Jessica Piche

Storyteller Karen Gummo prefers throat and mouth to book and pen.

With nearly 100 tales in her repertoire and a rich Icelandic and Danish heritage, it’s no wonder professional storyteller Karen Gummo possesses a love of collecting and telling stories. “There is a universal longing to enjoy the rhythm of the human voice,” she says.

It is in the oral rendition of a tale where magic is created between the listener and the teller. Gummo believes that in addition to entertaining, the ritual of listening to and telling stories helps us to understand ourselves, and others.

“As you are listening, you make predictions about how things are going to fall out, and you put yourself in there and see some of the foibles you have as an individual,” she says. Gummo suggests we recognize some of the weaknesses that we all possess and see how someone else works it out. In doing so, we discover new possibilities. Some, including mythologist Joseph Campbell, believe the power of storytelling lies in its ability to make connections and provide a kind of psychological road map for finding ourselves in a complicated world.

Storytellers obviously played an important role in non-writing society. Not only did they entertain, they carried news from community to community and offered explanations for the mysterious. In the past two decades of digital revolution, however, storytelling appears to be making a comeback. Despite instant messaging, texting and tweeting, there seems to be a yearning for oral storytellers and their tales.

World Storytelling Day, on Saturday, March 20, aims to satisfy some of that increased craving, with events planned throughout the week in Calgary. This year’s theme is “Light and Shadows” which, according to Gummo, means the focus will be on stories of old wisdom lurking in hidden places.

Gummo believes a tale that begins once upon a time in a land far, far away can still resonate with modern audiences. She says one of the gifts of being a storyteller is that as she listens to, and looks for, stories to learn, it connects her to other cultures — how our human condition is common no matter where you are or how different various cultures might look on the surface.

She is quick to point out that in her storytelling experience, one of the common themes is “fear between groups who misunderstand each other.” To prepare for one of the Calgary events, “The Shadowlands of Scheherezade — Tales of the 1001 Nights,” Gummo noted that the storytellers have been learning old 10th century Arabic stories. They are a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folk tales told by the Persian queen Scheherazade to her captor, King Shahryar, in order to delay her execution.

While doing some historical research, Gummo discovered that the stories developed at the same time as the rise of Islam. Inevitably, as she delved into the stories of the women of Baghdad, Gummo found it connected her to the culture and the people from whom the “1001 Arabian Nights” developed. The process also helped her discover that some values expressed in them, such as always caring for the needy and putting the needs of others before one’s own, paralleled her life. She has come to see herself in those tales.