Since 1967, Diane Wolkstein has occupied a unique place in the world of storytelling and literature. Through her performances, teaching, books, and recordings, she has played a major role in the renewed interest in mythology and the modern storytelling movement.
In 1964, Diane went to Paris to study pantomime with Etienne Decroux, whose best–known student was Marcel Marceau. She also took many jobs to pay for her classes. The one job that changed her life was teaching Sunday school classes at the Temple Copernic, where she told the children stories from the Bible.
When she returned to the United States in 1966, while studying for her M.A. in Education from Bank Street College in New York, she told ecumenical stories at All Souls’ Church, a Unitarian Universalist congregation. The following year, she was hired as a “recreational director” within the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Diane described that moment in The Horn Book Magazine (November 1992 issue): “I began in McCray park in Harlem, standing in front of a crowd of about a hundred children. Radios were blaring and water pistols were firing. I skipped through my carefully–memorized rendition of ‘Peter Rabbit’ to improvise the Nigerian folk tale ‘Fattest of All.’
‘There was once a girl who was very, very, very, very, very, very…’
“I don’t recall how many ‘very’s’ I said, but at a certain point the radios were turned down, and the children were saying ‘very’ with me. We were laughing and ‘very–ing’ together, and my career as the Official Storyteller of New York City began.”
Her new job took her throughout the city, and caught the attention of The New York Times and the Associated Press. That fall, her summer job became a full–time career, and Diane told stories at schools, hospitals, day care centers, senior citizen centers, and parks. And her own radio show, Stories from Many Lands, premiered on WNYC–AM/FM in 1968, and remained on the air until 1981.
In the early 1970’s, Diane’s search for stories led her to Haiti where she collected over four hundred stories and later published three books: The Magic Orange Tree and other Haitian Folktales (Random House/Schocken, 1978, reprinted in 1997), The Banza (Penguin/Dial, 1981), and Bouki Dances the Kokioko (Harcourt, 1997). The Magic Orange Tree, in particular, is memorable not only for its poigant stories but also for the personal vignettes of the Haitian storytellers. It is now considered a classic in both the storytelling and the publishing worlds. Each year, several of its twenty–seven stories is reprinted in a major anthology.
A year after The Magic Orange Tree was published, Diane was drawn to the myth of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, the goddess of love, war, and fertility as well as the morning and evening star (Venus). This epic, written on cuneiform tablets, dates back to 1900 B.C.E. It is the world’s oldest written epic as well as the only epic of a woman. Diane worked on the text for three years in collaboration with the eminent Sumerologist, Samuel Noah Kramer. In 1983, HarperCollins published Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. Today, Inanna is a major part of Diane’s repertoire, and she has told it (often with the musical accompaniment of Geoffrey Gordon) in such diverse places as London, Crete, Austria, Australia, and Israel. Diane’s version is frequently cited, and excerpted, in books dealing with religion, literature, healing, and goddess spirituality. Inanna has been published in five languages, and has been made into a ballet and opera (see Publications).
From 1983 to 1990, Diane worked on the seven epics to be published in her book, The First Love Stories: From Isis and Osiris to Tristan and Iseult (HarperCollins, 1991). Her research took her to Israel, Egypt, Greece, and Turkey. She began telling these and other “large stories” in theatres and museums for adults. In 1995 Diane traveled to Australia to work on an Aboriginal creation story — SunMother Wakes the World — and to live in the desert in preparation for writing a collection of Jewish stories. The project grew into an eight year adventure, during which time Diane went to Israel to study Hebrew in order to understand the Jewish calendar and its relationship to story and ritual. In 2003, Random House/Schocken published Treasures of the Heart: Holiday Stories that reveal the Soul of Judaism.
Diane is known as a “storyteller’s storyteller” because of her wide range and knowledge of storytelling. Her programs include folk and fairy tales for children and families at schools, libraries, parks and festivals, and epics and myths for adults at festivals, theatres, museums, and libraries. She is a sought after speaker/storyteller for keynotes and celebrations. In addition to her performing and writing, in a desire to create a community of learning for storytellers, Diane founded the first educational conference for the National Storytelling Institute in Jonesborough, Tennesseee in 1978, and co–founded the Storytelling Center, Inc. of New York City in 1983. She started the first storytelling course at Bank Street College in 1972 and taught storytelling there until 1996. She has taught courses in mythology at Sarah Lawrence, The New School, and Pacific Graduate School. For eighteen years, she taught mythology at New York University and continues to tour internationally giving workshops on myth and the art of storytelling. Diane directs the storytelling programs at the Statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park in the summer and at Scandinavia House in the winter.
Her latest project is the writing and producing of Journey to the West, a Buddhist/Taoist parable that she is working on with Taoist master Sat Hon and Bharatnatyam dancer Anita Ratnam.
