A few pics here of the beautiful group we had for the second Keys to Re-enchantment workshop, you can see us here in the Chapel of Hope at the Athol Gill Centre in Clifton Hill. The venue was perfect, only 3km from Melbourne CBD and opposite the Darling Gardens as well as excellent coffee in Queens Parade. Julia Reid is an inspiration and I love telling stories and poetry with such an open-hearted humans!

Last weekend the Centre was also being used by groups learning Tai Chi and Aikido (what were those thumps we could hear?!) as well as a choir preparing to sing at the a capella festival. We were all good neighbours to each other and managed to share the kitchen and garden before hiving off into our respective venues. It is nice to have the option of intimate small space in the chapel as well as room to dance and sing, tell stories and make collages in the church.

Returned to the much loved and hugely subscribed PFF this weekend. The storytelling is a small treasure in the midst of it – a lovely session on Sunday. A traditional selkie story from Andrew McKenna won the Pat Glover Memorial Storytelling Award this year and several others of us told biographical stories in addition to some verse from the judges. Jackie Kerin has made a sustained contribution to this event, hats off to her for her role in this and for her blog for Storytelling Australia (Victoria) http://storytellingguildvic.blogspot.com.au

 Jackie tells me they are now up to 20,000 hits which is about as many people as there were at Port Fairy this weekend.

A photo here of a moment of quiet away from the crowds at Port Fairy, note the BYO camping chairs which are a defining mark of the festival.

Before I set off for Cape Town a fellow story-lover loaned me George Steiner’s book, Real Presences where he talks about the act of learning by heart and the reciprocal shaping it forms in us.

Now that I have left South Africa, I am remembering the landscape, the sculptural plant life, the thrum and harmonies of the human voices. These are some of the sensate components of memory. It feels like I am learning them by heart.  It is hard to forget the readiness of song and rhythm in this one small taste of the African continent.

George Steiner says, “Accurate recollection and resort in remembrance… generate a shaping reciprocity between ourselves and that which the heart knows… What is committed to memory and susceptible of recall constitutes the ballast of the self…the detergent tide of social conformity cannot tear it from us.”(1989) 

It is wonderful to be receiving emails from Europe and Africa and NSW now as friends from the Cape Town course are taking stories back to their various communities.

Just to give you a picture (and see photos below!) we were 14 course participants aged between 23 -72 and came from South Africa, Uganda, Swaziland, the Netherlands, Australia, the USA and the UK (including our teachers from Emerson College there), Finland and Spain.  Maria has reported in from Finland from her sled (!) and the South Africans are already immersed in a sustained project with older people.

Serendipitously on Monday here in Melbourne I delivered my first training session with a group of volunteers working in the Aged Care sector who want to assist people to tell aspects of their life stories. It was delightful to see the volunteers leave in the afternoon with a spring in their step. Me too, doing the work is a great consolation in that moment of loss at the dispersal of a group you have come to know and love.

        One of the pieces of teaching I thought was memorable and elegant in the Storyteller and the Community course was about tresholds in stories. Sue Hollingsworth is a master of the art of the biographical story and it was delicious to watch her teach and coach. The difficulty many people have in telling their own experience is knowing how to structure their story which can begin as just a nub of memory or a big amorphous mass.

Encouraging us to see some of the thresholds in our stories, Sue got us to start in one seat and move to another as we crossed from the beginning stages of setting the scene into the story itself. Such a simple invitation, but a good plan if you want to help people make something conscious. The mantra Ashley and Sue gave us was ‘there are no rules, you just have to know what you are doing!”

I like to travel light but I always take sturdy footwear. I went through a fair bit of shoe leather in Cape Town and found myself in a shoe repair shop in Rondebosch, negotiating with the particularly tall repairman to fix my sandals while I waited. In a fine piece of storytelling he told me he was descended from the Masai and proceeded to regale me with visceral details of their lion hunting habits and polygamous preferences. Just as I was beginning to wonder where the story was going he remarked that the Masai don’t care about voting or the modern life. “If they see your car they will spear the tyre so they can make a shoe out of it.”  I looked carefully at the new heel on my beaten up old sandals and checked “Is that where you learnt your trade?” I can report that there were no tread marks on the new heel. 

One of the downsides of 20 years experience as a storyteller is that sometimes I get it all a bit too perfect. I could see this in myself and occasionally in others on the course with a history of performing - we tended to have things covered.  The beauty of storytelling is in managing the delivery to a particular audience. Herein lies the magic.

It is like improvising a meal while your guests are present; you have the ingredients, you know what you are doing but you have not served it up before they arrive. The old perfections can get too easily preserved under cling wrap - the plastic film that supposedly keeps food fresh. In the new fresh, I am enjoying the cook up in the moment when audience and performer are curious to see what arises between them.

Found whilst hiking near Kirstenbosch last week!

Heading home now, but no doubt there will be stories basting as the 5 week course has now drawn to a close. Sigh. Consoled myself for the long flight with an airport read of The Elephant Whisperer, a memorable story set in South Africa, about the emotional intelligence of these magnificent creatures. The editor in me had to take a back seat, I suspect PanMacmillan have been economising on proof readers…

Note to self: when booking flights check map. Emirates are cheap and cheerful (actually delightful!) but Dubai is NOT on the way home from Cape Town to Melbourne. The Australian airline Qantas seem to have a corner on the only direct flights between South Africa and Melbourne but my friend tells me they were neither cheap nor cheerful. Oh Australia, when will you notice how deeply fortunate you are and offer a generous face to the world?!

Travelling in South Africa has its quirks, but it has been nowhere near as ugly as the warnings suggested. There was one moment when coming off the train a little later than intended, I found myself with several women friends being tooted by numerous taxis as twilight moved into darkness. Riffing on the much loved opener from Pride and Predjudice I declared,“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that three women by night in Cape Town, must be in want of a taxi.”  

Favourite quote from a newspaper seller on the train, “Save your  batteries, read a paper, if you can’t read you can look at the pictures!” And if you are on the station waiting you can look at the mountain, a companion in all weathers.

While the Rondebosch United Church have been remarking on the fact that it took a storyteller from Australia to tell them they had a storytelling course around the corner, I have discovered that one of the stories told here exists in a book that has been on my shelves for 20 years. Mama Rhino discovers a red dress in a shop window and it proves irresistible to her. Well, guess what happened to me last Friday?! My friend Maria told me she had found a shop with great African dresses. The outfits didn’t fit us but on the way home we happened past a window with a red dress in it... 

Here are some samples of the African designs, my Mama Rhino red dress is yet to be revealed but the story can be found in Arnold Lobel’s collection  Fables.