Category: storytelling

From monsters to Manila: a few upcoming events

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Awestruck Time Travel Detectives!
Awestruck Time Travel Detectives at Parkes Shire Library, New South Wales

Once again, it’s busy times over at Finch Towers. I owe this blog a report on Time Travel Detectives and Big Box Battle, two immersive roleplay activities that I’ve just run at Parkes Library. That’s coming, but in the meantime you can see a few photographs from the two events below. There’s no qualitative assessment quite as cool as the awestruck expression on a child’s face…or the air-punching victory of a seven-year-old girl who just took down a chainsaw wielding Elvis robot.

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Next week sees schools from around Central West New South Wales converge on Tullamore for the sequel to 2012’s zombie showdown, and after that I’ll be speaking in Manila and Sydney.

Zombie at the window
ALWAYS with the zombies…

In Manila, I’ll be running a youth activity for the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, (MCAD) as well as speaking to Filipino librarians on strategy and innovation. MCAD made a rather beautiful poster for the event:

Poster for Matt's talk on librarianship to Manila museum of contemporary art and design

After that, I’ll be speaking at a New South Wales Writers’ Centre event on Thursday 24th October, Monsters Under The Bed, alongside novelist Kate Forsyth and researcher Nyssa Harkness. We’ll be looking at the place of monsters in children’s and Young Adult fiction – and with Nyssa’s gaming background, I’m hoping we get to explore whether our relationship to monsters changes in an age when interactive storytelling and gaming often allow us to struggle with them directly… You can order tickets for the event at the Writers’ Centre Eventbrite page.

And when all that is done, I have a few words for you on immersive roleplay, performance and literacy, and embedding stories in a community. Stay tuned…

Busy week, lucky country

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It’s been another busy week out here in Central West New South Wales.

On Monday, I interviewed the Australian comics creator Pat Grant for the New South Wales Writers’ Centre. You can read Pat’s comics Blue and Toormina Video online. Pat and I will both be teaching courses at the Centre later this year – Pat’s on Graphic Storytelling and mine on Storytelling for a 21st Century Audience.

Time Travel Detectives poster

Talking to Pat was timely, because I’d just arranged for Sydney’s superlative comic store Kings Comics to send our local library a vast selection of comics on sale-or-return, which we then allowed the public to choose from in a series of all-ages workshops which I ran to determine our new collection. (Kings mistook me for Doctor Who, too, which only endeared them to me more).

Tuesday saw the kick-off of Time Travel Detectives, an immersive role-play programme for 5-12 year olds which invited local children to enter the Parkes Library Time Travel Lab and venture back to 1873 to prevent a time-lost Justin Bieber and his strange minion creatures from changing history and taking over the town.

The event included two new artworks by the Melbournian artist Peter Miller, Spirit Box and the Life Projector, which became Victorian scientists’ devices for detecting the time-travelling intruders – with Peter and his wife Wendy taking on the roles of rival 19th-century inventors battling to outdo one another. Read more →

A spatulate depression, part I – Speaking with the dead and distant

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Since my series of posts on Key 23 and the Nth Degree – really about personal commitment and library work – I’ve been digging a little deeper into my thoughts on these issues. If it all gets too heavy, jump back into my blog archive and read something fun about roller derby, or something about drinking your way to better librarianship. Ka pai?

One of my favourite novels is Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister. I guess it’s a pretty minor work of his, and I only ever picked it up because I liked the goofy, almost Hitchockian cover of the Penguin paperback.

Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister
Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

The book’s about Adam Krug, a philosopher from an Eastern European country which is under a totalitarian regime. He fights the tyrannical dictator Paduk at great personal cost, building to a bizarre climax in which Krug is saved from a moment of grief and rage thru a bit of metafictional deus ex machina. It’s really not the best thng Nabokov ever wrote. It’s kind of M. Night Shyamalan for the Times Literary Supplement set, but I still love it – and partly for that cheat ending, which includes the narrator (Nabokov himself?) uttering the lines:

I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for mothing.

I love that whole paragraph. It’s so perfect, right down to that mad ‘twang’ and reference to Nabokov’s lepidoptery, it sets me on fire. [Pale Fire?] It’s something that you’d never, never say in real life – it’s the essence of wanky literary-speak – and yet, it has a poetry. The vision of the puddle, the imprint in the ground, filling with water – seeing this on the page, knowing it to be a trick of words – to me it’s the essence of why we read. To see that constant depression filled once again with a glint of life.

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City of Souls: Gaming and Augmented Reality in Auckland Libraries

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Auckland Libraries has just launched its first online game, City of Souls – an interactive zombie adventure for ages 14 and over.

City of Souls game
City of Souls – click the image to play!

Written by my colleague Danielle Carter using the free Twine game design software, City of Souls takes place in the same universe as both our Tupu Youth Library zombie siege and the recent Apocalypse Z interactive theatre event in Auckland’s CBD.

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From paints to puddings – Art and sensory play in Parkes Library, New South Wales

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Aussie kids become little Michelangelos in a Sistine Chapel library activity!
Aussie kids become little Michelangelos in a Sistine Chapel library activity!

“Libraries need to understand literacy in the broadest sense – exploring all of the senses in the way kids and teens relate to the diverse services they have to offer.”

There’s coverage of some amazing work from my colleagues in Parkes, New South Wales over at the Library as Incubator Project.

Image gallery: September workshops from Australian libraries

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A selection of photographs from some of my recent workshops for children and young people in New South Wales.

These school holiday sessions in libraries offered high quality speaking and listening opportunities alongside exciting and unusual hands-on experience, with attendees also producing a range of narrative and non-fiction writing amid the fruit smashing and tower building!

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You can see more images from the spooky mining themed workshop “Mysteries Underground” at my Tumblr page.

Diane Wolkstein – Storytelling across cultures from Australia to NYC

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Is the universe made of stories? Human beings can’t keep from telling tales, or listening to them – whether it’s creation myths or the “grand narratives” of science and politics, flights of fantasy or just an answer to the question, “So what did you do today?”

For more than four decades, one woman has sustained the tradition of oral storytelling in the heart of Manhattan. In 1968, Diane Wolkstein began an official role with New York’s Department of Parks and Recreation which has brought stories from around the world to life through her passion and craft.

Diane Wolkstein

Diane caught up with me recently to discuss her career, the challenges of drawing on stories from other cultures, and the business of telling tales in the modern metropolis.

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Nikky Smedley – Storytelling for Young Children in 2012

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Nikky Smedley, the performer, storyteller and choreographer best known for her role as the Teletubby Laa Laa, first appeared on my site back in 2010, when she took her children’s dance show The Tell Woman on tour in the UK.

Nikky Smedley as The Tell Woman

On the eve of my interview with New York’s official storyteller Diane Wolkstein, Nikky joins us again for a guest post about storytelling and education in 2012.

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Guest Post: Lee Castledine on Storytelling for Young Children, Part 2

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Today on Books and Adventures, we have the second part of a guest post by Lee Castledine, the Australian storyteller, youth librarian and secretary of the Australian Storytelling Guild.

You can find the first part of this post on Storytelling for Young Children using Props and Audience Participation here.

Props aren’t suitable for all stories and shouldn’t be used to prop up a bad story!  It is important to choose simple props that enhance the telling.  Don’t overwhelm the story by trying to use too many props or props that are difficult to manoeuvre, as they can distract the audience’s attention from the story.  Once you choose your props, it is important to practise using them until you are comfortable handling them without constantly looking at what your hands are doing.  Remember, it is vital to maintain eye contact with your audience.  Props can help a storyteller to remember the sequence of the story, but if you become distracted with handling the props, you can lose your audience.

Many storytellers are of the opinion that the use of books in storytelling isn’t true storytelling.  I agree somewhat, as there is considerable difference between story reading and the art of story telling.  But to me, and to many other children’s librarians, a picture book can either be read to an audience, or it can be used as a visual prop for the audience.  If a storyteller knows the book well, they don’t read it, they tell it, whilst showing the pictures to the audience to invite audience participation at certain parts of the story.

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