click to enlarge - Courtesy Of Jeb Wallace-Brodeur
- Tim Jennings
One day about 50 years ago, Tim Jennings was riding in a van with students from the Mountain Road School in Jeffersonville, returning to campus with a class after a trip to the library. Winding through Lamoille County, the young teacher told the students a story called "Dimwit," a so-called "three brothers" tale in which two older boys are unable to do something that their youngest brother, clever and lucky, can do.
"Telling that story in the van was the first thing I was able to do that the kids actually liked and gave me some credit for," Jennings said.
The oral tradition had interested Jennings, both as a listener and a teller, for some time before he told "Dimwit" that day. And it continues to fascinate him all these years later. After decades of performing as a storytelling duo with his late wife, Leanne Ponder, Jennings is now revving up his solo work, with plans to present a selection of pieces to the public.
The East Montpelier resident will appear in an hourlong show, "So I've Been Told," on Wednesday, May 24, at his local Kellogg-Hubbard Library. He calls the free, upcoming event his "grand reentry."
Jennings, 75, has fond memories of his grandmother telling him stories when he was a boy in Philadelphia. But it was only after getting a positive response from his students at Mountain Road School, where he taught for four years, that he sought out and found more opportunities to tell stories — and to learn about and practice the craft.
"I heard about somebody who had become a storyteller for pay," Jennings said. "And I thought I was more qualified to do this thing by my standards than he was. I was a cocky son of a gun."
He went on to fashion a career telling folktales. The practice involves crafting original treatments from traditional stories (tales typically set down in print), interpreting them, and reciting or performing them for an audience.
For three decades, Jennings worked and performed with Ponder, who died on Christmas Eve 2021. The couple achieved a wonderful harmony both in their method of gathering and preparing material and in their performances, according to Jennings. Not long after her death, he told Seven Days that in the "narrow field" of two people telling stories together, he and Ponder were the best there was.
"I miss Leanne like hell," Jennings said last week. "And I miss the work that we did together."
"So I've Been Told" represents his next chapter. The program consists of six or so pieces that Jennings learned solely through oral transmission. Included in the repertoire are two fairy tales not found in written literature, he said. One, called "Redcap," made an impression on Jennings when he heard it 60 years ago as a "hippie teenager" at the Philadelphia Folk Festival. The other fairy tale, "Simpleton," is a family story that Jennings learned from a fifth grader at Calais Elementary School about 20 years ago.
"It's traditional oral material that I've gathered over the course of my life, a great deal in Vermont," he said. The pieces in "So I've Been Told" are not as "flashy" as his earlier work, Jennings said, which he likened to performing comedy.
"There had to be a punch line," he said of his past endeavors. "I was very big, the gestures were very large, and I was very loud."
By contrast, his new repertoire consists of the kind of stories that, "if you were very, very lucky, your great-grandma might tell you while you're in a car or in bed," Jennings said.
His maternal grandmother, Marie Woollcott, told him such stories when he was sick with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. His illness kept him largely confined to bed for a year and a half starting at age 7, Jennings said. He remembers his grandmother sitting bedside, telling him Brothers Grimm fairy tales: "Rumpelstiltskin," "The Town Musicians of Bremen," "Hansel and Gretel."
"It didn't seem strange for her to do this: informally relating a fairy tale, telling a story out of her head," Jennings said. That tradition, he said, has become less common — even odd — over the years.
Jennings also loved to read stories as a kid, including fairy tales, the Mary Poppins and Doctor Dolittle series, and Understood Betsy, by Vermont author Dorothy Canfield Fisher. "That was my first taste of Vermont," he said.
His parents, Francis and Joan Jennings, were both writers. His father was a historian with expertise in the U.S. Colonial era and the author of two books, The Invasion of America and Empire of Fortune. His mother was a staff writer for the Philadelphia Bulletin and later a freelancer who wrote about medical topics, among other subjects. His parents were also "hams," Jennings said. "They crafted stories that were designed to make you laugh."
Jennings thought that he, too, would become a writer before he became intrigued by the oral tradition — a genre that combines storytelling, a little ham-dom and some laughter.
"I think the majority of people love stories. If you notice, fucking everybody calls themselves a storyteller these days — musicians, moviemakers and painters," he said. "Stories would take me to a different world. And I needed to be in a different world sometimes."