August House and Storytelling

August House and the National Storytelling Festival both started in the 1970s, each by a young person who was concerned about multicultural changes, especially about the quality of stories and tales feeding our national psyche.

The storytelling movement in America began with an idea: that handed-down stories have a richness which affects the well-being of those who share and hear them.

August House began with the idea that many good stories were being overlooked by the major publishers.

When these two ideas converged something special happened. And it is continuing to happen. A manuscript of original stories by a North Carolina minister was the first tangible evidence August House saw of contemporary American storytelling. Even before attending a festival or meeting the author, we knew we had to publish those stories.

Luckily for August House, their author turned out to be a tireless storyteller, a man whose love for traditional and revivalist storytelling is so great that he just can't stay at home for more than a week or two at a time. Now August House has published ten of Donald Davis's books, even more of his storytelling CDs, as well as books and audios by nearly a hundred other storytellers.

Now you can find August House at storytelling festivals coast-to-coast. You'll find our storyteller/authors in schools, at libraries, and speaking before conventions of every type. Storytelling is alive and well in America , making its impact through individual tellers, local guilds, in the workplace and places of worship.

It is thousands of caring, talented people working together to preserve great stories and perpetuate the practice of looking another human being in the eye and relating with love, wisdom, and humor.

Today that spark that was ignited, when a cultural rock in the form of Jimmy Neil Smith met the folks at August House, continues to extend the light of good stories and multicultural tales to every corner of the country and the globe.