Suddenly They Heard Footsteps: Storytelling for the Twenty-first Century (review)

They Heard Footsteps: Storytelling for the Twenty-first Century. By Dan Yashinsky. fackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. xviii + 317 pp. Yashinsky calls himself a storm fool, a wanderer who carries tales from one place another, often blown in by bad weather. This modern-day storyteller from Toronto has fooled himself through Canada and the United States and across the great ocean. In the first 184 pages he describes his narrative adventures, interwoven with suggestions on the art of storytelling. next 60 pages are devoted seven original texts, including his book-length tale The Storyteller at Fault (published under the same title by Ragweed Press in 1992). He proposes a challenging quest, to find the that will mend the world, and details his own personal odyssey over almost three decades as internationally recognized storyteller, organizer, and prolific writer. This book, his sixth, offers a passionate retrospective of his own work. What it lacks in scholarly notations and indexes is partially balanced by his direct experiences and examples. He does include annotated list of works cited and a useful ten-page discussion of storytelling resources, emphasizing books that have influenced him directly. Throughout the book Yashinsky never strays far from his own frankly subjective thoughts and experiences, which are often both entertaining and illuminating. For example, in his one -paragraph Afterword he describes a young listener who shouts out, Never finish! and brings it back this book's title by suggesting that stories let us hear the footsteps of own transformation coming towards us on the pathway of everyday life (293). This personal approach is both the strength and the weakness of They Heard Footsteps. Dan Yashinsky is engaging writer and teller, which makes much of the book a pleasure read. It flows from one chapter another, covering topics that have fascinated him throughout his long career, especially the importance of skilled mentors as models and trainers, the place of community as the lifeblood of storytelling (as it always has been), the abiding value of careful listening by tellers and listeners, and of course the themselves. He is also very fond of the guiding metaphor of Scheherazade as a life-saving storyteller. Yashinsky plays with endless variations on these themes throughout the book in his zeal stress the importance of and storytelling. In his preface Yashinsky situates his book among our common elders, especially Ruth Sawyer, whose seminal book, Way of the Storyteller (1942), was one of the sparks for educated tellers in schools and libraries in the early part of the twentieth century. Sawyer and more recent tellers/writers like Toronto's Alice Kane and Joan Bodger were central in making storytelling a living art for centuries (xvii). Yashinsky also honors oral masters like Angela Sidney, a Tagish elder from the Yukon, and Joe Neil MacNeil, a master teller in Gaelic from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. At times Yashinsky suggests that his own book is an honour song for storytelling ancestors and invitation for you join the circle (xviii), a sentiment that is most familiar in selfconscious contemporary storytelling. In his introductory chapter, Suddenly They Heard Footsteps, he relates one of many of his family anecdotes: His three-year-old son was drifting off sleep as the boy's mother told him a deliberately monotonous story about various animals falling asleep. …

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