Sandbar Storytelling Festival Our Purpose
Mission
To present storytelling performances which celebrate and preserve the power and pleasure of our varied cultural traditions and human experiences and to promote the art of storytelling for all ages.
Vision
To be the foremost storytelling festival in the Upper Midwest.
Why Storytelling?
We are our stories
Humans are creatures of story. We create and share stories as naturally as we breathe. Stories are how we know the world. Know each other. Know ourselves. All through the magic of the spoken word.
No one will ever know who was the first storyteller or what was the first story. We do know the stories that told of the first man, the first woman; of how they came to be and how the world they and we live in came to be.
Stories were told of thunder gods, of why the rains fall and where the fire that lit the story circle had its origin. They told of heroes, of ogres and demons, of fair maidens and shady scoundrels. Stories passed on wisdom, warned of folly, made us laugh, gave us courage.
Stories became our histories, explained why we would do this and not that. They told us where we came from, who we had become and what would become of us. They hold our memories, our hopes, our fears, our deepest longings.
Our shared stories bind us to family and friends. Stories are shared with those we meet to give us common ground, common understanding. We tell our stories every day, many times each day, and take in story after story in return.
We are our stories. Our stories tell of who we were, who we are, who we aspire to be.
Come join us in sharing stories. Come join us in sharing the magic of the spoken word.
— Jerome Christenson
A Letter from Our Artistic Director
I was returning to the U.K. from a tour of duty in the Far East with the Royal Air Force in 1971. While flying over the Persian Gulf in our VC10 aircraft, the captain asked me to join him in the co-pilot seat. Thousands of feet above the ground that night, we flew over hundreds of lights below, spread across the desert floor. Nomadic Bedouins huddled around campfires, sharing tales. Another time, while hiking in the Pukaskwa National Park of Canada a few years ago with my son Gareth, we attended a ceremony honoring the Anishinaabek and Metis First Nations, who were celebrating their ancestors and their lands by the sharing of their stories. Over time, these experiences inspired me to explore the potential for an annual gathering to further the art of storytelling as a way of teaching, understanding, respecting, and appreciating other cultures, nations, races, and religions.
As children, we learned of cave drawings telling stories of hunters and gatherers. Traditionally, stories were shared when bringing in the harvest, celebrating weddings, funerals, and tribal gatherings, and often sitting around fires, sharing and reflecting on our humanity and profound connections. Here, in southern Minnesota, the First Nation cultures including the local Dakota people, continue to pass on their rich history and knowledge in the form of oral storytelling. Listening to a good story that is well-told is a wonderful source of entertainment. We come to understand people who are different from us while experiencing that very diverse community. Telling stories is one of the most powerful tools any teacher or leader possesses to educate and inspire others. While sharing stories, we engage our communities in active listening and mutual storytelling. In our modern world, not only are our stories still shared around the campfire, they often appear through our digital media as well.
In October 2024 we will gather here, in Winona, Minnesota, on the banks of the upper Mississippi River, to celebrate and share together in the great tradition of storytelling at the annual Sandbar Storytelling Festival. Revisit the land where travelers for thousands of years have navigated up and down the Mississippi from its source in the northern part of our state to its union with the Gulf of Mexico. Winona, poised on the banks of this grand North American waterway, will annually invite some of the very best storytellers from points throughout the world to share their tales with us.
Please, consider yourself invited to Winona. Join us as we share in the great oral tradition of storytelling in the Driftless Region of southeastern Minnesota. Here, we will listen to some of the finest tellers of tales and enjoy the diverse cultures they represent!
Kind regards,
Hywel ‘Taff’ Roberts
Artistic Director, Sandbar Storytelling Festival
