Telling their stories

Legends, legacies, tall tales, whatever you choose to call them, people are always telling stories. Starting Friday, four national and five Midwest storytellers will be telling their stories and ones they've learned over the years.

The first Cape Girardeau Storytelling Festival starts at 9 a.m. Friday with performances until 9 p.m. On Saturday, the telling starts back up at 10 a.m. and continues through to 9 p.m. The festival ends Sunday with stories from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Three tents will be set up and 45-minute blocks have been scheduled spanning the three days. Several downtown tourist attractions like art galleries and the Glenn House and Old St. Vincent Church will be open for tours as well.

For a complete schedule and all the storyteller profiles, download the Cape Girardeau Storytelling Festival brochure at semissourian.com.

Daniel Keding

By the time Daniel Keding was 12, his grandmother Rose had told him dozens of stories about her family from the old country.

"She taught me the stories so I wouldn't forget them," he said.

A folk singer for many years, the Chicagoan started telling stories between songs and eventually evolved from a singer who tells stories to a storyteller who sings.

He has performed in a waiting room for the grand opening of a chiropractic practice and was hired to tell stories and sing for bus commuters going to work.

"Tough crowd," he said.

Prisoners, mental patients, legislators and folks attending a tractor pull at a county fair have also been in his audiences.

Whether happy or sad, a good story allows the audience "to recollect their own story," Keding said.

"They let us understand that we are not alone, that others have cried and laughed, suffered loss and gained happiness. There is great comfort in knowing that others have experienced what you have in your life."

Willy Claflin

Willy Claflin was a quiet, shy boy whose father told him stories every night. Like fellow storyteller Daniel Keding, he discovered the art of storytelling through singing traditional ballads.

"They had fascinating storylines," he said.

He was a Harvard history major during the socially turbulent 1960s, a perspective that informs some of his stories.

But he didn't really become a storyteller until a truck drove through his living room on Christmas morning when he was 28.

"Everybody wanted to hear about it, so I started telling the story," Claflin said. "One tale led to another."

While working as a teacher, he developed many of the puppet characters he employs, including Maynard Moose, Boring Beaver, Socklops and Gorf.

He has told stories most everywhere, including on a Hawaiian lava flow at midnight during a volcanic eruption. Stories are the way people communicate, Claflin said.

"All conversation really is storytelling. And although I know telling tales can accomplish many things, I just do it for the love of the stories themselves," he said. "It's a joy to tell, and a joy to listen."

Sheila Kay Adams

Sheila Kay Adams has written a book of short stories titled "Come Go Home With Me" and a novel, "My Old True Love," and has appeared at the National Book Festival and the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival. Her recording "All the Other Fine Things" is filled with the traditional love songs — all sung without accompaniment — she learned as girl in Appalachia.

Her most requested story, "Little Betty and Amos," and most requested love song, "Four Nights Drunk," contain characters that roam through many of her tales of growing up in Sodom, N.C., including "Granny" Dellie Chandler Norton, Lizey Leake and Adams' dad, Ervin.

These are family stories she has been preserving since her childhood. "I can't imagine a single day without this music and the people that kept it," she has said.

Donald Davis

The Appalachians seem to breed storytellers, and that's where Donald Davis "absorbed" his first tales. Stories were his Uncle Frank's means of conversing. They became the way Davis, a retired Methodist minister, relates to being alive.

"I discovered that in a story I could safely dream any dream, hope any hope, go anywhere I pleased, fight any foe, win or lose, love or die," he has said.

His stories include fairy tales, Welsh and Scottish folktales and many about his kinfolk.

He has been featured at the Smithsonian Institution and is a master teacher of workshops and storytelling courses. He also has been a guest host for the NPR program "Good Evening."

In a review of his work in the New York Times, Wilma Dykeman wrote: "I could have listened all morning to Donald Davis — his stories often left listeners limp with laughter at the same time they struggled with a lump in the throat."