Once upon a time, in a small mountain village, a thoughtful man gathered a few friends to swap tall tales. The friends loved sharing their stories and spread word of the event far and wide.Many years later, the man put the stories in a magical machine that carried them to people around the world. Folks in distant lands loved the magical storytelling machine so much they filled it with their own tales for others to enjoy.
The world was connected. Peace and harmony broke out everywhere.
In real life, the man with the vision is Jimmy Neil Smith, and the magical machine is the computer. Smith believes it can help preserve and strengthen traditional storytelling around the globe.
Smith, a mild-mannered Southerner with a slow-as-molasses cadence and carefully chosen words, is executive director of the National Storytelling Association, a coalition of more than 7,000 folks dedicated to preserving the traditional art of the told tale.
Smith and a few friends sparked a storytelling revival 25 years ago by organizing a rag-tag story swap around an old trailer on the main street of little Jonesborough, Tenn. The friends spread the word of the event, formed a storytelling organization and returned each year for a new and bigger get-together.
Lo and behold, the concept of a storytelling organization and annual festival captured thousands of imaginations and turned the peaceful mountain village of Jonesborough into a storytelling mecca. Now 10,000 people flock to the town the first weekend in October each year to hear many of the world's most gifted tellers perform in packed circus tents tucked among the beautiful red-streaked mountains of eastern Tennessee.
Now Smith, seeking to push the storytelling revival even further, is looking over a new horizon - and modern communications technology is staring back. Smith, envisioning a future of interactive computer networks, figures that millions of people can use the Internet to learn the history and importance of storytelling, enjoy new and old yarns, and share their own tales with the world. In an odd way, these connections can add a human touch to an increasingly technological world.
The possibilities are as rich as a country tale: Databases of classic stories. Interactive storytelling sessions. Global story swaps.
"Because of expanding technology, people are wanting to reconnect with their past, to reconnect with the humanity of the simple told story," Smith said. "The Internet is just another venue for making that happen. We can tell stories on the World Wide Web just as we can tell them in the living room, in front of the fireplace or on the front porch.
"Having said that, I've got to add that the Internet is not a substitute for face-to-face storytelling," he said. "We all seek the intimacy of the face-to-face story. There is no replacement. Think of how important it is for a child to be pulled up on his mother's or father's lap and be told a story. I call it lap time."
So we will have lap time - and laptop time too.
The NSA recently moved into the high-tech age with the launch of its Web site at (http://users.
aol.com/storypage/nsa.htm.) The site provides a range of basic information and valuable resources for storytellers.
There are the background and history of the organization, festival highlights, conference notes, feature articles from the NSA magazine, bios on great tellers, and links to newsletters, chats and forums on topics ranging from puppetry to censorship.
But Jonesborough is no Silicon Valley, and the path to cyberspace is full of obstacles. "We are still learning," Smith said. "We wanted to put up a perfect site, but that wasn't the way to go. So we decided to get the site up and keep working on it."
NSA's bigger vision is still in development. It is called StoryNet. The plan is to create a highly interactive Web site to provide a wealth of storytelling materials to users and connect them with an even broader world of resources on the Internet. The NSA is planning a database retrieval system for its library and archives, feedback forms, chat rooms and real-time movies.
NSA is also developing the National Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, which will house a museum with interactive exhibits as well as a library and performance space.
But all this technology will seem a world away when thousands of people descend on Jonesborough this fall for the 25th annual festival.
The masses will salute the pioneers who founded NSA, listen to tales from many of the greatest tellers, look out over the patchwork of changing colors in the surrounding mountains and share sto-ries of their own. Most will be secure in the knowledge that - given an unquenchable desire to communicate by any means possible - storytelling is destined to live happily ever after.