Statewide Interactive
Originally aired April 11, 1997
 PERSPECTIVE
Beth Cross-Storyteller

Produced by Brad Pace,
STATEWIDE Director

"...and she pulled that trigger, and kabloom!"
[Jana McGuire, Statewide Host] It takes a special gift to tell a story well. Tonight take a listen to one of the best in Nebraska. Our "Other Voices" segment features the voice of Storyteller Beth Cross.
[Beth Cross as she introduces herself to a new audience] So I'm your storyteller for today and I'm going to have some stories for you. What do you know about Scotland?...
[Cross explaining her approach to storytelling] What makes a good story is a good listener. You'll see somebody's eyes and you'll see the story coming to life in that person's eyes, and you're telling to everybody, but in every crowd, there's going to be someone that that story is alive for. Maybe it started out as something that really did happen in the neighborhood, some strange thing happened, and then it gets turn into this tale, and it grows and it grows, and then there's this hero and all sorts of things get attributed to him. Once the imagination starts working, it just never stops.
[And Cross as she plys her craft] ...And she pulled that trigger, and kabloom!
"What makes a good story is a good listener. You'll see somebody's eyes and you'll see the story coming to life in that person's eyes... "
If you tell a story -- if you just try to tell a story that you've heard, you'll remember it better, and then the second time you try it, they'll be more ideas, you can see it better, and you will get more of the details, and it will just grow in you....where sits our sulking, sullen dame gathering her brows like gathering storm nursing her wrath to keep it warm. I don't know if you understood that all, but what it means is that when the peddlers began to leave the street.The beauty of the story is that it carries you, it moves. And if you summarize at the end -- "This is the moral of the story," -- you're shutting it down, you're breaking it into parts because usually stories don't have one moral, they have many....And the thunder crashed and the lightening flashed, and anyone, even a bare child would know that it was not a fit night for man or beast...The stories are a way of teaching that it's not for the kindergartners, it's not for people who can only understand simple things. Stories are for everyone.
Captioning by Nebraska Captioning Center, Lincoln, Nebraska .