I have been telling stories all of my life. In my family, you had to be a storyteller to get any attention at all. The competition was fierce.

One day, while visiting my uncle Chuck, an Iroquois chieftain, I asked him if he knew any stories about Raven, the Northwest Coast American Indian god. He smiled broadly and leaned back in his chair.

"Craig," he told me, "I will not only tell you the story, I will give you the story. You see, to the Native American people, a story is not just something you can tell just because you know it. A story is property—medicine. It's valuable, and it belongs to someone. You don't tell a story unless you own it. And so I will give you these stories, that you may share them with others."

That night in 1994, Chuck told me three stories: one of Raven, one a Coast Salish Changer myth, and one of Thunderbird. After that long evening, I actively searched for tales to add to my collection. Today, I could tell you well over a hundred myths and folk tales from memory, ranging from Norse myths to Touraeg tales from Mali—from Romanian ballads to Russian fairy tales. Some I have discovered in dusty, gold-stamped, leather-bound books on seemingly forgotten shelves in university libraries, and others I have learned from friends and storytellers in countries such as Romania, India, or Nepal. Some tales, such as Mullah Nasruddin tales, take only a minute or two to tell, whereas others, such as certain Hindu epics, take all night. I can usually tell a substantial fairytale in twenty to forty-five minutes, but I never tell a tale exactly the same way twice, because each audience is unique, and the spirit of the moment changes each telling.

In addition to traditional tales, I have many personal anecdotes to share. It has been a pursuit of mine to live life in a way that makes for a good story afterwards. The worse things get, the better the story will be if I survive—and I guess I got what I asked for. If you'd ever like to hear a tale of one of my travels or an experience that changed the way I look at things, let me know. If it feels right to share, you might get to hear what happened. My friends know that if they ask me a question about my life, they'll probably get a story, so be careful. Some of them rival those Hindu epics in length.

In this section of my website, I've shared some of my own writing about storytelling and some retellings of stories I've written down. I hope you enjoy them. Please drop me an e-mail if you'd like to use them or if you would like me to tell a tale at your event.

Happy tales,
Craig Coss