I have been wanting to create a website of children’s stories for years, but last autumn I only had about forty stories to put on it – mostly recordings of live performances that I had made at the Moray Steiner School in Findhorn.
But then I hit upon an idea.
I was at the time telling a bedtime story to Luke every night, and my idea was afterwards to write down each story’s basic elements. Then, each week, I would go into my recording studio and retell some of my favourites. In this way I was able to record two or three stories a week, and over a six month period I created over sixty short stories, ready for this site. I have never had such a prolific period of story creation!
Most of those stories I put in the “for ages 4 to 6 category” as Luke was in his fifth year throughout this time, but occasionally I would tell a story that was a bit longer, or a bit more challenging (or scary even) than most children in that age group might be comfortable with, and I’ve put those stories in the “for ages 7 to 9″ group. (I think of Luke as a fairly untypical listener by now, as he hears so many of these stories, and seems fine with long or even mildly scary stories, but I want to assume that some children will not be so familiar, or so brave, and classify stories accordingly).
During this period I also taught myself the appalacian dulcimer, a very simple stringed instrument. It is so simple, and so pleasant-sounding, that it didn’t really take much learning to get the hang of making a nice sound with it. What took more practice was learning how to play it and tell stories at the same time. I’m happy to say that even this was much easier than I had thought it would be. The key is to play the dulcimer with simple rhythmic strokes that don’t interfere too much with the rhythm of the telling voice. So, many of the stories that I recorded in 2010 have the dulcimer in the background.
I think stories for children really benefit from having a musical accompaniment. At the beginning of my storytelling career, back in the early nineties, I became a fan of a series of children’s storytapes called “Rabbit Ears Productions” that took classical fairy tales such as Jack and the Beanstalk and The Emperor’s New Clothes, had them read by famous actors, and then asked composers such as Ry Cooder and Mark Isham to set them to music. I studied the way they had woven stories and music together and used that as the inspiration for a series of my own storytapes.
In those days computers were still quite a new thing. My first one was an Atari and I taught myself how to use it with a music production program called Cubase, which I have now been using for almost twenty years. I used synthesisers to create multiple tracks of voice and music, giving the stories a sound track. Each story took months and months of work, a real labour of love! You can find those stories quite easily in the catalogue, as they are the only ones there from the 90s (hint: sort by “year”).
Ten years later, when I got together with Stella, we set three of my own stories to her music, using the same method. She is a much more accomplished musician than I am, and I think she created some really inspired music. Those stories are How the Dragon Remembered His Fire, The Fish Who Wanted to Fly and The Laughing Cat.
Then we had kids.
But now, to come full circle, our children are three and five years old and
are inspiring our latest collaborations. They are out of the house a little more too, so there is more time for creativity now. Our hope is that soon Stella will be creating new music to accompany the latest stories that I record.
We moved house this summer and my recording studio is still in pieces in the garden shed. Soon it will be put back together again, and I will tackle the huge backlog of recordable stories that has built up over the summer. A story a night, you see, means about a hundred stories every few months! Of course, not all of them are good enough to record, and with so much choice, I have taken to categorising them into Very Best, Best, Worth Looking At Again, etc. It all means that when I do finally begin this task there will be some real peaches.
And with music, too. That would be peaches and cream!
