Suddenly They Heard Footsteps: Storytelling for the Twenty-First Century

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Vintage Canada, 2005 - Biography & Autobiography - 317 pages
Canada's best-known storyteller, Dan Yashinsky, lives his life as teller and listener, and shows how storytelling can and does create vital connections between individuals, communities and families.
In an age of instant messaging, entertainment systems and digital interaction, why is it that more and more people are being drawn to the art of oral storytelling? As Dan Yashinsky, one of Canada's most well-known and beloved storytellers shows, an old tradition has become the new avant-garde. Storytelling is still very much alive in this digital age: it connects us to each other, to our communities and to our past. In fact, people are as hungry as they've ever been for the wisdom and solace of told stories. But they are also looking for stories that will speak to our post-modern, fractured, apocalyptic age.
Suddenly They Heard Footsteps is part memoir, part instruction, part cultural history, and includes tales that Dan has told to wide acclaim. By turns humorous, inspiring, instructive and philosophical, Dan shows us that, like love, stories mean the most the very moment we give them away.

"From the Hardcover edition.

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About the author (2005)

Dan Yashinsky has been a working storyteller for almost thirty years. He is the recipient of a Toronto Book Award for Tales for An Unknown City, and the author of The Storyteller at Fault. He founded the Toronto Festival of Storytelling, was one of the founders of the Storytellers School of Toronto and began the 1001 Friday Nights of Storytelling in 1978, a weekly institution in Toronto that continues to this day. In 1999 he was the recipient of the Jane Jacobs Prize for making a valued contribution to Toronto’s cultural life, and in 2007 won the Anne Izard Storytellers' Choice Award.

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