Storyteller Daniel Morden entertains on Smart Talk; Social enterprise
“If you’re a human being, you tell stories . . . you organize the events of the day in order to emphasize a certain attitude to those events. You omit certain events, you emphasize others. That is the act of creating a story, we are natural storytellers.”
– Daniel Morden
The spoken word has transcended print, television and the internet as a living document of human progress. Storytelling preserves history, teaches generations life lessons hidden within parables and fables, it entertains and comforts us. It connects people through our most basic form of communication. And while people drift from moveable type to radio to television to the internet, the one constant is the need for people to share their stories with others.
This tradition will be on display at the 5th Annual Lititz Storytelling Festival, Friday and Saturday, September 10th & 11th at the Warwick Middle School Auditorium.
Award winning Welsh storyteller Daniel Morden joined Smart Talk Wednesday to discuss life as a modern-troubadour, the role of Greek myth in contributing to today’s storytelling tradition, and why pain and adversity make for the most resonant tales. Morden described just how engaging a well told story can be for the listener:
“When you finish a performance of The Iliad or The Odyssey, the audience ought to have gone a journey. They ought to have finished and sit back and go “aahh.” And there ought to be sweat rings under their armpits. They ought to have been through that ordeal, at some level, with Odysseus.”
Good storytelling can create images every bit as vivid as something seen on film, what Morden calls the ‘cinema of the mind’:
“Someone can tell the story of a giant tearing a palace out of the ground and wading across the ocean and placing the palace on the other side of the sea and we don’t have to spend all that money, we don’t have to waste all those resources on CGI. We just say it, and the audience pictures it.”
Festival founder David Worth discussed who will be presenting at the event, including Carmen Didi, a Cuban American who tells tales of growing up Cuban in Georgia, Donald Davis, the “Dean” of American storytelling as well as Daniel Morden.
During Wednesday’s Smart Talk, we also explored the juxtaposition of social responsibility and environmental attention with business development in Lancaster County as Jessica King and Jonathan Coleman, both of ASSETS Lancaster, talk about Lancaster County’s 2017 Great Social Enterprise Pitch, an effort to encourage new businesses that serve the community as well as their clients.
ASSETS Lancaster spoke of the motivation for the endeavor:
“It’s a way of doing business that integrates impact, social impact, environmental impact, changing the world in some way into an actual business model. So not to say that business is to make money at all costs, but also to do good and to make change in the community.”
The Great Social Enterprise is a partnership between the Lancaster County Community Foundation and ASSETS Lancaster.
