 From the blackness of the universe, a spinning orb begins to form, and we go down through the clouds until we meet the landscape of this spinning form. Mountains, growths, plants, more and more things develop and spread over the surface of this planet. Trees, rivers, bodies of water, and from these bodies of water organisms spring organisms with strange appendages which over time develop into other strange appendages. Claws, wings, flippers, beaks, more time, beaks, talons, fangs, feathers, wings, snouts, more and more changes occur until these animals go to land and then accrued, fumbling, four-legged creature which eventually goes upright and then eventually develops weapons and suspicion and anger, bows and arrows and animosity. This creature, later, wears a lauren yet, is sophisticated, smokes a cigarette, walks in a more sophisticated way. This creature then creates the internal combustion engine. Cars, more and more cars, more and more ways to destroy this new world that has been created. More and more things arise on this created world. Things that are seen, things that are heard. Looking out the window I look and I see and I call on the phone and I watch TV in my heart pounds as I see what has happened to this beautiful world. Airplanes, people leaving this world to a new world to create a new colony because what has happened to this world will destroy this world. All the trees destroyed, all of the animals extinct. There is nothing left in this world for us anymore. The purpose for our presentation today, the title is known as building blocks of storytelling. And I know that these three days you've seen many fascinating pieces of literature produced for you. And today we're going to be talking about the what and the how of it all. And I thought, well, I would like to talk about some of the technical strategies and techniques of expressing stories. My purpose today will be to identify and define some terminology and then my sister will be illustrating the points that I am making. Many of the stories we will be sharing come from stories that our family and friends have shared with us and passed down through the generations. Most of these stories are original stories rather than translations. First of all, I'd like to talk a little bit about the history of storytelling for among deaf people. There's no research that's really been done with it. And there is a body of information about ASL, linguistics regarding morphology and syntax and all those types of terms. But when it comes to poetry and discourse and things like that, not much has been done. So I'd like to encourage perhaps some of the researchers to take that on. So what I'm presenting today is not something that's based on research. It's based on things that I have observed and both my sister as well have experienced. And when we've seen good stories, we've analyzed those stories. And perhaps you'll think that what we share with you today is incomplete and that you might have some other aspects that need to be added as well. That would be nice and we would encourage that kind of feedback. Now in terms of the history again, I went to residential school for the deaf and back in those days we didn't have TV and caption programs and of course that's available now, but as children we didn't have that. And remember in the dormitories, in the evenings of the residential schools we used to take turns telling stories to each other. And whenever someone had a really good story then we'd ask more children to come and watch that person to repeat the story and we took turns doing that. Now we have other family members who are deaf and I wanted to let you know that my mother, it was a phenomenal storyteller. She often took stories from books and shared those but she also always would read the stories and then figure out how to tell the stories herself in ASL and we look forward to those times. We often would hurry to get into our bed close so that we could watch mom telling her stories to us. And when she had taken a look at a book and she would share with us, we would ask for more and she always would say you've got to wait for the next day and I'll tell you some more from this book because she'd read a few chapters at a time and deliver them in ASL. And we often would watch these and there were friends of hers who said that they always used to be fascinated with the way that she would tell stories as well. So these stories we have not yet published but we have been carrying them on as a perfect world tradition. They're very natural and of course over time they're going to change somewhat depending on the style of the particular person who's delivering the story. Now, you might wonder why we wanted to focus on storytelling. What's the value of storytelling? If you think about America and sign language, yeah we look at language but that word language, that's a way through storytelling that we can preserve the value of our culture and our belief systems through carrying on stories and sharing them with others. Well, there are different purposes for storytelling, perhaps teaching a moral lesson or something about our world, maybe for entertainment and there are a variety of purposes for storytelling. And sometimes we tell stories to teach a lesson. Or simply to share language. The first thing we have to think about is the goal, the reason for which we're telling that story and that it should drive how we deliver that story. We have to think about how we're going to share it. We have to think of the purpose is it to teach, is it for entertainment, is it for explanation, is it for teaching and so forth. And in order to make people think, is it to make them think or for them to enjoy the sign language itself? So we have to really analyze for ourselves the goal before we produce our story. Now hearing people have a term that's called intonation because their voices change with inflection to show emotion and things like that. Well, deaf people have that built into American sign language as well through visual imagery. For example, if you're walking, there's a way to inflect the sign for walk and show whether you're walking in a slow way or a fast way and we call that visual imagery and that's our equivalent of vocal inflection or intonation. Now the purpose of that is that we want to deliver information visually for the eyes to see. We want that expression to be delivered to deaf people. We don't want to focus on something that they cannot hear. We've shared a little bit about the purpose of storytelling and it's something that's for people to enjoy with their eyes. And before I continue, we have to have a plan. So what do we want to share with our audience? Who are our audience, our listeners, our watchers? Are they people in the dormitories? High school students? So it's important are they adults? Are they somebody from a club for the deaf or who are they exactly? I do have an outline that I can share with you if you would like later on so that you don't have to take notes. It's also important to think about who the audience is. Are they males or females? What are the ages of this audience? And what's the culture? It's very important to understand their culture and people from the south and North Carolina have a different type of culture than people up in the north. So we need to adapt our stories to meet the needs of those regional differences. How do you know if you're familiar with the sign Easter that I've just shared? Other people have different signs for Easter, okay? There's some common agreements here but see, I have several different signs for Easter. Yes, I'm showing a variety of these signs that represent Easter, okay? So we have to find out what your regional signs are and then use those and incorporate them into our stories that we deliver. Now, let's talk about Easter. Maybe we've got a story related to that and I have to think, I have to plan for my audience and now I could share that in the best way. According to techniques and things that we need to put into it, maybe you'll think that, oh, I've forgotten, I'm going to share with you the techniques I think are important to do this. First of all, we have 11 of these strategies or techniques and when we talk about signing space, we mean we have to have a right perspective. We can't have a limited signing space unless the person, of course, is shy and timid. Then we would want a very small signing space but if we got a person who's very bold and so forth, we'd want to use a larger signing space, everyday conversation. We want to change our roles on the stage itself, change positions. That's what I mean when I use the term signing space and when we talk about sending a scene, we're talking about something that occurred quite a while ago in history. We might want to change our appearance through clothing, having something freely and having hair that looks befitting the time that we're talking about. For example, women used to have a bodices a long time ago and we might want to think about how the environment was back then at the period of time that we're trying to emulate. Maybe the houses were row houses and just stretched on forever and then we'd see a steeple at the end with one church in the town so we have to give that kind of visual information to set the scene before we tell the story. Now, also in terms of characters, some characters are shy, some have an ego and an attitude. We have to show that so when we tell a narrative and we have a person who, for example, a guy falls in love with a sweet young thing, we want to show the character within each person so we can show that through our posture and how we move and just emulate the person so we have to shift our roles by actually acting out the character within ourselves. Now, the period of time is very important to make sure that we've got everything matched up correctly, never make assumptions. For example, back in that period of time when you tell a story, perhaps there was no electricity at the time so we have to take that into account so alarm clocks would be different so you have to explain those kinds of details. So it's important to emphasize and make sure that people know what you know. For example, back a long time ago, there were different types of vehicles for transportation so we also talk about role shifting and I mentioned about moving before now we're talking about times when we have to actually step to a different part of the stage to indicate different characters on the stage so we incorporate more movement into our delivering when we talk about changing perspectives we have to move as well. Let's say if we were going to talk about wrapping a turtle when we show the turtle going very slowly and then show the rabbit from a higher level and very rapid kinds of movements in a slow way we can show perspective that way or if an animal is up in a tree or a bird is up in a tree that bird needs to look downward and the animal needs to ease upward into the tree and that's what I mean by perspective and we also have a thing where we can have inanimate objects take on personality for example, the moving beauty and the beast you have a teacup and that teacup has a little baby teacup and so the mother teacup walks along and she tells her little baby to hurry so we can take on the personalities of the two teacups when we're describing that in sign language so we can incorporate personalities into inanimate objects now these are, I also have four things that begin terms that begin with E that would help us to make the story come alive and the first term that I use is elaboration and I mean describing something by elaboration for example, if I'm a small child and I'm gazing up at Abraham Lincoln, the statue in Washington DC and I need to go up the stairs to go and see that statue I show as I'm climbing how long and how high those steps are to me as a child and when I get to the statue I have to look way up to show the perspective involved and that's what I mean by elaboration and the second term I have with an E is that of enhancement and by this I'll give an illustration if we want to show feelings or emotions or personality it's very important to elaborate on that for example, if a girl is shy you just use the sign you have to show how the person would move and how she would hold her head or if a person is a braggart how they would walk in a very braggadocio way and so we need to emphasize that and then we move on to employment and that's very important as well we have to show conflict of good and bad and dark and light we show anger and happiness we show contrast and we have to somehow weave those together and also of course we expression is very important as a fourth term it's something to think about we have to show our emotions some of you when you've told stories you show how a person can be plump or if a person is scared and how they manage to walk along when they're scared it's very important how you carry your body and show expression through your face also we look at time we can inflect our signs in a way that shows that time was a long time ago or that it's going to be a great distance in the future great period of time in the future or if we are hearing something we can show the rhythm that something's coming closer to us and we can show how scared we are it's very important though to look at these aspects of storytelling and we have to watch our audience as well and see how they're reacting to the way we're telling our story if we're not getting the kind of facial feedback from our audience that we would expect in listening behavior then we need to change ours accordingly so that we can make sure that we're meeting the needs and expectations of our audience so that is very critical in terms of our delivery of stories to an audience now if I were presenting on stage like this and I do it one way but if I'm in a classroom then I have to tell a story in a way that suddenly I could get the classroom to participate as well and ask people who stole our hat and somebody said I know, I know so I could actually stop the story and ask for people to participate with me and respond so make it interactive in a classroom situation now I'd like to put an overhead up at this point in time to set this up and then we're going to pick some of these strategies to incorporate into the story to show you to demonstrate okay, you can look at this picture it shows a lot of different movement in a different place and you want to set it up for an example how would you sign some of those things if you were going to use this picture in the story you see the rocks you see the people's clothes there how would you describe some of that? oh I'm sorry you can't see me over here on this side for example you have a character changing that like the rocks are real heavily laid out up over the hill and they can see the dragon with the big teeth and the scales on it and everything and you can see the night see the night with his sword and everything and you have the dragon with his tongue hot up there and the soldier looking at that and you've got the ram up there with his horns hanging over there describe the dragon with the eyes bugging out and his tongue flicking out of his mouth and just breathing these heavy breaths and big claws on the ends of his claws and just fire coming out of his mouth and flames shooting across and the soldier drawing his sword out and finding that perhaps it was stuck in there and he finally gets his sword drawn and he's looking at the dragon and contemplating cutting its head off and the girl you know maybe you'd describe the girl as having nice clothes and being a tractor sweet young lady with a big headband on and the fellow acting extremely macho and pushing the girl aside to protect her and stepping out in the path you can see the kinds of changes that I made as I described that okay and now I'd like to talk about the term genre I still think that many of our stories we're trying to fit into the forms of folklore and legend and so forth that are already existed in the spoken English language but I'm not sure that we have really collected all the possibilities for ASL literature and there are a lot of there's a lot of folklore folk legend examples available I'm sure there's some things that are similar between both English and ASL don't get me wrong but when we do talk about folklore I took the term and the definition from the dictionary and this is what we came up with and that is something that's been passed down orally practices and beliefs tales from people so it's been passed on over time and becomes a legend and we don't know whether it's true or not so there are always questions about it now Eileen is going to be sharing some of her stories that are within that realm many many stories as I was growing up I saw and I watched and I've just kind of picked a few of them that I would like to share with you would you please step forward there are many many stories that various adults have told oh wait a minute you interrupted me it made me move here and I could get my train of thought back alright when I was a small girl I was always fascinated by the story that older folks would tell I'd say please teach me those there was one story a man who had told the story that really impacted me and I thought wow this is really something the story was just terrific there's a deaf king in this country and all over the land that the king had let me get started here self was deaf who was deaf called all the villagers together I said come on over here and the villagers assembled wondering what was wrong and the king said I'm really angry somebody stole my crown where is my crown and the people were all like gee I don't know I have no idea what happened and the deaf king looked out over all of his people I've got an idea alright all of you folks get in a row and the men and the women all lined up and there were different folks there there were human people and there were big strong heavy people and there were some folks who really looked emaciated in that and the king said somebody's got to be lying here he said ok this prisoner out from jail so this prisoner came out and he was shackled and the chains were wrapped around his arms and the king said you see this fella's guilty for stealing and he's been convicted of that already I want all of you folks I don't know who stole my crown but I want you to see there's this big pot of water here and it's a very special water it's not your normal water it's a special it's very unique if somebody does something bad and they dip their hands in the water they'll come out blue and that means they're guilty of doing something and if they dip their hands in and come out and they're uncolored that means they're innocent and villagers were all looking around and thinking oh wow this is something special and the king ordered that the prisoner immerse his hands in the water and when they came out they were all covered with blue and the king said you see you see what happens when you're a guilty individual and now he ordered bowls of water to be set for each person in the crowd and one man was standing there thinking to himself what am I gonna do oh boy I know what I'll do I'll just act like I'm dipping my hands in the water and just barely touch the surface of it so the king said are you ready everybody immerse their arms and all of the villagers immersed their arms and the king said raise your hands and they raised their hands and the king looked and the first one was blue and the second was blue there was one person whose arms weren't colored and everybody else's were blue and the king said you're the one who did it now a second story you know imagine the king the king is hearing now and his hearing king thinks I've got all of these villagers again deaf and hearing coming old in the community and the king assembled everybody and all of the villagers came and they were wondering what was up and the king said I want all of you to tell me a story something that I can enjoy understand tell me a story I don't want you to stop I'll decide when the story ends myself I will tell you when it's the end you can't decide that so the villagers got together and said what are we supposed to do we have to create a story we can't stop we have to continue telling this story until the king can tell us to stop what are we going to do so the king commanded one man to step out front and the man stepped down and he started to spin this tail and he came to the end and the king said behead him and other men were like oh my gosh the second guy came up and he was trying to tell a story and go on and on and on and he ran out of things to say it came to the end and the king said behead him and the next person and the next and finally there was a deaf woman who stepped forward and she thought oh boy the people have dwindled our numbers are getting fewer and fewer she had an idea she said I'll tell the king a story king said fine stepped forward so the woman stepped forward and she started talking about the tree that was over there and there was a baby bird in the nest it was in the tree and a baby bird was so cute and just chirped up in the tree and a baby bird sitting in the nest and was just growing and growing and tried to fly as it got bigger and stronger and it was finally ready to fly and it practiced and practiced and it's launched itself out of the nest and flapped its wings and it was really thinking oh gee I just can barely fly and was getting stronger and ready to do all of this and trying to get out of the nest a little more it was inspired and finally looked at the ground and flew out and thought oh I can do this I'll be able to fly and flew up just a little higher and felt good and started to travel all over and was just soaring above the land and flying down on all of the trees and the scenery and saw the rivers as it soared through the sky and the mountains she looked at had all across the land and the various animals and was just flying over the trees and soaring back and forth and enjoying all of the sights in the world and the king started to become sleepy and said that's enough over and the woman was like had saved all of the people in the land and the people were so elated that's the story a man told me when I was very small and it really hit me what did it mean he taught me something I learned something from that story it's a true story about what happened it's a true story you know my family my sister when she was very small you know she had to hold the mom's hand when we were walking along and my sister would always be bothered by my mother and hitting her and saying mom what's this and my mother was constantly being interrupted by my sister saying what's that she was so curious so one day my mother decided she was just going to ignore my sister she had had enough of this and my sister just kept poking her and finally my mother was exasperated and she looked down to see what happened and here my sister had been looking up at a bird flying in the sky and a bird pooped right in the middle of her face there's another one that story really happened I mean you know my mother you know we worked at residential school it's a true story I don't know if this is true or not but it makes you think about something a small girl you know in the girls dorm you know I have a line up getting ready to go to the bathroom and brush her teeth and wash her face and get ready in the morning and a darn parent or supervisor this very sweet soft hearted woman saw what was going on and she would always sit in this corner in a rocking chair and she would watch as the girls filed into the bathroom and they'd all wave to her and she'd wave she's just such a sweet woman and the girls all loved her and in the morning they'd take care of their toiletries and get ready for school every day she'd sit there and watch them come by it was the same old routine and one day she was absent she wasn't there and the girls as they were lined up going to the bathroom wonder what happened and a superintendent of school came out and said have some very sad news you know the dorm mother who was always here has passed away and the girls were just astounded to hear that she died and they looked over at the empty rocking chair and the next day as they filed in the morning to go in the bathroom and get cleaned up and ready for school they looked at the rocking chair it was empty the chair was still rocking and the girls looked at the window to see if there was the windows were open and there was a breeze doing that but the windows were all closed and still the chair rocked and the girls all thought about that and as they grew up it was the same they'd come in in the morning to go to the bathroom and that chair was always rocking I'm thinking about this here okay okay have another one I've got one more story I can tell oh that story about the small girl wait wait wait wait turn off your voice please the interpreter's been ordered to be quiet how many minutes do I have left 10 minutes alright okay I think we'll move on to mystery we have a lot of different examples for example the rocking chair could have a little bit of overlap between legend and mystery another story that I really enjoy was about my mom my sister but there are other ones there are mystery stories and some are scary and might not be appropriate for young children so we have to think about the age of the children that we're telling the stories for now my sister will tell another one that's a mystery just at the end of it and kept walking and it just seemed such a dark one at the end of the long wall and kept approaching it and it seemed like an interminably long and he got it all tuned in and then watched the program we'd like to talk about romance and how much time do we have left seven minutes I think we'll move on we have a good story that's about romance during the war the german war and it's about jews it's very touching so long though about a couple that were separated during the war and then met again after the war so we do have romantic stories like that and that is available in ASL literature and we also have stories that have repetitive lines that are good for children because they can learn how to give and take in a chorus and rhythm we have examples of that and like the teeny tiny teeny tiny house and had a teeny tiny cat and the teeny tiny cat liked to eat what little teeny tiny mice and that's repeated and there was a little teeny tiny mom lived in a little teeny tiny house and what did she have she had a little teeny tiny cat who liked to eat what small teeny tiny mice and so that's how you play that kind of story with children and we have lots of samples of that like there's a person who came with a man with a yellow hat and who came? yes, the man with a yellow hat you're correct he came to eat dinner so we have lots of examples of that they're more interactive and then we have rhythmic clapping stories and Barbara Campbell has a story that she tells that's just amazing I don't know if you've ever seen it involves rhythm and clapping please show this for us and then I'll explain about it you know like a bunch of small children maybe three or four years old and you have a nursery you get them to clap, they can clap they love that action kind of a story you know for example Easter is near so you can talk about the Easter bunny you can say the bunny has what it's got this character and it's got the long years and you say fine you pull somebody out you can say the long years it's got the big whispers something feed and of course a cotton tail on it and you can get the children involved in that kind of a story and they really enjoy that so follow me by clapping and rhythm clap, ears hop, whiskers hop, a cotton tail and that's it, that gives you the idea of how you can get the children involved children just love that three and four year olds can do that and have a tremendous amount of fun with that it's only for children that's not right because there are people who really do like that, who are older and even at Gallaudet for example they use rhythmic kinds of songs and cheerleaders use rhythmic kinds of songs in their cheerleading so we've seen samples of that and there's one that's called Rai Whisky Rai Whisky, yeah Rai Whisky because they are familiar with that song that has a rhythm of clapping to it and older people enjoy the rhythm of that sense of rhythm when it's repeated and perhaps it's difficult for children when they're young when they don't have a rhythm so if you give them stories that have rhythm incorporated into them it helps them to learn a sense of rhythm for themselves now there's this word that's visual soliloquy now excuse me interpreter era visual in English we have sounds and the term onomatopoeia that refers to that but also in ASL there's a form of onomatopoeia that's visual in nature for example alarm clocks and shoes tapping and watching the repetition of that, that's a form of onomatopoeia sometimes you just look at a leaf and you see it swish swish swish swish and so that's an example or an example of visual onomatopoeia now I've given you a lot of different genres and you may wonder how can I start to create stories before I finish though I almost forgot there's soliloquy and that's when a person it's a very complex kind of genre where a person delivers a solo kind of performance and you probably saw Julia Feld when she was telling her soliloquy it was just fascinating and Patrick Grable told one about the evils of chewing tobacco and so I would recommend that's a real tough one to master so you might want to start with something a little bit more simple now if we talk about fingerspelling and stories I'd like to make some comments about that it's important when you think about fingerspelling not to use too much you have to really restrict how many things you go ahead and fingerspell if you want to emphasize something you might go ahead and fingerspell or like alien or something like that that would be used in a story so you don't really use it that much and when you do fingerspell you should do it very slowly though in a very pronounced way and other things I've seen is that when you're telling a story you have to know the difference between pantomime and telling a story itself we certainly can incorporate parts of pantomime when you're telling a story for example talking about monkey if you take on the characteristic of a monkey and just jump around that's not really part of the story that's a description of the monkey itself and how it does that that's fine if it's a part of the story but if you just become completely the animal itself that goes across the line into pantomime rather than storytelling now one thing I hadn't thought about before in Nancy Drew's stories you see that things come in and mime is at it and maybe that's important I'm not so sure so we need to do some research in that so I have a lot of suggestions with strategies and they're all included in the outline that I have available for you here you might want to take a look at them yourselves and think about them thanks so much and I would also recommend that if you look at cartoons that have no words to them and I'll show you one here on Overhead those are good to start with grabbing them in the mirror one of my favorites is once I've done it I look in the mirror and look at myself and then I realize it doesn't look so great so I test out my children and my family and people who know ASL and if they look at me like they don't get it then I know I've got to do something else to make sure that it really expresses it well so I keep trying until I've got it adapted to a point and of course these things are never the same and you're always working on them to make them better okay so if you take a look at this cartoon up here there are no words and so you could use something like that to get you started on how to express things because that way you don't get bogged down in the English if you look at English then it's very hard to be creative so if you look like so something like this without English then that makes it a lot easier you might want to look at a couple of things that have just a couple of sentences or look at folklore and try to take on the character of the person and change before characters or perhaps you might want to look at children's story books that have one or two lines and ponder how you can tell those stories and I do have a book here that I really recommend and it has some really good story telling things in here and it would be good to practice them so if you'd like to know more about it I do have an address where you could get hold of this book if you'd like I'll put that up on the screen now I've shared with you some ideas and on the overhead how you can start but I want you to think about children who are being mainstreamed and aren't, I'm so concerned that maybe we're going to lose this the children are going to have the best story telling so we've got to do something more and so I realize it's really critical to encourage people to go into the schools and tell stories to their children and to pass on that oral tradition through the generations I have some other strategies of how to do that and I'm sure that you could think of some yourself and even if you don't work in a school or a community you could still volunteer your services to tell stories to children maybe in a public library or at a carnival stay fair go with an interpreter into it we really need to get this word out and do more of it for children where am I I enter through a portal and walk along a landscape over there a stately deer regards me and as I look at this landscape and work my way through it I notice the portal is diminishing getting smaller and fading into the background a beautiful glittering stream flows nearby I crouch near the stream's waters and gather it in my hand to refresh myself and as I reach down for more water I see reflected in the water the shape of ears and a snout glittering eyes and the salivating mowl breathing heavily as I move the wolf moves and I retreat and then start to run the wolf in hot pursuit I run as fast as I can feeling his panting breath behind me as I make my way through the trees through the forest with him so close behind and I see another portal and I run towards it as fast as I can to escape the wolf who's gaining on me faster I go until I throw myself through and arrive on the other side of the dark space all around me and I look at myself as if separate from myself this portal has disappeared and I'm lying there all this darkness and I feel somebody tugging at my arm hey hey tugging at my arm yo you slept too late come on get up we gotta get out of here what leave me alone and then as I sit up in bed and my friend turns I see behind him a wagging long furry tail