Firebrand - Oral Storytelling Workshop

Quick Details

Small group: max 12 participants

When: 2-Saturdays in-a-row (various dates below)

Where: 25 Donaldson Road, Kangaroo Ground

Cost: $480

Come with something to write on (journal/notepad/laptop)

Bring food for a shared lunch (morning tea provided)

And, of course, come with an old story if you've been wanting to have a go at telling an old story.

2025 DATES

August-September:

• Day 1: Saturday 30 August | 10am-4pm

• Day 2: Saturday 6 September | 10am-4pm

October-November:

• Day 1: Saturday 25 October | 10am-4pm

• Day 2: Saturday 1 November | 10am-4pm

(2026 dates to be announced)

Firebrand - Oral Storytelling Workshop

This 2-Saturdays workshop might be the beginning of an apprenticeship in oral storytelling for you. You will have the opportunity to hear old stories and to practice telling them. You may come with a story you are already learning, or receive a story on the first day to work with during the week. You will have an opportunity to witness the art of oral storytelling and begin to practice both listening and responding.

Aside from the actual telling of a story, there is all the background relational work that goes into telling a story. If you know a story well, you can tell it with or without details, with just the bones or in full detail - much as you might introduce a friend to another friend: given the time and setting you might tell a story about them or add a detail or describe their favourite things, and if pressed for time you will entrust one friend to the other. Such is oral storytelling if we treat the stories as living beings.

In this respect we're talking about a kind of animism. Oral storytelling is a transformative art, it is inevitable that you will be changed in the process of getting to know the story just as much as you will be changed in the telling and changed again when you hear how the story is landing in the hearts of those who hear you tell it. Fidelity to the aliveness of oral storytelling is one of the features that distinguishes it from a recital of literature. To be sure, the oral tradition and literary tradition are not foes, not opposed, but they are different and they can feed each other - more on that in the workshop. 

Why a Workshop on Oral Storytelling?

Over the last year I've been gathering soul kin together to listen to old stories, folktales and myth and to remember the medicine of stories. For you who have been coming along to Remembering Story Medicine you will know that when stories are told in these old ways, in community, with ritual, there's something deeper and older that we enjoin. As you know, the stories keep feeding us well after we first hear them, especially if we feed them in return.

How are they medicine? Stories - particularly old stories told in old ways - can rescue us from stories that are two small or that don't allow us to unfurl into our full shape. Stories shape and confine character. Genres determine what we see and what can happen, genre can mute and sometimes entirely block certain emotions and ways of being. If you're in the wrong story you will not be able to know yourself, nor will anyone else, you won't be able to fill your full shape. Stories can also give us an opportunity to try on different shapes. There's so much more that could be said here.

This is re-indigenising work. This is culture building. Soulful, ecological, animist, relational community building.

Since running the first Firebrand workshop I'm delighted to report that there have been three other storytellers giving us folktale medicine at the Remembering Story Medicine Potluck & Folktales and there are more storytellers coming through. If you've come to a few of those gatherings you might already be halfway out in the wilderness tracking a story. If so, this two-Saturday workshop might help you to tune in and get closer and to get ready to tell us what you've heard and witness - to tell an old story.

I would like to be a firebrand and set you all on fire so that you too tell stories, and for you also to become firebrands. This way of being together and listening is not new. It's an element of how we've spent time together for millennia. Stories have been with us since the earliest times, along with food, fire, song, dance and ritual. If you have a story in you, or you have a desire to work with a story, come, come, come along to this two-Saturdays workshop. 

Details 

The workshop will be held at the Kangaroo Ground Centre, 25 Donaldson Road, Kangaroo Ground. We will begin at 10am and conclude at 4pm on two consecutive Saturdays. Please bring a journal or notepad to write on as well as any material you have that relates to a story that you would like to begin to tell. We'll have a shared lunch, so bring something to share. Morning tea and coffee, fruit and nibbles will be provided. Tickets are $480. There is parking at the venue. There are cafes in Research and a general store/cafe in Kangaroo Ground if you're thinking to get a coffee before the workshop begins. There's a small fridge to store things. Feel free to come early, from 9am, make a cuppa, walk the grounds, sit under the lemon scented gum, meet the horses and kangaroos. 

Preparation

If you are already feeding on a story I encourage you to listen and look out for the ways that the story is already moving in your life. Look for omens, signs, dreams, synchronicities - hold them lightly, with an open hand, refrain from making too much sense out of them. Such helps are like fairy-wrens, they will dance and play for you but they will fly away if you hold them with anything other than your eyes.