Culture & Community | Guilford | Storytelling | Arts & Culture | Youth Arts Journalism Initiative
Denise Page. Ruby Szekeres Photos.
Denise Page channeled her mother. In one world, it was 1927, and Page’s mom was just seven years old, lying across from her own mother in an old New Haven apartment. Her mother blinked, a question still forming on her tongue, and Page could feel it in her mouth. In another world, it was 2024, and an audience of listeners clung to every word, eager and anxious to see where the story would go next. Page took a breath, and dived in.
Those worlds collided last week, as master storytellers Jennifer Munro and Denise Keyes Page took the stage—or rather, the gallery—in an evening of rich story sharing at the Guilford Art Center. A collaboration with GreenStage Guilford, the event put narrators in conversation with works at the GAC, as they responded to pieces in the Art League's 76th annual exhibition.
“We are just so happy to be here tonight,” said Page, who started storytelling in 2019. She cleared her throat. “Tonight, the first story I tell is a story I heard in two parts growing up from my mother.” The crowd seemed to lean closer with every word. “You will hear it as my mother.”
Around her, the small gallery was crowded with art lovers and lovers of the community. Without pretext or preamble, Page began, the room listening to every word.
The story began in a cramped apartment in New Haven. It was 1927, and Page’s mother—just seven—was lying across from her mother, newly widowed after a bout of tuberculosis took her father. The girl lay on a small cot and waited. She yearned to ask her mother a question, but couldn’t say it aloud. She wanted to know if her mother, who was dying of cancer, was still alive.
Time passed until it was midnight. Her eyes wide, Page’s mother listened carefully for the only constant thing in her life—Miria—and it finally came. Miria was the train that chugged by every night at midnight, with a loud engine and blaring horn. She turned to her mother to ask if she could hear Miria. Sleepily, her mother turned over. Yes, she had heard it and yes, the girl had gotten her question answered.
Page’s mother thanked the universe for allowing her to still have a mother. Finally able to get to sleep, she dreamt of her life before everything had fallen apart.
“Of life,” Page said, back in the gallery and also in her mother’s world. “Of love. Of books. Of art and health.”
It was not long before Page’s grandmother became too sick to care for her girls, and the two were assigned to a foster family. At times she visited her mother, but eventually that stopped, and she was a ward of the state. By the time she was 16 and ready to go to college, she realized that she would need to make money to do it.
While her late father had squirreled away enough to start college, there wasn’t enough to complete classes, and she worked as a maid for a couple.
She truly felt what it was like being a Black person, Page-as-her-mother recalled. The wife looked down at her with scorn and the husband made her feel unsafe.
She decided to find a new job, searching until she stumbled on a “help wanted” sign in the window of a dry cleaner. The street seemed totally new and familiar at the same time. Inside, the owner was looking for someone to press the clothes.
That would be a breeze for Page’s mother: she had learned to sew and even fashion together her own clothes as a child. After filling out an application, she showed off the long, beautiful skirt she had sewed, spinning around to make the colors whirl together.Then she told him how much experience she had.
The man looked up, her application still in his hand.
“I once knew a man with the same last name as you,” he said, wondering aloud if she could be related.
Page-as-her-mother nodded. The man who he spoke of was her father—who had sold the house in which the dry cleaner now stood.
When she got the job, it was like walking through her early childhood. In the kitchen, she pressed anything and everything that came her way. Though she wasn’t allowed to be seen, she was able to get money for college. Sometimes she would hear a train and she knew that Miria was there.
Page stopped talking, bringing the audience back to the real world. Amidst the thunderous applause that followed, she thanked the audience.
“It was really important for me to tell this story for my mother,” she said. “She can’t remember much of her mother and even less of her father. This is her story.”
“My job is to tell the story as if it is first discovered,” Munro said.
It was time for the second story, told by Munro. Unlike Page, Munro reached back into narrative history, taking it back to author Chrétien de Troyes and the Arthurian legend “The Fisher King.” The story, which has its roots in the adventures of the knight Perceval, dates back to the 12th Century. Since, there have been many adaptations, the most popular of which may be a 1991 film with Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams.
“My job is to tell the story as if it is first discovered,” Munro said. In her version, a group of teens—including Parziful/Perceval, who seeks the Holy Grail—pile their belongings into a van, set on fixing the unfixable. En route, one of the teens uses a walkman to play the story of “The Fisher King.”
The group travels to a home where an old couple lives. The man has one leg; his wife has all of her limbs, but doesn’t look much better. Their house stands in ruins. Their toilet overflows with waste. The group clears a rock blocking the path, then sets out to build a ramp for the old man. They get to work, and the world around them begins to morph and change, throwing new challenges constantly their way.
At first, work seems to be going well; the teens clear away some of the rubble. But by midday, things come to a stop. The rock becomes a boulder. The bathroom floor has rotted through. When one of the teens asks if the couple has any children, the wife becomes tearful and the husband goes stone-faced. They decide to leave for the day and get anything else that they might need to continue.
Friends Lacey Browne and Jenifer McShane, a board member of Guilford Art Center.
The next day, one of the teens imagines that the old man is the Fisher King and the woman is the Lady of the Lake and they are on a quest for the Holy Grail. Soon the couple tells them that indeed they did have a son, but had left after an argument with the parents. The thought—an unhappy one—is unlikely motivation: it pushes the teens to get back to work. Before long, they have built a sense of family out of their work.
As they continue to work, the old man checks in with the group, ultimately presenting one of the teens with a golden watch. He explains that it has been passed down from father to son in the family.
“I hope someday I will be able to give this to our son,” Munro said as the old man. Back in the story, he carefully put the watch back into the cereal box where he had hidden it. Days later, when a truck drove in with a toilet, they felt as if they had found their own Holy Grail.
“My advice to other storytellers, starting out and otherwise … tell stories as yourself,” Munro said in an interview after the event. She’s taken that advice to heart: Munro has been a storyteller since 1983. “Don’t try to copy anyone else. Everyone is doing their own thing and that is what makes stories so amazing.”
This article comes from the 2024 Cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative. Ruby Szekeres is a sophomore at the Sound School.