Everyone loves a good story, and Storytelling Alberta is providing virtual events throughout the year to highlight different cultures, lives, and storytellers.

June Johnston, Media Representative for  Storytelling Alberta explains what their organization is all about. “Storytelling Alberta is a nonprofit organization and we promote the ancient art of oral storytelling. We have lots and lots of events, We have online events where we can just meet and share and tell stories and get feedback. One coming up this weekend, for example, we teach some storytelling skills, and the theme of the workshop is around telling hopeful stories which certainly is something we can all use right now.”

“It's really learning the skills of storytelling and oral story storytelling is very, very different from reading a story in that it's, you know, it's connecting with the emotion and giving just enough information that the audience, becomes engaged by sort of filling in their own gaps or creating their own story.” Johnston said.

“We mentor very young storytellers, we mentor storytellers who just want to get going on the storytelling career. There are actual scholarships to mentor and support storytellers.”

What kind of stories will you hear if you attend a Storytelling event? Johnston says the sky is the limit. “Storytelling can be anything! It can be faithful, it can be life stories, it can be folklore, can be stories that you enjoyed reading yourself and sharing with others with permissions, of course, and there's a lot of cultural stories as well.”

Storytelling Alberta’s next major event is called Story Cafe: The Black Experience - Journeys of a People and it is in celebration of Black History Month. For more details and a full list of events, go here.