Burning Brightly: New Light on Old Tales Told Today

by Kay Stone

Burning Brightly is the first full-length book treatment of professional storytelling in North America today. For some years there has been a major storytelling revival throughout the continent, with hundreds of local groups and centres springing up, and with storytelling becoming an important part of the professional training for librarians. In the book, Stone explores storytelling through storytellers themselves, while providing enlightening commentary from her own background as a storyteller. Included in her analysis are informative discussions of organized storytelling communities, individual tellers, and tales. Issues such as the modern recontextualization of old tales and the role of women in folktales are linked to individual storytelling accounts. Texts of eight stories that exemplify the approaches of the various storytellers are also included. Burning Brightly will be compelling reading for storytellers―and for everyone who loves storytelling.

304 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 1998

About the author

Kay Stone, folklorist, storyteller, writer, and artist, was born in Detroit, Michigan and raised in Miami, Florida. She heard her first stories in the 1940s when her father told her very tall tales about the animals he saw while driving his gasoline tanker across the wild Florida everglades. She herself didn’t begin telling tales “officially” until she and her husband moved to Winnipeg in 1969. Here she started her teaching career at the University of Winnipeg, where she taught folklore, children’s literature, and storytelling for almost 30 years. She began giving workshops and performances for teachers and librarians in 1975, and has happily continued with these activities in her retirement.

In addition to schools and libraries, Kay has given workshops and performances at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Manitoba Children’s Museum, The Manitoba Museum, the Winnipeg Folk Festival, and the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, among others. She has also been part of storytelling events throughout Canada (notably several times at the Toronto Festival of Storytelling), in the United States, and in Hungary.

Her professional organizations have included the American Folklore Society, the Folkore Studies Association of Canada, the National Storytelling Association (U.S.), the Canadian Storytelling Association (SC/CC), and the newly organized Manitoba Storytelling Guild, of which she is a founding member. She is also a founding member of Stone Soup Stories and Eldertales, two informal groups that have been meeting regularly for open storytelling since the 1980s.

(from http://www.kaystone.com/about.html)