We here at Lit Drift are trying to take a look at how storytelling and literature are changing because of (and in spite of) popular culture.

But when some people talk about storytelling, they mean the oral tradition. Someone standing up in front of a group and talking, motioning with their hands, using facial expressions and sounds, dancing, laughing, relating. I’m increasingly finding myself drawn to this art of storytelling as it existed before all of our contemporary mediums…before radio, before television, before podcasts, before microfiction, before Twitter, before Facebook.

I know we’re called “Storytelling in the 21st Century,” but I guess I keep wanting to write like it’s …1899?  Maybe the 21st century of storytelling will start to look a bit like the last century when people get tired of technology and yearn for something more…human. Well, I might not be too far off since it seems that this ancient art of storytelling is in the midst of a revival.

The latest example of this is the annual National Storytelling Festival held in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Perhaps you all had heard of it before, but the festival’s existence is news to me.  Exciting news. The festival features three days of performances by various tellers, including ghost stories told at night in an open-air park. Here’s how it all got started:

Back in 1973, Jonesborough, the oldest town in Tennessee, was a backwater, with crumbling sidewalks and decaying buildings. Mr. [Jimmy Neil] Smith, a Jonesborough native, was then a 25-year-old high-school journalism teacher who volunteered on a committee that was trying to plan events to attract tourists and help rebuild the local economy. One day, as he rode with his students to a nearby town to print the school paper, the comedian Jerry Clower came on the radio, telling a story about hunting in Mississippi. “We were laughing and having a great time,” Mr. Smith says. “And I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could bring storytelling to Jonesborough?’ The idea just kind of floated away and pulled me along.” He presented his idea to his colleagues on the event-planning committee. “They said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’” he recalls. “So, without any manual, we rolled an old wagon into the shadow of the courthouse. We had 60 people in the audience.”

The event is now in its 36th year and attracts around 10,000 visitors, pointing to the revival of a folk tradition.  I love this kind of stuff.  Because I myself am a writer who writes to be read.  My writing is always sprinkled with italics, mis-spellings, intentional sentence fragments.  These all point to how the piece should be read out loud, which is how I intend all my writing to be heard.  I love intonations and elongations of words. So I’m attracted to this oral tradition.

But I also realize that the storytelling revival isn’t only coming in this form. The larger trend of storytelling seems to be strongest in the business world, with stories touted as a marketing strategy. They aren’t talking about the tents set up in Jonesborough, they are talking about how to communicate why your business is special, why your product is necessary.

Where else do you all see the revival of storytelling?