A librarian looks at the rights and wrongs of sharing literature orally

More opportunities equal more responsibilities” is a simple explanation of copyright. As a librarian, I can read or tell stories to children in the library or as part of a school visit. Fair use also permits me to tell stories in classrooms where I teach graduate students. Responsibilities change when I’m hired as a storyteller—then acting ethically means seeking permission. However, Catch-22’s abound.

It is frustrating, at best, to learn a story and then discover you may not perform it. This door only need slam once for tellers to realize that clearing performance rights is the first thing to do. Unfortunately, the first thing publishers and agents ask for are the date(s) and time(s) a story is to be performed. Storytellers cannot know if they will add a story to their repertoire until they’ve spent considerable time working with it. Even then, storytellers cannot know where or when they will be invited to perform in the future. Some tellers are trying to bring storytelling to the college circuit and into small theaters. Nonetheless, the majority of storytelling opportunities are in educational settings or at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN, or other festivals/conferences across the nation.

Problems arise when tellers approach agents and they are told they may not change a word. Recitation and reading are not story-telling. Storytelling is a performance medium, less physical than a play but just as much a departure from the grammar of print. One fall when I requested permission to perform Truman Capote’s “A Thanksgiving Visitor,” the representative said yes, but not a word could be changed. Because of the age of the audience and the time available to tell the story, the text required editing. Later that week, the town newspaper advertised a local theater company’s production of—you guessed it!—Truman Capote’s “A Thanksgiving Visitor.” I’d bet the production was neither word for word, nor any more “faithful” to the short story than my adaptation. Adaptations that strive to interpret stories faithfully for film and theater do not reproduce material word for word because they employ additional “languages” to communicate—so does storytelling.

More and more, audiobooks now depart from the text and say “as you listen” rather than “as you read.” This alteration is aurally less jarring and, therefore, less damaging to the flow of the narrative; a matter of common sense, it actually enhances the aural experience of the material. Live performances are primarily aural events with physical components that serve a story most effectively by using all the verbal and nonverbal cues available to performers.

Not all stories and poems are suitable for telling. I seek material that can be interpreted conversationally—material suitable to the directness, confidentiality, and simplicity experienced when we tell one another important stories in semidarkness. While I might edit lines out, I rarely add lines. My goal is to communicate the appeal of a text, which grows out of an author’s particular language and style. Mostly, a story sounds just as an author wrote it. Yet adaptations occur when I:

• differentiate characters more easily by placing taglines like “He said,” at the beginning of a quote, instead of halfway through or at the end of it;
• indicate characters vocally, which allows me to communicate “she said” and/or “he said sadly” effectively without actually saying those words;
• replace words like “she pointed” with a simple gesture;
• utilize a range of facial and physical cues to communicate more complex emotions like “disappointment overwhelmed him”;
• repeat a word or line for emphasis, as people naturally do in conversation;
• avoid words that are problematic today;
• edit because of time or age constraints; and finally,
• interact with listeners during a performance.

Lengthy descriptions, which are delectable to read, can become numbing in performance. But not always. Audiences let storytellers know when the narrative thread is lost to them. Responding to audiences can recalibrate stories. An audience of middle schoolers can respond to Ray Bradbury’s story of a boy losing his best friend in “Dandelion Wine,” but middle schoolers are not a nostalgic audience. Details that might send an adult spinning into reverie when reading the novel or hearing the story can be an impediment to the audience sitting in front of the teller. Forty years of interacting with audiences have led to more-informed decisions about editing material, as well as when to—and when not to—respond to cues from an audience. It is a learning curve and it never seems to end.

No one censures all actors or musicians when one fails to achieve a level of artistry. But people have condemned “those storytellers” after hearing one poor performance. Seeking to balance literary tradition’s value of exact replication with the oral tradition’s more fluid definition of faithfulness to a text is like standing in the middle of a seesaw—balance is maintained by risking imbalance. Generally, storytellers are not cavalier about Story. Most tellers are humbled by and grateful for the great gift authors give when they allow another to work with their material.

Another change occurs when a story, written in first person, is adapted into third person. I’m not an actor; I’m a storyteller. I am not a character delivering a monologue; rather, I do my best to indicate all the characters in a story. I cannot be an author’s omniscient narrator; I am simply an older woman who has learned something that I’m aching to pass on. In performance it is the way the voices of the narrator, characters, and storyteller coalesce that allows spoken literature to astound us.

In Paul Fleischman’s multivoiced novel Bull Run, the five segments about Toby Boyce, a boy from Georgia, begin: “I was eleven years old and desperate to kill a Yankee before the supply ran out.” When I tell the story, it begins: “Toby Boyce was eleven years old and desperate to kill a Yankee before the supply ran out.” Yes, the shift in point of view reverberates throughout the entire story, but telling Toby’s story in the third person keeps the focus on him, and not on my artificial Southern accent or acting techniques.

For most storytellers, performing is not their day job. Telling stories is not a get-rich scheme built on the sweat of writers. Most storytellers perform because they believe in the power of story; find words, images, metaphors, and a strong narrative line intoxicating; and relish the singular satisfaction of interacting with an audience. Those of us who are librarians usually share a deep desire to connect listeners with books. The majority of contracts between storytellers and publishers would be covered by nonexclusive performance rights to tell a story 10-20 times per year for 5-10 years in educational settings; a separate fee schedule could be drawn up for performances in more lucrative venues. When “platform” storytelling’s renaissance began in the late ’60s, the messianic zeal to spread the word meant tellers sometimes behaved thoughtlessly, as individuals and as a community. We may have encroached on rights by failing to secure permissions. I’d say we’ve come a long way.

Unfortunately, this awareness has led the majority of storytellers to no longer perform magnificent poems, short stories, or sections from biographies and novels because of the obstacles in securing permission. This is tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. All of us who love literature—authors, editors, publishers, agents, and storytellers—can and should find a way to negotiate our complementary interests. Storytellers can pay a percentage of their performance fee to authors whose stories they perform. What we cannot pay is a percentage of “gross box office receipts” from festivals. We are hired for fees—neither privy to nor paid according to what festivals earn.

There are those who would argue that a great author like John Steinbeck does not need me. Fair enough, but students do. Teens and adults need to hear Steinbeck’s lyricism, power, and art out loud. It opens the door to material mistakenly dismissed as too daunting or irrelevant. The words of fine writers are not what most kids plug into on their iPods, but they are hungry for the feast fine writers offer. My experience as a librarian and storyteller tells me that listeners seek out books after they’ve heard sections of them. As the author Margaret Mahy has said: She never would have been a writer, if she hadn’t been a reader, and she never would have been a reader if she hadn’t first been a listener. Listening to stories lays the twin tracks for reading and writing. Eyes and ears “read” differently; ears and eyes “hear” differently. When audiences of children, teens, or adults hear language lifted off the page, it can enhance their experience of literature.

One fundamental issue is: Will authors, and those who represent them, allow a story to have an independent life? The answer for filmmakers and playwrights seems to be “Yes!” Why is it most often “No” for storytellers?