Speak Story Series opens season with Priscilla Howe

Speak Story Series, part of Speak Storytelling Inc., will open its 11th season with story artist Priscilla Howe, who will perform live onstage at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 14 and 15 in the newly-renovated Shepherdstown Opera House.

Howe has been a full-time storyteller since 1993, telling a mix of folktales, tales from books and original stories, most with a generous dollop of humor. She travels the world — 14 countries and counting — with a bag of puppets. In 2015, she spent five months on a Fulbright scholarship in Bulgaria collecting folktales. Howe also is searching for the best restaurant fruit pie on Earth.

The Feb. 14 show will also be streamed online. This program will be “The Story of Tristan and Iseult: A Medieval Classic,” perfect for Valentine’s Day — an epic tale of good luck, bad choices, giants, dragons, fools, betrayal and, of course, romance.

Howe will give a different performance on Feb. 15.

Tickets are $15 and available at speakstoryseries.com.

The Speak Story Series is for adult audiences. Mature youth are permitted at a guardian’s discretion.

Opera House Live is at 131 W. German St., Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

For more information, email info@speakstoryseries.com.

Everyday poetry

BY SHERYL MASSARO Special to The News-Post

Remember last month? The one that ended with news events that were just plain awful? Evilness running rampant and scattering victims? Our hearts breaking yet again over nature’s extremes or human inhumanity to human?

I’ve had it with evil, and I’m not sure what to do about it. I suppose we could personally start to combat it by being respectful to every person we meet, everywhere, all the time, starting with ourselves. But I write that as someone who has never been beaten up, been in the middle of a war, or faced ruin from a natural disaster. So what do I know? Not enough.

But I have lived long enough to know that mind and imagination can free us a bit, or a lot, from that feeling of helplessness and frustration in the presence of overwhelming cruelty. It is a strange kind of physics that happens when we imagine being freed of horrors and evils. When we imagine it firmly and with determination, we feel stronger. We might not understand exactly how to accomplish this freedom, but we begin to feel the strength to believe it can be done, and that’s an important start. I will never underestimate the power of imagination. We use it quite a lot, actually, daily. Maybe we should take more time to better examine our mind-wandering moments.

Sheryl Massaro is a Frederick poet and oil painter. She holds an MFA in creative writing from The American University. She is a recipient of one of the many stipends granted in 2022 from the National Endowment for the Arts through the Frederick Arts Council.