Storytellers are not just for fables.
In the long, long past days before the written word, storytellers were perhaps some of the most important people in a community for they carried the history. Fables and myths were really grounded in a mixture of truth and faith. An expression of history grounded in religion. Too often historians and teachers dismiss the myth as not possibly carrying truth but when you open up to the concept of history as not simply a regurgitation of statistics but a broader understanding of our past morals and thoughts, then you can understand how myth merges with fact.
A true storyteller is a person with a specific set of unique characteristics that include a vivid imagination, strong understanding of history, and a charismatic verbal personality.
To understand a true storyteller you cannot simply listen to him, you must sit in front of him and watch. His gestures. The way his eyebrows furrow during the scary parts. The tone of his voice that raises to nearly a holler and suddenly drops to a mere whisper. This is how you retell history.
Without storytellers, we do not understand the whole truth of our history. We lose that strong memory of the story that is simultaneously visual and verbal. The storyteller paints the canvas with his talents but you create the details with your imagination. Those sounds and pictures will stay with you your whole life as an understanding of that particular historical story.
I have known less than a dozen true storytellers in my life, but they all had one thing in common: they fundamentally changed my understanding of history.
