Not the Plot
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Not the Plot
Alyssa Curtayne – Breathing new life into old stories
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Alyssa Curtayne is a passionate storyteller, writer, and researcher who is on a mission to breathe new life into forgotten fairy tales and the ancient art of storytelling. With a deep love for the old stories and the timeless lessons they hold, she is dedicated to reviving these tales and the traditions of the original tale-tellers, ensuring they continue to inspire and encourage imagination, creativity and wonder for future generations. A former journalist and English teacher, she has a strong commitment to inspiring creativity, fostering self-expression and cultivating connection through her writing, teaching and art.
In this episode of Not the Plot, host Teena Raffa-Mulligan chats with Alyssa about the importance of fairy tales, how stories connect us, and the challenges of funding a creative life.
You can find out more about Alyssa’s storytelling, books and writing services on her website at https://www.alyssacurtayne.com/
Thank you for listening.
Find out more about Not the Plot host Teena Raffa-Mulligan at https://www.teenaraffamulligan.com or follow her FB author page https://www.facebook.com/TeenaRaffaMulligan You can also sign up for her occasional newsletter at http://bit.ly/2gqsJz3
Hi, and welcome to Not the Plot, the podcast that seeks out the insight stories on the creative lives of writers and artists. I'm Tina Ratha Malligan, lifelong reader, writer, sometime artist, and daydream believer. I've always been interested in finding out what inspires writers and artists to create what they do and how they navigate the inevitable highs and lows of their creative life. Let's find out what today's guest has to say. Alyssa Curtane is a passionate storyteller, writer, and researcher who is on a mission to breathe new life into forgotten fairy tales and the ancient art of storytelling. She has a deep love for the old stories and the timeless lessons they hold, and she's dedicated to reviving these tales and the traditions of the original fairy tales, ensuring they continue to inspire and encourage imagination, creativity, and wonder for future generations. A former journalist and English teacher, she has a strong commitment to inspiring creativity, fostering self-expression, and cultivating connection through her writing, teaching and art. Alyssa, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Well, websites are helpful. They really are. And Google. But uh my first question, I guess, is what set you on this path to being a storyteller, particularly of fairy tales?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's an interesting uh journey because when I was a little girl, I always loved fairy tales. And I have a collection of um Readers Digest. There's a two-book collection that I would read over and over again. It's dated from 1981. And I read them over and over again. And of course, life happens and you forget about fairy tales. You know, you've grown up, you think you don't need them, but we really need them more than ever. And during 2020, I was having a not a great time of life. And so I rem I looked at my book collection. So I've I've carried my collection of books around the country. I've moved a lot. And I looked up at my book collection, there were my two little readers' digests. Alongside the Reader's Digest were collections of folk and fairy tale and myth that I've carried around my entire life. And I just had this moment of enlightenment of, oh my gosh, there it is. This reason for being, the purpose of my life. It was always there beside me, traveling in the car, always there. But I'd forgotten about it because you know, life gets in the way. And from that moment, I then Googled everything I could about fairy tales and storytelling. And then the idea of being able to have a job as a storyteller where there's no paper produced, you're not doing any environmental damage, you are engaging audiences, you are opening hearts. It was just such an attractive option to be an oral storyteller that I and then in really engaging with fairy tales as well. Um, it was just the perfect combination of things that happened for me. And yeah, and now here I am. Five years later, I'm the president of the Australian Fairy Tale Society. I'm very involved in storytelling. I went to England in 2024 to study storytelling at the world's most uh prominent storytelling school, and yeah, everything's going great now. So it's amazing how it the journey, the journey has been amazing.
Teena Raffa-MulliganDid you feel uncertain when you first presented your earliest storytelling sessions? Or was it did it come naturally or was it a learning process?
SPEAKER_00Well, there were two really pivotal moments. One was in a school. So I was working at a school and I was team teaching with this young woman who had very little experience in education. She was teaching them about Red Riding Hood, and the kids' faces were all blank. Like they they had, and I said, Do you know what this story is? And I just sort of on the fly told them the story of Red Riding Hood. And the next morning, one of the girls who hated reading, hated writing, came back and had written Red Riding Hood of her own volition without any teacher direction or parent instruction. She had written the story and she hated writing. That was that felt really incredible. But when I went to my very first structured audience-based thing, I felt very uncomfortable. Storytelling is not about rehearsing word by word, and what I had done for that was, you know, it's a very um common mistake people make was I rehearsed Rumpel Stilskin until I had lost every sense of improvisation from it. So, but I mean that was my first time. So I'm I put it on my YouTube so people can watch it, and then you can see my progress from that very first one till to where I am going in now. But yeah, it was a really those two events, those two first storytelling moments, the one in the school felt really comfortable, and the one in public felt very uncomfortable, but I'm much more comfortable now with public public storytelling.
Teena Raffa-MulliganHow do you prepare? You say you don't rehearse it, so what do you do ahead of a storytelling session then?
SPEAKER_00Ah, so I do a lot of research. So I love uh researching fairy tales and particularly fairy tale origins. So I go back and find the very earliest version of a story, and I usually find three or four versions that are quite old, and then I record them orally into my phone, um, and then I listen to them over and over and over again until I'm really solid with the story, and then I write the story out. And sometimes I use my the notes or I use the recordings to help, but I just write it out and then add my own sense of uh self in it because sometimes the stories, you know, if you're telling to children, you need to be careful what you say these days. And and while the fairy tales are really important for teaching kids about resilience, the backlash uh can be quite brutal in today's cancel culture. So you just gotta be careful. Um, yeah, so my it's a very research-based practice, and then as I'm going to sleep at night, I rehearse it in my head and also do some hand gestures or think about my body gestures. So it's quite a um somatic thing in my body. So when I come to tell it, it just comes naturally. And with storytelling, if you're uh telling a story and someone coughs or there's a thunderstorm, those things can be incorporated into the story in the moment. So it's actually really beautiful. It's it's a type of improvisation in many, many ways, but you're still holding the story within.
Teena Raffa-MulliganAre you watching for audience reaction so you can read their interest level?
SPEAKER_00Yes, you can, but that's not always a guarantee that people are paying attention. I've heard I've um heard people who are telling to people in palliative care, and the people in palliative care are closing their eyes and they you think they're asleep, but they're actually really taking it in deeply, they're visualizing in their mind. So body language isn't always a great reflection, it's more about the energy in the room and gauging people's energy. If they're fidgety, you know you've you they're not listening. If they're completely still and they're looking at you, you know you've got them in this world. You know, not got them, that sounds a bit, but you you've engaged them in the story and they're with you, traveling in the story with you in this moment, which is the most precious, beautiful thing ever.
Teena Raffa-MulliganWhy do you think then that fairy tales are as important now as they were when they were first created?
SPEAKER_00Well, they're the story of humanity. They're humanity stories, they belong to all of us. They don't have a specific um, for example, Cinderella, we would all say is a Western story. Cinderella is not a Western story. It's the very first fragment of Cinderella was in ancient Egypt. The very first full documented Cinderella is Chinese. The Cinderella we're familiar with is French. Stories travel, they are global. They traveled over sea, they traveled over land, they traveled between people. So they're they the story of humanity in many, many ways and how humanity reacts to different life experiences. How do you react when there's a wolf in the woods? If that wolf is personification of a man and you're a single woman by yourself, you know, how do we cope with grief and death and trauma? And I think one of the things that's happened in recent years is because we've we've cleaned up the fairy tales so much, they're so sanitized, they don't have that depth of psychology that they originally intended, which was to teach people through metaphor about life and share, share that, you know, share the metaphors of life and give us guidance on how to deal with wolves knocking at our door, how to deal with the famous Chesterton quote, how to deal with a dragon when a dragon knock turns up, you know, how to slay the dragon. Dragons turn up, metaphorically speaking, in the world. Um, yeah, I think there's a lot of treasures to be found in fairy tales. And and one of the things that I love, and I know a lot of people retell fairy tales, which is great. And the the industry of retelling fairy tales in literature, um, they're one of the biggest selling types of books on the market, you know, the retelling of fairy tales. But we are still telling the same stories over and over again. Everyone knows Cinderella, everyone knows Second Beauty, everyone's, you know, we're still telling the same stories. I think perhaps we need to go back and find older stories and retell those because some of those, particularly ones written by women, have been forgotten, women who have agency, though, people of colour, all of those stories are just sort of pushed to the side and and forgotten. And I think we need to remember them. They're really important because they're part of the global story of humanity.
Teena Raffa-MulliganDo you find that adults and children have the same love of hearing stories? Or do we lose that capacity as we grow older?
SPEAKER_00I think we have been conditioned to relate to visual stories. Most of our and like in video games, many of our imaginations are very visual now. We're very visual with our when we think about some people when they're writing a novel, they will think it in movie form. So we're very visual. I don't think there is a difference between adults and children. I think adults the joy that they experience is just as valuable as the joy that children experience. The children are just a bit more unguarded with their responses. You know, like tell us again or tell us another story. You know, that's the response that children will have. We'll take well, adults will go, that was lovely. Thank you for sharing that. I really liked, you know, and they're a bit more diplomatic with it. Yeah, I don't think I think so. I think, and the other thing that storytelling does, which is something quite special, is that there's a bit of study on this that shows that when a master storyteller is telling a story and engages an audience, the audience moves into a liminal state, which is somewhere between sleep and awake. So we are collectively dreaming this story into life. And it's like the space, you know, the space between awake and asleep, you know, that moment just before you wake up or just before you go to sleep. It's in that liminal space there that we all exist in a story. And that I don't know if you've ever tried to change a dream when you're doing a dream, and you have a terrible dream, and you're oh I want to change this dream. It's very much like that. You you have some agency as the viewer of the dream or of as the participant in the story to modify it to suit your own narrative. So that's quite an exciting part. I think that's one of the most special things about the oral tradition is that collective dream that we can create in the moment of the story.
Teena Raffa-MulliganSo you are a writer as well as a storyteller. What's your creative process like when it comes to writing a story as opposed to preparing to tell it?
SPEAKER_00Mmm, that's a good question. One of the biggest challenges for me has been finding a system that works so I can work on this project and this project and have discipline with that. With my writing, quite often I will the inspiration will come like most writers, it will be in a notebook or something that you see in the street. And then I will write as much as I can in that moment and then park it. For well, my most recent book is called The Fart Catcher. So fairy tales and farts, you know, excuse me. The Fart Catcher, I had that idea for a while, and then one day I just sat down. I went, I'm gonna write this book. And I sat down and it it was psychic channeled, to be honest. When I'm writing, it's very much like I'm channeling it. Then I park it and then come back to it to do the editing. I find editing really challenging. Editing other people's work, not so much. Editing my work, I find really, really hard. Yeah, so I find that if I dedicate a block of time to it, I can get the work done. In terms of the creation of the story, a lot of it is in turn in my head. A lot of going on a walk and thinking about things or um getting inspiration from nature, getting inspiration from history. I quite like historical fantasy. The Far Catcher obviously is not historical fantasy. But the um, but the one I'm working on at the moment is historical fantasy for children. And it there is, I've got the framework, and then once I've got the framework down, then I go back and edit and and um add the details to it. And I'm not, I'm not what is it, planner and pants? I don't I don't know that I fit into either of those because it's it's more of a uh it's not a stream of consciousness, but it's also not structured planning as such. But I have hundreds of stories that I've never written, so you know then they're all there waiting for me to have quality time to be able to write them down.
Teena Raffa-MulliganAnd it it does take a lot more time than people realize to write a book, even if it's a children's book or a picture book. People have no concept unless they're involved in that side of creativity. Just how much work is involved in writing 500 words or 10,000 words of something like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I go into the library or in a secondhand bookshop and think there are millions of hours of someone's creative energy being poured into these things, and I don't want any of them to be wasted. I you know, it's just so much love into every single book that you see is so much love has been poured into it, and um and I guess that's the same for all of us. We have these projects that we want to bring to life in some way, and and there's I know for me, my experience is I want to bring more love into the world. And if people can find more love and joy and happiness through my books, for then I'm really happy with that. So that would be the best part of your creative life.
Teena Raffa-MulliganWhich part? All of it wanting to share that, bring that more love into people's lives and sharing these age-old stories that have uh such uh an importance to humanity. I would say, from what you said, that sounds like that's the best part of your creative life. Is there a downside to your creative life?
SPEAKER_00I don't have enough time to I have to work, I have to do my day job. So the downside is I don't have the time. But one of the other things that has been a problem up until fairly recently has been my my attention has been scattered. So I'll start the morning with the email check and then I'll do something else, and then and I don't have any clear direction, but recently I've just started doing one project a day. Like I need to finish this one thing each day. It's not finishing over a month because I would get bored if I had to do the same thing over a month. Um, but one thing a day for me has been actually been quite revolutionary because I've finished a project in three days during the school holidays. You know, it was three days of solid focused work, and I've got this brand new product, you know. So it was just that the challenges are around scheduling and um prioritizing, prioritizing what's important um to me, but also maintaining things like the Substack. I I would like to, it's monthly, I would like to be on the Substack monthly. I'd like to be finishing, you know, two picture books a year. And you know, like I've got a list of things I'd like to do every year, and I I need to prioritize those things as well. I mean, for my podcast, I I recorded in three months a whole year's worth of episodes, and that was pretty intense, but that's a whole year done. I don't actually have to think about it too much now.
Teena Raffa-MulliganHow often do you release your podcast?
SPEAKER_00Uh fortnightly.
Teena Raffa-MulliganFortnightly.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
Teena Raffa-MulliganOh that is a lot of recording to do at one time.
unknownYes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It was, but it was also it's freed up my space now to work on my middle grade novel. Yeah, it's freed up my space now to work on some storytelling projects. So it by by chunking them in one block, I actually think this is a practice that works for me. I think in three-month blocks or even one-month block for me is actually really productive. I quite like doing doing things because I like I said, I get bored or I come to it like with a story, I come to a roadblock and go, I don't know how to solve this particular problem in this chapter. And so I'll leave it and then come back to it. You know, that sort of thing is is how I sort of get around it a bit.
Teena Raffa-MulliganI think for some of us, we don't fit into the category of either a planner or a panther, where something in between, and that's probably partly because, as you were saying, we have so many creative areas that we want to explore, so many ideas that we want to pursue. And what you were saying about focusing on completing one thing, that's probably something I could take on board and actually complete some of the unfinished projects that I have because I'm a bit of a butterfly. And shiny things everywhere. Of course. Sparkly things everywhere. If you were going to give someone some advice who wanted to live a fully creative life, what would you say to them?
SPEAKER_00Well, most of the people who can fund this, you either have a partner or parents who can fund a life like this. But in the absence of a wealthy benefactor, um, I would say start with one thing. Start with one project, get it up and running. If I'd have done it all over again, this is what I would have done. Pick one thing, get this one thing really solid, get it automated, get the marketing solid. Um, so even if it's just one, like the fart book, for example, if that is all automated, the ads send people straight to the buyer's page, they order. I don't have to have anything to do with it except check the accounts and then move on to the next one, and then move on to the next one. That's how I would do it because to fund a creative life is the biggest challenge, because we don't have patrons, we you know, we're not living in a time where arts are very valued. Um, people's money is split, they can't afford to fund us. Um, so we need to fund ourselves through having things that make us money.
unknownSo
SPEAKER_00Example, I have some online courses on Udemy that are just ticking over, making a little bit of money here and there. It's not huge amounts of money, but it's a little bit of money. And eventually, I mean, it's not going to be my full-time income, but eventually that will start to be a stream of income that's a bit more substantial. So these streams of income are, I think, yeah, for artists, the biggest challenge is funding it to fund a creative life. You know, we're not all as privileged as others to have, you know, wealthy parents or partners or or a partner who says, Hey, I support what you want to do. Let me fund you for 12 months, you know, that sort of thing. So I would definitely say pick one thing, put all your energy into getting that monetized, and then move on to the next thing and then monetize that.
Teena Raffa-MulliganYeah, that's how I would do it. Sound advice, because it really is a balancing act for anyone who wants to live a creative life, that finding that place that you can actually survive in in our society where you have enough income to allow you the freedom to create and the space to create. Because if you're stressed about how you're going to keep a roof over your head and food in the cupboard, that's certainly going to block off any creative expression you might be capable of.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And also like workload. So sometimes if I've been working a lot, it'll take me three days to recover from my school experience. Um, being a teacher, sometimes the days are really challenging. And so I don't have creative energy when I got home. So I can't, you know, make art in the margins. I can't do that when I'm working full-time. So it becomes a um a real balancing act, trying to find the creative energy as well as the time and the freedom.
Teena Raffa-MulliganThere'd be very few of us, I think, who who have really felt that we can just go off and do all the creating that we want to without giving any thought whatsoever to the financial side of it.
SPEAKER_00Oh, well, that's my lottery plan, Tina. If I ever win, that's my plan is to fund artists and creatives. That's my plan.
Teena Raffa-MulliganI'm still waiting to win Lotto. I've probably been waiting longer than you. If you were going to be having dinner with any writer or creative person, living or dead, who would you choose to spend your time with and ask them about living a creative life?
SPEAKER_00That's a very easy question to answer. Um, there during the 17th century in France, there was a group of women who wrote fairy tales. And there was a man in their group, and of course, his fairy tales became very famous. His name was Charles Perrault, but her name was uh Charlotte Rose de la Force. Um and she wrote poetry, she wrote uh historical stories that were really taking the Mickey out of society, and she wrote eight fairy tales that are absolutely stunning. And one of them is Rapunzel. And she, well, she didn't write Rapunzel, she adapted it from an earlier version. But I would sit down with Charlotte Rose Dela Force and I would pick her brain about her creative process, how she managed to. I mean, she wrote most of her stories when she was forced into a convent by Louis XIV because she was an outspoken woman in possession of a pornographic novel. So, you know, she wrote it while she was incarcerated, really. But before that, she was telling stories, and I think she would be a fascinating person. She never married, she didn't have children. She may have had children. There is, I suspect she had to give up a child because she wasn't married. Um, and she was very sexually active, so it's highly likely that she did. But um, she would be my person of choice if I had to talk to her. And I did my thesis on her, so I would love to pick her brain so I could write more about her and bring her to the forefront of fairy tales. Um, bring another bring another woman back into the forefront of fairy tales.
Teena Raffa-MulliganI shall have to look her up because I had not heard of her and she sounds fascinating.
SPEAKER_00Well, Kate Forsyth wrote a book called Bitter Greens. It's a fit it's a fictional account of her life.
Teena Raffa-MulliganBut yeah, it's um Ah, I shall have to read that too.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yes.
Teena Raffa-MulliganWell, thanks for joining me today on the podcast, Alyssa.
SPEAKER_00It's been a pleasure to chat with you. It's been a pleasure to be here. It's been fun to talk about creative process. I think it's it makes up a really large part of my day and my thinking, and to be able to articulate what it is that I do is really quite a pleasure.
Teena Raffa-MulliganThank you for listening to this episode of Not the Plot. I hope you've enjoyed the conversation and will join me again as I find out the inside stories on the creative lives of writers and artists. Until then, I'm Tina Rafa Mulligan, saying goodbye for now and happy creating.