NOTE: “Today” and “tonight” refer to Friday, Oct. 16.
PORT ANGELES — The difference between storytelling and theater: In one, the action happens on stage as the performers wrangle with one another.
In the other, the action develops inside the mind of the listener.
“You are connected to the teller,” as the tale takes shape inside you, says Rebecca Hom, herself a veteran storyteller and listener.
She’s artistic director of the Forest Storytelling Festival, the 21st annual gathering opening today and running through Sunday at Peninsula College, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd.
Every year at this time, Hom perches on the edge of her seat awaiting people who come from all over: master storytellers Ingrid Nixon, Jim May, Anne Penfound, Michael Parent and Judith Black are this year’s bunch, and all five perform tonight and Saturday at 7 p.m. as well as Sunday at 10 a.m.
That connection, that beam of light between the person at the microphone and the one in the seat, is what smote Hom 27 years ago.
“The first time I heard a professional teller, I knew she was telling that story to me,” she recalls.
Hom was part of a large audience at a writer’s conference in Sitka, Alaska, in 1988.
But when Gioia Timpanelli stepped up to offer her tale, “she looked in my eyes, and I knew what she was saying.”
Port Angeles’ annual festival, one of the largest of its kind in the Pacific Northwest, is presented by the Story People of Clallam County, and brings together tellers of divergent styles, Hom adds.
While Parent comes from a French Canadian culture, May was raised in a German-Catholic farming community in Spring Grove, Ill.
Black offers historical stories to give her listeners a new angle on America’s past.
Penfound, a native of the United Kingdom, tells original and multicultural tales.
Then there is Nixon, who manages to pair Grimm’s fairy tales with her own stories of world travel.
She grew up in Port Angeles, of all places — storyteller Viola Nixon is her mother — and has since lived near Mount Rainier and in Alaska for many years.
She’s also worked in expedition tourism, traveling to Patagonia, Antarctica and the high Arctic, among other hard-core destinations.
Naturally, such forays feed her storytelling penchant.
But while she loves to offer the personal “You’ll never guess what happened” kind, Nixon likewise relishes a good one from the Brothers Grimm.
“I have my own version of ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ ” she says, along with “others that are lesser-known, and delightfully quirky and dark.”
Such tales have the power to enthrall, Nixon says, no matter our electronic devices.
She challenges anyone — any age — to try a performance this weekend.
Sunday is the traditional day for the free Inspirational Concert from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. in Peninsula College’s Little Theater.
Forest Storytelling Festival director emerita Cherie Trebon will open, and then the five featured tellers will bring their tales.
Nixon has hers picked out: a piece comparing the experiences of two young people coming to understand life and death.
“It’s also a travel story,” she says.
Nixon has ideas for after the festival too.
She’d like to see a “story slam” or some type of quasi-regular gathering, and she doesn’t doubt it will be well-attended.
“We are storytelling beings,” she says.
