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The Azalea Storytelling Festival is this weekend, March 7, 8 and 9 at Callaway Auditorium in LaGrange, Georgia. If you’ve never been to one, you need to come this weekend. If you’ve been before, come back and keep supporting this group.

The event started in 1997 by three women with Donald Davis as an early headliner. This year, you’ll be able to see Donald Davis, Josh Goforth, Michael Reno Harrell, and Sheila Arnold deliver their stories, and local celebrity Carol Cain will be the festival emcee.

It starts on Friday, March 7, in the evening. Saturday, March 8 the festival will be going morning, afternoon and night. On Sunday, March 9, it will be in the morning. Typically they would have “Sacred Storytelling” on Sunday which my Sunday School class would attend. Find out more about the whole festival here on Facebook, and at the Lafayette Society for the Performing Arts! 

Way back in 2002, my second semester of teaching at LaGrange College, I received an email. “Would you like to have a storyteller come to your class to speak?”

I had never heard of a storyteller, but I had so many classes to prepare that getting a “day off” sounded perfectly. So this gentleman named Donald Davis came to my “American Experience” course to speak that afternoon, and I was introduced to the world of storytelling.

Davis told a tale of learning to drive a school bus, the hijinks that followed from not following directions. But it was more than just a funny story. There was a moral message at the end. He told the class how to develop a story, and its components, so it was plenty educational. And I became hooked on storytelling.

My wife was skeptical at first, but I begged her to come to their performance that year. She was hooked. The same thing happened to my sister-in-law and brother-in-law. As our kids grew up, they became fans as well. We checked out storytelling CDs from local libraries for long car rides.

In these tales, I learned a lot about growing up in the Southeast, as well as those traditions that were different from my own, which helped me understand the local culture, and why people think the way they did, not just now, but years ago. Subsequent years, we heard tales of his mother learning to drive, a snake loose in the car, seeing “Psycho” and a trip to the Grand Canyon.

My students have been treated so a class of storytelling here and there in subsequent years. They look forward to such events.

In recent years, locals have come up with their own monthly storytelling festivals, an open mic event where I’ve heard everyone from a young kid to former State Representative Randy Nix, with Joyce Morgan Young and Pepper Ellis Hagebak always present.

I’ve even been able to come up with a few of my own, though unlike others in the category of memoir, mine can be fictitious stories sometimes. It’s called “Stories with Friends” in LaGrange and the next one is set for April 27. Even if you don’t have a story, you can learn a lot from others. Hope to see you there, at either event.