Georgia Mountain Storytelling Festival

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2021 Georgia Mountain Storytelling Festival this past weekend. It was lovely to see so many of you online, and we really appreciated everyone’s goodwill as we transformed the festival for the virtual sphere. Ticketholders can enjoy the storytelling videos and recordings of the workshops and other events that took place live during the festival through May 17th, so you still have plenty of time to take advantage of the festival’s offerings if there’s more that you want to see. If you haven't yet gotten your ticket, it’s not too late! Registration will remain open until May 17th. https://host.regform.com/2021-georgia-mountain-storytellin/

All five of our featured storytellers will be together twice today during the festival! At 4:00PM Eastern, they will be available for a Q&A session, and at 7:00PM Eastern, each teller will share one story to wrap up the festival in grand style. You won’t want to miss it! https://host.regform.com/2021-georgia-mountain-storytelling

The festival kicks off this Friday! In addition to dozens of recorded stories for you to enjoy, we'll have four live events on Friday. The first one will be Friday at 11:00AM Eastern, and you won't want to miss it because it's origami and storytelling combined! See the details below, and click the link to reserve your festival ticket if you haven't already. Access to all recordings, workshops, and live performances is included. $10 per household general admission; free for te...achers and students 11:00 AM-12:00 PM Eastern Workshop by Megan Hicks: Stories (un)Folding with the Origami Swami Is it . . . a.) a workshop? b.) a play date? c.) professional development? d.) all of the above! Megan Hicks, Origami Swami, demystifies this ancient folk art for children and adults--for recreation, as STEM curriculum enhancement, as professional development for librarians, teachers, and entertainers. This workshop is a happy marriage of storytelling and paperfolding. Participants learn simple stories whose plots provide cues to the folding sequences of equally simple--but very cool--origami models. What's that you say? You have no eye/hand coordination? No patience? No problem! Self-avowed klutzes have amazed themselves in this workshop. No experience--telling or folding--is required. What is required will be a few sheets of square paper and a few sheets of copy paper. Origami paper is fun, but not necessary. Right angles, however, are important. MATERIALS: Participants will need about a dozen sheets of square paper. Suggested size: 5 to 8 inches. It can be junk mail trimmed down to a square or actual origami paper. What matters is that the paper will take a crease and that your squares are accurately cut. We hope to see you there! https://host.regform.com/2021-georgia-mountain-storytellin/

Day 1 of the virtual festival was grant, and day 2 promises to be just as good! In addition to a plethora of recorded stories, we have three live (Zoom) workshops coming up today. See the details below, and sign up for your festival ticket if you haven’t already! All videos, workshops, and Zoom storytelling events are included for just $10 (free for teachers and students) and can be watched for 30 days after the festival. https://host.regform.com/2021-georgia-mountain-storyte...llin/ *9:30AM Eastern: Hidden Gems by Antonio Rocha Hidden Gems. The power of the eyes, tone of voice, and posturethe moments in a story where we shift between one thought and the next, one character and the other, from one scene to the nextare hidden gems tucked away in a story well told. Whether you’re your family’s unofficial historian or a professional teller, learning to master these moments will give your stories extra polish and finesse. This workshop will teach you how to identify and develop the transitions within your stories by practicing techniques with voice and body. *11:00AM Eastern Prepare to Scare by Elizabeth Ellis Why tell scary stories? What do they do for us as human beings? Maybe you weren't born with "the ghoully gene," but you can learn to increase "the fear factor" in your stories by sharing them more effectively. *1:30PM Eastern Tell Us about It: Creating Stories to Heal by Megan Hicks If you are reading this workshop description, you are a survivor. You have lived through the worst pandemic in 100 years. Surviving hardship exacts a tollloss, grief, depression, confusion, social isolation. Survivors have a story to tell. Nah. I don’t think I’m special. It’s all been such a blur. Words cannot express I wouldn’t know where to start. We start, together in this workshop, by tying our memories, thoughts, and feelings to things that the senses can see, smell, taste, hear, and touch. We identify places associated with those thingsa room in the house, an off-ramp on the interstate, another continent, your favorite chair. We start putting words on a page, with no consideration about whether or not, at this point, it’s making any sense at all. And then we share. As much or as little as we feel like sharing. The sharing sparks more memories, and stories emerge. When you create a story about surviving a global disaster, you have created a bit of order out of chaos. You have listened, you have been heard. Together, through our stories, we create a community of healing. This workshop is for teens and adults and will cap at 25 attendees. The first 25 people to log into the Zoom session will be admitted, so if you'd like to attend, please be on time, if not a few minutes early.

The 2021 festival kicks off one week from today, and we've got so many good things in store for you! See our website (gamountainstoryfest.org) for descriptions of all the sessions, and go to https://host.regform.com/2021-georgia-mountain-storytellin/ if you still need to reserve your ticket. The festival is free for teachers and students, and general admission is only $10 per household.

LIVE TONIGHT at 7:00PM Eastern, Antonio Rocha will be sharing stories about his experiences as an immigrant. Motivated by the increasing numbers of the dispossessed and by turmoil at the Mexican and U.S. border, Antonio decided to share his own story of leaving Brazil and becoming an American citizen so that he could bring humanity to the fear of the unknown. He will tell about his experiences and then participate in a Q&A. Tickets for this performance are free thanks to a grant from the Georgia Humanities Council, and a ticket to the full Georgia Mountain Storytelling Festival is just $10 (and includes tonight’s performance). We hope you can join us! https://host.regform.com/2021-georgia-mountain-storytellin/

Tim Lowry will be live at 3:00PM Eastern at the festival tomorrow (Friday, April 16), teaching us about how stories can create community. We hope you can join us for this important and inspiring workshop! See the details below, and click the link to reserve your festival ticket if you haven't already. Access to all recordings, workshops, and live performances is included. $10 per household general admission; free for teachers and students https://host.regform.com/2021-georgia...-mountain.../ 3:00 PM "A Ladder to the Moon: Stories Build Community" True connection requires deeply meaningful communication. All too often in our current society, we talk about one another, over one another, at one another, but never WITH one another. Communication is an exchange of ideas, a two-way street with stories being told and stories being heard. The very strongest connections are built when the stories are told and heard with heart and soul. This deeply meaningful use of stories is called a Ladder to the Moon and has been used by great leaders for millennia to foster communication, strengthen relationships, and bind people together in community. Learn about this ancient tradition with Tim Lowry and begin building stronger relationships today!

In just over a week, we'll be gathering online for the festival! In addition to sharing the work of our five featured tellers, we're delighted to be presenting these eight talented tellers from our region: Jess Willis: https://www.jessthestoryteller.org/ Judy Baker: http://www.tellyouastory.com/ Matthew Tooni: https://www.blueridgeheritage.com/artist/matthew-tooni/ The Pressley Girls: https://thepressleygirls.com/... Kanute Rarey: https://www.kanuterarey.com/ David Petty Cayce Terrell You're in for a real treat with these folks!

Are you ready to get your hands clapping and your heart dancing? Diane Ferlatte will be at the festival live on Friday at 1:00PM Eastern teaching a workshop on combining story and song. See the details below, and click the link to reserve your festival ticket if you haven't already. Access to all recordings, workshops, and live performances is included. $10 per household general admission; free for teachers and students https://host.regform.com/2021-georgia-mountain-storytel...lin/ 1:00 PM-2:00 PM Eastern: Combining Story & Song This workshop with Diane Ferlatte will look for the songs, the chants, and the rhymes in stories. We will be discussing and looking at different ways to combine singing with storytelling, creating songs that fit the story, add spirit, enrichment, and audience participation. Do you have to be a good singer? No, but be willing to have fun with singing and join in a playful experience with storytelling. This is a participatory workshop that will benefit anyone looking to add a little zest to his or her storytelling.

Megan Hicks will be bringing her artistry to the 2021 virtual Georgia Mountain Storytelling Festival! As a self-proclaimed Teller-Without-a-Niche, Megan dives heart-first into every story she tells fairy tale, personal story, American history, parody, ghost and horror, humor and magically, her listeners are happy to follow. She performs throughout the United States, and she recently completed a month-long tour of China, adding a fourth continent Asia to her internatio...nal storytelling credits. Megan is a sought-after workshop presenter and seminar leader, with credits ranging from storytelling festivals and conferences across the U.S., bi-lingual schools in Latin America and China, libraries in Australia and New Zealand, juvenile detention centers, and the FBI Academy. In addition to sharing a wide variety of stories, Megan will teach two workshops at the festival: Stories (un)Folding with the Origami Swami (a hands-on workshop that’s a happy marriage of storytelling and paper-folding) and Tell us about it (a workshop for pandemic survivors on creating stories to heal). (Photo by Kim Brundage Photography) To see Megan and our other spectacular tellers, get your ticket through https://host.regform.com/2021-georgia-mountain-storytellin/. See more

Antonio Rocha, a native of Brazil, will be featured at the 2021 virtual Georgia Mountain Storytelling Festival! Antonio began his career in the performing arts in 1985. In 1988 he received a Partners of the Americas grant to come to the USA to perform and deepen his mime skills with Mime Master Tony Montanaro. Since then, he has earned a Summa Cum Laude Theater BA from USM (University of Southern Maine) and studied with Master Marcel Marceau. Mr. Rocha’s unique fusion of mime... and spoken word has been performed from Singapore to South Africa and many places in between, including 16 countries on 6 continents. Some of the venues include The Singapore Festival of the Arts, Wolf Trap, The National Storytelling Festival, The Kennedy Center, The Smithsonian Institution, The National Geographic, The Tales of Graz in Austria, and the Dunya Festival in Holland, as well as many other storytelling festivals and educational institutions around the United States. Antonio will share many stories in his unique style and will teach a workshop on using tone, voice, and posture in storytelling. To see Antonio and our other spectacular tellers, get your ticket through https://host.regform.com/2021-georgia-mountain-storytellin/. See more

To maintain the safety of our storytellers and audience during the pandemic, our April 16-17 festival will be held online. Join us for a celebration of the art of storytelling shared by a breadth of voices. Enjoy traditional and contemporary stories, children’s events, and workshops by our featured artists: Elizabeth Ellis, Diane Ferlatte, Megan Hicks, Tim Lowry, and Antonio Rocha. Some of the festival’s storytelling sessions will be recordings made by our tellers especially ...for GMSF 2021. Other storytelling sessions, all of the workshops, and the Q&A session will be presented "live" online. We hope you will find joy, hope, and laughter as you participate in this year’s virtual events through our festival platform on Expo Pass. You’re in for a treat! Registration is a snap, and you won't find a better deal: $10 per household for the full festival. Also, as always, tickets are free for teachers and students. See https://host.regform.com/2021-georgia-mountain-storytellin/ to sign up for your ticket and to get more information!

Donald Davis is always a true delight! We hope you enjoy his wit and wisdom in these five stories for folks of all ages. We’re grateful for the recordings that he made especially for GMSF! https://youtu.be/zuS7QNkvDGo

We’re ending our fall series in style with master North Carolina storyteller and humorist Donald Davis. We hope you enjoy these five tales recorded especially for students. https://youtu.be/Wii-uyyRoeo

Good morning, and welcome to our final fall Storytelling Saturday! We're excited to be sharing the work of the incomparable Donald Davis. Here's a short welcome video: https://youtu.be/r5_ojyW2LOs On the Georgia Mountain Storytelling Festival website, you'll find a program that lists all of the online events in the fall series and gives information about each storyteller. You'll also find links to videos that the storytellers have created especially for our festival. We have... shared those links here on Facebook too. We hope you enjoy! We'd like to offer special thanks to the many individual donors and the following organizations and businesses who have helped us make the fall series free for viewers: National Endowment for the Arts, Georgia Council for the Arts, South Arts, North Georgia Community Foundation, Blairsville-Union County Chamber of Commerce, Union County Commissioner's Office, United Community Bank in Blairsville, Peach State Federal Credit Union, Walmart Supercenter #3874 in Dawsonville, Walmart Supercenter #4616 in Cleveland, Avid Bookshop, Byron Herbert Reece Society, Nora Roberts Foundation, Alexander's Store, Blue Ridge Mountain EMC, and Jacky Jones Ford.

To close out our fall series, North Carolina storyteller Donald Davis will be joining us on December 12th! Known for the warmth and wit of his homespun tales, Donald is in demand across the country. We're so fortunate to have him joining us online this Saturday. Links to videos that Donald has made especially for our audience will be posted on our website and Facebook page by December 12th. He will also be teaching a free workshop on the 12th via Zoom. If you'd like to participate, sign up ASAP. Seats are going fast. Click on this Eventbrite link; click on "register"; sign up for the workshop. https://fallstorytellingsaturdays.eventbrite.com