Highland County Arts Council Presents Storytelling Performance July 9
The Highland County Arts Council is presenting another storytelling event this month as part of it’s 2nd Saturday @7 series. Rick Hill will be performing with both stories and songs, Norma and Bucky Reynolds will provide stories and Jim Sherman, who moved to Highland in 2017, will also be telling stories. He first shared his storytelling ability in the Highland community when he was invited to a gathering at Norma and Bucky Reynolds house.
“I’m a story teller from way back,” says Sherman. “I’m a retired physician. I was in academic medicine, in charge of residency programs, fellowship programs and students, and giving conferences to practicing physicians. So, these are all very intelligent adults who have a learning need and thought that I might have some information for them. In adult learning, it’s very clear that if you can connect a new fact with an old fact, something that somebody already knows, then recalling the new fact or learning the new thing becomes easier. And so, it takes a little longer to connect it to an old fact, but when you do that you’ve been an effective teacher. So, I always thought I could give a conference and tell them fifty new things, but in three months if they only remembered one of them, I hadn’t done a very good job. If I took that same period of time, took a little longer, and connected new facts to old facts and I taught them ten things instead of fifty things, but they remembered nine of them, then I would be a much better teacher. And that’s essentially what storytelling is. It connects facts, perhaps to other things in someone’s experience, and teaches them something. I’m a teacher. That’s kind of who I am and storytelling became a part of the way that I taught people things. Principles, new facts, imparted the wisdom that I had gained over the years. My children heard stories, my friends heard stories and the students and other people that I was trying to teach heard stories. I’ve done some preaching in churches that I’ve been in and there’s stories there, so I’ve been a storyteller for a long time.”
The storytelling performance, Stories Tall & Short in Words & Song, is Saturday, July 9, at 7pm in the garden at the Jones House on Main Street in Monterey. The performance is pay what you wish and remember to bring a chair.
“Before there was written words people handed down the wisdom of the ages and the stories of their beginning and how they viewed the world was all in the form of stories,” says Sherman. “Storytellers were really honored in these primitive societies. So, I think there’s this incredibly long and rich history of storytelling used for lots of different things, so I think it’s useful. As pure entertainment, it’s as good as reading a book or watching a movie or going to a play. It’s just a different way of relating a story.”
You can get more information at www.highlandcountyartscouncil.org
The Highland County Arts Council is a supporter of Allegheny Mountain Radio.
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