The International Storytelling Center of the World
Jonesborough, Tennessee is home to the International Storytelling Center. I first heard about this place on my second night in the park while I was working the Firefly event and from about a dozen people thereafter. Tellers-in-Residence have hour-long story sessions every day at 2pm and there is a festival the first weekend in October that draws over 10,000 people from all over the world to this weensy little town to hear stories.
I arrived at 11.30am only to find that there was nowhere to park in this weensy little town and half the streets were blocked off to cars. It Jonesborough Day! A little train took kids for rides around town, there was a pepper eating contest in front of the courthouse, and a bluegrass concert in front of the Storytelling Center. I settled in to the set of Southern Gilmore Girls to listen to bluegrass, eat the bread, hummus, and blackberries I’d picked up at a farm stand, and catch up on my pen and paper journaling. When the concert ended a man in overalls, a wizard cap, and a staff with the head of a snake stood up to tell stories about life in the mountains. His accent was “country as cornbread”and he stopped to hack up a lung every few minutes, all of which induced me to put my pen down and listen to his strange story about a prize rooster that had it’s feathers boiled off by a rouge cauldron of hot water that resulted in the rooster wearing bib overalls the rest of it’s days. I decided to like Jonesborough.
Indoors, it was essentially The Moth Story Hour live. Corrine Stavish, the teller-in-residence this week, told stories about family, Judaism, and Midrashim- the time honored Jewish tradition of learning a story by heart and then making it your own in the re-telling. Not terribly unlike what I’ve been doing the past few weeks but a little more non-fic. I was crying by the end of her third story, which was about a daughter’s adventures in driving with her father from her childhood role as navigator to the transportation of his coffin to her hometown many years later. Emotionally depleted as I was, Corrine’s fourth story- a Jewish tale of challah bread in the Ark of the Covenant, brought me back around to full belly laughter. I went out to the lobby and signed up to volunteer at the festival in October. I have much to learn and would gladly make the drive to camp out among other storytellers for three days. Hit me up if you’re interested in joining.
The stories I heard today from Corrine, Mountain Man Bob, and another plaza story teller who’s name I’ve forgotten, were all true…ish. Much like this blog. The events of this blog all happened in the physical world, and I have, as promised, stuck to the essential truth of them. I have, however, taken liberties with the timeline for thematic posting purposes and, also as prefaced, left a lot out.
I spent the evening in Wear Valley hearing more stories from residents of Tennessee, aka getting to know people, at a picnic hosted by one of the Fisheries guys. Unsurprisingly, I learned a lot about fishing. Do you need advice on when/where/how to saltwater fish in the Outer Banks? I am now a wealth of information on this topic. I also know a great deal about Violet’s river cruise down the Danube and Guy’s son’s stint in oceanography at Duke University. People are just fluid-filled sacks of stories when it comes right down to it.
My favorite story of the night came from Eric, one of the seasonal workers. Eric is about my age, he’s intense, misanthropic, and also entirely well-intentioned and deeply empathetic. He’s the one who was shouting army orders at us in the stream last week. Eric:
“I was snorkeling in The Little Pigeon River last Summer looking at Brook Trout and I had my dry suit and goggles on when this guy comes and pulls on my foot, which is sticking out of the water. I turn around, take my mouth piece out, and he says “I thought you were a seal! I had to come down and see if you were a seal!” And I thought to myself, if people think there are seals in the rivers of Eastern Tennessee, these fish are fucked. No one cares about these fish. They’re all going to die because no one cares about them. The whole environment is collapsing and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
With that he violently skewered his pork chop, hunched his shoulders, and remained silent while the rest of us contemplated how fucked we, and the Brook Trout, truly are.
