*The full article, below, is featured in the Jonesborough Herald and Tribune
Storyteller Gay Ducey is no stranger to small town charm.
Her work has taken her into communities—most recently a little town in Mississippi—where she works with locals to dig up their collective past.
“I like the idea of taking storytelling directly to and from communities in the form of oral history,” she explains. “There are a million ways to approach it. We chose the perspective of what people did for a living—businesses and enterprises in town.”
Most of these businesses were the kind you might expect. There was the family-owned candy store that had been passed down through the generations. There was the general store that was the heart of the community. And then there was the pickle factory.
“At one time, they had the largest pickle manufacturing business in the world,” Ducey says. “Hard to believe given the Germans, but hey, I don’t know that anybody was there to challenge them.”
Ducey and her team of helpers (all local volunteers) gathered stories of these places over three days of intense interviewing. Her background in social work makes her especially skilled at helping people uncover their own stories. “It’s a combination of listening, prompting, and getting out of the way,” the storyteller says. “I told my interviewers that if they are speaking more than one-third of the time, they’re talking too much.”
On the fourth day, Ducey helped her new friends stage a production based on their shared history in the town church. “We didn’t know whether anybody would come or not, but the place was packed,” she recalls. “The people who were being spoken of were in the audience. They were there listening to their own lives being told.” Other people were discovering the stories of their neighbors, their ancestors, and above all, themselves.
While Ducey has no plans to collect Jonesborough’s stories in the near future, she shared some of her own at the last National Storytelling Festival and will again as the next teller in residence for the Storytelling Live! summer concert series. She’ll tell a wide variety of fairy tales, folk tales, and personal stories during the week of July 6 – 10. Matinee performances are daily at 2:00 in the Mary B. Martin Storytelling Hall, an intimate theater in the heart of the International Storytelling Center. Tickets are on sale now and reservations are highly recommended.
A small number of season passes, which offer 45 percent off the cover price, are still available for a limited time.
Ducey will also host a special workshop—the last of the Storytelling Live! season—on Friday, July 9, at 9:00 a.m. “Catch Them If You Can: A Workshop Devoted to the Elusive Art of Making A Reader” is geared towards parents, educators, and anyone else who works and plays with kids. Tickets are just $20 and slots are filling up fast.
Tickets for matinee performances are just $10 for adults and $9 for seniors, students, and children under 18. The Center is open 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Storytelling Live! sponsors are BB&T Bank and Mountain States Health Alliance. Media sponsors are News 5 WCYB, FOX Tri-Cities, Tri-Cities CW4, Johnson City Press, Kingsport Times-News, and Citadel Broadcasting.
A complete schedule of this season’s performers is available at www.storytellingcenter.net. For more information about Storytelling Live! or to make a group reservation, call (800) 952-8392 ext. 222 or (423) 913-1276.