Feb 27 - Mar 1, 2009
Gioia Timpanelli may be the most respected master of the ageless art of storytelling in the world today. Poet/singer/songwriter John Terlazzo first saw Gioia in 1980 telling stories with Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly: “What she did with story blew a spark into my chest that over the years has turned into a raging bonfire.”
We live deeply through story, song, ideas, writing, and reading aloud, and we do so to actively court transcendence. Modern consumerist culture trivializes our natural human longing to imagine and create – it’s a tragedy beyond words. But using the natural creative energies that we – all of us – possess is the difference between real freedom and servitude.
Gioia says, “The world is falling apart because human beings have stopped doing their real work.” Our work, now, is to nourish the seed within ourselves – and the external – that reclaims the deep mysteries of story telling and creative writing. Both, when approached with conscious intention and open hearts, are contemplative acts – they are ways to ignite one’s soul and give rise to one’s true nature. An impossibly fast pace, a lack of silence, and a media “bombardment” have begun to atrophy that part of the brain that understands metaphor and subtle thinking. When we cease creating images, we lose the ability to imagine. But when we actively pursue the deep images in story and in our psyches, subtle thinking is reborn, and we restore what it means to be a human being.
Old and ancient tales, rich with images and told from tongue to ear, psyche to psyche, raise us up to hover above the stones. Throughout the weekend, we’ll engage, together, through marvelous stories, poems, and songs, in writing experiments, reading aloud, discussion, and deep listening. This is for experienced storytellers and writers as well as those “who’ve always wanted to.”
Click if you would like to read two articles we published in our newspaper The Center Post.
To be in Gioia Timpanelli’s presence is to participate in the mystery of story. An early and central figure in the worldwide storytelling revival, she won the Maharishi International Award for “promoting world harmony wherever she goes by enlivening within the listener that field of pure consciousness that is the source of all stories.” She has taught at CUNY, Pace University, and The New School; founded Storytelling at Art Park, and co-founded the New York City Storytelling Center. Tales from the Roof of the World: Four Tibetan Folk Tales and Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily are beautifully written, and her new novel, What Makes a Child Lucky, is coming out in the fall of 2008.
“Maybe the finest storyteller I’ve ever known.”
- Andre Gregory
John Terlazzo is a poet, painter, singer, songwriter, and storyteller who performs and records with his trio, Voices in the Hall. He has led The Secret Tells Itself: Writing as a Contemplative Act for close to 20 years with people of all ages and in all walks of life. He has published four collections of poems, including, most recently, The Secret Work: 52 Poems & One Essay, and six collections of recorded songs, including the soon to be released Ecstasy & Longing.