Storytelling must go back to Adam and Eve. Could it have started when he came home to tell her about the big fish that got away?
Taking the art of storytelling through the ages, Speaking of Stories this weekend offers for the first time Personal Stories: Santa Barbara Voices. These stories — written and read by local writers — will be performed by two lineups Friday through Sunday.
They are much like the Moth Radio Hour, a New York City nonprofit organization dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. These true stories draw audiences like a light draws moths.
For 20 years, Speaking of Stories has featured professional actors reading published short stories. In September, it ran a contest for true stories to be read by the author. The result is an eclectic collection of humorous, poignant, embarrassing and touching stories at Center Stage Theater at Paseo Nuevo in Santa Barbara. Among the two groups are Linda Stewart-Oaten, Jeff Wing, Dan Gunther, Kathy Marden, Michael Russer and, admittedly, myself. Click here for the complete lineup of 20 authors, times and more information.
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In a world dominated by computers and high tech, the typewriter barely gets a mention any more. Not with award-winning actor Tom Hanks. Since 1978, he has collected typewriters, both manual and portable dating, from the 1930s to 1990s.
According to the Los Angeles Times, he has written a collection of stories to be released at an unknown date by Alfred A. Knopf.
“The stories are not about the typewriters themselves, but rather the stories are something that might have been written on one of them,” he says.
Hanks’ inspiration goes back to storytelling (a familiar theme in this column?).
“I’ve been around great storytellers all my life and, like an enthusiastic student, I want to tell some of my own,” he says.
Hanks has had one of his stories published in The New Yorker magazine recently, “Alan Bean Plus Four.” He gives credit for the inspiration from being around the space program while making Apollo 13 and From the Earth to the Moon. I’d say he’s a good type of writer if inspired by a typewriter …
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When local author Joan Bowman’s father, Joe Marinello, died, she joined her two sisters to honor him by creating a cookbook. In the last year of his life, this outstanding Italian cook wrote down favorite recipes for his daughters. They now appear in La Cucina Marinello: Three Generations of Italian Cooking.
This family cookbook was, as she says, “A labor of love for the last six years. My sisters and I wrote it to celebrate our Southern Italian heritage and honoring our dad’s wish to pass our family recipes down to the next generation.”
A Santa Barbara resident for almost 30 years, Bowman is not new to writing and publishing. She was the acting publisher of Advocacy Press, a nonprofit educational publisher, where she revised the celebrated Choices Life Skills Journals for adolescents and published Letters from the Heart for Girls Incorporated of Greater Santa Barbara.
The cookbook uses her Ph.D. in human development to write about family rituals and traditions. She and her blogging partner, Rhona Gordon, can be read on their blog, Food and Friendship Santa Barbara, which focuses on the essentials of food and friendship, while celebrating our unique area and its bountiful resources.
Bowman found extra pleasure with the book project when doing signings.
“I am having fun with the book,” she wrote. “People’s reaction to it interests and stimulates me. It’s as if they pick out the most important themes, and from their lens you adjust and see your book in a wholly different light.”
Click here for a sneak preview of the cookbook.
“My identity is hidden behind a Scottish last name, but if you were in my kitchen, that’s another story,” she says.
The book demonstrates her Italian side.
Click here for a related Noozhawk article on Bowman.
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“A gentleman and a scholar.”
That classic handle sums up the late Charles Champlin, the Los Angeles Times arts editor, film critic and columnist for almost three decades. Champlin died Sunday in Los Angeles of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He was 88.
Even with credentials that any journalist would die for, Champlin was easy to talk to and showed genuine interest in others. He was also a mainstay in Barnaby Conrad’s circle of well-known writer friends, along with Ray Bradbury, Charles Schulz and several others who participated in the Santa Barbara Writers Conference.
As a student years ago at the writers conference, I knew Champlin from a distance: head of his nonfiction workshop or on stage speaking. He was many degrees of separation from me, but not for long. One morning we ended up at the same table for breakfast. Conversation came easily.
In the mid-1980s, Paul Lazaurus, co-director of SBWC, asked me to lead my own nonfiction workshop. I was filled with a “newbie’s” doubts for this assignment. Even though Champlin had graduated from Harvard, served as journalist for two of the country’s top magazines, Life and Time, and personally knew endless celebrities, he again sat at breakfast next to me.
Right away he congratulated me on my new role and proceeded to share encouraging words of wisdom full of common sense and integrity. Soon I was calling him Chuck, a name his friends and colleagues used, and knew I had a friend forever. The world without him will not be nearly as classy has it has been.
— Noozhawk columnist Susan Miles Gulbransen — a Santa Barbara native, writer and book reviewer — teaches writing at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and through the Santa Barbara City College Continuing Education Division. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are her own.
