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Thrilling Tales: How to Do an Adult Storytime at Your Library, and Why

It is Monday morning at the downtown library. Patrons drop by to pick up their reserves; classes of children flock to storytime; and regulars settle in to chat, read, and ruminate. As the noon hour strikes, people gather in the auditorium, doffing raincoats, unpacking lunches or needlepoint. They are men and women, young and old, singles and couples, and groups. The spiraling strains of Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack to Vertigo die down, the house lights dim, and the crowd settles into an expectant
hush.

A librarian steps out before them and takes a seat at a small table with a microphone, clock, glass of water, and light. He opens a binder, looks out at the assembled listeners, and smiles. Peering into the semidarkness, he sees familiar faces, and those of curious newcomers. He greets them, mentions a few items of library news, and then lowers his gaze to the warm light reflecting up off the pages before him. The surrounding shadows seem to deepen, the silence to sharpen. He looks up again and addresses his audience—now his conspirators— with a curious glint in his eye. “Why don’t we kill somebody?” he suggests. What remains of the cares of the day drop away. They’re hooked.

The previous scenario has unfolded at our library twice each month since that day five years ago when I first presented Thrilling Tales. Over the years, many visiting librarians have asked me about this program— what it is, how it works—and I now realize that this kind of storytime might work very well in many libraries, done many different ways. In this article, I’m going to tell you the story of how I started my program; discuss ways that you might produce your own adult storytime to get your creative juices flowing; and offer practical tips for selecting stories, staging the program, and reading stories.

A Storytime for Grown-Ups?

It is almost impossible to overstate how important story is to people, and to libraries. Story is what makes us human. We think in terms of narrative: it is how we make sense of our lives and our world. Hardwired for creating and interpreting stories, our dreaming minds spin tales even in our sleep. Despite the library profession’s habitual (over)emphasis on information, it is story in its myriad forms and formats that keeps our doors open and the lights on. The readers’ advisory renaissance reflects a recognition of the story’s centrality to what libraries do and how we’re viewed by the public, even as the Internet winnows our role as information providers.

In addition to advising readers in person and online, there are many different services and programs with which libraries promote and celebrate story within and beyond their walls, such as book discussion groups, booktalking, and author events.
Most libraries offer storytimes as well; they are one of our hallmark services. A circle of children gathered around a librarian, galvanized by unfolding events as they are elicited as if by sorcery from the pages of a book, is an image that resonates deeply with all of us.

Patrons and donors who love and support libraries often owe their allegiance to those childhood library visits, a temple of story where high priests and priestesses unleashed the magic of reading. But storytimes are for kids, right? Our need for story doesn’t end when we turn thirteen, but abides in us from the lap-sit to the nursing home. The booming audiobook industry, together with the popularity of Selected Shorts and similar radio programs and podcasts, shows that more and more teens and adults are tuning in to the pleasure of hearing stories read aloud. At first the idea of an adult storytime is unfamiliar, and patrons learning about my own storytime will sometimes get a quizzical look as they search for context. “Where do I get the stories? Do we read them in advance?” No, no—it is a storytime. “For grown-ups?” Yes. Then the coin drops, and—thinking of spooky stories by the campfire, or the comfort of being read to by a parent or spouse— they smile. And whether or not they
decide to attend, I like to think that the library has just become a little bit more magical for them. What could be a purer and more natural expression of our vital role in preserving and promoting story?

My Adult Storytime

Thrilling Tales began with a gut feeling I had when we moved into our new digs at The Seattle Public Library’s landmark central branch, and I saw our 275-seat auditorium. My instinct for keeping things simple and cheap, and my own love of reading silently and aloud, led me to the idea of a noon-hour story program that might draw seniors and also draw workers out of the surrounding buildings to come enjoy a relaxing lunch. It could be a fun drop-in program for locals and tourists who come to look at our building, offering them a taste of why we’re here and what we’re about.

A quick look around showed that there was a smattering of similar programs around the country and in the United Kingdom, most using literary stories. Seattle already has its own Selected Shorts-style series taking place just a few blocks from the library, featuring local actors reading for paying audiences. My interests and sensibilities drew me in a different direction. As a working readers’ advisor who talks about books with real, live, flesh-and-blood readers each day, I tend to stick up for popular reading.

“Never apologize for your reading tastes” is the readers’ advisory motto, and the Readers Bill of Rights¹ is our declaration of independence from the hidebound world of literary oughts and shoulds. So although there is nothing wrong with the idea per se, I wanted something that was decidedly not a “story appreciation hour,” but that celebrated the sheer pleasure of story, and the delightful expectancy we experienced as children hanging on the reader’s every word, wondering “what next?”

Think of driving late at night on a lonely stretch of road and you tune to the AM radio dial and are captured by the disembodied voices of some old suspense program coming to you out of the dark. Imagine the chilling delight of gathering with friends in a dark place to share ghost stories, willing each other into a haunted state of mind. Think of how The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents can so utterly draw us in with that delicious twist, even when we already know what the twist is. That is what I wanted my storytime to be: fun, captivating, a bit dangerous, and unexpected in all the expected ways. Although I’ve used stories from several genres, the overwhelming majority of what I read could be called suspense. Some Thrilling Tales mainstays are Roald Dahl, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, and Patricia Highsmith, among others. With suspense as the guiding
principle, I’ve featured a range of stories that includes classics and pulp fiction, contemporary surrealism and golden-age ghost stories, international tales, and all-but-forgotten American magazine stories.

One lesser-known author whom I’ve used a lot is Jack Ritchie, a master of perfectly pitched, whimsical rime stories. The very first story I read was Ritchie’s New Leaf (also known as The Green Heart), which egins with this great hook: “We had been married hree months and I rather thought it was time to get id of my wife.”² ince March 2004, I have presented Thrilling Tales
on the first and third Monday of every month, with hrilling tales generally between forty and eighty people in attendance. or most of the program’s life, I have been irtually the only person involved, selecting and eading stories, running the control booth, and doing scant marketing. Our only expense beyond my own fairly minimal time has been a folded flyer with an annotated list of each year’s stories. I’ve had visits from local radio stations and newspapers, gracious e-mails from authors whose stories I’ve read, and the pure pleasure of hearing audiences snicker and sigh, murmur and gasp, indulging their love of stories and
enhancing their appreciation for libraries.

Your Adult Storytime: Some Ideas

Thrilling Tales is just one way of doing this program, which can be tailored to a variety of goals, communities, and venues. You’ll want to present stories that interest both you and your target audience, be that a specific group or simply enough butts in the seats to make the program worthwhile. You’ll need to give whatever you try plenty of time to find its audience if it is to succeed, or to fail successfully. For variety, you may wish to try out different types of storytimes; for consistency’s sake, you may want to stick to one. If a regular weekly or monthly program is unrealistic given the 542 other things you do each day, you might opt for a seasonal or annual festival. You may find that afternoons, evenings, or weekends serve your needs, or you might extend your reach by giving multiple readings of the same story, at the library and also on the road. In other words, create your own adult storytime. Here, in no particular order, are some ideas to help you get started.

• Add a discussion: “It’s the world’s easiest book group!” That irresistible tagline perfectly describes the combination of a story hour and discussion group into a brilliant hybrid that may appeal to patrons for whom a traditional book group (or
  an additional book group) may be unfeasible. Participants can read stories in advance, read along, or just listen. If participants prefer, stories can be read aloud round-robin style, or on a rotating basis, and story selection can also be
  shared. Groups can spend time working through a single author’s works, read on a theme, or jump around from genre to genre. The discussion portion might also be treated as an optional part of the event, allowing a larger group to simply
  enjoy the story.
• Story and a movie: Adapting the book-and-a-movie program that many libraries have done, participants hear a live reading of a short story, and then follow-up by watching the movie based upon that story. Combining films and reading reaches out to a broader range of users (including men) than the traditional book group, and you’d be amazed how many films are based upon surprisingly short stories.³ 
• Explore cultures: Libraries seeking to include and celebrate the diversity of their communities can have a series of stories that reflect the experiences of specific cultural or ethnic groups. Culturally themed story anthologies abound.
• Explore the world: You could do a story series focusing on world literature and travel writing (“Around the World in 80 Stories”), featuring background information on each country or region’s culture and literature. Display relevant library materials, play preshow music, show slides from the place you’re visiting, make note of your literary travels on a map, and provide participants with passports that they can get stamped for each fictional place they visit.
• Travel through time: Highlight stories from a particular historical era (the Victorian Era, the Great Depression, the 1950s), or progress through the decades or centuries, reaching far into the distant past or tightening the focus with stories year by year. Feature supporting materials from the collection, and add context with headlines, images, and hit songs from the week the story was published.
• Genres: There are myriad genres and themes to anchor a series or festival of readings, such as sports stories, true crime, love stories, humor, fantasy, westerns, horror, ghost stories, science fiction, or myths. Focus on very short stories, or add poetry, letters, and speeches. Just imagine the kind of crowd that might show up for a festival of vampire stories.
• What’s new: Explore emerging voices from hot literary journals, blogs, zines, and sources such as McSweeney’s, Best New American Voices, or Best Non-Required Reading. Try a program built on the model of the hugely popular “cringe readings”
  such as Mortified,⁴ in which participants share embarrassing passages from their old diaries, or story slams such as Moth and Porchlight.⁵
• Award winners: There are many awards for short fiction, and a series might be built around the runners-up for some of these, with a culminating event built around the award-winning story.
• Locally grown: Focus on authors from your state or region, or combine a story reading program with a writing program in your area or hosted by your library. Short stories are the lingua franca of writing programs, and having those stories read
  aloud, perhaps with subsequent discussion or anonymous comment cards from the audience could be both a valuable teaching tool for the writers and an entertaining (and unpredictable!) story program for the public.
• Adjust the age range: How about an all-ages storytime? Not a lap-sit, but one aimed at families with plenty of humor and suspense for all. How about an afternoon storytime focusing on teens, using stories that appeal to them (or that tie in with their schoolwork), or enlisting their aid to select, read, or discuss the stories. Other variations might be a mother/daughter or father/son storytime, or a storytime aimed specifically at seniors. You could aim for a particular gender, though I always think a mix is best.
• Seen and heard: This is an excellent program for blind and low-vision patrons, requiring no adaptation except room for their service animals. Patrons who are hard of hearing will be glad for the use of amplification. This program can also be presented with a sign language interpreter to make it accessible to the deaf, with added visual interest for everyone.
• English as a Second Language (ESL): I learned what a good program this was for ESL students by accident when two local language schools started bringing classes on field trips to Thrilling Tales. Eventually I’d send a copy of the story to the teacher in advance, which was shared with the students. If you’re focusing on ESL, avoid very difficult texts, or perhaps provide definitions to them or discuss idiomatic expressions after the reading.
• Bilingual: The People and Stories/Gente y Cuentos program in New Jersey⁶ offers a terrific example of how such programs can be used to serve a bilingual community. Reading aloud has always been a key activity in adult literacy learning, opening up books to new readers and bridging the distance between text and speech, and between oral and literary cultures.
• Add it to the mix: In addition to staging a story reading festival, you can add stories to other existing programs. A story reading is a low-cost, low-fuss way to flesh out a summer reading festival, a One Book One City program, or a lecture
  series.
• Encourage multitasking: A story reading can be the perfect accompaniment to knitting, quilting, eating lunch, drinking tea, or any other activity that doesn’t distract others.
• Outreach: Storytimes are highly portable, and can be taken to branch libraries, retirement homes, schools, hospitals, community centers, churches, prisons, factories, street corners, bars, or pretty much anywhere you need them to go.
• Podcasting: This is a perfect program to include in your library’s podcasts. You may want to podcast a live program, or do a story program through podcasting alone.⁷ As this entails recording (copying) and distributing (publishing) the story, you will need to address copyright concerns that are not really a factor with a simple live storytime. Do this by restricting your podcasts to stories and translations that you are certain are in the public domain, or working to get permission from the
  author or rights holder.⁸

Few Practical and Technical Tips

• Setting the stage: Very little is required here, no props or puppets, just a podium or table, a reading light, a glass of water, and some chairs. Do what you can to make a special space for this. Lowering the lights creates a nice mood while still allowing people to knit, eat, or gently nod off. Preshow music, tailored to fit the day’s story, is a wonderful, cheap way of setting a mood.
• Use a microphone: I strongly recommend this; in fact, I pretty much insist on it. Patrons who have difficulty hearing will either tell you so loudly in the middle of your story or—worse—simply stop showing up. You may be very confident in your
  stentorian voice, but you don’t want to read like the town crier or a Broadway star. Rather, read in a relaxed, natural way that allows you to convey the details and nuances of the text. I caution against using a headset mic, which doesn’t respond well to the abrupt changes in volume from whispering to shouting that stories call for. An affordable stationary microphone and portable amplifier can work well for any space in or out of the library. If you’re podcasting, you’ll want to invest in a good digital microphone with a pop filter to soften the consonants.
• “How long is this going to take?” That is a fair question, and you should tell your listeners the reading’s length and if there will be breaks as you introduce yourself and the story. There is no ideal length for a storytime: evening programs might last a couple of hours, while my own lunch-hour program is around forty-five minutes. What works best for me is to begin with a five- or ten-minute story, followed by a longer one, which warms up the audience and makes the program viable for
  latecomers. If you do a longer program, I suggest giving people explicit permission to leave early through specified exits.

To Read, or Not to Read

One obvious question that you’ll want to answer right away: Who will read the stories? If you’re a ham like me, that answer is obvious. If you’re not, there are other ways to produce this program without reading yourself. For the first year of Thrilling Tales, I made use of a resource found in most communities: theatre people. Actors love to perform, and many will gladly
contribute time and talent to their public library free of charge. Not everyone who would like to read stories in your library will be good at it, so you’ll want to hold auditions. This is more fun that it sounds. Here’s how I did mine.

I first tapped into some of the actors’ networks in Seattle to get the word out about the auditions and what they were for. Most cities and towns have some sort of system for alerting actors about auditions via electronic message boards or e-mail lists; just ask performers in your area. If you’re in a rural system without a theatre community, regular community channels will work. I called actors in groups of five for thirty-minute slots, rather than one at a time. I took a very short story and divided it in six parts which I assigned to the actors, saving the last page for myself. I allowed the actors about ten minutes to read through the story quietly, and then we read it aloud together, round-robin fashion, finishing with the surprise conclusion read by me.

This proved much more fun than most auditions. While the others were reading, I made notes about how well each person read and their particular vocal qualities. Later, I graciously thanked those folks that I couldn’t use, and I contacted the best and sent them each a small batch of stories that I thought would work well with their voice and persona. They then picked the stories they liked best, and I scheduled their readings and was there to emcee and run the show.

For the first year, I alternated reading stories with several guest readers who gave some truly inspired readings. My ultimate decision to switch to reading the stories myself had less to do with my own abilities as a reader, and more with a sense I got from some of our regular attendees that they appreciated the consistency of having a single reader rather than a variable succession of guest readers. Because it was actually less time-consuming to do the readings myself, I did what most busy librarians would do and chose the easier, more sustainable path. This is not to say that having guest readers isn’t a wonderful idea and a workable system, although if I do go back to using guests in the future, I will assemble a smaller company of two or three skilled readers.

How to Read a Story

Listening to a story can be hard work. If you don’t believe me, try an experiment. Take a book you haven’t read that has been professionally recorded, and have a friend or colleague read you the first couple of pages. Now listen to the audiobook version.
You’ll probably be stunned by the difference. Now, nobody is expecting you to be a professional actor or audiobook narrator, but here are some small things you can do that will help your listeners and you to more fully enjoy the author’s words.⁹

• Rehearse: I suggest reading a story three to five times before sharing it with an audience, and at least twice aloud. If there’s someone you can read it to, even better. You need to have a good sense of the story’s structure, and full command of any difficult words or grammar. The rule is: if you think you know how a word is pronounced (but aren’t sure), look it up! You’ll also need to know how long the story is, and the only way to do that is by reading it aloud.
• Start slowly and don’t rush: Probably the most common error for story readers is to get ahead of themselves and their listeners by reading too fast. Hearing a story takes much longer than reading it silently, so take your time and let the story unfold at its own pace. This is especially important in the establishing sequences of a story, when your listeners are just tuning in to your voice, meeting the characters, and getting their bearings in the fictional world. Even during faster-paced action sequences, heighten the intensity rather than merely upping the speed and dashing ahead of your audience.
• Editing for length: If the story you’re reading doesn’t fit within the allotted time, this will also encourage you to rush. The best solution for this is to select shorter stories, but if you just love a story that is a little too long, you might do some artful
  editing to bring it down to size. Short stories tend not to have much fat, and it is surprisingly easy to ruin them by snipping some crucial detail or stripping them of personality to squeeze the plot in, so be very careful about what you cut.
• Editing for content: Mine is a live program in a public library with a semi-captive audience, so I have no compunctions about translating contemporary swear words into their Victorian antecedents, and suggest you do the same. For the same reason, I steer clear of stories where profanity is an integral part of the style, rather than Bowdlerize great gritty crime writing.
• Mark up your “script”: Although it may seem artificial at first, adding some notes to your photocopied story actually frees you up during a reading, allowing you to relax into the moment without getting lost or making mistakes. Develop your own notations. Among the things you might wish to make note of are:
  
  1. Emphasis: Underline key ideas; crucial information; turning points in the plot; or moments of discovery, realization, and
     revelation.
  2. Character: When a story has lots of characters, I underline the different voices with colored pens to help me keep track of who is speaking.
  3. Pauses and narrative breaks: Be careful about pausing too much in a story; pauses are costly, and must be earned. Some are natural and necessary, so remind yourself where those are.
  4. When to look up: Eye contact with your audience while reading a story is a tricky thing, as you don’t want to get too distracted from the page itself. Marking moments of emphasis where you plan to look up can help take the pressure off.
  5. Subjective notes: Note crescendos and diminuendos in a story’s pace or intensity, indicating attitude or tone.
•  Character voices: You don’t have to do much, but it will be a big help to your listeners if you do a little something to help distinguish the voices of the various characters. (And remember, the narrator is often a character too, even when omniscient.) Often the story will give you cues as to how a particular character speaks. Use pitch, timbre, accents, pronunciation, pacing, and manner (in moderation) to mark your characters’ voices.
• Place your characters in the room: It really does help both you and your listeners to keep track of things if you read with a physical sense of where your speakers are in relation to each other. In two-person dialogue, think of one speaker on the
  left, and the other on the right. In a three person scene, add someone in the middle. Make subtle adjustments accordingly; you don’t have to jump around in your chair. Try this out until it feels natural.
• Warm up: I recommend doing some basic stretches and vocal warm ups before a reading. Do a little yoga, sing in the shower, take some deep breaths, or roll your neck and shoulders. Reading aloud is all about breath and thought, so give
  yourself five or ten minutes to get your head in the game, and get your breath relaxed and supporting you.¹⁰
• Beware of dropping in pitch or volume at the ends of sentences: If you find you’re running out of breath, you need to relax and breathe and invest in the words and the moments. 
• Don’t comment on the story: We want to hear the story, not your opinions about it. If the story is humorous, read it straight. Let the story do the work, and do your level best to mean what you say, investing the words with sincerity and sense.
• Flubs: No matter how prepared you are, you will make mistakes while you read. Even the pros say the wrong word or lose their place in the text or lose track of which character is speaking. It is no big deal: just correct yourself and move on.
• Enjoy yourself: Preparation enables you to relax, breathe, and fully enjoy sharing the story with your listeners. Find and remember the things you love about the story. Celebrate those things, and enjoy them afresh as if for the first time.

“Where Do You Find All Your Stories?”

I get this question a lot from librarians who are curious about my storytimes, and I confess a snide impulse to reply, “You’re a librarian, look it up!” In truth, short stories are plentiful and easy to find, but their question betrays a fact that is worth  discussing here: There just aren’t that many short story fans out there. The reasons for this are varied and complex. The experience of reading short fiction is very different from that of novels. Many readers may think of short stories as highbrow aesthetic objects, not aware of the fact that most genres have an excellent short form. Brad Hooper discusses this in his excellent Short Story Readers’ Advisory,¹¹ a good introduction to short fiction.

I confess that I was not an avid short story fan until I started doing this program. Now I can’t get enough of them, and am always seeking out new authors and perusing the latest story anthologies. Yes: the short story can be more demanding than the novel, with a more intense concentration of effects which makes them, in Hooper’s term, “piquant.” Stories are a vivid, all-consuming experience for the reader and listener. That is what makes an adult storytime so much fun and so addictive for you and your patrons.

Some of the greatest writers of all time excelled at short stories, voices as varied as Charles Dickens, J. D. Salinger, and Alice Munro. Each year scores of anthologies are published of genre and literary stories, many of them culling the best short fiction from other collections and magazines.¹² You’re a librarian, look them up. They’re easier to find than you may think.

Conclusion

Stories are in our blood. For thousands of years, we have gathered around to hear them. As children it was stories that brought us to the library. Libraries are temples of story. It is at the heart of what we do, not merely as repositories of data and knowledge, but as centers of meaning. What could be a purer expression of our treasured role in preserving and promoting
story than to fill the very air of our libraries with stories, for young and old?

Editor’s note: This article is a condensed version of chapter 17 of The Readers’ Advisory Handbook (ALA Editions, 2010). The author would like to thank the book’s editors, Jessica Moyer and Kaite Mediatore Stover, for their assistance.

References and Notes

1. The Readers’ Bill of Rights can be found in Daniel Pennac’s The Rights of the Reader (Walker Books, 2005), one of the best books about reading that I know of.
2. About half of Jack Ritchie’s stories seem to be about husbands poisoning wives, or wives poisoning husbands. Ritchie’s stories are heavily anthologized, but mostly out of print. Try Little Boxes of Bewilderment: Suspense Comedies (St. Martin’s Pr., 1989).
3. Examples include The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Minority Report, and Million Dollar Baby. For ideas on other story/film pairings, take a look at Stephanie Harrison’s anthology Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen—35 Great Stories That Have Inspired Great Films (Three Rivers Pr., 2005) or Carol Emmens’ Short Stories On Film And Video (Libraries Unlimited, 1985).
4. See www.getmortified.com (accessed July 4, 2009) or http://salonofshame.com (accessed July 4, 2009).
5. See www.themoth.org (accessed July 4, 2009) or www.porchlightsf.com (accessed July 4, 2009).
6. See www.peopleandstories.org (accessed July 4, 2009).
7. An older version of this that many libraries still use is the dial-a-story, a program that enables children and adults to dial their local library from any telephone and listen to taped stories.
8. See Richard Stim’s Getting Permission: How to License and Clear Copyrighted Materials Online and Off (Nolo, 2007).
9. For more on story reading technique, see Robert Blumenfeld’s Acting With the Voice: The Art of Recording Books (Limelight, 2004) or Peter Kahle’s Naked at the Podium: The Writer’s Guide to Successful Readings—How to Use Drama as a Tool to Give Dynamic Readings Anywhere (74th Street Prod., 2001).
10. Those looking to learn more about the care and development of the voice may benefit from Cicely Berry’s The Voice and the Actor (Macmillan, 1973) and The Actor and His Text (Scribner, 1987), as well as Kristin Linklater’s Freeing the Natural Voice: Imagery and Art in the Practice of Voice and Language (Nick Hern, 2006).
11. Brad Hooper, The Short Story Readers’ Advisory: A Guide to the Best (Chicago: ALA Editions, 2000).
12. For example, Best American Short Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 1978–), Best American Mystery Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 1997–), Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Pr., 1990–), The O. Henry Prize Stories (Doubleday, 1919–2002; Anchor Books, 2003–), and Best New American Voices (Harcourt, 2000–).