Storytellers bring tales to life

The great thing about storytellers is that they always have something to say. The bad thing is that putting their words on paper seems like trespassing on their craft.

Fortunately, the stories behind the storytellers are often interesting in and of themselves, especially those of Emil Wolfgramm, Ruth Halpern and Shain Miller, who will appear at the 23rd Annual Talk Story Festival at Ala Moana Beach Park this weekend. For them, stories are not just words, voices, acting and imagination, though those skills all come into play. For them, storytelling is life itself.

Wolfgramm, who is of Tongan descent, grew up in New Zealand listening his father’s all-night storytelling sessions with friends. “They would start with discourses on church doctrine, but then they would always end up in legend,” he said. “I used to sneak out of bed and lie in the corridor, and … we would listen in on these exchanges of traditional stories and proverbs and fall asleep on the carpet.”

So it is particularly important to Wolfgramm that he is now retelling the epic legends of his ancestors that date back 3,500 years.

“It’s controlled by chant,” said Wolfgramm, who is pursuing a doctorate on the topic. “And it is so perfectly metered and measured that … it’s seamless. When you memorize it and (recite) it you can’t improve on it. So it fixes the storyline.”

His job is to bring that storyline to life, using current characters and language. “It is plot-rich, but character-poor,” he said. “And so guess who has to bring the character to life? A storyteller. And it was purposely crafted that way so that every telling of an ancient traditional story is actually a current update.”

“I’m the first-generation storyteller in a language other than Tongan,” he said. “And it’s so good; I’ve never heard any other stories that can match it.”

Halpern also was born into a storytelling family, though by profession her father was a lawyer and her mother a social worker.

“When we went on long drives, it was time for my dad to make up stories about an imaginary superhero, and my mom would tell us all these sad stories of her childhood,” she said. “I was just waiting for my turn on stage.”

She attended a storytelling session in college and “at the end of it, I remembered every single (story),” she said. “I just thought, ‘This is it, this is the name of what I was meant to do.’”

She developed her own major in storytelling and has performed at festivals around the world. For her “day job,” she is a corporate communications consultant. “It’s all about learning each other’s story and finding a way to connect through story,” she said.

Halpern specializes in improvisation. She asks the audience for a place and a character and goes from there.

“Once you have a character, they have some kind of longing, she said. “That longing drives a quest of some kind, and I never know what that quest will be because I can’t plan the ending.”

Halpern has performed at previous festivals and has found Hawaii to be fertile ground. “Hawaii has such a rich tradition of ghost stories and stories of the supernatural that — I don’t want to say they seem ordinary — but it’s a fluent language here, whereas in California there’s a certain, ‘Well, this is all just pretend.’”

Miller is new to the festival, and to storytelling itself. She met festival organizer Jeff Gere at protests against school furloughs last year, and he encouraged her to have story slams at Ong King Art Center in Chinatown, which she manages.

“I emcee our First Friday and our Sunday-night open mics, so I tell stories during that time just to fill time between bands and performances,” said Miller, a native of Pennsylvania who first came to Hawaii on a college exchange program. She did a lot of service work in college, providing her with ample material for her stories.

“I worked down in Mississippi after Katrina, I taught a camp in Kentucky in kind of the backwoods area of Appalachia, so there are plenty of stories,” she said. “Really, there’s a story in every aspect of life.”

She finds Hawaii to be a place imbued with mysticism. “In Hawaii I find the stories are more based in mystical folklore, of the religion and old Hawaii,” she said. “Whereas in Appalachia it’s more personal stories.”