First storytelling festival weekend comes to close

Donald Davis moved from one story to another like walking into a different room at a family reunion Sunday. He told not just stories but life lessons learned through family tales and weaved around punch lines to keep the audience entertained and interested.

Davis was the last storyteller to perform individually at the first Cape Girardeau Storytelling Festival, which ended at 3:30 p.m. Sunday. The three-day festival sold "well over 500" tickets and drew people from all over the country, said festival co-producer Chuck Martin, also the executive director of the Cape Girardeau Convention and Visitors Bureau. That number does not include the 700-plus school children who attended Friday.

The chairs have been broken down and the tents are gone, but the memories of the first-ever event are fresh.

"We loved the moose, Maynard — Maynard the Moose," said Donna Sanders of Cape Girardeau. She and her 14-year-old daughter Kristyn were leaving the festival Sunday afternoon.

Master storyteller Willy Claflin used puppets like Maynard Moose, Boring Beaver and Socklops to tell his stories. Sanders' son is in Boy Scout Troop 21, which stayed in the tents each night to keep watch over the sound equipment. Her son and husband stayed in the Southern Convenience Store tent on the River Campus on Saturday night. Boy Scouts or fraternity members from Southeast Missouri State University stayed in each of the tents Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.

"I guess I didn't think they would be as professional as they are," Sanders said. She and Kristyn went to a few stories Saturday and all of them Sunday.

"I liked the funny stories," Kristyn said. The two agreed they would come back next year for the different storytellers.

Martin said a least four new storytellers are signed on for the 2009 Cape Girardeau Storytelling Festival. He said the festival next year will be basically the same as this year's.

"The fact is that when 95 percent of the feedback you get is positive, I don't think you need to change much," Martin said Sunday as he separated chairs that had just been full of festival goers. "I think we'll tweak it a little bit."

He said next year they might expand one tent and play with scheduling some to give people more time to walk around, eat and shop downtown. Martin said he "couldn't be happier" with the weekend turnout and that he would "be totally surprised if we don't double the turnout next year."

"Most importantly, I think I learned that storytelling will fly in Cape Girardeau," Martin said.

The storytelling brought out more than just people from Cape Girardeau. Ned and Kathy Carter drove about nine hours from Muskogee, Mich., to attend the festival. Ned belongs to a storytelling group and had been to a few daylong festivals, but said this was a new experience.

"I like this because you get not only a variety of stories, but you get a big variety of storytellers," Ned said.

"I'm surprised," Kathy said, "for your first festival, you've had a lot of people."

This was the Carters' first visit to Cape Girardeau.

"You know," Ned said, "this town has got the friendliest people in it."

The couple planned on staying through the night to have dinner and drive around town, then leave today.

"We've had a good time," Ned said.

charris@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 246

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