John Passmore
John Passmore is the Archives Manager at WNYC.
These Charming Kids Tell Really Scary Stories
Thursday, October 16, 2014 - 12:00 AM
WNYC
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Established in the year 2000, the New York Public Radio Archives are the station's physical link to its rich and storied past.
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Kids are great at using stories to cope with frightening events in their lives. In this audio, excerpted from WNYC's 1979 storytelling festival, we hear some rather creative interpretations of Little Red Riding Hood and Dracula, as well a pretty decent joke about a talking skull. Later in the episode, the theorist and scholar Brian Sutton-Smith talks about how kids often change, edit, and reinterpret stories to deal with the big and sometimes frightening matters in their lives.
Twenty five years ago, WNYC produced its first (and only) storytelling festival in New York City. Along with live events in every borough, the station aired a week long series of programs devoted to both the story teller and the story scholar. Unlike today's emphasis on the genre's more confessional or personal form, this series' focus was more academic: each broadcast devoted itself to the origins and meaning of various oral history traditions, and the stories we hear are the kind of familiar allegoric tales meant to teach a lesson or enforce particular cultural norms.
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