Listen, Now, to a Storyteller’s Tale of Work

Ed R. Dobyns, 55, believes he was born to be a professional storyteller but took the long way around getting there.

“I originally set out to be an engineer and became a good one,” said the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station worker who lives in San Clemente. “It took me until I was 40 years old to discover I was also supposed to be a storyteller.”

It began with stories for his three daughters. Then “their teachers asked me to tell stories at school to the other children,” he said. “I liked that.”

So much, in fact, that he’s still telling stories before school groups and others, and charging money for it. For an hourlong “gig,” as he calls a storytelling assignment, he charges anywhere from $300 to $500. The school visits, which are usually paid for by parent-teacher groups, are less.

He has a number of oral histories in his repertoire, he said, but it’s sagas about the sea that give him the most pleasure.

“I have a close relationship with the sea,” he said. “I love to sail and love the sea.”

“Storytelling belongs as part of every young person’s education,” he says, pointing out that being a storyteller is one way of being a teacher.

“The fact of life is that any performing artist who brings out anything of substance to an audience is a teacher,” he says.

Although he enjoys performing for students of all ages, he finds that those between 12 and 18 are the most challenging.

“Adolescents are in a period of growing up and experiencing autonomy and becoming rather demanding of the world around them,” he said. “They won’t take pap.”

One of his stories is about a young girl in the middle of the 19th Century who worked in a coal mine and had an extremely tough life.

In listening to the story, he says, “kids experience the same life and experience the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, not from the facts, but from the feeling about that time.”

For adults, he says, storytelling is more an entertainment.

He performed recently at a formal event for the Festival of Whales in Dana Point. For that date, he wrote “The Ballad of Moby Dick,” a 28-verse story based on the Melville novel.

“Everyone was in (formal clothes) except me,” he said. “I was in dungarees, sea boots, a turtleneck sweater and a sailor’s hat.”

The performance was to have been his first accompanied by music from a symphony orchestra.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “the conductor who was writing the music for it died a couple of weeks before the show, so we had to cancel the music part of it.”

Dobyns hopes, though, that he will get another chance at something like that.

Although he prefers concert settings for his storytelling, he said, he can be found performing in several kinds of environments.

“Some fellow just asked me to do a gig for his daughter’s wedding--to tell stories at the reception,” Dobyns said. Dobyns said he plans to talk about the joys of marriage--no doubt a reflection of his own life. He has been married 25 years.

Dobyns is a member of the National Assn. for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Story Tellers based in Tennessee. He also makes yearly trips to the Mystic Sea Festival in Mystic, Conn., where storytellers from all over the world meet to listen to one another’s yarns.

Dobyns, however, said his best times are performing at schools.

“The most thrilling experience is to sit in front of a classroom and look at their faces and see that they are someplace else because of the story I’m telling them,” he said.

Acknowledgments--James Leyva, a third grade pupil at Las Positas Elementary School in La Habra, received a Merit Citation from the American Automobile Assn. for his poster in the association’s 46th Annual School Traffic Safety Poster program. His poster was chosen from among 68,219 entries nationwide. The contest is designed to encourage children to learn traffic safety behavior.