By Andrea MacDonald
Ruth Stewart-Verger and her husband, Dean Verger, sit in the middle of their cozy living room telling the story of an evil Count brutally torturing a man. The seven people listening in the room shudder as they can actually hear the man scream.
The couple sits back and smiles — they know how to captivate an audience.
They are two of more than 50 storytellers from across Canada taking part in the 15th annual Ottawa Storytelling Festival, presented by the Ottawa Storytellers.
The festival takes place Nov. 8 and 9 at the Library and Archives of Canada, and features more than 20 storytelling sessions, with topics ranging from folk tales to personal vignettes, ghost stories to children’s tales.
The festival has grown in popularity over the past few years because it offers an alternative to television or computers, says Ryan Abbott, a spokesperson for the Ottawa Storytellers.
“In this day of mass media and short attention spans, it’s an activity that gets you relaxed,” Abbott says.
“It gets you sitting in one place for a bit and really listening to someone who has put in so much time and energy communicating all this emotion and information. It’s a great way of communication that has been forgotten in the computer age.”
Storytelling not only takes listeners out of the computer age, but can bring them to another world entirely.
That is what the Vergers hope to do with their story — an adaptation of William Goldman’s fantasy novel, The Princess Bride.
“It all started in the car with two young children who were not very happy about driving a distance,” says Ruth. “Dean told them the story of the fight scene in The Princess Bride. And the kids were quiet, they wanted to hear more.”
Dean, a professional storyteller since 1982, spent a year and a half adapting the book into a two-hour long story, and he and Ruth spent more than two months memorizing it.
Charlie Sohmer adds a musical element to the story by playing the banjo and singing five original folk songs inspired by the book.
The couple says this artform has always been important to them, and it seems they’re not the only ones who enjoy a good story.
The festival is just one of many storytelling events popping up around the city.
Rasputin’s — a folk café owned by the Vergers — hosts the Ottawa Storytellers series Stories From the Ages, where larger traditional epics are told.
Every month, the group hosts Story Swap at the National Library, which provides an open stage for the public to tell a story or just listen.
And in 2001, the group began a storytelling concert series at the National Arts Centre, showcasing local tellers.
Storytelling has become so popular, in fact, that Mayor Bob Chiarelli has officially named Nov. 8 Ottawa Storytelling Day.
Donna Balkan, a spokesperson for the Canada Council for the Arts — which has supported the Ottawa festival since 1995 – says artforms like storytelling, and even spoken-word poetry, are growing in popularity as the definition of literature changes.
“It’s an evolution,” she says. “At one time, literature was something that was in a book. Now, there’s a real interest in the notion that literature can be oral as well as written.”
She says storytelling is particularly significant in Canada due to its roots in aboriginal culture, when stories were passed from generation to generation.
Ruth says it is the stories that have lived on rather than the people who told them. She keeps this in mind when telling her own stories.
“When the storyteller steps back, and the story steps in front of the teller, the audience no longer sees the teller, they see the story,” she says.
“And if you’re a good teller, they might not even remember who you are.”