The “side-splitting nature” of Bil Lepp causes listener reactions like on these faces as they they laugh at one of his ridiculous and hilarious stories. Jay Huron
The Tennessee mountain town has become an international center for people and cultures telling what needs to be told.
Maybe one way to think about the upcoming 50th annual National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, is through the words of International Storytelling Center President Kiran Singh Sirah, in a blog this spring:
Our organizational history is inextricable from this particular community, where residents watched a dying Main Street transform into the “Storytelling Capital of the World,” one October weekend at a time.
Or maybe think about it via this famous quote from the Los Angeles Times: “For what New Orleans is to jazz . . . Jonesborough is to storytelling.”
Whatever the perspective, the reality is substantial and sustaining. That first gathering of 60 people led by founder Jimmy Neil Smith through the years of perhaps the festival’s most famous storyteller—Ray Hicks—Jonesborough has come to now host a three-day festival that draws more than 10,000 people. Sirah is evangelical about the resulting magic: stories from all over the world.
“We know that stories from different people, different times and different places contain important information about the past,” writes Sirah, who took over from Smith in 2013. “But they are also in dialogue with the present, helping us make our way through the world with empathy and curiosity and kindness.”
The ‘22 event is October 6-9. storytellingcenter.net/festival/main
The story above first appeared in our September / October 2022 issue.
