The End of Summer, and the Year ahead.

My two oldest children started back to school yesterday, and my son will enter SK next Tuesday. This will give me 2-3 days a week of utter peace and quiet to work on building Contented Copy. I fear I might have adult onset ADD, as I have not been able to get much work done with all 3 kids home for the last 8 weeks. It’s been a kind of lazy, hazy summer here, and I am amazed at the change in me once September 1st rolled around! Ok, time to knuckle down and focus.

I received some good news last week, I have been appointed Artistic Director of St. Marys Storytelling Inc (www.stmarysstorytelling.org), a Not for Profit Arts organization that I have worked closely with for about 5 years. The main event is the yearly “Once Upon a Thames” Storytelling Festival that runs the first weekend in June, and for the past 3 years, they have also offered a monthly Winter Performance Series from November to April. I have a lot of work ahead of me in this regard, and also some new and innovative ideas I am hoping to try out.

I have realized that I LOVE working in the Arts sector. And I thoroughly love the genre of oral storytelling. As a child/youth/young adult I never knew this category of arts existed. I knew, emphatically, that Story drives everything, but I never realized that there was an avenue for people to just get up there and share their stories. My Liberal Arts training made me want to capture everything on paper, to preserve and protect for future generations. But, as we all know,listening to a story, and more importantly, passing on a story, is a very powerful medium. That is where the true magic lies, as I experienced many times during Journalling and Life Story Workshops. It is Here and Now, immediate, as opposed to my goal of writing, storing, and collecting dust.

So that is how the next year of my life is going to pan out, dividing my work time between Contented Copy and St. Marys Storytelling. On an aside, while watching a comedian on CBC the other night, my almost 5 year old son (who has grown up listening to storytellers) says to us “Is that guy a Storyteller?” I caught the “Look at what you’ve done to my son” joking look from my husband. “Yes,” I replied to him,  “He is most definately a storyteller”.