Ada Forney Interview

Storytelling was often the way myths were passed on from generation to generation. Stories were told orally as well as written down. Many stories were told through dance, music, plays, rituals and art. 

We were lucky enough to get an interview with a storyteller who uses the tales of mythology to tell her own stories. Here is her interview:

How long have you been telling stories? Officially, for the last ten years. I started by getting into an organization called Toastmasters International. I did a management presentation at Harris Corporation down in Palm Bay, Florida. The vice president came up to me and said, "You're pretty good at this presentation thing, you ought to get into Toastmasters, which is a group that does professional public speaking." It all started from there.

What was it like the first time you told your stories in public? I teach storytelling. Most people rate their fear of death lower than their fear of speaking in public. Most people would rather DIE than be up here. I already had a background from toastmaster's in giving presentations so by the time I was a story teller I had a lot of preparation. The very time I got up in front of a group, and for about a year, everything I did was scripted. Everything was written down. Everything was important. It just seemed natural. It just seemed right, so I didn't experience a lot of that nervousness that a lot of people experience. For me, it was I was meant to do.

Why did you become a storyteller? There is something about words and the power of words. I had a college professor one time tell me I had a "flow" when it came to words. I wasn't sure what he meant at the time. It's a kind of inspiration that reaches in and flows through me. The words flow through me in like a stream or river of words. And that flow of words flows out, and if I do my job correctly you don't see me you see the images painted by the words. That flow of words is what drives me as a storyteller. It's almost like a living movie inside of me. People ask me how I remember all my stories, because I do thousands and thousands of them. I can't tell you exactly, because it's, like I told you, it's this inspiration that takes over. And the power of words. I have told a family story from four generations in my family from Florida and Georgia and I have had someone in an assisted living community who hasn't spoken a word since they came there, come up to me and start telling me their stories. I have seen tears come to the eyes of someone who hears a story that they haven't heard since they were a child. There is a real commonality of story and that is another thing that drives me as a storyteller. If you can reach inside someone and change them a little bit just by the power of words.

Do you relate your stories about Greek Mythology to your own experiences or to the experience of your audience? A little bit of both. One of the stories I do is about Priam's daughter. Priam was the king of Troy. Four of Priam's daughters were cursed. One of his daughters was the beautiful Helen, who started the Trojan War. Three of them were cursed to become the Gorgans, like Medusa with hair like snakes. You don't hear about this unless you do a lot of research in Greek Mythology. You think that the Gorgans simply existed. They were three very beautiful women. There are times in our lives when we face that kind of curse. This story is a good one when I do storytelling to women's groups. This young woman was swept up and ravaged by Poseidon and left up on the Temple at the Alter of Athena, because Poseidon and Athena had an argument over the naming of the city that became Athens. He wanted it to be Poseidia and because it became Athenia, he wanted to make Athena angry so he takes this young girl and leaves her bloody and broken on the altar. And to get back at him, instead of taking it out on Poseidon because she is afraid he will sink her ships, she takes it out on the young girl. There are times in our lives when everything seems to go wrong. When one curse after another seems to fall on our heads. To me that's an eternal message whether you are 6 or 60. We have to learn that we can overcome those things and go on to become stronger people. So that's kind of an example of how I relate it not only to my personal life, when I was going through a time that I thought was the end of the world and I felt much like how Medusa must have felt when they turned her into this horrible creature. Every time she looked at someone, she turned him or her into stone. Imagine going from this beautiful woman to this horrible creature. Going through that kind of transformation only to come out on the other side-and most people don't know this-when the hero came and took the head of Medusa, the blood fell to the floor and rising from the floor was Pegasus, the winged horse-a gift to the people. Of course, there was also the monster called Chrysaor. In my story, Pegasus carries her soul up into the stars and she becomes a constellation. So we are able to overcome difficult times in life. I related it not only to my life, because that terrible time lead to my meeting my husband and becoming the storyteller that I am today. That would never have happened if I hadn't gone through that tragedy. It kind of relates to personal experiences and to the experiences of the audience.

Who is your favorite mythological character and why? That's a tough one. I think probably Demeter and Persephone. The story of Persephone is such an incredible story and again it this is relating personal experience and audience experience in real life. I went through a very traumatic period with my daughter when she was a senior in high school. It required me to do some difficult things. I had to changer her high schools and let her move in with her father for about 6 months, exactly the same amount of time that Demeter and Persephone were separated when Hades came down and pulled her into the Underworld for six months. She ate six pomegranate seeds, which is why she lives in the Underworld for six months and on Earth for six months. In the six months she's on the Earth, we have spring and summer. In the six months she's in the Underworld we have fall and winter, because Demeter, who is the goddess of spring, curses the Earth. Knowing what her mother's heart must have felt like when she had to make that difficult choice, I think Demeter and Persephone are my two favorites. That's why!

What is your favorite mythological story and why? The Priam's daughter story is probably my favorite, because it took me so long to put together. I had to do a lot of research from probably a dozen different references to weave this story together. There are variants to this story. One of them says that Priam's daughter had the most beautiful hair and she dared challenge Athena by telling her she was more beautiful than Athena and that is why she was cursed to become a Gorgan. That to me was a little too easy (though it has its own message). This idea of her being so beautiful that she went off by herself because of the jealousy….Think about the prettiest girl in your whole school. All the guys look at her and talk about how cute she is and the women are all jealous. So it makes it difficult to be a beautiful woman in the world sometimes. For her to take herself off to an island by herself to have some peace and quiet, only to have Poseidon and Athena get into this battle and cause her to meet a fate-a terrible and incredible fate-to me that talks to us about life and what we go through in life and those powerful times of transformation. Like the making of a great sword where you plunge it into fire, beat on it for awhile, stick it into the water, then back into the fire again. And when you are done, it is this incredibly beautiful piece. To me that's a lot of what its about.

Many mythological stories are complicated, what do you do to make them more understandable? It depends on the audience and the age level of the audience that I am telling the story to. Many times when I am working with a younger audience, I will take a story and divide it into sections. I create a starting point and go up so far and then I will stop. Then we will talk a little bit about the story and I will make sure people are on track and understand where the story is going. Then we move over into the next section and I make sure they have a good grasp of the story before we move onto the next section. We go through that to the next crisis and resolution there. Then we move back again and I will stop, make sure people understand where we are going before moving on. Sometimes I will use what they call "storyteller's license" and actually change the story in some places, because sometimes it just simply needs to be a simpler story for people to really understand it. So I judge it pretty much by the audience and the age levels and how much they know. If I am presenting to an audience of Ph.D. level Greek Mythology experts, you can bet I'm going to be shakin' in my shoes.

How do dolphins relate to Greek Mythology? Well, the dolphins were sacred to the Greek people. The center of the world at that time was the city of Delphi. That's part of the Greek name for the dolphin. The story of Poseidon and Amphetrite and the dolphin constellation being placed in the sky….they felt that dolphins had a very unique and special place in society. They recognized the intelligence and the, almost, superiority over all the other creatures the dolphins had, so they gave them a unique place in mythology and their history. If you look at your Greek sculpture, you will see a lot of sculpture of dolphin's and also porpoise.

If a student wanted to start studying Greek Mythology, where would be best place to start? In terms of finding the materials? Of course, you can go online and type in "Greek Mythology" and you'll immediately get 900 gillion websites dealing with Greek Mythology, including the Bullfinch site which has the entire text of all of the Bullfinch books with their version. I like to go into bookstores and libraries and peruse their Greek Mythology sections and find different versions of the story. I would suggest starting with the shorter or simpler stories, like the Poseidon story. That's one of the nice things about that story. It's the chunk of a larger story, but it a small enough piece that you can really understand what the message of the story is.

Sometimes mythology can seem a little too "racy" or inappropriate for younger students. What can parents and teachers do? I think the best thing you can do is to research and understand as much as you can about Greek society and to understand who the Greek people were. Quite often when I do a program specifically on a specific culture, I bring large format posters with me to show the country, I talk about the people, their belief system. I give a little bit of a social studies or history lesson about who they were. I think that is really, really important for this. Understanding the people and what they believed. Sometimes, if people are of a different faith, it can be difficult talking about gods and goddesses and that kind of thing. I find the best thing is knowledge-as much knowledge as you can find about the subject. Read the stories over before you just give them out. And you can adjust that story. The story of Priam's daughter can be a very tricky story because in it there is a great deal of violence done to this young woman and how I handle that depends on the age-level and sophistication of the audience. That is an important part of this. To read the stories over. Modify them if you need to in order to make them acceptable for certain age-level audiences.

Storytellers usually have morals to their stories. What are some of the morals you have used in some of the stories you tell? Again, the message in Priam's daughter is, yes, you can go through difficult times in order to transcend and become new people. That's part of what life is all about. So that is one of the important moral lessons in this story. It is a very important life lesson-or moral lesson. There is another story I do called Circe and Scylla about the power of love. In the story, Circe, who is the sorceress, sees this beautiful young woman who is a nymph, and becomes overcome by jealousy. Its about jealously and its ability to tear people apart. This happens all the time around us. Maybe you have gone through something similar in your life. Perhaps you have a boyfriend and another girl comes in and through jealousy tries to interfere in your relationship. What Circe does is she actually goes down to the shore and pours a powerful potion into the waves. When Scylla wades out into the sea and the waves break over her, she scales rising up and she becomes this horrible sea serpent and swims away. When the handsome young shepherd comes back down the beach, he sees this happen to her and is just devastated because he really loves her. He finds out that one year from this day, she will return to this same place and once again be herself. He goes to that beach every day for a year and waits for her. It's about hanging in there when things get tough. It's about waiting through the tough times. She comes to shore and she is a beautiful as she ever was. When the sun touches the horizon, he takes her hand. She takes off and starts to run into the water again. He runs down and takes her hand and they wade off into the sea together and the curse takes them both. But for all time, throughout eternity, they return to that same beach-once every year-and they once again return to their human forms and celebrate their eternal love. It's another morality lesson-life lesson-about love transcending the tough times and the terrible times that sometimes take us away. Those are the kinds of moral lessons that I like to use in my storytelling.

How do you adapt some of the stories to your storytelling style? Lots of research. We have an enormous library. I do lots of research to find that particular variant. What I look for is uniqueness about a story. I look for versions that no one has ever heard before. To me, that's the most important thing.