Book Trailer: Haunted Waters by Dale Jarvis

From an encounter with a shrieking horror on Signal Hill, St. John's, to the legend of the headless pirate of Red Bay, Labrador, folklorist Dale Jarvis conjures up stories of white horses, men in black, haunted punts, vanishing boats, and things that go bump in the basement.

With its tales of premonitions of death, eerie phantoms, and strange creatures, Newfoundland and Labrador is truly a haunted place. Beware, gentle reader! The unquiet spirits of dogs, wolves, little girls, ships, and soldiers drift through these pages. You may even run into the Old Hag herself, Newfoundland and Labrador's most infamous nighttime visitor. Blending local history, folklore, eyewitness interviews, and archival research, Haunted Waters is the latest collection of ghostly tales from one of Canada's finest, and creepiest, storytellers.

Haunted Waters: More True Ghost Stories of Newfoundland and Labrador
by Dale Gilbert Jarvis
Format: Paperback, 170 pages, b&w photos
Pub Date: July 2010
Price: $16.95
ISBN-10: 1-897317-79-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-897317-79-2

Link to YouTube book trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltS_QZM2xOo

Canadian Youth Storytelling Scholarship – Call for applications

The St. John’s Storytelling Festival and Storytellers of Canada-Conteurs du Canada (SC-CC) is pleased to announce the launch of the Canadian Youth Storytelling Scholarship. Each year, SC-CC holds its annual conference in a different location across Canada. The Canadian Youth Storytelling Scholarship will send a young storytelling enthusiast from the conference’s home province or territory to that year’s conference.

In 2010, the conference is being held in St. John’s from July 28th to August 1st, and the first recipient of the Canadian Youth Storytelling Scholarship will be from Newfoundland and Labrador. One scholarship winner from Newfoundland and Labrador will be invited to the conference to meet and interact with storytellers from across the nation and around the world, take part in exciting workshops, and be invited to concert performances by some of Canada’s and the United Kingdom’s finest storytellers. The winner receives:

• Free admission to the SC-CC conference, July 28-August 1, 2010
• Entrance to all concerts and workshops
• A one-year membership to Storytellers of Canada-Conteurs du Canada
• A $250 grant to help offset the cost of travel and accommodation
• Partnership with an established storyteller, who will act as a mentor, guide and resource.

WHO MAY APPLY:
Youth aged 18-30 interested in using storytelling in their respective fields (i.e., education, psychology, museum work, environmental education, healing arts, law, religion, business, theatre, or freelance storytelling!)

HOW TO APPLY:
Please provide the following information via email:
• Name, Address, City, Province
• Telephone Numbers (home and cell)
• Email Address
• Date of Birth
• Storytelling experience (either telling or listening)
• Answer the following three questions:

1. Why are you interested in attending the Storytellers of Canada-Conteurs du Canada Annual Conference?

2. What do you hope to gain from the conference?

3. How can storytelling be used in your present or desired line of work?

Completed applications for the Canadian Youth Storytelling Scholarship must be submitted, by email, to youthstorytelling@gmail.com by Wednesday, June 30th, 2010.

Information about the annual conference may be found at www.sc-cc.com

Wicked Wednesday with Dale Jarvis, Storyteller

Celebrating 13 years of telling terrible tales!

Wednesday, May 26, 2010
8:00pm
Newman Wine Vaults, 436 Water Street.

$13 at the door

Join storyteller Dale Jarvis as he launches the 13th season of the award winning St. John’s Haunted Hike with a special evening of his favourite ghoulish and ghastly tales by candlelight in the haunted Newman Wine Vaults.

Since 1997, the Haunted Hike has thrilled locals and tourists alike with stories of public hangings, duels, and horrific murders, forgotten cemeteries and unmarked graves, vengeful lovers, murdered soldiers, and mysterious fires. He also tells stories of the faerie folk, tales from the collections of the Brothers Grimm, local legends and traditional tales from Newfoundland, Ireland, the United Kingdom and beyond. He is the founder of the St. John's Storytelling Circle, and president of the St. John's Storytelling Festival, Inc.

Last chance to register for storytelling conference

The response to the July 2010 Storytellers of Canada conference in St. John's has been fantastic! We have only twenty slots left before we're completely sold out, so we have decided on extending the registration deadline! If you haven't registered yet, it isn't too late, and we will take the first 20 people who send in their registration forms and payment.

http://www.sc-cc.com/conference/2010/2010-registration.html

If you have already registered and haven't make your room bookings, you can get the information on accommodations at:

http://www.sc-cc.com/conference/2010/2010-accommodation.html

Don't forget the 5-Minute Story Slam, happening Wednesday July 28th, at 7:30pm. We want the slam's theme to fit the local environment, and for St. John's, that means fog, and lots of it! The foggiest place in the world is the Grand Banks off the island of Newfoundland, the meeting place of the cold Labrador Current from the north and the much warmer Gulf Stream from the south. With storytellers from all over the world congregating in St. John's this July, all that hot air is bound to see an increase in the misty stuff. We welcome stories related in any way to fog: foggy days, the mists of time, fog horns, fog banks, lost in the fog, living in a fog, condensation nuclei, various visibility hazards or drizzle, fo' shizzle! Have your foggy tale ready.

Vikings take over the Ship Pub

This from the Folk Arts Society:


On Wednesday night, May 19th, join Bjorn the Beautiful, L'Anse aux Meadows' Viking Chief, (shown above) and his merry band of Vikings at the Ship Pub, where they'll be hosting the Folk Arts Society's Folk Night. Featured guests Jeff Dyer, Bill Brennan and Glen Collins will dazzle us with a mixture of Newfoundland and international folk songs, with a few blues and jazz standards mixed in, while Bjorn will regale audiences during the Open Mic portion of the evening with snippets from the Norse Sagas that relate to the Viking's journeys to L'Anse aux Meadows over 1000 years ago, and tales of the gods and goddesses they brought with them. So come raise a glass, share a story and celebrate 1000 years of the music and culture of this place.

Do you know the ghost horse of Bannerman Street, St. John's?

Help! I am trying to track down some information about a little-documented ghost story from Bannerman Street in downtown St. John's.

Here is what I know, taken from Frank Galgay and Michael McCarthy's book "Olde St. John's: Stories from a Seaport City" (Flanker Press, 2001, page 111):

"A house on Bannerman Street was said to be troubled by the spirit of a white horse that galloped up a stairway and then vanished through a second-storey window."

Dramatic stuff! But that, sadly, is all that I know of the legend. I would love to know more! Does anyone know which house was said to be haunted by this rather extraordinary ghost? Have you heard the story before, and if so, from whom?

You can reach me by email at dale@dalejarvis.ca

Other stories of ghost horses also welcome!

Brimstone and Gall! A Stratford Postcard

Earlier this week, I went went my parents and a few family friends to see the Stratford Festival's production of Peter Pan. It was great fun, well staged, beautifully costumed and acted, with Tom McCamus as an elegant Captain James Hook, who must be one of the most entertaining stage villians to play.

It was nice to be there with my parents. I have strong memories of going to see pantomimes as a family when I was young, and I'm sure that it was one of the things that influenced my love of the arts and performance.  We are all getting a lot greyer, but it was good to still sit and laugh and enjoy the spectacle of Peter Pan as a family.

I like the mythology of Peter Pan, and I do believe that J.M Barrie captured some of the otherness of the fairy realm quite well. There is magic and wonder and adventure, but always that hint of sadness, death and loneliness.

In the program notes for the Stratford production, Bob Hetherington writes, "Peter Pan is arguably the last man-created myth of near-universal appeal, in the sense that subsequent fantasy narratives have tended to be regarded as pastiches of general to which Barrie's belong unambiguously." In a sense, Barrie's word is a pastiche, a blending together of fairy lore, Rackham-esque buccaneers and classical mythology. But it does have a remarkable wholeness that does, as Hetherington argues, move it beyond a pasting together of motifs towards its status of modern myth.

As a storyteller, I loved the framing of the Stratford production around the on-stage presence of J.M Barrie as narrator. And I had nearly forgotten as an adult that it was storytelling that enticed Peter to the Darling household, and that it was Wendy's professed talents as a storyteller that ultimately took her to Neverland. All in all, a great production, for all those who believe in fairies, or those who never really wanted to grow up.

Storyteller on the road: A Wisconsin Postcard

I've just finished the Northlands Storytelling Network conference in Green Lake, Wisconsin, and barely know where to begin. The conference was great, and packed full of stories and wonderful conversations with storytellers. It is a very busy conference, with lots of great workshops and storytelling concerts. Some highlights for me:

• Jeff Gere from Hawai'i and his great Pele and chicken skin stories;
• Greg Weiss's workshop, and great ideas for using story cards with kids to create stories;
• Sue Black's fantastic story (with a rather grisly stew recipe);
• Cathryn Fairlee's illustrated talk on traditional Chinese teahouse storytelling;
• Debra Morningstar's great workshop on who should tell aboriginal stories;
• Having another Canadian there this year, Renee Englot of Alberta;
• Hanging out with the American tellers who are coming to the 2010 St. John's Storytelling Conference this July; and,
• "Goldilocks and the Three Beers"...

Thanks to the very large, very enthusiastic group who braved my early Sunday morning workshop on working with historical material!

Links:

Jeff Gere

http://www.jeffgere.com

Sue Black

http://www.sue-black.com/

Debra Morningstar

http://www.debramorningstar.com/

Cathryn Fairlee

http://sonic.net/~cfair/

Renee Englot

http://www.reneeenglot.com/

July 2010 Conference

http://www.sc-cc.com/conference/2010/index.html

Storyteller on the road: A Toronto postcard

Another note from the storytelling odyssey that is my month of April.  I had a VERY long day on Tuesday. I woke up early in the morning, and storyteller Ruthanne Edward kindly picked me up and took me to the airport, for which she earns lots of celestial karma, I am sure.

I flew Porter into Toronto Island, the first time I've flown them. I loved it. I loved skipping Pierson altogether, and ending up right downtown. Emily Pohl-Weary was there to meet me, waving from beyond the sea of men in suits.

I met Emily in Happy Valley-Goose Bay at the Labrador Creative Arts Festival a few years ago. She is an author, poet, comic book writer, youth organizer and the type of community arts activist I love doing stuff with. I'd done a workshop for her Parkdale Writers group before, and had said I'd do it again. She asked me to do a workshop for a native men's writing group at a place called Sagatay (a new beginning), a transitional shelter developed and operated by Native Men’s Residence (Na-Me-Res). So after breakfast at the Tequila Bookworm, we went off to Sagatay.

I told a few supernatural stories, and the guys started in with stories of the Wendigo, little people, ghosts and hauntings. I had them map out the community they grew up in, and tell each other stories about that place, and then everyone did a writing exercise about one of the stories they had told.

After than, Emily and I booted it to Parkdale Library, where Emily runs the Parkdale Writers group, or as their website describes it, a "free writing group in Toronto's west-end led by kick-ass local authors, comics artists, filmmakers, hip hop poets, and street artists."

I started them all in on a fairytale workshop, telling the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, complete with toes getting cut off and eyeballs getting plucked out. Then I taught them how I teach storytelling to younger kids, teaching them all the tools to be able to do that themselves in the future. All of them worked with a short traditional pourquoi tale or Aesop's fable, and ALL of them told their story in front of the group. I was impressed at how supportive they were of each other, and even the shyest of them felt comfortable enough in the group to share their story, a testament to the kind of work that Emily is doing.

Afterwards, most of the group stuck around for another hour, and we talked about art and working as an artist, storytelling, and how to get started doing what you love and making money at it.

A late subway and bus to the Cousin Cindy Slaney-Miller Bed and Breakfast, where she fed me, as always (mmm, homemade macaroni and cheese...) and put me to bed.

Then, the next morning, less than 24 hours from when I arrived, I was back at the lovely Porter lounge, waiting for my flight to the US. If you ever need to fly from Toronto to Chicago, trust me, there are about a thousand less headaches flying Porter than flying anything that goes through Pierson. Just a little plug for Porter there (anytime you want to thank me by sponsoring the St. John's Storytelling Festival, just let me know, Porter Management!).

Links:

Sagatay
http://www.toronto.ca/housing/newsitem-sagatay.htm

Emily Pohl-Weary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Pohl-Weary
http://emily.openflows.org/

Parkdale Writers
http://parkdalewriters.ca/

Tequila Bookworm
http://tequilabookworm.blogspot.com/

Storyteller on the Road: An Ottawa Postcard

I'm travelling for a few weeks, doing a series of storytelling events, and am just finishing up in Ottawa. It has been a great week! My storytelling show (part of the Speaking Out/Speaking In series at the NAC's 4th Stage) sold out a week ago (woot!) and I had a lot of fun with those of the Ottawa storytelling community who turned out to my day long workshop on historical storytelling at Library and Archives Canada.

I spent two days on the lake out near Almonte, Ontario with Jan Andrews, Jennifer Cayley and Ellis-Lynn Duschenes. It is always fabulous to see them, and I had great long walks, and chats with Jan and Jennifer about the state and future of performance storytelling in Canada and abroad.

Then I hung out today with Ruthanne Edward, who is our Señorita del Slam for the first Storytellers of Canada-Conteurs du Canada story slam in July. The poetry slam stuff happening here in Ottawa seems to be exciting, and it would be great to see some of that energy in contemporary storytelling.

Tomorrow I head off to Toronto, where I'm doing two workshops for the fabulous Emily Pohl-Weary. Stay tuned! Props to Jason Brophy for lending me his house while he is ash-bound in Italy, poor unfortunate that he is, and to the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council, who are making my trip to Toronto and beyond possible.

Links:

Ottawa Storytellers
http://www.ottawastorytellers.ca/


St. John's Story Slam
http://www.sc-cc.com/conference/2010/2010-storyslam.html