All of us tell stories to grandchildren, co-workers, or friends, but few of us are so accomplished as to be able to make our living doing it. Classmate Mitch Weiss and his wife Martha Hamilton, as Beauty and the Beast Storytellers, have been making a living at it since 1980, and as Mitch says, “I would definitely do it all over again if I had the choice.”
Mitch, who majored in government at Cornell (a “perfect field for storytellers,” he jokes), was co-owner of the famous Moosewood restaurant in Ithaca. Martha was a full-time librarian at Cornell who was dabbling in storytelling, having walked into a storytelling workshop at a library conference by mistake, and become fascinated by it (although, she says, “It took me a year to get the courage to tell a story in the group I joined”). They were introduced by a mutual friend who thought Mitch was a natural storyteller, and one of their first dates was a party of Martha’s storytelling group. Mitch learned three stories in the next few days after that date, because “it’s amazing what love will make you do.” In the early 1980s there was a renaissance in storytelling, and Mitch and Martha got a spot telling stories at the Ithaca Festival in 1980. A film of their performance made its way onto local cable, which led to their being booked into thirteen local schools. Their storytelling career was off and running, and they left their day jobs in 1983 to become full-time storytellers.
The real turning point came when a principal at one of the schools suggested they teach kids to tell stories. That became their storytelling niche and led to repeat invitations from schools for over 30 years. Their typical gig consists of a week to coach kids in telling stories, followed by a storytelling session by the students and Mitch and Martha for the parents. They’ve been at it so long that some of the parents are students they taught years ago. Says Mitch, “The parents see real value in it because learning to tell stories to an audience boosts the kids’ self-confidence. Students learn to overcome stage fright by going slowly through the process: First tell the story to the wall. Then tell it to one other student. Then tell it to a few students. Pretty soon, the student is able to tell the story to a roomful of listeners. And the teachers nurture the kids, too.”
By way of example, Mitch describes the time he and Martha taught storytelling at an Ithaca-area school where one of the pupils was autistic. The student told a story at the parents’ session, and his father was weeping, saying “That was the most words I ever heard him speak.” And other parents had no idea their kids could be so sophisticated in their use of language.
Not surprisingly, storytelling is also a powerful learning method for non-native English speakers. It’s fun and less formal than traditional methods, and, Mitch says, “They get smiles from their classmates, which encourages them.”
One of the keys to teaching storytelling to kids is that Mitch and Martha have, over the years, refined traditional folk tales to be simpler and have more dialog, which the students find easier to memorize. (Books of their simplified stories are available on their web site.) They have been working most recently on a series of Noodlehead books with noted children’s book author and illustrator Tedd Arnold. The second book in the series, Noodleheads See the Future, won the Aesop Prize from the American Folklore Society, the Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor Book from the American Library Association, and was named one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year in 2018. Originally projected to be a three-book series, the publisher has bumped the target up to six books because of the excellent reception of the first three.
Mitch and Martha have literally traveled the globe telling stories. They very rarely have stage fright (“only when we have to tell stories to other professional storytellers,” says Mitch), and are so familiar with the stories that they never have “senior moments” where they forget what happens next in a story. They plan to keep brightening kids’ and adults’ lives with their unique style of storytelling and teaching for a while yet. Says Mitch, “We’ll retire when we can’t remember the stories.”
