My grandmother was the penultimate storyteller. She was from Russia, actually from the Ukraine, Byelorussia. She had a thick accent. And every night she used to tell us tales, because when I was young, televisions had been invented, but they were very expensive. And our family was poor. We couldn’t afford one.
So she used to do what she called “fire-talking” every night. She put a fire in the fireplace. She’d pop popcorn. She would make fudge if we were really lucky. She picked snow apples fresh off from the tree outside of the kitchen. My brother and I would go in with our little bowls and she put wedged apple and popcorn and fudge in the bowl. And then she’d say, “Go in living room – because now I’m going to come in and fire-talk to you!”
And we did. We’d go in and sit down and she would explode into story. And we heard her stories thousands of times. And the beauty of telling, or even reading for that matter — but telling especially, is watching the person’s eyes that you’re telling the story to. And if their eyes get bigger, you add stuff to the story – and she certainly did.
I do know whenever she finished a story, my brother and I would lean in to her and say, “Okay, that story you just told — is that a true story?” And she’d look at us over her glasses and say, “Well, of course it’s true story! But it may not have happened.”
