Only 3 weeks until the festival!

The 2021 Georgia Mountain Storytelling Festival will be here in just three weeks! It’s all online this year but will still be brimming with opportunities to laugh and learn, to draw joy and inspiration from well-told tales. We’ll be showcasing stories from five nationally-touring tellers—Elizabeth Ellis, Diane Ferlatte, Megan Hicks, Tim Lowry, and Antonio Rocha—and eight popular performers from our region—Judy Baker, David Petty, the Pressley Girls, Kanute Rarey, Cayce Terrell, Matthew Tooni, and Jess Willis.

They will share a wide range of stories, including:

·        traditional folktales from around the world and right here in Appalachia

·        stories that bring historical figures and time periods to life

·        personal narratives

·        ghost stories

·        and more!

Our tellers have created videos especially for students and videos for a general audience, and we’ll also have nine live events in which you can watch and interact with the performers. You’ll find a PDF of the schedule for these live events on our home page. All of the videos will be available on demand, meaning that you can watch them anytime during the festival and for 30 days afterward, and the live events will be recorded and put on the event site for viewing during and after the festival too.

If you haven’t already, head on over to 2021 Georgia Mountain Storytelling Festival-new-format | RegForm.com to reserve your ticket. General admission is just $10 per household (not per person), and tickets for students and teachers are free. Please help spread the word!

We hope to see you online in a few weeks.

"‘Tell us about it’: Creating Stories to Heal”

Megan Hicks, one of our featured tellers for the 2021 festival, will teach “‘Tell us about it’: Creating Stories to Heal” on Saturday, April 17th in conjunction with the festival. This workshop will run between 90 minutes and 2 hours, and it will be geared toward adults and older teens. Seating is limited to 25 participants.

Description: If you are reading this workshop description, you are a survivor. You have lived through the worst pandemic in 100 years. Surviving hardship exacts a toll — loss, grief, depression, confusion, social isolation. Survivors have a story to tell.
“Nah. I don’t think I’m special.”
“It’s all been such a blur.”
“Words cannot express…”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
We start, together in this workshop, by tying our memories, thoughts, and feelings to things that the senses can see, smell, taste, hear, and touch. We identify places associated with those things — a room in the house, an off-ramp on the interstate, another continent, your favorite chair. We start putting words on a page, with no consideration about whether or not, at this point, it’s making any sense at all.

And then we share. As much or as little as we feel like sharing. The sharing sparks more memories, and stories emerge.

When you create a story about surviving a global disaster, you have created a bit of order out of chaos. You have listened, you have been heard. Together, through our stories, we create a community of healing.


Please contact the festival for more information: info@gamountainstoryfest.org.

Update on the 2021 Festival

Dear friends,

To maintain the safety of our storytellers and audience during the pandemic, our April 16-17 festival will be held online. Join us for a celebration of the art of storytelling shared by a breadth of voices. Enjoy traditional and contemporary stories, children’s events, and workshops by our featured artists: Elizabeth Ellis, Diane Ferlatte, Megan Hicks, Tim Lowry, and Antonio Rocha.

Elizabeth Ellis is an Appalachian storyteller and author by way of Texas who has captivated audiences from the National Storytelling Festival to Walter Reed Medical Center with her downhome humor. Diane Ferlatte, an internationally renowned teller of African and American tales, breathes life and music into classics from Aesop onward. Megan Hicks shares everything from moments in American history to ghost stories, and her wit and wisdom make her a favorite wherever she performs. Tim Lowry, known as the “sweet tea commentator,” spins tales of Southern life and history. Antonio Rocha’s unique fusion of mime and spoken word enchants and teaches too.

Some of the festival’s storytelling sessions will be recordings made by our tellers especially for GMSF 2021. Other storytelling sessions, all of the workshops, and the Q&A session will be presented "live" online. We hope you will find joy, hope, and laughter as you participate in this year’s virtual events through our festival platform on Expo Pass. You’re in for a treat!

Registration is a snap, and you won't find a better deal: $10 per household for the full festival. Also, as always, tickets are free for teachers and students. See https://host.regform.com/2021-georgia-mountain-storytelling-festival/ to sign up for your ticket and to get more information.

With best wishes to you and yours,

Amanda Lawrence and Ruth Looper, festival co-directors

P.S. If you haven't had a chance to watch all the videos by the terrific tellers in our fall 2020 series, the links are on our website, and the videos will be available through March 1st. 


Fall Storytelling Saturdays Begin!

Our Fall Storytelling Saturdays will kick off tomorrow with stories and workshops by Carolina Quiroga and Gene Tagaban. If you’re signed up for the workshops, please check your email for the Zoom invitation. Links to the storytelling sessions will be posted on our website and Facebook page. We’ll also have a PDF program for the full series of Storytelling Saturdays on the website. Check it out to learn more about the wonderful storytellers whose work we’ll all get to enjoy. We hope you can join us online!

Update on Storytelling Saturdays: changing to online format

Our board has met to discuss the current state of the state (and the country), and in the interest of safety, we have decided that we must make all of our planned programs online instead of in person. We had planned to make in-person events possible by deep cleaning the venues, ensuring social distancing, and requiring attendees to wear masks, but the local ordinance that required masks in county facilities has run up against our governor’s executive orders prohibiting county/local governments from requiring masks. Since we cannot legally enforce this essential safety precaution and since the number of cases in Georgia continues to rise, we think it best to make all of the events virtual. Although we know that much is lost when storytellers and audiences aren’t in each other’s presence, we hope that even more people will be able to hear the wonderful stories our tellers will share and that face-to-face events will be possible again sooner rather than later.

Are you up for going virtual with us? We hope so!

All of the workshops will be offered online via Zoom, an online video conferencing app that you can use for free: https://zoom.us/.  This means that if you are signed up for a workshop, you will be able to interact with the storyteller leading your workshop and with the other participants too. The workshops will be held on the originally scheduled dates, but some of the times may be shifted from the original plan to accommodate storytellers who will be joining us from different time zones. If you are signed up for one or more workshops, we will email you all the information you need to participate. If you haven’t yet signed up for a workshop but would like to, please see:  https://fallstorytellingsaturdays.eventbrite.com

For the performances, the storytellers are recording videos for you to enjoy. We will send out the links to the videos as they are available. Each video link will be shared on or before the date of the originally scheduled performance:

August 22: Gene Tagaban and Carolina Quiroga-Hurtado

September 19: Sheila Kay Adams and Josh Goforth

October 24: Charlotte Blake Alston and Noa Baum

December 12: Donald Davis

All of  these events will still be free. We hope that you will join us in thanking and supporting the following area businesses and organizations that have generously donated to help make these events possible: Peach State Federal Credit Union, United Community Bank, Dawsonville Walmart Supercenter #3874, Alexander's Store, Blue Ridge Mountain EMC, the Byron Herbert Reece Society, and Walmart Supercenter #4616 in Cleveland. 

Thank you in advance for understanding and for supporting these events from home.  We hope you enjoy them!

FALL STORYTELLING SATURDAYS!

Mark your calendars! In place of the April 2020 festival (which had to be cancelled in the wake of COVID-19), we will be putting on a series of storytelling Saturdays that include workshops and performances. Check out this amazing line-up:

August 22: Gene Tagaban and Carolina Quiroga-Hurtado
September 19: Sheila Kay Adams and Josh Goforth
October 24: Charlotte Blake Alston and Noa Baum
December 12: Donald Davis

These programs will be free and open to the public, and we will work to ensure safety by requiring social distancing, limiting audience size, and providing masks and hand sanitizer.

More details to come soon!

Seeking Volunteers

Every year, the festival is put on thanks to the help of many volunteers. We couldn't do it without you!

We need assistance with a variety of tasks: welcoming visitors and checking them in at registration, selling merchandise for our visiting storytellers, and monitoring the doors to the performance spaces. Most jobs involve a 2-4 hour time commitment on either Friday, April 3 or Saturday, April 4.

As thanks for your wonderful work, you will receive a weekend ticket to the festival, a snazzy festival t-shirt, and the unending gratitude of the festival organizers, storytellers, and attendees. Plus, you'll have a lot of fun!

If you'd like to volunteer for this year's festival, please email info@gamountainstoryfest.org with the following information:

Name:

Email address:

Cell phone number:

T-shirt size:

Preferred job(s) (choose from registration, merchandise sales, or door monitor):

Preferred shift(s) (choose from Friday morning, Friday afternoon, Friday evening, Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, or Saturday evening):

Thank you!

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“This kind of culture sharing needs to continue.” -–festival visitor