Carol Otis Hurst: The stories in her head

Teaching Pre K-8, May 2001 by Romano, Katherine

Armed with the belief there's a story around every corner, this renowned storyteller now sets her sights on bringing her stories to the page

For Carol Otis Hurst, longtime master storyteller and now published author, the world around us is brimming with stories. She believes that even with all of the various types of storytelling traditions, every story can be placed into one of two categories: those that have been told and those that have yet to be told. "I try to show people how many stories they know that they've forgotten they know," she commented.

"For example, the day you were born is a story that only your mother and father know and you know because they told it to you. Everyone's first name is a story. Why you're here and not there is another story."

Surrounded by storytellers. As a child growing up during the Depression era, Carol found herself blissfully surrounded by. storytellers. "When I was little I thought it was normal for people to sit around the dinner table and tell stories," she told us.

The second to youngest in a family of seven children, she lived with many of her extended family members who were either temporarily without a home or had stopped in transit to find work elsewhere. "They talked to entertain and they talked because they needed to tell," she remembered.

This formula for great storytelling, culled from her family's evening ritual of "dinner and a story," has been one that Carol has never forgotten. From her travels as a storyteller working with kids, teachers and librarians all over the country - and now as a writer - Carol Otis Hurst knows what makes a great story.

Rocks and locks. For her first published picture book, Rocks in His Head (Greenwillow, 2001), Carol drew on a story she has known all of her life - the incredible tale of her father's lifelong fascination with rocks and minerals and how he made his ultimate dream come true. Carol's father began his rock collection when he was a young boy growing up in Massachusetts. He would often go out to search the slag piles of nearby quarries or the stone walls surrounding farms for valuable rocks and small crystals. "And that's also the story of how he really met my mother," Carol said. "He stopped at her parents' farm and asked permission to walk the walls."

In her book and in real life, her father's encyclopedic knowledge of rocks and minerals eventually lead him to the job of his dreams: Curator of Mineralogy and, later, Director of the entire Springfield (MA) Science Museum. "He was probably the happiest man I ever knew," she states in the afterword to Rocks in His Head.

Carol again called on the stories of her family as inspiration for her first novel, Through the Lock (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). In the afterword to the book, Carol states it is "fiction based on fact" and that the title character, Etta Prentice, was loosely based on her grandmother. When writing Through the Lock, she purposely sent her grandmother's character back a generation in order to be able to use the canal and lock as a setting for the adventures of the two main characters, Etta and Walter.

The book pusher. Carol's remarkable gift for the art of telling a story became evident during her days as an elementary school teacher. "Other teachers," Carol told us, "began to say to me, `The kids say you tell really wonderful stories. Will you come to my classroom and tell?' " Her love of children's books and stories eventually led to a second career as a librarian (she spent over 21 years, combined, teaching pre-school through third grade and then as a pre-K through eighth grade school librarian).

After organizing the library for the elementary school where she was teaching - it had no librarian - Carol decided she would try a stint as school librarian for one year, before returning to the classroom. That's when she realized that all the teachers in her building were already reading to their students so she began telling the children stories - something they would know they could only get at the library.

"And then people began to ask me to come to other school systems and tell my stories," she commented. "That's when Teaching K-8 found me and said I was a storyteller!"

During her storytelling travels, Carol has been careful to point out to kids that the good stories she tells them come from books they can read on their own. "I'm really a book pusher," she said. "Storytelling just came to me naturally."

Even with her career as a writer well on its way, Carol continues to be an avid reader and admirer of children's literature. "When you are reading tons and tons of kids' books, some of them just haunt you forever," she said. "And then you find yourself needing to tell someone about it"

With a second novel forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin and another book in the works about the Blizzard of '88, we know Carol has many more stories for us that she has yet to tell.

KATHERINE ROMANO (WITH ALLEN RAYMOND)