Librarian’s Tales Open World of Stories for Pasadena Youths

Two blocks away from Washington Middle School is La Pintoresca Library, a whitewashed adobe building with red Spanish tiles where only the soft murmur of patrons and the crisp sound of turning pages fill the air.

It was to here that Teri Uyemura marched her boisterous sixth-grade class one recent morning, slipping in through a side entrance and herding the children into a room filled with folding metal chairs.

This was an unusual outing for the students of Room 115. Today, they would leave the three Rs behind for half a day to experience the ancient tradition of storytelling. Then, they would act out the fairy tales. Finally, they would spin their own creative tales by writing and illustrating storybooks that would yield some startling results.

Their guide through the world of dancing shoes, river demons and wicked stepmothers was Barbara Martin, a storytelling librarian who succeeded in casting her own spell on the pupils from Northwest Pasadena.

“It made me laugh,” said Camea Gholar, summing up the exhilaration that swept most of the class that winter morning. Camea, who played a wicked stepmother with a fondness for citrus, also discovered that acting infused her with surprising confidence.

“I’m shy to read in front of the class, but not to perform here,” she confided later with muted pride.

Martin, an animated woman whose facial expressiveness helps bring her characters to life, first told a Haitian folk tale about a forlorn stepchild who discovers an orange tree that blooms magically with bountiful fruit. Thanks to the benevolent tree, the child banishes hunger and eventually wins favor with his wicked stepmother.

The tale seemed to have particular resonance for the children in Room 115, some of whom come from poor families and have experienced either hunger or parents who are indifferent or absent.

“Those stories are chosen purposely to keep their attention, because the kids can relate a great deal,” Martin said later. “I’ve had kids ask me for oranges right out of my lunch.”

The storytelling at La Pintoresca Library is part of a cultural heritage program sponsored by the Pasadena Public Library and the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts. The idea, in addition to sparking creativity and dramatic skills, was for the children to use the stories to get at their personal feelings, a sort of storytelling therapy, Martin said.

“They can show anger and ugliness, but it’s not them being ugly or angry, it’s their character,” Martin explained. “Sometimes it’s fun to experience emotions like that in a safe situation like a play.”

The class also relished the music-making that accompanied the fairy tale, a standard feature in Haitian stories. Adriana Bernal, Chris Spearman, Greg English and Jaime Solorzano got to make a symphony hall’s worth of noise: discordant, clanging sounds using everything from a guitar to maracas to sticks drummed against metal trash cans.

“Orange tree, orange tree, grow and grow and grow,” they sang and banged on cue as the tree miraculously sprouted oranges in the barren land.

When it came time to act out the fable, Martin had to pick from a host of eager hands who wanted to seize the day.

And to their surprise, Martin and Uyemura found that some of the most outspoken pupils in the classroom were transformed into silent wallflowers while the quiet children who rarely spoke in school, suddenly took center stage.

For the plum role of the stepchild, Martin made an auspicious choice in Ryan Whiting, whose eyes glinted mischievously as he plotted his performance.

Ryan proved a natural comedic talent, as he pantomimed inhaling the sweet aroma of the oranges, meticulously peeling and then wolfing them down, then smacking his lips, patting his full belly and sighing with sated relief.

“Ryan was really good at remembering the story and picking out little things to re-enact,” Uyemura said. “He loves it and he’s a real character.”

Jacob Hweamel, who played the tree, also showed a canny understanding of an inanimate object, bringing sympathetic life to what could have been a thankless role.

Later that week, the students filed back into La Pintoresca-- pintoresca means picturesque in Spanish--to try composing their own stories. Besides their own imagination, their tools consisted of cardboard, colored construction paper and colored felt tip pens.

The project, which combined creative writing and art, brought home to Uyemura the harsh realities that her students grapple with today, both inside and outside the classroom.

Although many of the children penned short stories about traveling to Mars and visiting the Alps, Tommy Najarian opted for a deadly detailed and graphically illustrated story about two rival black gangs that dress in red and blue and fire machine guns at each other.

Tommy, who spent his early years in a town outside Beirut and speaks Lebanese, Armenian and English, is no stranger to violence.

But having escaped from one of the most war-scarred places on Earth, Tommy finds that violence still dogs him in Northwest Pasadena.

When asked about the Bloods and Crips, two of the most notorious black gangs in Los Angeles, the sixth-grader responded, “I learned about them from the streets of L.A . . . I saw a fight after school with Bloods and Crips.”

Tommy’s seatmate, Aaron McKinley, whose storybook bound with gold string tells the tale of a frightened dog and cat who meet in a New York City dump, chimed in with his own personal advice about gangs:

“You don’t mess with them. You stay away from them. If you just look at them, they’ll beat you up.”

Martin says it’s not unusual for students in Northwest Pasadena to forgo writing about leprechauns and pots of gold in favor of personal experiences, especially when “some of them have seen people in their own families get killed.”

But the librarian says she feels especially rewarded when after school, one or two Washington Middle School students who have participated in her storytelling program drift into the library to seek her out and find out how to borrow books.

“A lot of the ones we see may not even finish high school, so this is their only chance. If we give them a positive picture of a library . . . and bring the books alive for them when they’re young, maybe they’ll keep coming back.”