• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Story Tellers Channel

Sharing The Stories That Matter

Follow Us on FacebookFollow Us on Twitter
  • Home
  • Welcome
  • Storytellers
  • Workshops
  • Free Audio Book
  • Behind the Curtain
  • Contact Us

Poe

About Edgar Allen Poe

By Gayle Turner

This edition of the Storytellers Channel’s newsletter features the profile of Edgar Allan Poe from The Poe Museum’s Editions of Poe’s canon written by The Poe Museum’s Curator, Chris Semtner.
The March Stories Matter! Showcase begins this Friday.
If you’re in Richmond we hope you’ll join us.

And, if you haven’t purchased your copy of the audio book Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Deadly Matrimony click here or on the graphic below.
Remember: You Matter. Your Stories Matter. Tell Them Well!

Gayle Turner
The Storytellers Channel

About Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Having run away from home to become a great poet, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a magazine editor, “I am young — not yet twenty — am a poet — if deep worship of all beauty can make me one — and wish to be so in the common meaning of the word. I would give the world to embody one half the ideas afloat in my imagination.” 

Poe would devote the rest of his life to embodying his boundless imagination. In the process, this literary innovator invented the detective story, revolutionized science fiction before there even was such a thing as science fiction, developed the tale of psychological terror, composed some of the most popular poetry ever written, and became America’s first internationally influential author. 

Born in poverty to two traveling actors, Poe lost both of his parents before he was three. A Richmond, Virginia tobacco exporter named John Allan took in the orphan and agreed to prepare Poe for a career in business and a life in Richmond society. Allan sent Poe to the best schools in Richmond and in London and even put him to work in the counting room of the family export business. The future poet had other plans and spent his time in the counting room writing poetry on the backs of the ledger sheets. 

In 1826 Poe left Richmond to attend the University of Virginia, where he excelled in his classes while accumulating considerable debt. The miserly Allan had sent Poe to college with less than a third of the money he needed, and Poe soon took up gambling to raise money to pay his expenses. By the end of his first term, Poe was so desperately poor that he burned his furniture to keep warm.  

Humiliated by his poverty and furious with Allan for not providing enough funds in the first place, Poe returned to Richmond and visited the home of his fiancée Elmira Royster, only to discover that she had become engaged to another man in Poe’s absence. The heartbroken Poe’s last few months in the Allan mansion were punctuated with increasing hostility towards Allan until Poe finally stormed out of the home in a quixotic quest to become a great poet and to find adventure. He accomplished the first objective by publishing his first book Tamerlane when he was only eighteen, and to achieve the second goal he enlisted in the United States Army. Two years later he heard that Frances Allan, the only mother he had ever known, was dying of tuberculosis and that her final wish was to see him before she died. By the time Poe returned to Richmond she had already been buried. The grieving Poe briefly reconciled with Allan, who helped him gain an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point.  

Before going to West Point, Poe published another volume of poetry, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. One critic wrote that the thing he most enjoyed about this poetry was watching it burn in the fireplace. Another thought the book was incoherent, but the Boston critic John Neal opined that, though the poems were “nonsense,” they were “exquisite nonsense” and that the twenty-year-old author might one day “make a beautiful and perhaps magnificent poem.” Poe recalled these as the first words of encouragement he ever received.

While at West Point, Poe was offended to hear that Allan had remarried without telling him or even inviting him to the ceremony. Poe wrote to Allan detailing all the wrongs Allan had committed against him and threatened to get himself expelled from the academy. After only eight months at West Point Poe was thrown out, but he soon published yet another book of poetry. This one also sold poorly, and it seemed like Poe’s hopes of becoming a writer were doomed. That is when he decided to change course. Rather than compiling another book of poetry, he began to concentrate on writing short stories and on submitting them to various magazines and newspapers for publication. As he later observed, “The whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward,” so if he was going to be a writer, he was going to write for magazines. These cheap, mass-produced publications were viewed by some not as literature but as entertainment, and their readers demanded anything new, sensational, and shocking. Poe would give them exactly what they wanted.

Broke and alone, Poe turned to Baltimore, his late father’s hometown, and called upon relatives in the city. His widowed aunt Maria Clemm became a new mother to him and welcomed him into the tiny home where she lived with Poe’s grandmother, his brother Henry, his cousin Henry, and his cousin Virginia. Clemm’s nine-year-old daughter Virginia first acted as a courier to carry letters to Poe’s lady loves but soon became the object of his desire.  

While Poe was in Baltimore, Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will, which did, however, provide for an illegitimate child Allan had never seen. By then Poe was living in poverty but had started publishing his short stories, one of which won a contest sponsored by the Saturday Visiter. The connections Poe established through the contest allowed him to publish more stories and to eventually gain an editorial position at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. It was at this magazine that Poe finally found his life’s work as a magazine writer.  

Within a year Poe helped make the Messenger the most popular magazine in the South with his sensational stories as well as with his scathing book reviews. Poe soon developed a reputation as a fearless critic who not only attacked an author’s work but also insulted the author and the northern literary establishment. Poe targeted some of the most famous writers in the country. One of his victims was the anthologist and editor Rufus Griswold.

Poe shocked the Messenger’s genteel audience with his first horror story “Berenice” and followed it with experiments in comedy, drama, and a serialized novel. He even wrote a science fiction story about a trip to the moon, paying careful attention to describing the technology that would allow the voyage to take place.

At the age of twenty-seven, Poe brought Maria and Virginia Clemm to Richmond and married his Virginia, who was not yet fourteen. The marriage proved a happy one, and the family is said to have enjoyed singing together at night. Virginia expressed her devotion to her husband in a Valentine poem now in the collection of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and Poe celebrated the joys of married life in his poem “Eulalie.”

Dissatisfied with his low pay and lack of editorial control at the Messenger, Poe moved to New York City. In the wake of the financial crisis known as the “Panic of 1837,” Poe struggled to find magazine work and wrote his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.  

After a year in New York, Poe moved to Philadelphia in 1838 and wrote for a number of different magazines. He served as editor of Burton’s and then Graham’s magazines while continuing to sell articles to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger and other journals. During this time, he wrote the first detective stories and created some of the most influential horror stories of all time. These include “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Black Cat.” Despite his growing fame, Poe was still barely able to make a living. For the publication of his first book of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he was only paid with twenty-five free copies of his book. He would soon become a champion for the cause of higher wages for writers as well as for an international copyright law. To change the face of the magazine industry, he proposed starting his own journal, but he failed to find the necessary funding.

In the face of poverty, Poe was still able to find solace at home with his wife and mother-in-law, but tragedy struck in 1842 when Poe’s wife contracted tuberculosis, the disease that had already claimed Poe’s mother, brother, and foster mother.  

Always in search of better opportunities, Poe moved back to New York in 1844 and reintroduced himself to the city by publishing a “news story” of a balloon trip across the ocean. The amazing account caused a sensation, and the public rushed to read everything about it—until Poe revealed that he had fooled them all with one of his hoaxes. 

The January 1845 publication of “The Raven” made Poe a household name. He was now famous enough to draw large crowds to his lectures, and he was beginning to demand better pay for his work. He published two books that year and briefly lived his dream of running his own magazine when he bought out the owners of the Broadway Journal. The failure of the venture, his wife’s deteriorating health, and rumors spreading about Poe’s relationship with a married woman drove him out of the city in 1846. At this time he moved to a tiny cottage in the country. It was there, in the winter of 1847 that Virginia died at the age of twenty-four. Poe was devastated and unable to write for months. His critics assumed he would soon be dead. They were right. He only survived another two years and spent much of that time traveling from one city to the next giving lectures and finding backers for his latest proposed magazine project to be called The Stylus. During this turbulent time, he wrote his last book, “Eureka,” and returned to his first love—poetry. His last year brought with it many of his best poems, including “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells,” “Eldorado,” and “A Dream Within a Dream.”

While on a lecture tour in Lowell, Massachusetts, Poe met and befriended Nancy Richmond. His idealized and platonic love of her inspired some of his greatest poetry, including “For Annie.” Since she remained married and unattainable, Poe attempted to marry the poetess Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence, but the engagement lasted only about one month. In Richmond he found his first fiancée Elmira Royster Shelton was now a widow, so began to court her again. Before he left Richmond on a trip to Philadelphia he became engaged to her and prepared to settle permanently in Richmond with her. On a business trip to Philadelphia and New York, Poe stopped in Baltimore and disappeared for five days.  

He was found in the bar room of a public house that was being used as a polling place for an election. The magazine editor Joseph Snodgrass sent Poe to Washington College Hospital, where Poe spent his final days far from home and surrounded by strangers. Neither Poe’s mother-in-law nor his fiancée knew what had become of him until they read about it in the newspapers. Poe died on October 7, 1849 at the age of forty. The exact cause of Poe’s death remains a mystery.

Days after Poe’s death, his literary rival Rufus Griswold wrote a libelous obituary of the author in a misguided attempt at revenge for some of the offensive things Poe had said and written about him. Griswold followed the obituary with a memoir in which he portrayed Poe as a drunken, womanizing madman with no morals and no friends. Griswold’s attacks were meant to cause the public to dismiss Poe and his works, but the biography had exactly the opposite effect and instead drove the sales of Poe’s books higher than they had ever been during the author’s lifetime. Griswold’s distorted image of Poe created the Poe legend that lives to this day while Griswold is only remembered (if at all) as Poe’s first biographer.

Although Poe was never well-rewarded for his literary work, he never lost sight of his childhood dream “to embody one half the ideas afloat in my imagination” through his writing. As he wrote shortly before his death, “Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. I shall be a litterateur, at least, all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California.”

Stories Matter! Showcase

Let Us Entertain You
Friday nights at 7:00 pm Storytellers Channel presents stories honed in our Stories Matter! Workshop in Studio 20 at Plant Zero, 0 East 4th Street Richmond, VA 23224.

This Friday the newest cohort of tellers, Lelia Pendleton, Steven Saltzberg and I, Gayle Turner, share our stories we’ve developed during February’s Stories Matter! Workshop.
Every Friday during the month of March we will have a surprise guest storyteller.
Click to purchase tickets.
We hope you’ll join us and bring a friend.

I Want to Hear from You

Drop me a line at gayle@storytellerschannel.com and let me know what storytelling topics you’d like to me explore. 
Til next time, 
Gayle Turner
Executive Producer.

Filed Under: Behind the Curtain Tagged With: Poe, Storytellers, Storytellers Channel

Poe’s Dark Humor

By Gayle Turner

This edition of the Storytellers Channel’s newsletter Chris Semtner, Poe Museum Curatoe, previews our next audio book: Tales of Dark Humor by Edgar Allan Poe. I’ll be headed into the studio over the next few weeks to record King Pest, Hop-Frog, and Loss of Breath
Our latest Stories Matter! Showcase was well received by the audience last Friday February 1st and will continue throughout the month.
If you’re in Richmond we hope you’ll join us.

Remember: You Matter. Your Stories Matter. Tell Them Well!
Gayle Turner
The Storytellers Channel

Dark Humor

Some subjects are just too dark and disturbing to joke about. In fact, Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “King Pest” was in such bad taste that author Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) wrote, “He who could write ‘King Pest’ had ceased to be a human being.” Stevenson thought it was his duty to warn potential readers to avoid this story, lest “another victim should be permitted to soil himself with the perusal of the infamous ‘King Pest.’” 

What did Stevenson find so disagreeable about this narrative? He opined that Poe “scatters [horrible images] abroad in these last tales with an indescribable and sickening levity, with something of the ghoul or the furious lunatic that surpasses what one had imagined to oneself of Hell.” Basically, the critic was disturbed that Poe had made comedy about sickening, ghastly things like disease, death, and decay. Stevenson admitted, “There is much laughter; but it is a very ghastly sort of laughter at best — the laughter of those, in his own words, ‘who laugh, but smile no more.’”

“King Pest” is set during a plague. It may already be difficult to imagine laughing at a comedy set against a backdrop of suffering and disease, in which the dying drink from human skulls as they throw themselves a disgusting party in anticipation of their own deaths. Now imagine you are reading that story when Poe first published it in 1835—just three years after a worldwide cholera pandemic wrought millions of agonizing deaths from India to the United States. Poe was in Baltimore when cholera struck the city, and he witnessed cartloads of corpses carried to mass burials. The pandemic claimed one of his closet friends, so how could he write a tale making light of such an awful tragedy? 

Apparently, Poe thought no subject was off-limits, but he also found nothing to be above ridicule. In “Hop-Frog,” Poe sets an initial comic tone only to turn the tale sharply and horrifically to terror by the end. It is a tale about a court jester named Hop-Frog who exacts agonizing punishment on the king who has enslaved and maltreated him, and the reader sympathizes with the murderer. The reader, in fact, laughs alongside that mad jester. Was Poe thinking of the many slave rebellions that left his fellow Southerners in a state of constant fear when he wrote about the enslaved Hop-Frog setting his master on fire? If so, Poe, who grew up in the pro-slavery South, seems to be taking the side of the rebellious slave. Could Poe be suggesting that sometimes violence is justified in the face of injustice, or was he just trying to write a terrifying tale?

In “Loss of Breath,” a man gets wrongfully hanged on the gallows, mistaken for dead, and buried alive. That might sound like a horror story, but Poe plays the subject matter for laughs and adds grotesque details about having the narrator’s ears cut off by an anatomist and his nose eaten by cats. 

Few critics have found much nice to say about Poe’s dark comedies, but they seem strangely modern and in keeping with the dark humor of Shawn of the Dead, Southpark, or Family Guy.

Artifact of the Week: Mortality Statistics for New York City

Poe survived the great cholera pandemic of 1832, and the experience inspired his stories “King Pest” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” Then he nearly died during another cholera outbreak in 1849. Nearly two-thirds of the population evacuated New York, which Poe passed through on his way to Richmond. Then he contracted the disease in Philadelphia. 

Cholera caused its sufferers extreme diarrhea, which led to such severe dehydration that the victims turns blue and often died within a day. Poe complained of spasms and bloody fluid coming from his ears, so his doctor gave him some toxic mercury pills to “cleanse” his system. It is a wonder Poe escaped with his life.

Many others were not a fortunate as he. The July 8, 1849 issue of New York’s Christian Intelligencer provides the following list of the causes of death over the course of one week. Over five thousand New Yorkers would die by the end of the epidemic. Keep in mind that the city’s population was only about half a million at the time.

Apoplexy, 10
Cholera, 317
Cholera Infantum, 31
Cholera Morbus, 10
Consumption, 48
Convulsions, 47
Coup de Soleil, 1
Debility, 15
Diarrhea, 25
Drinking Cold Water, 1
Dropsy in the Head, 15
Drowned, 4
Dysentery, 25
Inflammation of Brain, 15
Inflammation of Bowels, 6
Inflammation of Lungs, 11
Marasmus, 17
Small Pox, 12

Download

Tales of Deadly Matrimony 
by 
Edgar Allan Poe
Audio Book E-Book

Stories Matter! Showcase

Let Us Entertain You
Friday nights at 7:00 pm Storytellers Channel presents stories honed in our Stories Matter! Workshop.

Jennifer Einolf, Linda Faye Newton, Dan Schultheis, and I, Gayle Turner, share stories that matter to us.

And we hope after you hear them; they’ll matter to you, as well.

More importantly, we hope they’ll inspire you when you leave the showcase to share stories that matter to you with those who matter to you.

We know you’ll have a good time, because everyone who has every come to one of our storytelling events has said they had a great time!

Steven Saltzberg had such a good time last Friday he’s signed up to participate in the February Workshop and will be telling in the March Showcase.
Join us and bring a friend.

I Want to Hear from You

Drop me a line at gayle@storytellerschannel.com and let me know what storytelling topics you’d like to me explore. 
Til next time, 
Gayle Turner
Executive Producer.

Filed Under: Behind the Curtain Tagged With: Hop-Frog, King Pest, Loss of Breath, Poe, Storytellers, Storytellers Channel

Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Deadly Matrimony

By Gayle Turner

This edition of the Storytellers Channel’s newsletter we are releasing our first audio book since our original recording of The Tell-Tale Heart.
I share the journey of how we got here.
It’s been a learning experience.
Enjoy,
Gayle Turner
The Storytellers Channel

Story of a Creative Journey

Let’s start by dancing in the street. We’re celebrating the release of Tales of Deadly Matrimony by Edgar Allan Poe as an ebook on Amazon and audio book on Audible book.

Spoiler Alert: The story is about a few of our adventures bringing this project to fruition. So, if you couldn’t care less, and just want to get your ears on the long-awaited recording feel free to click on the graphic above. Our feelings will not be hurt.

But if you’re interested in the behind-the-scenes drama and maybe even considering attempting this sort of artistic endeavor yourself, you might find this of value. If not you can always just cut to the chase and listen to the finished product.

Click to Download Tales of Deadly Matrimony by Edgar Allan Poe
          Audio Book                                     E-Book

From the beginning the team at Storytellers Channel has been creating digital content. We began creating videos at our earliest Showcase performances. Our Storytellers’ page has grown with each subsequent Stories Matter! Workshop/Showcase.
In January 2017, at a Culture Works event encouraging collaboration between local arts organizations, I met The Poe Museum’s Director of Programs, Debbie Phillips. She invited me to visit. Storyteller Lelia Pendleton, and I met with Phillips and Tyler Minks, the Museum’s Communications Director exploring opportunities to play together. I was also introduced to Jaime Robinson Fawcett, Poe Museum’s Executive Director.
We met a couple of times into the spring. The staff was gracious and open. Everyone wanted to find a way to make something happen. Both organizations had a lot on their plate and then, another delay. I took a sabbatical to serve as the Director of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia’s MAD Camp, aka the Music and Drama Camp at Shrine Mont in Orkney Springs, VA.
Right before I left, Charles George, our fractional head of digital marketing, recommended I read MaryEllen Tribby’s Reinventing the Entrepreneur.
Shortly after my return in August, 2017Debbie asked Lelia and me to participate in the Sunday Reading in the Garden at the museum. During warm weather, Dean Knight, Education Director, does dramatic readings of Poe’s work in the Shrine in the Garden. Dean scheduled Lelia for a Sunday in August and me for the following week. I recorded my performance, and something clicked. In light of having just finished Tribby’s book, the audience’s response, and my joy in reading the story, I went to Jaime and suggested we collaborate on producing and distributing Poe’s canon. She agreed.

At first Charles was hesitant, but then once again a light went on. Charles looked at me and said, “These are audio books!” Charles has a lot of experience helping authors promote and distribute their digital books. He said, “Let’s do it.”
I then went to Overcoast Recording Studio’s Matthew Whitworth, an extraordinary recording engineer, and pitched the idea of a strategic alliance. Matt asked to think it over and talk with his partners. He came back and said, “Let’s do it.”

And I went back to Charles and said, “Let’s do it.”

The first story we recorded was The Tell-Tale Heart. If you’re reading this, you took advantage of our free offer of the recording and have become a subscriber to this E-newsletter.

That was Spring of 2018. So far, so good. The going had been slow, but we were rolling now and we announced the first three stories we would record and offer for sale would be what the Museum’s Curator, Chris Semtner, called The Dead Bride Stories.
Part of our collaboration on the project was that Chris would contribute content to the newsletter. He would write about the story and do a spotlight an artifact in the Museum’s collection.

We began publishing the newsletter with Chris’ articles and we kept promoting the newsletter with the freemium of The Tell-Tale Heart and the newsletter was gaining new subscribers at a rate of 20+ a day.

We were having difficulty finding time in the studio (Overcoast is a hot shop) but we managed. Charles was elated at the growth trajectory of our subscribers. We decided to post our audio books on Audible.com.

We began the process and immediately hit a glitch.

In my experience, whenever someone says, “All you have to do is…” They are not the ones who have to do it.
We reached out to Audible’s help desk and they said we had to connect the book to a book on Amazon.com.

So, I called Chris at the museum and he directed me to an edition of Poe’s work that he felt was truest to Poe. We attempted to connect our recording to that book. It didn’t work. 
We called the help desk and they said, “That’s not your book.”

And I said, “No, it’s a work in the Public Domain.”

She said, politely, “That’s not your book.”

After repeating this apparently nonsensical round a couple of more times I asked,

“Are you telling me we have to publish our own edition of this Public Domain work.”

She replied, “Yes.”

This entire exchange was handled very calmly. As incredible as I found the entire situation I remained calm. After all, it’s never wise to get upset with people who can scuttle your enterprise and obviously the Audible Help Desk lady had been well-trained to deal with dunces like me.

It took me several days to start working on the book for Amazon. And this was definitely a case of something not being the highest and best use of my talent.

I got on the phone with Jaime to alert her to the delay. I thought I was doing my best not to whine, but she said, 
“You know Tyler would really like to do that. Would you mind?” 
I’m telling you I heard choirs of angels.

We decided to package Chris’ articles along with the texts of the three stories and during this new chapter we decided to rename the collection:

The Poe Museum EditionTales of Deadly Matrimonyby Edgar Allan Poe
Shelli Jost Brady, Storytellers Channel’s Chief Operating Officer who has an astounding background in design had created our cover for the Dead Brides audio book. She was busy on other projects and so Tyler created a cover design for the e-book and we used that design as the new cover for the audio book, as well.

We registered the book with the Copyright office and secured an ISBN. Tyler uploaded the book to Amazon. Then began the wait for it to go live. Amazon came back to us needing confirmation that Poe was actually dead and Chris’ date of birth before they could activate the book at Amazon. I wanted to cry, but I decided to laugh. We gave them the info: a Wikipedia link confirming when Poe has shuffled off his mortal coil and Chris’ DOB and we were live within days.

We then began the process of uploading our newly rechristened Tales of Deadly Matrimony by Edgar Allan Poe.

We thought everything had gone well. We sat back and waited. And waited. And…

Finally, we called the help desk again. The lady (we always seem to reach a woman, a calm, patient woman) said,

“We have no record of your audio book.”

Calmly I said, “I uploaded it.”

She asked if I had internet access and I said yes.

She said, “Go to the upload page.

There’s a button in the upper right-hand side that says I’m Done. What color is it?”

“Purple”

“There’s the problem. Click the button.”

I did. It changed colors.

In a moment she said, “There it is. You have to click that button. We’ll get back to you in a few days if there are any problems.”

Three weeks ago, on Christmas Eve, we were notified our audio book was available for purchase on Audible.
Between the holidays and getting ready for our 3rd Annual Hearts Afire Storytelling Festival I’ve been busy. But it snowed here in Richmond last night and we’re all staying inside, so I thought I can’t procrastinate writing this story any more.


Celebrate With Us!

We think we’ve learned how to do this now. I hope you enjoy the three tales as much as I enjoyed recording them.
We’d appreciate if you’d drop us a line with your reaction.
In conclusion, if you’d like to learn more about producing and distributing audio books, drop us a line at gayle@storytellerschannel.com. 
I’ll be happy to share what we’ve learned.
After all, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Wishing you a Happy New Year.
Gayle Turner
Executive Producer.

Filed Under: Behind the Curtain Tagged With: Poe, Story of a Creative Journey, Storytellers, Storytellers Channel, Tales of Deadly Matrimony

Patchwork Tales: Making Stories from Story Fragments

By Gayle Turner

This edition of the Storytellers Channel’s newsletter features an article by Author/Storyteller/Playwright Linda Goodman. An Appalachian Mountain native of Melungeon descent, she draws on her roots to create a magic world where fantasy and ordinary heroes come together to entertain and inspire. She also tells traditional tales.

She has performed nationwide and been published in the Chicken Soup and Stories for the Heart Series. Her CDs include Jessie and Other Stories and Bobby Pins, both winners of multiple Storytelling World Winner Awards. Her one-woman show and book, Daughters of the Appalachians, has also been performed as a play by theater companies throughout the country. In 2017, Linda appeared on both Ghost Story Stages at the International Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN 
Contact Linda at happytales@aol.com, or visit www.lindagoodmanstoryteller.com.

You can also reach Linda at 804-687-6341if you want to book her for a performance.

Also, an update on the long promised Dead Brides’ Audio book.

Enjoy,
Gayle Turner
The Storytellers Channel

Patchwork Tales: Making Stories from Story Fragments

By Linda Goodman
©Linda Goodman, 6/2015

I have hundreds of story fragments (concepts, memories, story starters) running through my head. Every so often, two or more of them collide and a story is born. Those are usually the easiest stories to write. I feel like I am taking dictation.

Sometimes, though, the collision never happens. That means work is required.

After both my parents had passed away, I began telling an anecdote (fragment #1) at family reunions about the first (and only) time that my Daddy every punished me. My Mama, the disciplinarian in our home, was so mad at me that she did not trust herself to administer my punishment. She ordered Daddy to do it for her. To my surprise, he agreed and took me into the back bedroom and shut the door. I was scared, but even worse, I was humiliated. Daddy had never laid a hand on a child. I would be the first child to have ever been bad enough for him to have to hit.

I readied myself for the blow, but it never came. Instead, Daddy whispered to me to start crying, and I did. Meanwhile, he clapped his hands together hard for about thirty seconds. We did a good job of simulating the sounds of a whipping. In fact, we were so convincing that when Daddy and I came out of that room, Mama wrapped her arms around me and cried, “My baby!” Then she hollered at Daddy for hitting me too hard. She did not speak to him for days.

Whenever I told this anecdote at family gatherings, folks howled with laughter. I decided to take this anecdote to the stage. Before I could do that, though, I had to turn it into a real story. My family laughed at the anecdote because they remembered Mama and Daddy well. My family also knew the context surrounding my story. My storytelling audiences would not have that context. I had to create it for them.

I asked myself why I wanted to share that story. Daddy was a man of great integrity. Why did he choose to make a fool out of Mama? That was totally out of character for him. 

Pondering this issue brought back a memory (fragment #2) of overhearing Mama tell Daddy that we children loved him more than we loved her. Daddy told her that was nonsense. “They don’t love me more than they love you,” he insisted. “It’s just that you’re so stern all the time, they’re afraid to show you any affection. It wouldn’t hurt you to show a little compassion once in a while.”

Why was Mama so mad to begin with? That question brought forth another memory (fragment #3): I had asked Mama if I could go home with my friend Cathy after school that day. She had answered NO! I went anyway. I knew in advance what the consequences would be. That is, I knew until Daddy was brought into the equation. 

Why did he so readily offer to whip me? To make a fool out of the woman he loved and respected most? Or was this his effort to get her to show some compassion to one of her children?

This is where storytelling meets interpretation. I thought back to when I walked out of that room, crocodile tears running down my cheeks, and was met by Mama’s arms, wrapping around me and holding me close. That was the first hug I had ever received from Mama (fragment #4). I don’t know if Daddy planned for that to happen, but in my mind, he did. Because of the hug that resulted from that fake punishment, Mama and I became close. I stopped purposely doing things that I knew would make her mad, and I started to care about her feelings.

This fourth fragment was the key that unlocked the story. The anecdote about the first time Daddy ever punished me had morphed into being the story of the first time Mama ever hugged me. Titled The Punishment, the story became a tool to illustrate the power of compassion over the power of force. 

The Punishment is also one of the tools I use to teach my writing process to participants in my workshop Patchwork Tales: Making Stories from Story Fragments. Everyone has story fragments. Finding the fragments that match up to make a story, much like making a patchwork quilt, can be challenging. It also requires patience when the fragments cannot be matched so easily. Finding the key that unlocked the story to which my anecdote belonged took me almost a year. Once the key was found, however, the story flowed beautifully. In 2014, it received a Winner Award for Tellable Adult Stories from Storytelling World.

What fragments are hanging around in your head? Those that make you feel nothing are dead weight. Instead of focusing on them, concentrate on the ones that make you feel an emotion. Which ones give you the warm fuzzies? Which ones scare you? Which ones make you mad? Which ones make you cry? They are the fragments that are seeds for what could be great stories. These fragments are pure storytelling gold.

What’s Going on at Storytellers Channel

I’ve been telling you about our strategic alliance with the Poe Museum and our plans to record Poe’s canon. The decision was made to offer the audio book(s) for sale on Amazon’s Audible platform. We’re novices at this business of selling stuff online and in order to offer our audio books on Audible, they require you connect to a book sold by Amazon to which you have copyright.

Poe’s works are in the Public Domain and the folks at Amazon said, “Yes, so publish your own version and then you can connect to it and we’ll allow you to sell your audio books on our platform.”

So, we are formatting our own publication of Berenice, Ligeia and Morella along with commentary by Chris Semtner, the Poe Museum Curator under the title, The Dead Brides’ Stories.

So, we appreciate your patience as we continue to move out of our comfort zone. Once this system is in place and we’ve worked the bugs out we expect to start cranking out stories in time for the school year and the holidays.

Until next time, be kind to one another, tell your stries and make time to listen to others’ stories.

Gayle Turner

Filed Under: Become a Storyteller Tagged With: Patchwork Tales, Poe, Storytellers, Storytellers Channel

Love & Death Poe Style

By Gayle Turner

This edition of the Storytellers Channel’s newsletter features Chris Semtner, Curator, The Poe Museum, writing about the impact of Love on Poe’s work  and highlighting a couple of artifacts from the museum’s collection.
This past spring I directed R.Satiafa’s play, Love Locked Down, about the legacy of slavery. In my ongoing research as we prepare to mount another production in the fall I just finished reading The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. I cannot commend the book too highly.
Enjoy,
Gayle Turner
The Storytellers Channel

Love & Death

Young, lovely, and musically gifted, Virginia Poe was deeply devoted to her husband Edgar Allan Poe. And he wrote a friend that he loved her “as no man ever loved before.” Despite their struggles with poverty as he moved from city to city in search of writing jobs, the couple found warmth and happiness in the parlor of their modest home where, no matter how poor he became, he made sure she had a piano to play. After grueling days at the magazine office, he would join Virginia and her mother to make cheerful music by the gentle glow of the fireplace. 

Virginia sang and played her piano while Edgar accompanied her on the flute. Her mother sang along while their cat Catterina curled up in her lap. Having grown up as an unwanted foster child constantly reminded by his guardian that he did not belong, Edgar finally found peace and security with two women who absolutely adored him.

Then one night everything changed. While she was singing, Virginia started to cough. She coughed again and again, struggling to breathe. That’s when Edgar saw a few drops of blood on the piano keys. She was coughing up blood. It was tuberculosis, the same dread disease that had claimed his mother, brother, and foster mother. In Poe’s day, there was no cure, and all hope was lost. As Poe wrote, “Her life was despaired of…She recovered partially and I again hoped. At the end of a year the vessel broke again — I went through precisely the same scene. Again in about a year afterward. Then again — again — again & even once again at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death — and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity.”

How did the knowledge of his wife’s impending death impact his writing? Listen to “The Oval Portrait,” the story of a brilliant artist with a beautiful young wife. Like Poe, the artist is committed to his craft and labors to paint the perfect portrait of his beloved. He devotes so much time to this painting that he fails to realize his wife is dying from neglect. Could this be Poe’s expression of the guilt and sorrow he felt as he watched his own beloved die?

The next selection, “Eleonora,” tells the tale of two young cousins who grow up together, just as the very young Virginia grew up before the eyes of her cousin Edgar. (She was nine when they met and only thirteen when they married.) In the short story, the two cousins fall in love and get married. Just like Virginia, Eleonora, the wife in the story, grows ill. Before she succumbs to the disease, she makes her husband never to love another. As you will soon hear, her widower struggles with guilt and despair, terrified that devoting himself to another woman will invoke the wrath of his first wife’s ghost. Listen to the story to find out what happens next.

What’s Going on at Storytellers Channel

Well, we had the Virginia Storytelling Alliance’s From Plot to Narrative retreat with Elizabeth Ellis up at the Whippoorwill Manor Farm in Madison, VA June 8-10. It was a grand success. Danita Rountree Green aka R. Satiafa crafted a story at the workshop thinking she’d never have an opportunity to tell it again. The very next week she was asked to step in for the key note speaker at a conference she was attending and got to tell the story again to another appreciative audience. Congratulations Danita.

Andy Offutt Irwin and Darci Tucker’s concert at HATTheatre in Richmond’s fashionable West End was an equally delightful event. Darci shared her story of a colonial woman who dressed up like a man (an illegal act in those days) and enlisted in the Continental Army. We were all enraptured from beginning to end. Check her out at AmericanLives.net

Andy delighted us with guitar, singing, whistling par excellence and of course he regaled us with stories of his Aunt Marguerite.
You can find more about Andy at AndyIrwin.com

I mentioned Danita Rountree Green aka R. Satiafa earlier and the work we’ve been doing on her play, Love Locked Down. My research on the project led me to reading The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. The book is subtitled A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America.

I begin our storytelling workshops by saying, “We live into the stories we tell ourselves.” This book lays to rest a number of fallacious myths that permeate our national dialogue. I found it riveting and stayed up past my bedtime way too many evenings reading it. As I mentioned in the intro, I cannot commend this book too much.

This Issue’s Poe Museum Artifact: A Gift from Poe to His Last Love

Shortly before his death, Edgar Allan Poe gave this glass, part of a set with a decanter and other glasses, as a gift to his last love, Elmira Royster Shelton. Though the struggling author could ill-afford such extravagant purchases, he gifted her the glassware set, a gold ring with his name inscribed on the inside, and a locket with his and her initials on the back. Meanwhile, his hotel confiscated his luggage until he could pay for his room.

Poe had first fallen in love with Elmira Royster Shelton a quarter century earlier, when they were teenagers in Richmond. Even though her father James Royster, a wealthy merchant, disapproved of her relationship with the unadopted orphan Poe, Elmira had clandestine meetings with Edgar behind the tall brick walls of a secluded garden. Determined to spend their lives together, the young lovers became secretly engaged. They were to marry after Poe graduated college and could take care of himself. 

Then her father intervened. When Poe sent her love letters from the University of Virginia, Elmira’s father saw them before she did and burned them. Each time Elmira handed her father letters to mail Edgar, Mr. Royster destroyed those, too—convincing each lover that the other had forgotten them. 

Consequently, by the time Edgar returned from college for Christmas, Elmira was engaged to an older, richer man. Upon learning the news, the devastated Poe ran away from home. A few years later, he heard from a mutual friend that Elmira never really loved her husband and still had feelings for Poe. About this time, Poe wrote “The Assignation,” a short story about a dark-haired, mysterious young man hopelessly infatuated with a beautiful young woman who is married to a rich older man she didn’t really love. Does that sound familiar? Listen to the story to discover how the loss of his first great love inspired Poe’s art.

Elmira stayed with her husband until his sudden, early death. In the last year of his life, the widowed Edgar reunited with her, and the two renewed their engagement. That is when he gave her this glass, which her great-great-great grandson donated to the Poe Museum as a reminder of Poe’s first and last love. You can see it today in the Poe Museum’s Elizabeth Arnold Poe Memorial Building. 

Be sure to visit the Poe Museum.

Filed Under: Behind the Curtain Tagged With: Eleonora, Poe, Storytellers, Storytellers Channel, The Oval Portrait, Virginia Poe

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Coming Together

This Friday evening, June 12, and Saturday morning, June 13, the Virginia Storytelling Alliance will hold its Annual Virginia Storytelling Gathering … [Read More...] about Coming Together

Copyright Storytellers Channel, Inc. © 2021 Website By Charles George