and 20. As the festival continues each year, and as the art form continues to shape and reshape itself, More Tales welcomes the stories of young, old and all those years in between. We might have something to learn from each other.
More Tales: Why We Tell Stories
The heat sat heavy, as it always does during a Kentucky September. More Tales programs waved back and forth in people’s hands, offering a slight breeze to cool the sweat on our necks as we sat. If you glanced across the Dan Glass Pavilion, you would see every color of hair, from brown to aged white to dyed pink. College students and retirees sat with their cross stitch and crocheting on their laps – listening.
“We got sugar in our blood,” career storyteller Tim Lowry elongated each consonant with his southern drawl. South Carolina, Lowry’s home state, is the birthplace of sweet tea. “You’re welcome,” he said.
If it weren’t so hot on the 90-degree Saturday, Lowry might have had his jacket on, displaying his pale blue pin-striped suit in its entirety. Instead, he stood in his white dress shirt, pink paisley bow tie and a cardstock fan in one hand.
As one might imagine, career storytellers are an eclectic bunch. The seventh annual More Tales festival brought storytellers from West Virginia, South Carolina, New York and the host state of Kentucky. Along with Lowry, More Tales welcomed Dr. Heather Forrest, whose retellings of classic fairytales move smoothly from song to poetry to prose. Her guitar and lilting voice carried on the tone of Friday night’s “tales of mystery and surprise” with the song “Shine On Harvest Moon” as the sky grew dark for her set.
Ed Bryson, co-founder and committee chair of the More Tales Storytelling Festival, opened up the weekend with the kinds of stories you hear passed between family members on the back porch in late summer. The youngest of this year’s band of storytellers was Adam Booth, returning to More Tales from West Virginia. He brought his own unique tone (and sound effects) through everything from his stories of West Virginia little league games and Pooh contests to his bone-chilling folk tales of hags and stew. His spookier stories elicited plenty of jumps from the audience and we all walked a little faster to our cars after he closed out the Friday night session.
This year’s festival brought in new inclusions, like the first annual Tall Tales Contest. These contests, more commonly known as “liars contests,” are popular throughout much of the South and the Midwest. The event was emceed by Booth, who has four West Virginia Liars’ Contest wins himself. The very first More Tales Tall Tale Contest winner was Asbury screenwriting professor Sean Gaffney. He told his tall tale of flying reindeer and Etch a Sketches as if it happened yesterday.
Many jokes were cracked throughout the weekend about how good methodists might respond to receiving the title of “best liar” but it was somewhat of an in-joke amongst the career storytellers. They seemed to be unshaken and sure: storytelling is different.
After Booth’s final storytelling session on Saturday, More Tales committee member Anna Bryson thanked him, “whether [the story] was true or not.” To which, Booth shouted out across the crowd, “All stories are true, some actually happen.” Likely a reference to a book by Sheila Otto of that name, this quote expressed the unspoken foundation of each story told throughout the weekend. Just because something is fictional doesn’t mean that it is untrue.
“As human beings, we have this built-in need for stories that express the way we wish things were,” Lowry told me as we enjoyed the air conditioning between the morning and afternoon sessions. “In our core, we long for order,” he says. He tells me how fiction can fulfill this longing “even if it’s not a happily ever after story.”
Beyond the longing “in our core,” as Lowry put it, storytelling is a connecting force to the past. When asked why the kind of storytelling that More Tales offers is important for the general public, Booth told me an idea he had heard from Loyal Jones. Jones, who passed away last year, was one of the fathers of Appalachian studies. “What folklorists and musicologists did for us,” Booth said, “was give credence to things that we thought we should leave behind.”
Booth’s work surrounds the concept of what he describes as “forward-thinking story artistry.” So, while an essential part of these stories is connecting young people to generational narratives that came before them, Booth continues to highlight contemporary stories as well. He told me about the potential that he sees in “bi-directional generational storytelling.” In Booth’s view, there is power to stories coming down from older generations, but he tells me that “If we can empower [younger generations] to tell their stories so that it is bi-directional, I think that some great change could happen.”
There’s something striking about the scene of a crowd with folks sixty years apart listening to the same story while working on their respective fiber arts crafts. As More Tales continues to grow and seeks new ways to invite younger storytellers into these spaces, the festival is pushing for the kind of bi-directional generational stories that Booth and others in the field find essential. “I’m on the younger side of this business, and I’ve been doing this for 20 years,” Booth explained. “One thing that I’ve always had in mind is what stories of my region I think should be perpetuated, like folk tales and traditional stories. But also, where is this art form going?”
More Tales 2025 is already on the books for Sept. 19 and 20. As the festival continues each year, and as the art form continues to shape and reshape itself, More Tales welcomes the stories of young, old and all those years in between. We might have something to learn from each other.