The First Step - A Storytelling Workshop

Award-winning storyteller and author Tim Tingle will facilitate a workshop entitled 'The First Step' as part of this year's YARN Storytelling Festival and this is a gem you don't want to miss!

In this highly-interactive workshop for all levels of storytellers, we will explore a variety of techniques of creating and learning an oral performance piece.

Whether you select a personal story, a folktale, a historical narrative, or a tale from another genre, we will discuss the common elements; learn the basic rules and how to acknowledge and break them.

Music, movement, gestures, vocal quality—we'll cover all the basics, and leave with the beginnings of a wonderful tale.

About Tim Tingle:

Tim Tingle is an Oklahoma Choctaw and an award-winning author and storyteller. His great-great grandfather, John Carnes, walked the Trail of Tears in 1835, and his paternal grandmother attended a series of rigorous Indian boarding schools in the early 1900’s. Responding to a scarcity of Choctaw lore, Tingle initiated a search for historical and personal narrative accounts in the early 1990’s.

In 1992, Tingle began mentoring with Choctaw storyteller Charley Jones. He retraced the Trail of Tears to Choctaw homelands in Mississippi and began recording stories of tribal elders. These recorded interviews are the basis of his most important writings.

His latest middle grade novel, How I Became a Ghost, (Roadrunner Press, May 2013), is a fictional first-person account of a young boy who “becomes a ghost” on the Trail of Tears, but stays on the walk to help family and friends survive. Filled with humor and elements of traditional lore to soften the tragedy, HIBaG includes a shape-shifting panther/teenager, a five-year old ghost sister, a talking dog, and a headstrong teenage girl who refuses to give up.

Danny Blackgoat, Navajo Prisoner (June, 2013), a Hilo novel, concerns a tough sixteen year-old on the Navajo Long Walk of 1864. Danny fights bullying soldiers, rattlesnakes, and his own fiery temper, till he meets an older prisoner who devises a dangerous escape plan. Danny Blackgoat, Rugged Road to Freedom, (January, 2014), continues the history-based saga of the imprisonment of innocent Navajos.

House of Purple Cedar is set for release in January of 2014. Fifteen years in the crafting, this novel describes the struggles of Choctaws in pre-statehood Oklahoma, through the eyes of a young girl who witnesses the burning down of New Hope Academy boarding school. Filled with hope in the most tragic of circumstance, HoPC is Tingle’s testiment to Choctaw elders who continue to watch over the well-being of the Choctaw Nation and its people.