I gave a keynote this month at Sharing the Fire, the New England conference on storytelling sponsored by LANES about storytelling as a craft. In the talk, I outlined some areas of skill development and questions storytellers should ask themselves about their work. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a number of years. Below [...]
Archive for March, 2010
The craft of storytelling
Posted in Artists, performing for children, solo theater, Story, storytelling, tagged aesthetic, critique, evaluation, narative form, performance, show structure, voice and physical instrument on March 29, 2010 | 10 Comments »
Songwriting with kids – not rocket science
Posted in Art and community, Artists, Children, music, performing for children, School culture, Schools, singer/songwriter, Song, Teachers and teaching, tagged kids, music education, songwriting on March 18, 2010 | 8 Comments »
This week in my day at Paul Cuffee School, I wrote and recorded a song with each second grade class. This may sound fairly impressive, but it’s really a pretty straightforward process if you remember to keep it simple. The songs will not make the hit parade, and in fact, unless they’re sung at an [...]
A future for independent bookstores – A. Bitterman speaks
Posted in Books, Children, Fiction, tagged ebooks, independent bookstories, Publishing on March 8, 2010 | 2 Comments »
My friend Pete Cowdin runs one of the best children’s book stores in the country, the Reading Reptile, in Kansas City. He’s smart and funny, and obviously a little weird, since he’s a big enough fool to run an independent bookstore (and for children no less) in these days of the uncertainty of marketing the [...]
