Look to different cultures around the world for stories of dragons, and you will find countless depictions. Look to a group of children and ask them to imagine their own, and you will find numerous more.
Stories unite us because they are both individual and universal. Individual, as each person can interact with the same narrative in a different way, can hold a different mental image in their head. Universal, because shared themes and cultural touchstones bond us all.
Ottawa Children’s Storytelling Festival - November 2019
In a session at the last in-person Children’s Storytelling Festival, children in attendance were so eager to listen and participate with the story, they moved down to the floor to be closer to the storyteller — and each other. Though this year’s event, held on November 22 through 27 by the Ottawa Storytellers (OST), will be held online, children and families attending the event will find the same quality of imagination engaging and community bonding storytelling.
To listen to a story is not simply to passively process words, but to actively engage with metaphorical and figurative language, to process, learn, and acknowledge complex feelings and themes that cannot be distilled down into a few short sentences, and to construct and hold entire worlds in your mind. It gives the children an opportunity to not only engage with the literal and the obvious, but the figurative and the hidden, and, thus, gain greater skills in empathy and comprehension. It promotes creativity that is not hindered or restricted by artistic skill, physical materials, vocabulary capacity.
The imagination, unrestrained by physical limitations, can heighten the real world, expand it, and entangle people within it in a way that is both uniquely personal and wholly universal.