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GIOIA TIMPANELLI, NOVELIST & STORYTELLER

“No one in the world can tell a story better than Gioia Timpanelli.” 
—Frank McCourt

“She has the capacity to draw out the very depths of the power of myths and narrative and to take literature back to its sources before your eyes (and ears.)” —Gary Snyder

Gioia Timpanelli is one of the founders of the worldwide revival of storytelling. Often called the 'Dean of American Storytelling,' she is today considered one of the world's foremost storytellers—widely respected as both a master and scholar of the ageless art. She won two Emmy Awards for her series of programs on storytelling, Stories from My House on educational television, where she created, wrote, produced, and appeared in eight series of literature programs shown on PBS stations all over the United States. She has also received the prestigious Women's National Book Association Award for bringing the oral tradition to the American public and recently the Maharishi Award for 'promoting world harmony wherever she goes by enlivening within the listener that field of pure consciousness that is the source of all stories.' She received The 1999 American Book Award for Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily (W.W Norton).

 She has performed her improvisational telling of ancient and modern stories and given talks in collaboration with respected masters of other art forms—especially in the world of poetry and letters (Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly, James Hillman, Nor Hall, and Gary Snyder) throughout the United States, including The New School, The Art Institute of Chicago, The University of California, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The American Museum of Natural History, Il Santuario De Guadalupe in Santa Fe, John Hancock Hall in Boston, the Laurel Theatre in Knoxville, Riverwalk in New Orleans, the 1980 Winter Olympics, the Spoleto Festival, and The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and many other venues. She has also performed in Canada, Britain, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Greece.

“Timpanelli's tales are little treasures. We need them in these times for their psychological clarity about feminine experience and masculine identity.”
—Nor Hall

“I love almost all storytelling, but this woman, Gioia Timpanelli, is the greatest I have heard in the art.”
—Robert Bly

Gioia Timpanelli, Storyteller

Downloadable images are in the Photo Gallery

Click here for audio files in the Audio Gallery

WHAT MAKES A CHILD LUCKY (exerpt)

“Hunger,” she said, “is very personal. At first, it even tricks you into feeling guilty over your own misery, guilty for your human lack of grace. It holds your wrists tightly in its bony fingers; it breathes its foul breath into your gaping mouth as you sleep.”
          “But wait,” we said, “doesn't this happen in a story Ovid tells about Erysicthon's hunger? What does it have to do with now? It's an old story.”
          “True, true,” she said, “but why do you insist on being literal to time? You see time might change the details but the story of greed and retribution, or as you moderns insist of ‘cause and effect,’ is essentially the same. Erysicthon starves in his soul as well as his stomach. Why do you believe hunger could never happen to you, not where you are, and not now among your people? You think you are too well off for hunger to find you? Ah, my friend, we thought exactly the same.”

(Sicily at the end of the nineteenth century or anyplace at anytime)
Forthcoming from WWNorton in September 2008