The Storyteller Short Story Pdf
The Storyteller Short Story Pdf
The Storyteller Short Story Summary

Liz Lochheadcasts a spell in this magical realist poem.

In 2011 Lochhead was chosen as the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry winner. During her decades-long career she has also been writer-in-residence for Dundee College of Art, poet laureate for Glasgow, and Makar (the national poet of Scotland). She is one of Scotland’s foremost writers: poet, playwright and performer.

Storyteller is the introductory poem in a 1978 collection entitled The Grimm Sisters. These poems follow paths trodden by well-known fairy-tales, but the viewpoint is female and the tone is often ironic. The title of the collection alludes to ‘The Brothers Grimm,’ but the gender and syntax is switched. Lochhead’s intention is to restore to a central position those people whose stories are often marginalised or silenced in mainstream narratives: women, lowly workers, domestic servants. The collection also explores ‘storytelling’: the social importance of stories and tales; the power of a well-told story to cast a spell over listeners; how sharing in the telling of and listening to stories can draw a community of people together. As such, this poem presents a lowly female domestic worker in a central position – her work and words fill the scene and illuminate the household. We can see and hear how important storytelling was to people during long, dark winter nights before the coming of electricity and mass communication.

Storyteller’s first line sets the scene: she sat down. The words are simple and unadorned. Even the capital letter is absent, as if this is a scene that repeats every night without rest. One of the most famous storytellers is Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights. Each night she would leave her story on a cliff-hanger and take it up seamlessly the next night, keeping her audience – including the king – on tenterhooks. Night by night, Scheherazade postponed her own beheading (eventually the king was so won over by the power of her words that he pardoned and married her!) Lochhead’s storyteller wears the mantle of this literary trope: the storyteller sitting down in front of an eager audience to tell a tale. Think of a primary school teacher in front of her class; a troubadour in front of a crowd; an actor stepping out on stage. Lochhead herself is a prolific performer: the simple physical act of ‘sitting’ signifies the storytelling time has come.

For the next hour or so the real-world melts away, to be replaced by the imaginary world of the storyteller’s design. The story is completely captivating. In the lines below look how enjambment between held / breath creates a little physical pause, as if you are holding your breath, waiting:

I will try to add a few short stories every month. The Storyteller (Saki) by H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916) Approximate Word Count: 2109 I t was a hot afternoon, and the railway carriage was correspondingly sultry, and the next stop was at Templecombe, nearly an hour ahead. The occupants of the carriage were a small girl, and a smaller girl. The Storyteller Presents A Short Story. Yesterday I was telling a marvelous tale of how the moon became round, and suddenly, as I reached the best bit, I couldn't remember what came next. The Storyteller was featured as The Short Story of the Day on Fri, Oct 25, 2013. Create a library and add your favorite stories. Get started by clicking the 'Add.

Night in
she’d have us waiting, held
breath, for the ending we knew by heart.

You might recognise this feeling of anticipation from sitting on the carpet as your teacher read to the class, or being tucked up in bed listening to one of your favourite stories. It doesn’t matter how many times you heard someone tell it to you, you still enjoyed it over and over again. In this poem it’s not the story but the way the storyteller tells it that her listeners love.

The scene is close and intimate. Her audience crowd into the tiny kitchen, each busying themselves with small tasks (grating, sewing) while they listen. She sits at a kitchen table beside a ‘dresser’ (kitchen shelves displaying pots and pans). The diction Lochhead employs is archaic, drawn from the world of fairy stories: ‘delft’ is a Scottish dialect word for clay pottery; ‘swept kitchen’ alludes faintly to the story of Cinderella; ‘dresser’ is an old-fashioned word. Lochhead writes in the literary tradition of magical realism. Rather than point to a specific time and place, she wants to capture a feel: timeless, historical, before electric lights and television screens, a time when nights still hid imaginary terrors and the spoken word contained spellbinding power. Other diction points to the realities of subsistence living: scoured, swept, cracked and salted all suggest physical labour, hardship and privation. Lochhead makes it easy for us to imagine the peasants and servants crowding into a tiny kitchen after a hard day’s work, ready for their evening meal and nightly story by the warmth of the stove.

The first line of the second stanza is the key idea in the poem: no one could say the stories were useless. Telling stories is another kind of work, as vital to the community as salting fish, scouring clean the table, planting in the fields or stitching clothes. It is different because it is not physical work: but telling a vivid story is its own art and skill and is just as important. Lochhead writes as the tongue clacked at the head of a list of other tasks on which her audience absent-mindedly work as they listen: grating corn and repairing (pieced, stitched, darning) worn clothes. The strongest sound in the poem so far is the onomatopoeia word clacked. Drawn from the vocabulary of weaving at a loom, this sound word effectively allows the storyteller’s voice to dominate the scene and equates her art with the work of weaving cloth.

In both the first and second stanza, whether to bring alive the sounds of housework or to suggest the artful mastery of storytelling, the words of the poem leap from the page and into your ear. Try reading it aloud: in stanza one the simple action of the broom comes to life through sibilance: she sat, scoured, swept, beside, dresser, last, salted. In the second stanza fricative F sounds suggest fingers brushing cloth: five or forty fingers. Plosive and dental alliteration bring to mind the physical action of needle punching through fabric: patchwork was pieced… darning was done. But that’s not all – through careful sound matching (an effect called euphony) Lochhead’s scene is peaceful, warming and quiet. Sounds of housework are in the background, they run underneath the storyteller’s words like a musical accompaniment.

The Storyteller Short Story Pdf

In the first of two figurative comparisons, the storyteller’s art is directly compared to weaving:

It was like spinning,
gathering air to the single strongest
thread.

In this simile, Lochhead likens the telling of a story to textiles. In her work the storyteller weaves a story out of her words, seemingly summoned out of thin air. The single strongest thread may refer to the most important feature of a story: its plot, perhaps, or the main character. In idiomatic ways the English language is already tuned to this simile: we say both ‘to spin a good yarn,’ meaning to tell a good story, and ‘following the thread’ of a narrative. Figuratively, it is easy to imagine a story as a single piece of cloth woven from different elements: plot, character, language, structure and so on.

Whatever her supposed day job, we can see that, by night, she becomes an incredible storyteller. You might need to use some inferencing on stanza 3 though, as the first few lines are a little difficult to decode. ‘Slander’ means to speak badly of someone and ‘shift’ can mean a shift at work; therefore slander her shiftless means to complain that she’s not doing any work (like grating corn husks or mending fabric). Never the one looks a bit like Scottish