Storytelling at Walsh Bay

Each year the Potts Point Bookshop crowd trundle along to Walsh Bay for the Sydney Writer's Festival Opening Address.  This year, to our abashed surprise, we realised we had never heard of the speaker, Daniel Morden, who in the UK is celebrated for his immense storytelling skills.

The theme of this year's festival was storytelling, which seemed fairly obvious - it is a Writer's Festival afterall and don't writers make a living of telling stories?  After hearing Daniel Morden talk however, I think we all took stock of what true storytelling encompasses.
Storytelling, Daniel Morden-style, involves all the senses and makes sense of those things we can't always give a proper name, but make one up all the same.  Stories that are handed down, retold and relived and that make our lives fade into the background, no matter how dire the circumstances.

Daniel Morden - the ghost at our shoulder

Whilst there is plenty of craftmanship in contemporary writing, we quite often discern between authors who we think are great writers and those who tell great stories.  The performance element of storytelling has become separate and so when an author can evoke emotion from the pages of his/her new book, we swoon in astonishment, as let's face it, that's not really what "books" are about.

So when Daniel Morden got up this week and told stories from memory and from centuries of tradition, he owned us.  He took us all in hand and became the ghost at our shoulder.  We all walked away with a new story of our own to tell and the passion to "hear" stories again.

That theme certainly resonated throughout the week with authors and storytellers such as slam poet Kate Tempest, poet Jackie Kay, novelist Sheila Heti and others giving us all a new take on how we share, make and tell stories.

Whilst our traditionalist senses are tingling, it was indeed refreshing to harken back to days of childhood and yore, to hear a good yarn and to have one to tell others.

I wish you'd been there.