THE DESERT LEAF, October 2004

What’s Your Story?
by Jan Henrikson

What stories are you hearing? Perhaps one about your sister stealing an abused dog from neighboring Hells Angles or the tale about the five-year-old who began digging to China and reached it – or so she thought.

Ask Penelope Simmons, host and founder of the Odyssey Storytelling Series, a question and she’ll answer with a story. She can thank her father for that. Instead of coming home from work cranky and preoccupied, he would greet her with, "Let me tell you about the giraffe that was on the subway with me today."

"My father was a very imaginative person." says Simmons. "He was an artist. He’d tell us all these wild things and we knew that it wasn’t true, and we knew that it was a way to communicate. It was a way to entertain."

Simmons has taken that enchantment with the power of stories to the Wilde Playhouse. Once a month she invites anyone who is willing to share a story with an audience for 10 minutes on a specific theme, such as love and marriage, on the road, or creepy. These aren’t’ tall tales or folk tales, but journeys of the heart.

"It’s like truth-telling," says Simmons. "It’s like you’re known. People see you and acknowledge you and know you a little bit better. It’s an amazing feeling."

How does she select the storytellers? At first there was a lot of arm-twisting and a flood of e-mails sent to people she did and didn’t know. The people who were to speak on the theme of indecision had a hard time committing. However, within several months of Odyssey’s March 2004 opening, people started seeking her out.

"It’s a beautiful way to do networking." explains Simmons. "It’s all about diversity and getting people of different ages and ethnicities and educational backgrounds and interests together and listening to each other."

Besides, says David Gilmore, host and executive producer of Outright Radio, a storytelling show of interest to the gay and lesbian community, syndicated by Public Radio International, "Humans love stories. We’ve always told stories, and we tell them in very high-tech ways with huge productions in the movie industry. But I think that there is simultaneously interest in a really organic base-level story.

"I find it really heartening, because my experience with people in America in general is that they’re not really good listeners," adds Gilmore. "People are very sort of nervous and chatty and interested in ‘quick-quick-quick- give me the information’ and used to changing channels. We like to switch when something bores us. The cool thing about going to Odyssey is you don’t get to change channels."

But you do get to change your mind. Although stories are unscripted, storytellers rehearse briefly to get a sense of timing and comfort. Gilmore rehearsed one tale. Then, in the spirit of April Fools’ Day, he told another at the last moment.

Instead of a despairing love sage, he told of being pulled over in his car by the cops at …an inopportune time. Suffice to say, the story "was a little bit risqué for Tucson," says Gilmore. "Penny was surprised, but I think she was delighted anyway."

Fortunately, the audience is "very generous and ready to support and laugh and help you through whatever you’re going to say, simply because they’re wanting to have a good time and they’re wanting you to have a good time," says Amy Weintraub, a yoga teacher and author of Yoga For Depression, who spoke on indecision. "Most of them are there because they’re friends of a storyteller, or they’re interesting in storytelling themselves. By the time you’re finished, you have a new community of friends and well-wishers."

Apparently this is an especially safe space for those panic-stricken about public speaking. "One of the most valuable aspects is that people who get up on stage are really nervous, and usually by the end they’re calmed down." says Gilmore. "It’s very confidence-boosting that they’re able to step up on a stage without a script and just improvise and just work through it. Maybe Penny isn’t just staging these storytelling events. Maybe she’s staging these little transformational events."

Indeed, for Shanna Leonard, a network administrator at UMC hospital, the community of well-wishers provided responsive ears and support for something she’d rarely talked about – her ex-husband’s sudden health crisis. "He was walking around one day and three days later he was in a coma," she says.

Leonard spoke about spending countless hours at his bedside, battling for better health care in addition to raising their 4 year-old son and maintaining an aura of normalcy at work. The doctors were 95 percent certain he wouldn’t survive.

"It’s a very isolating experience," says Leonard. "People want to hear about it for the first few weeks. But then they don’t want to hear that you’re still miserable. So you just stop talking about it to most people. Telling the story was very inclusive. I could see that people related to it. It was a combination of exhilarating and terrifying and rewarding and disappointing." Disappointing only because she thought of a better ending later.

Ironically, her theme was "in the beginning." She says her ex-husband "had a new beginning that was totally unexpected. My story starts with an ending and ends with a beginning."

A former drama therapist, Leonard notes: "Making art out of something that is difficult or ugly or sad actually gives you some personal transformation. You’re basically making something of beauty."

As author Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, "Stories are medicine." And they seem to be contagious. Simmons gleaned the idea for Odyssey from her daughter-in-law, who hosts a storytelling series in San Francisco called Porchlight. Her daughter-in-law got the idea for Porchlight from Moth, the popular storytelling series in New York City.

"I want it to keep growing, but I don’t want to outgrow the space," says Simmons, referring to the Wilde’s 90-seat setting. "I’m not making any future plans. I’m enjoying what’s happening, enjoying developing it. I’m really interested that people are really having a positive experience. That’s thrilling to me."

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