Creative Storytelling: Building Community/Changing Lives

by Jack D. Zipes

Jack Zipes has reinvigorated storytelling as a successful and engaging tool for teachers and professional storytellers. Encouraging storytellers, librarians, and schoolteachers to be active in this magical process, Zipes proposes an interactive storytelling that creates and strengthens a sense of community for students, teachers and parents while extolling storytelling as animation, subversion, and self-discovery.

Genres: Nonfiction

284 pages, Paperback

First published September 19, 1995

About the author

Jack David Zipes is a retired Professor of German at the University of Minnesota. He has published and lectured extensively on the subject of fairy tales, their linguistic roots, and argued that they have a "socialization function". According to Zipes, fairy tales "serve a meaningful social function, not just for compensation but for revelation: the worlds projected by the best of our fairy tales reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society." His arguments are avowedly based on the neo-Marxist critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

Zipes enjoys using droll titles for his works like Don't Bet on the Prince and The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Ridinghood.

He completed a PhD in comparative literature at Columbia University. Zipes taught at various institutions before heading German language studies at the University of Minnesota. He has retranslation of the complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.

Reviews

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of great ideas for stories to share with students and follow up activities for teachers who have time to do so. Really well organized into the different genres that exist in storytelling. Great to read more than just fairy tales and folktales for ideas of other genres to share. The science fiction chapter was a bit weak. Particularly the follow-up activities. Having students write a "science fiction" story about how an invention has changed the world doesn't sound very much like science fiction. They would need to write about an invention that hasn't been invented yet for it to work.

[Erin Sterling · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Creative Storytelling, Zipes outlines a practical storytelling program that introduces literary genres to children in a hands-on manner. The book is divided into three sections: Setting the Scene with Fairy Tales, Exploring Genres, and Storytelling in Context. This is a great book for school librarians or teachers interested in developing a storytelling curriculum because it not only provides an overview of the history of different genres and goes over stories and their variations, but also gives great ideas of how to develop a lesson. I particularly liked the salad games and acrostic in which children are asked to think of characters, places, and themes in a certain story or genre and mix-and-match those characters and themes to create their own stories. [add something about social justice themes?:] This book will be useful to me as a teller when I’m looking for storytelling ideas for the classroom and particularly if I’m looking to develop a thorough, well-developed unit on variations in fairy tales, which is his passion.