PLEASANT DESPAIN, TRUE to his name, is an engaging sort of fellow. One fine morning he sits back in his chair at a local café and does what he's been doing for the last 23 years. He tells stories.
Oblivious to the curious who peer over their newspapers at the voluble man in the big straw hat, DeSpain launches into his signature story, "Old Joe and the Carpenter." It's a folksy North Carolina tale about two battling geezers whose rift is bridged by a canny carpenter. DeSpain delivers it masterfully, his voice traveling easily up and down the octaves, his malleable face sashaying through an impressive roster of expressions.
Newly transplanted to Tucson from Seattle, the self-described "pioneer of the storytelling Renaissance" will take to the stage at Centennial Hall Friday night in a concert that's a kick-off for a major storytelling festival. He'll join a dozen storytellers, some from Tucson and some from parts yonder, for the second annual Tales of Arizona...Then & Now storytelling festival. Saturday afternoon, the storytellers and local musicians will perform for free on stages planted around the Arizona Historical Society and the Arizona Sate Museum.
DeSpain's the author of five published books of tales he's collected from around the world, and he's a teller of renown in story circles, but he'll be making his first big splash in his new city at the festival. That's a bit of a change from Seattle, where he lived for 24 years and where the mayor long ago declared him the city's official storyteller. His health drove him to the desert, he says a tad wistfully, and even now he's armed with a portable adrenaline packet, so as to inoculate himself in the event of a serious asthma attack.
"Old Joe" is not the only story the 52-year-old DeSpain
spins in the café. In his capable anecdotal hands his health
becomes a story too. In fact, no matter what the topic, his broken-down
car, his ride on an airplane with a Guatemalan priest, the practiced
DeSpain shapes the raw material of his own life into a most entertaining
tale, with beginning, middle and end, and even a redeeming moral.
The story of how he became a professional storyteller is a classic,
polished over the years, one suspects, into the quintessential
story of an artist coming of age.
"I wrote my first story in third grade," DeSpain begins. "It was called 'The Mystery Artist.' I got in trouble because it was getting passed around the classroom. The teacher made me read it to the class. They liked it! My imagination was strong. The teacher said, 'The story is good, but your spelling is terrible.' We got a notebook and she had me write stories in it. She turned out to be one of the important teachers in my life."
But in young adulthood, like the woodcutter who accidentally ventures too deep into the forest, the former storyteller took a wrong turn, into the overly structured world of academe. He was trying to teach speech, drama and literature all at the same time, but the strictly un-interdisciplinary academy of those days would have none of it.
"I decided teaching wasn't for me...I came within six months of getting my Ph.D. Thank God I didn't. I had a dark night of the soul. I spent five months in Mexico."
DeSpain's soul told him what he had to do: tell stories. It wasn't easy. He worked as a house painter, short-order cook and dishwasher during the first five years that he was following his muse. But his trials were rewarded. Storytelling, an art form as old as the human race, was being revived elsewhere around the country too. "Twelve others were coming up with the same idea," he remembers. "We started hearing about each other and began to meet."
The happy ending to his story is that America has returned to storytelling in a big way. Librarians kept the stories going during the dark days after the advent of television, DeSpain says, and nowadays storytellers have their own well-attended festivals and competitions. They're sought-after school visitors and their tales are enjoying brisk sales in the bookstores.
Why stories and why now?
"Storytelling is essentially human," DeSpain says. "One is not complete without a story." People have always told stories around the fire at night. Television and computer technology may have ground the old story evenings under their collective fiber optic heel, but story has embraced technology and triumphed.
"I love technology--I had a television show for five years, I've been on the radio. (He's also got a CD-ROM that's a best-seller in Singapore.) My writing is on the computer--I'd never go back to the old way of writing.
"But face-to-face sharing of a story cannot be duplicated...I never complete an image. I allow the completion of the image on the other side of the stage. It's so interactive! It's what technology aspires to and never achieves...It's a powerful experience."
He's right. His stories are a powerful experience that you hate to have end. How about just one more story? What about that name?
"My name is real," Pleasant DeSpain says, crinkling his eyes in a most interactive grin, and sitting back down again. "It's been in the family five generations, beginning with my great-great-grandfather." And he's off and running with a family tale, which starts in the far-off land of Spain, winds through the Kentucky bluegrass and comes to an end, here and now, in the American West.
