Suddenly They Heard Footsteps

Canada's best-known storyteller, Dan Yashinsky, lives his life as teller and listener, and shows how storytelling can and does create vital connections between individuals, communities and families.

In an age of instant messaging, entertainment systems and digital interaction, why is it that more and more people are being drawn to the art of oral storytelling? As Dan Yashinsky, one of Canada's most well-known and beloved storytellers shows, an old tradition has become the new avant-garde. Storytelling is still very much alive in this digital age: it connects us to each other, to our communities and to our past. In fact, people are as hungry as they've ever been for the wisdom and solace of told stories. But they are also looking for stories that will speak to our post-modern, fractured, apocalyptic age.

Suddenly They Heard Footsteps is part memoir, part instruction, part cultural history, and includes tales that Dan has told to wide acclaim. By turns humorous, inspiring, instructive and philosophical, Dan shows us that, like love, stories mean the most the very moment we give them away.

Autorentext

Dan Yashinsky has been a working storyteller for almost thirty years. He is the recipient of a Toronto Book Award for Tales for An Unknown City, and the author of The Storyteller at Fault. He founded the Toronto Festival of Storytelling, was one of the founders of the Storytellers School of Toronto and began the 1001 Friday Nights of Storytelling in 1978, a weekly institution in Toronto that continues to this day. In 1999 he was the recipient of the Jane Jacobs Prize for making a valued contribution to Toronto's cultural life, and in 2007 won the Anne Izard Storytellers' Choice Award.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments
Preface

Suddenly They Heard Footsteps
Frankie and the Firebird
The Storm Fool's Tale
Annals of Hosting
Stories for the Crossroads
Lives of the Storytellers
Speaking Story
Hunting and Gathering
Thunder over the Library
Old Patterns, New Yarns
Letting the Story Through
Emergency Storytelling
Dreaming a New Myth

Stories
Why All Tongues Are Red
Rich and Poor
Strange Voices
The Devil's Noodles
The Devil in Don Mills
Mr. Globus and Laughing Boy
The Storyteller at Fault

Afterword
Appendix: Storytelling Resources
Annotated Bibliography
Permissions