Bard Has Tales, Will Travel

Within a single hour, the children and adults sitting on the floor and tables of the assembly hall were taken from the jungles of Haiti to the icy igloos of Alaska, only to end up on Alabama’s Tombigbee River.

Then the clock struck the hour and teachers started leading students back to their classrooms at George B. Miller Elementary School, where Jim Cogan had just finished another workday as a professional storyteller.

But the bard could not leave until the kids who immediately swarmed around him were coaxed away, still trying to imitate the uncannily accurate glugging and sucking sounds he had belched out to create the river for his version of “The Hairy Man.”

The children treated to Cogan’s stories Friday were only vaguely aware that the tale was a metaphor for the courage and wit of those who ran the underground railroad during the Civil War.

They instead were riveted to the voices, faces and sound effects that Cogan creates so seamlessly after nine years as a self-described “traveling bard,” one of about 400 who practice the art. All of the techniques of pause, pitch and tone caught them up in the tale itself, which is Cogan’s goal.

“I see the children grasp the story and I can go to sleep knowing I did something that mattered today,” he said.

Cogan, 47, who lives in Riverside County, has honed his body and face as much as his voice for his repertoire of about 300 stories, which range from classic myth and folklore to personal anecdote.

Every character has a voice, and Cogan is not afraid to skew his face, point his arms or throw his head back and screech, to the delight of his audiences.

He begins his tales for children by quickly giving them lines they can chant during the story, phrases that serve as a chorus. The point is to make them aware of the richness of spoken lore, which becomes new with every telling, he explained.

“When they become involved, it’s more of a full mental journey,” Cogan said.

Cogan was only 13 when he learned the craft of storytelling, and the power of its rewards, after a broken arm sent him from baseball to theater school for a summer.

“It was a pivotal point for me,” he recalled. “You realize what the capacity of the human instrument is--an endless capacity for expression.”

He would be 35 before finding the courage to resign his post as a middle school principal in Ketchum, Idaho, and roam the western states in a school bus, mentoring with others in the field.

Cogan has found that storytelling has revived as an art form over the last 10 years, although it never really went away.

“The form of the story will never die,” he said. “We always hang onto stories because they tell us some truth about life. We walk away with something permanent.”