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Submitted Photo Connie Regan-Blake will present a workshop on storytelling at the CLE today, at 3 p.m.
Internationally known storyteller, Connie Regan-Blake will be presenting a workshop on storytelling at the Center for Life Enrichment in Highlands today.
Growing up in the American South, Regan-Blake said she was surrounded by storytelling at a young age. She graduated from Loyola University in New Orleans and backpacked around Europe for over a year before landing a job in Chattanooga as a professional storyteller.
“It was a very innovative library program for that to even happen,” Regan-Blake said. “I just knew, probably within the first two months, that this was something I was going to be doing for the rest of my life. It was something about the connection with the audience. I don’t know if I could have said it this way at the time, but the energy of that and the openness, it has been an absolutely bejeweled life.”
With entertaining audiences from 47 states, 18 countries and six continents, Regan-Blake said it’s not the places that are different, but there are different types of listeners.
“Each audience has their own personality,” Regan-Blake said. “In some places, humor is different. People might laugh at certain things or not, but in general audiences are different and listen differently.”
She explained that stories are what makes humans human.
“Traditional stories are the ones that we have passed down for hundreds and thousands of years,” Regan-Blake said. “They are a part of who we are as humans and there’s something in those stories that we want passed to the next generation. I also tell personal experience and true-life stories. I tell lots of funny stories and one whole CD recording of ghost stories. So, I tell a whole gambit. It really depends on the type of audience that I have.”
Regan-Blake helped ignite and shape the American storytelling revival. She was a founding board member of the National Storytelling Association and continues to be a frequent host and featured performer at the National Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn. Throughout her career, she has performed at the nation’s top folk music and storytelling festivals, including the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington D.C., the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival in Orem, Utah, and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. It is Regan-Blake’s unique honor to be the only performer invited onstage for every NSF since its conception in 1973.
“This year in October, the National Festival in Jonesborough will be celebrating its 50th year,” Regan-Blake said. “Every year, it has grown. When it started, I was part of the audience and there were only 35-40 people. Pre-COVID, it had grown to about 10,000 people. There was a special intimacy to it. Once you come, you feel a magnet to it. It keeps bringing you back every year. There are people who have been coming for 20 or 30 years.
In the CLE workshop, Regan-Blake said she will be interspersing some of her favorite stories, as well as teaching ideas on how to tell stories.
“I hope that after they leave the workshop, it might just click something in them,” Regan-Blake said. “I’m going to give them some basics of storytelling, kind of a steppingstone of how they can do storytelling. If there are people that come that are already storytelling, my intention is to take them to their next step. I would love for people to walk out smiling and thinking, ‘You know, I think I can do that.’ It doesn’t have to be onstage, but maybe they will stop by a neighbor’s house or call a friend and tell a story that I told, or tell them a story they were reminded of within those two hours.”
The Art and Heart of Storytelling workshop will be held at the CLE Lecture Hall in the Peggy Crosby Center from 3 - 5 p.m.
- By Christopher Lugo