Oral History Program Ann Ellis Interviewed by Kandice Harris 19 March 2021 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ann Ellis Interviewed by Ann Ellis 19 March 2021 Copyright © 2022 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The WSU Storytelling Festival was implemented by the Friends of the Stewart Library in 1992. The library sponsored and managed the annual festival until 1998, when the festival was moved to the Department of Teacher Education, with the Library continuing as a sponsor. The three-day festival entails storytellers from all over the nation, including youth storytellers. The events are made up of workshops and presentations, a fund-raising banquet, and a wrap-up of wonderful stories from gifted performers. This interesting collection includes oral history interviews with visiting storytellers, discussing how they became interested in storytelling and where they receive their inspiration. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Ellis, Ann, an oral history by Marina Kenner, 19 March 2021, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Ann Ellis 19 March 2021 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Ann Ellis, conducted on March 19, 2021, by Kandice Harris, via Zoom. Ann discusses her life, her career as a storyteller, and her memories of the Weber State University Storytelling Festival. KH: Hello, my name is Kandice Harris, today is March 19, 2021, it's about 1 o'clock and I am meeting with Ann Ellis to discuss the WSU Storytelling Festival and storytelling. How did you become interested and involved in storytelling? AE: In general? Well, when I was a kid... In my family, we had a lot of really wonderful storytellers, and family events always included hunting stories and my grandma would tell pioneer stories, those kinds of things. They deeply intrigued me and I kept thinking, "Okay, so who's going to tell these stories when these people get old and die?" You know? And I thought, "I better pay attention." And then there was another event that was closer to storytelling festival that I absolutely loved. I grew up in Roosevelt, Utah, and we had an event every summer called the UBIC (Uintah Basin in Celebration). And it was one of those wonderful community events like Peach Days or something. And one of the events for children was The Story Princess. There was a lady who came and she had this wonderful gown that was like a Cinderella ball gown, and so all of the kids would go to somebody's neighborhood house and they'd go in the yard and sit on the grass under the trees. She would come floating out in this wonderful dress and tell stories for about an hour and it was terrific. I was mesmerized. It was really extraordinary. And I thought, "Ooh, I want to tell 2 stories." So I always had that in the back of my mind and thought, "How am I going to be this storyteller in my life?" So I tell stories to my nieces and nephews. I taught at Weber State in the education department. I told my students stories about my own teaching all of the time. When I was a new faculty member, early in my career, my colleague, Karen Lofgreen, was part of the team that started this Weber State University Storytelling Festival. She was the first chair and the Friends of the Stewart Library organization was kind of the sponsor and she invited me to be on the first committee. So about a year and a half before our first storytelling festival, we started having meetings and developing the goals, the mission of the festival, and those kinds of things. That has persisted, and the goals involving community and honoring community values and things through the creative process of storytelling and nurturing storytellers. So, we started out right away at that point on, I was thrilled because it was kind of a way to do what I had wanted to do with storytelling and support it. So that's kind of the beginning for me. KH: Okay, great. And you kind of already answered my second question, so what part of storytelling brings you the most joy and satisfaction? AE: Well there's an interaction between the storyteller and the story listener that is absolutely magnificent. It's like the interaction between teachers and students but there's something that happens. And so early on, one of the national storytellers explained one time that story just is. Here's this story and it exists somehow. And the story lives in the mind of the storyteller who brings it alive for the story listener. But what the story listener hears is different from what the 3 storyteller tells. But as they get closer and closer and interacting in the event of the listening and telling, there's this synergy that happens that's just profound. And I found myself in our last storytelling festival feeling those feelings. Even as I listened to just some of the videos, you know, because our current COVID adjustment to the festival was to go online—and I'm worried about that interplay. It's magic, and people live the story in their minds and they see the pictures of the stories and become the characters. That part of storytelling is amazing. And then, what happens as you experience the feelings of being the people in the stories are you solve the problems that the protagonists are solving and become victorious and learn lessons through the stories. And all of that is just a magic way to interact with people and to learn new things. KH: Great. Which type of audience do you prefer? Children or adults? AE: Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Because you adjust to your audience and there's something, that same magic can exist between audiences. So I am not a really seasoned storyteller, I'm more of an active amateur storyteller, but I love telling stories to little tiny children and to grandchildren. I love telling stories to my college students, I've been asked to tell stories to older people. And you just kind of, you know, it's like you're having a conversation and you just adjust to each one. And the responses are universal, and that's really one of the things that we've done in our festival is trying to make it possible to reach out to audiences of all ages. So in a typical storytelling festival year, we have stories for very young children who have the help of the Treehouse Museum—to work with really young children and with our children's school at Weber State to have stories for 4 toddlers and for very young children. And then elementary school kids and programs and meetings on campus for older people. Stories are sophisticated, they can be very long and ongoing. Or they can be short, like just a joke that just catches your funny bones. So all of those things happen and are very exciting. So I don't have a favorite, bottom line, there's something that is essential in storytelling that happens with every audience. KH: What are the qualities of a good storyteller? AE: They have to have a confidence, self-confidence, do be able to interact with other people in a comfortable and easy way. And it's a learned skill for some people, and for some people it just comes naturally. A good storyteller has to be able to convey the story, has to know the story, they have to be able to convey it in a convincing and enjoyable way. Well, I don't know by enjoyable. One of my very favorite storytellers at our festival started out telling a story and within one sentence, the hair on the back of my neck was crawling. It was a ghost story, and I'll tell you, that guy was good. He just really had me on the edge of my seat. I don't necessarily enjoy those feelings, some do, but he was amazing. So, there's a lot of performer in a storyteller, there's a lot of the ability to judge audience, be able to relate with your audience and see how they're moving and adjust. We were talking about age a minute ago, and adjust interests in the ages of your audience. There's just a lot of skills. Well, as any good performer, has to practice and develop those skills, and be willing to take criticisms to continue to improve. All of those things come to play. KH: What elements are required for a good story? 5 AE: Well, let's see. There has to be a place, a setting. There has to be characters. There has to be a problem. You know, it's kind of like the parts of a story with a plot. The problem in the story usually has some other element come along to help it out, with the people who are trying to solve the problem don't have yet. And after the resolution of everything, everybody has learned something. There's something new. You start out and this is the way things are, and the story develops and then there's a way that it is at the end that's different. So, we have a lot of good stories about COVID, because there was the way things were and now there's this big problem and now there will be a way that people work out of that problem. But, we are working through it. KH: Do you think our current pandemic environment has an impact on the importance of storytelling? AE: You know, I think that's a really interesting question because we're communicating with people in a different way. So the act of storytelling is perhaps changing. But I think there's opportunity for the development of storytelling in families and in homes where people have spent a lot of time together. I think that the need for storytelling is still present. And I think that, in the isolation that we have felt for one another, I think we have felt the urge to tell story. I know in Hawaii there's a cultural phrase about talking story and talking story just means hanging out and just talking one with another and telling about what you are doing and what's happening in your life and just in a very gentle kind of communication kind of way. And to talk story means that that's what happening in your group, when you are just talking with one another about who 6 you see or what you've done and those kinds of things. We have been kept from that during COVID, and I think that's been a huge impact of our experience. And people have figured out ways to communicate online with social media. And early early on in Italy, people were leaning out of the windows to sing with one another, those kinds of things. That kind of borders on the edge of being with one another to tell your stories. So I think that you are right, I think to raise that question is one we really need to consider. I think that we will enrich the stories that we tell about COVID in the years to come. KH: I agree. Where do you see storytelling in the future? AE: I think it's just going to exist. I think it's part of human nature, and I think we will be telling our stories forever. We write down our journals so we can share our stories of our lives with our children. I guess people hypothesize that some of the earliest language development was story around the fire in the evenings and those kinds of things. I don't think the need for story or the fact that there is storytelling is going to change, unless it increases because people figure out how important it is. KH: Great. What are some of your favorite memories from the WSU Storytelling Festival? AE: Oh golly. I have been involved with it from the beginning on the board and up from the planning stages. And there are lots of good memories of working together with the people who put it together. I loved in the mornings of the first day, watching the buses roll up to the Egyptian Theater and watching the 7 children pour out into the venues and you know, and check all of the things and make sure everything is ready. And I love the moment when everything we'd spent months planning just started to roll out and people would come in and they would sit out and the storytellers would step up to the microphones and children all over. Well not just children, there are always lots of adults as well, but people would be chattering one with another and the storyteller would stand up in the front and look at the people and say, "Good morning." Or whatever, or, "Once Upon a Time" and all of the sudden, all of those children would be right there in his hands, or her hands, and they would just be glued to that event and “What's going to happen next,” and “what's going to happen next?” And then you'd hear them telling the stories to each other on their way out. Or hear their parents come back in the evenings with the children and the kids would have told the parents all of the stories that they had heard during the day. And they would be coming back for more. But that active involvement is really powerful and when you are listening to a story, something different is happening like when you are watching a movie or watching TV. There is a different engagement that I just love. I remember really wonderful events. We had our sponsor dinners that we would hold for people who had contributed to the festival, because they essentially make it possible that we don't have to charge people to come. We can invite--we do have some sponsorships from the school districts. But individuals don't have to pay for the events unless it's a sponsored dinner. But those dinners were wonderful because the people who cared about storytelling were there. And the storytellers were there telling some of their very best work. 8 By then, in the festival, we would have a sense of who was there and what was happening, and who they were. And we'd get a sense in their stories of the real inner workings of their spirits. It was really powerful. I think one of my very favorites was a man named, Syd Leiberman, who has passed away now, but he was at the festival one time. We had a woman as a guest who had been at our first couple of festivals and she had won our Karen J. Ashton Award. Her name was Phyllis... I can’t remember her last name. I'll have to check it out really fast. But by the time of this event, several several years later, she was in a wheelchair, her daughters had brought her. Now in the storytelling, Syd Leiberman had told a story about a time in his life when the roles were reversed in his family. He was with his son doing some things, his grown-up son who was setting up his own apartment. And he was just telling different events about that period of time in his son’s life. And then he had gotten sick and then how they were walking down the street and the son put his arm around his dad and said, "How are you doing Dad? How are you doing?" And most of the people in that room could relate with that event. After the dinner, Syd visited with Phyllis. And they embraced each other because Phyllis was there, and her daughters were helping her be there. Otherwise, she couldn't have made it. She was in the middle of the same thing he had been telling about in his own life. And it was a priceless moment between two people I had come to love. The story had brought them together in that way. So you know, there are lots of things like that and there are lots of funny events too. We had one festival where we had three storytellers, whose names were either Bill or Will or William. Bill Harley is one of 9 our favorites. Anyway, we called it, "William's Tale." And so at our festival we had some musicians who played the William Tell’s Overture, and we told the story of the William Tell, and so these three guys told stories together and they just bounced off of each other. They were just master storytellers and they were really really funny. Willie Clappen was one, Bill Harley... at the end I'll probably will remember the third one. But you know, we've had wonderful experiences like that. This year, for our 25th Festival, we have a man named Ed Stivender, who was at our first festival. Ed Stivender has written a book called, Born Catholic, Can You Tell?, And he'll tell stories about his Catholic schooling and different things. Well at our first festival, we had Arrington... He's a fellow from around here who would tell in character as Brigham Young, Brother Brigham. So here are these two guys, where they were discussing what it was like to tell stories with religious backgrounds, you know, and to see the interplay between storytellers as they enrich their own backgrounds and their own storytelling. There are just so many good things. And another thing that I loved, we had a mission to—as I mentioned earlier—to support the community. So we'd get school kids coming and in our schools we have a lot of children who speak Spanish as a first language. Every year we'd have at least one teller who was bilingual—Spanish and English—and that meant that they could tell their stories and they could tell part of it in English and part of it Spanish. Or they'd say the Spanish and then repeat it in English. So when that would be happening, it was always so much fun for me to watch the Spanish speaking kids laugh first. When the storyteller would tell the Spanish part first and then tell the 10 English part, and then all the English speaking kids would laugh. It was hilarious. It was so much fun, and it was so much fun to see them enjoying the same thing at the same time in the same way. It was just terrific and being part of the same audience. A very unifying, very exciting kind of thing that I really love to see. I think that has been one of the real benefits. And I think verifies and validates that part of WSU's Storytelling Festival's mission. I better quit. KH: No, I’ve loved hearing these stories. These are great. AE: “Oh, there’s this one. There’s this one!” There's 25 year worth, so yeah. KH: What advice would you give to future storytellers? AE: Listen. Listen. We have children in the festival. That's really an amazing thing and when I was in my graduate work, I studied with a man named Joseph Windsor. He taught about helping children think, and feel, and act as practicing professionals. So when you find someone with a passion for something, a young child, or a teenager with a real passion for something, you make it possible for them to live that passion in the same way that a professional would. So our programming from the very beginning has included that notion of improving children in the program, on a stage with practicing professionals. And one of the things that we've done for them—well we did a lot of things to help their teachers be able to prepare them and all of those things. Because they come out of the schools in our service area here in Ogden and Weber and Davis and northern counties. That's the service area for Weber State University. So we've had workshops and things, but one of the things that we've found is that children 11 need to listen to stories and be able to hear them from people who tell stories well in order to develop those same kinds of skills. And it's really fun to see the ones who have really done that. I've had a lot of fun with the videos, to be able to look at children and say, "Oh there's one there, there's one there." Some kids haven't had enough opportunity yet to listen and practice the knack, and that means that they need the opportunity to continue to tell stories. We did some research at Weber State and discovered that children that had been in our festival, went on to junior high and high school and participated in debate, and drama, and other performance kinds of activities. And almost universally, the parents who responded and said their kids had more confidence because they had that opportunity to practice. But listening to stories, gives you stories to tell. And listening gives you the hints in ways that you can do it. Listening gives you an opportunity to understand human nature, which is the cusp of storytelling. I know that there are people who have worked with children who have told stories and have worked with other storytellers, and they say that one of the essential things for them is to practice. So, practice and be willing to make changes and to practice more to meet your audience. All of the different skills that can be a profession, people make money out of it, you know. But the people who are able to maintain that level of storytelling have those skills. KH: Great is there anything else you'd like to share? AE: About storytelling festival? KH: Or storytelling in general. 12 AE: Well, you know, like I said, I'm pretty much an amateur. And I come at storytelling as one who enjoys and is entertained by and who learns from story. I have enjoyed, as I've talked about, the different ways of telling stories. I think stories help maintain our culture. I think they help us maintain our history. I think they help us teach our families all of those different things that pertain of what it means to be human. As far as the storytelling festival, I am really pleased to have been involved in the Weber State University Storytelling Festival all of these years. From the very beginning, I think the people who envisioned it, the beginning of it, were really truly visionaries and seeing the value of and being able to see what could happen when the community came together in storytelling and all of those kinds of things. So, I just wish the people in the future who continue with the festival don't lose sight of those things as they struggle with administrative issues that come up. And that they are able to maintain the dignity, the artistic value, the cultural value of the festival. And where it appears to be something for children and it's out of a university, I think we are fortunate that it's coming out of an education department because of that. But I hope they never lose sight of the fact that stories are for everyone and that we all can benefit from stories. So, I just wish the people in the future well because what has happened in our festival to reach as many people as we have every year, we count up how many children come to the theaters, how many children and teachers are impacted in school events. How many people are impacted in the evening events, the workshops that we run in the summer and the fall for teachers, events for children. In the summer, we have one event where students 13 who have been in festivals before... I mean we have continued to reach out to university students. In every event, we have found ways to touch people's hearts and I think that's really powerful. I appreciate your time to ask me these things. KH: And we appreciate you sharing them, we love hearing all of these different stories. Especially from someone who has been interacting with this festival from the beginning. AE: Thank you. ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW AGREEMENT This Interview Agreement is made and entered into this ______19th______ day(s) of ___March 2021_________, by and between the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program (WSUSLOHP) and_______Ann Ellis­______________, hereinafter called "Interviewee." Interviewee agrees to participate in a recorded interview, commencing on or about __1:00pm, March 19, 2021______time/date, with_______Kandice Harris______________. This Interview Agreement relates to any and all materials originating from the interview, namely the recording of the interview and any written materials, including but not limited to the transcript or other finding aids prepared from the recording. In consideration of the mutual covenants, conditions, and terms set forth below, the parties hereby agree as follows: 1. Interviewee irrevocably assigns to WSUSLOHP all his or her copyright, title and interest in and to the interview. 2. WSUSLOHP will have the right to use and disseminate the interview for research, educational, and other purposes, including print, present and future technologies, and digitization to provide internet access. 3. Interviewee acknowledges that he/she will receive no remuneration or compensation for either his/her participation in the interview or for the rights assigned hereunder. 4. WSUSLOHP agrees to honor any and all reasonable interviewee restrictions on the use of the interview, if any, for the time specified below, as follows: ________________________________________________ Interviewer and Interviewee have executed this Interview Agreement on the date first written above. INTERVIEWEE INTERVIEWER _____Dr. Ann L. Ellis______________________ (Signature) _______________________________________ (Signature) _______________________________________ (Printed Name) ________Kandice Harris____________________ (Printed Name)