Jim May sees life as a series of stories, and the telling of stories as a key to understanding life.
“Telling stories is the way we define each other,” he said. “Where I grew up, everyone knew everyone else’s story, and storytelling was a part of our entertainment. I picked up the rhythms of the storytellers I grew up with.”
To those rhythms, May has added notes of his own. In the process, he has won a television Emmy award, has been a featured performer at the nation’s most prestigious storytelling festival and has had a publisher buy one of his stories for a children’s book. He’s working on another book, featuring stories of life in McHenry County, where he grew up and still lives.
Locally, though, May is probably best known as the co-creator, with his cousin Bob May, of the annual Illinois Storytelling Festival.
In its 10th year, the festival draws several thousand people from throughout the Midwest to Spring Grove, a quiet hamlet in the northeast corner of McHenry County, for a weekend of children’s tales, ghost stories, family reminiscences, liars’ contests and other forms of old-fashioned “back porch” entertainment. This year’s festival will be July 24-25.
Bob May, who runs a land management firm in Richmond, Spring Grove’s neighbor to the west, handles the business end of the festival. Jim May handles the artistic end, lining up performers and performing himself.
Indeed, Jim May’s storytelling skills are a big reason for the festival’s success. May has been earning his living as a professional storyteller the last eight years, traveling the country like a modern-day troubador. He taps the acquaintances he has made along the way to draw top storytelling talent to the festival. His local reputation also attracts many spectators.
“Very personal, friendly, laid-back, almost as if you’re sitting at the dinner-table listening to a warm family conversation,” is how storyteller Beth Horner of Evanston describes May’s storytelling style. “He has excellent comic timing. At the same time, Jim can tell a beautiful literary tale.”
One such tale earned him a Chicago Television Academy Emmy Award for children’s programming in 1989. “A Bell for Shorty,” which May composed as a tribute to his late father, George W. “Shorty” May, appeared on WTTW Channel 11’s Word Picture series. The seven-minute film featured May standing in a Spring Grove barn as he told the story, a sweetly sad reminiscence of his life as a 6-year-old boy with his father on the family farm.
“My father was in his 50s when I was born, so he was like a grandfather as well as a father to me,” said May, 46. “He died when I was 16. If I had to pick a favorite story to tell, it would be `A Bell for Shorty.’ When I tell the story, it’s like my father is here again, lending me a hand.”
And when May is at his storytelling best, listeners enjoy that same sense. A storyteller’s ability to give listeners a feeling of reality, and immediacy, and to help them conjure images the storyteller has in his own mind are why storytelling as an art form has been making a comeback in recent years, according to Jimmy Neil Smith, executive director of the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling (NAPPS).
The 7,000-member NAPPS runs the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn., an annual event since 1973. Smith said renewed interest in storytelling is an extension of a revival of folk arts that has occurred during the past 20 years. He attributes the revival to a desire many people have for simpler and more honest forms of entertainment than those that are being produced on television or in the movies.
“There is nothing more real in communicating than storytelling,” Smith said. “There’s a connectedness between a storyteller and the audience that people don’t get from TV or radio or movies. A storyteller can watch the audience react as the story unfolds, and the reactions influence the telling of the story. The audience is important in a way that it can’t possibly be while watching TV or a movie.”
And there’s more to storytelling than entertainment, even with the audience influencing the show. Storytellers once were a community’s historians, and today’s storytellers often tell tales of local legend or historical fact that help listeners understand different times, people or places.
Storytellers also help people use their imaginations “to dream and imagine and think of things that help us explore dimensions of reality,” Smith said. “Somewhere along the way Jim realized how important and powerful stories can be. He was among the early wave of the movement, a pioneer of sorts who has been instrumental in the revival of storytelling.”
The National Storytelling Festival, in fact, was instrumental in changing May’s life. May said that in 1979 a friend took him there “kicking and screaming. But once I got there, I immediately felt a sense of recognition and comfort.”
That sense sprang from May’s boyhood in Spring Grove, where his ancestors had settled in the 1840s. While May was growing up, his grandfather owned the town’s general store. One of his uncles owned the car dealership. And his father was a farmer and horse trader. The general store, the car dealership and the horse barn were gathering places for most of the locals, many of whom spun a good yarn, May said.
“The people I heard at the national festival were like the people I used to hear telling stories in the horse barn. Professional storytelling immediately appealed to me,” he said.
May, who was then an elementary school teacher in Woodstock, returned from the festival with one story, about a mountain man named Jack, in his head. “I told it to my students, and they acted like, `What happened to this guy? He wasn’t this interesting last week.’ “
May liked the reaction, and he started delving into storytelling as a serious art form. One way he did that was to start listening more closely to other people’s stories.
While listening to a playground tale children at Woodstock’s Clay Street School were telling, May started melding elements of the story with those of a traditional folk tale he knew. He threw in some original thoughts of his own and came up with “The Boo Baby Girl Meets the Ghost of Mable’s Gable,” a story that has been turned into a children’s book published by Brotherstone Publishers in Elgin.
The story is about a diaper-wearing toddler who outwits a ghost and bests two boastful 8th graders to recover treasure from a haunted house.
“Kids really enjoy `Boo Baby,’ ” said Jim Lehman, Brotherstone’s owner. “It’s a fun story, with a surprise twist. Add to that that it’s about a little creature who has more power and courage than two bigger kids. Kids love that. And you should see Jim tell the story to schoolchildren. He imitates the manner of a toddler in telling `Boo Baby.’ “
Lehman said he has attended several Illinois Storytelling Festivals and has heard May deliver his stories on many occasions. Some of May’s stories are traditional folk tales, but he probably is best known for his original stories, many of which he draws from the people and places he has known as a Spring Grove native and life-long McHenry County resident. May now lives near Hebron, a few miles west of Spring Grove.
Storytelling fans from around the country got to hear those stories in 1987, when May was a featured performer at the national festival, the largest in the United States.
May’s wife of seven years, Nancy Seidler, said it’s in her husband’s nature to tell stories. “He’s always sharing interesting anecdotes,” she said. “Even before he was telling stories professionally, he was the person in the group with good stories to tell.”
May often travels around the country and to Europe, she said, both to tell his own stories and to search for material for new ones, and that also keeps life interesting. But she said life really starts hopping when her husband gets together with other storytellers.
“That’s a kick,” Seidler said. “The stories come so fast, and are so well told.”
Many others wish to become participants, and May obliges them by holding storytelling seminars and workshops.
A recent participant in one of his workshops was Linda Raine of Cary, a teacher in Cary Elementary District 26. The object of the workshop was to help teachers learn to use storytelling techniques in the classroom. About 30 teachers in a master’s degree program at National Louis University in Evanston participated in the two-hour workshop, which featured May telling stories and then breaking them down to explain various storytelling techniques and how to apply them.
“It’s something I definitely will try to do,” Raine said.”Reading, writing and storytelling all go together. Using storytelling is another way to make school more interesting.”
And the way May sees it, storytelling is a way to do much more than that. The telling of traditional tales, variations of which have been around hundreds of years, are a way to “bring about a sense of the mythological as a part of everyday life,” he said. “Foolish stories show us that part of the universal condition.
“A good storyteller first needs to have a drive to tell stories. I don’t know why I have that drive, but I do,” he said. “I feel most alive when I’m telling my stories.”
