Writers, Griots Tellabrate

Nina Lesiga remembers when she realized that the chicken she was eating for Sunday dinner — a little tough and chewy, come to think of it — was in fact Vanya, once her grandmother’s favorite black-and-yellow plumed, softly cooing pet.

Thanks to a growing story-sharing initiative at the Institute Library, New Haveners now do too .

Lesiga’s story ​“A Love for Fowl” began in a Brooklyn apartment building, where her grandmother raised and butchered poultry for family meals, sometimes fortifying the growing chickens themselves with chicken soup. It ended on 847 Chapel St., where a group of around 60 had gathered for the third annual Tellabration!, the local chapter of a statewide adult storytelling festival presented by members of the Library’s storytelling workshop series. A second day of six stories will be presented Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Institute Library.

The idea for Tellabration! at the Institute Library started three years ago, when a few members instituted a series of four adult storytelling workshops — spaces to brainstorm, edit, and prepare for storytelling events like Hartford’s The MOuTH or the nationally-renowned The Moth—during fall, as the days were getting shorter and the temperatures dropped. The centuries-old space became a cozy reprieve for them, and for audiences as workshops transformed into what emcee (and storyteller) Jezrie Marcano-Courtney referred to as ​“story-sharing” time that exposed New Haveners to whole narrative universes, from amateur poultry farming to Zen Buddhist proverbs.

Three years in, it’s both growing rapidly and taking on a new, unexpected function: solidarity, safety and community in the face of a government whose motives may not align with the majority minority, sanctuary city in which storytellers and Institute Library members find themselves.

“Civil discourse is probably going to be at a very high premium for the years to come,” said Institute Library board president Greg Pepe, standing just a block from where JUNTA and ULA had protested president-elect Donald Trump just an hour before, ​“and I’m very glad we can provide it here.”

Thursday night, six storytellers rose to the occasion, weaving between their words a tapestry rich in history and fraternity, rendering the Chapel Street space almost familial. With her story ​“Graffiti,” Wendy Marans painted for the audience a tableau of difficult parenting: her son, on a family vacation, doing the most minor of graffiti on a public building, and then weeping when his offers to wash it with soap and water were met with glinting silver handcuffs. Teller Dana Savo turned into every adolescent women on a nervous, not-going-so-well first date when she revealed, midway through ​“Charlie’s Son,” that she’d forgotten her underwear. Saul Fussiner conjured his grandmother’s world — and in turn, his own — in small-town Russia with ​“Resele’s Balcony.” 

That’s the thing about stories. They remind us to open ourselves up to conversations as the conversations are opening up to us. That we’ve all been through something tough or fickle, and needed to figure out how to move through. That we did.

“Thank you all for being here,” said Marcano-Courtney as the evening wound down. ​“Given the times that we’re going through this week, stories really do connect us.”