Awwwwwwwwwwwk! -- Storyteller Jackie Torrence's Hiiiiissssses And Haaaooowwwllls Will Grab You

Jackie Torrence can tell a scaaaary story.

How scary? So scary that little bumps rise and crawl on your skin like a swarm of invisible insects.

One time, a high-school coach was so startled when Torrence got to the scary part in "The Monkey's Paw" story, he "fell back and wedged himself in a garbage can," she said, chuckling. "That was good, yes, I liked that."

Now, Torrence is not mean. No, that's not how her grandmother and grandfather and Aunt Sally raised her. They taught her to be nice and sweet and brave. But the monsters in her story can cause such a fright, like the one knocking at the front door in "The Monkey's Paw," she may scream as if she's seeing it herself.

Because in her mind she is.

She sees the Big Hairy Toe Monster, sees Br'er Rabbit, sees Jack and Hardy Hardhead. That's one of her secrets of storytelling:

Imagine what the character looks like. It doesn't mean you have to tell everybody. Just act out the character like you know him.

Torrence, who'll appear at Northwest Folklife Festival tomorrow and Elliott Bay Book Co. in Seattle Saturday, has told stories for 30 years. She's told them to people of all ages in 50 states and in Europe. She can tell funny stories and sad ones, too. She has many storytelling secrets and she wants you to know them so you will love to tell stories as much as she does. She writes the secrets in the margin beside the stories in her new book "Jackie Tales: The Magic of Creating Stories and the Art of Telling Them" (Avon Books, $25).

(Here's one secret: Don't be afraid to make a face. A lot of things, like love and hate, are too abstract for children to really understand without big expressions.)

Such secrets don't come cheap. She's told these stories at Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center and on David Letterman's show. She's told them to Disney and Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks team to help them tell stories better. She's showed companies such as IBM and AT&T how to talk to each other. She's won awards for the stories she's told on tapes and videos. Now she's telling you.

There are five kinds of stories in her book:

-- Family Tales are her own, and she encourages people to make up their own about incidents or people they'd like to remember.

-- Br'er Tales are ones her grandfather told about Br'er Rabbit, passed from generation to generation by descendants of slaves in the South.

-- Scary Tales are embellished from her grandfather's and ones she has made up.

-- Jack Tales are rooted in old Scotland and England, and you know the most famous one - "Jack and the Beanstalk."

-- Jump Tales, common in Denmark and England, wait until the last line to make the listener . . .

JUMP!

Like the one about the character Mary, who at the end of the story finally unties the mysterious yellow ribbon she wore around her neck all her life. Torrence writes about how the sound man reacted the first time she recorded the story:

"He was tilted back in his chair, and when I got to the end (AWWWWWWK!!!!! HER HEAD FELL OFF!!!!!), he jumped way up and back against a filing cabinet. There was blood everywhere, and he had to have 36 stitches on his head. He just jumped back and Bam! Boy, I really felt bad."

Torrence knows so much about telling stories partly because her grandparents and Aunt Sally told her part true stories about their lives.

As a little girl, Torrence spent a lot of time alone and learned to tell herself stories. She had trouble talking out loud because of a speech impediment, until her ninth-grade teacher helped her to speak as well as she could write.

She started telling stories as a librarian. Word spread that she told a good story and she soon beat out clowns and balloon blowers to entertain at children's birthday parties. The library fired her after word got back that she was making extra money telling stories.

She persevered, although it was hard to make enough to feed herself and her daughter. Even when she was a librarian, she needed food stamps. That changed after an article in the Charlotte Observer got her name to the National Storytelling Association. She was invited to Memphis for a convention. In one day, she booked 50 appearances. "And I haven't been home since."

She has traveled internationally. She wrote a play in 1992 called "Bluestory" about the blues, which she performed in London to good reviews.

Her daughter is 30 now and has a 2-year-old son. Both live with Torrence in her home in Salisbury, N.C., the small town where she grew up.

Torrence is 54, and for five years has used a wheelchair to ease getting around with arthritis. She makes six or eight storytelling appearances each month.

Her agents live in Seattle. They first heard her at the Vancouver (B.C.) Folk Music Festival in 1984. John Ullman, who runs Traditional Arts Services with Irene Nankung, saw her grab the attention of 10,000 people in a matter of seconds.

Torrence hiiisssssses snakes, haaaoooowwwwwlllllls dogs, KUSSHHLOOOOSHHHHHHs a tub spilling water. Torrence says: "That hissing is important, it's what children think of when they ask you to tell this story again."

(Another secret: Sounds bring kids into the scenes so they can understand what's going on.)

In Torrence's stories, stepmothers are no longer evil. She says the concept is obsolete because so many children have stepmothers now. She substitutes evil housekeepers. But her witches are still wicked. One day, a group of modern witches picketed Torrence:

"They said they weren't like that. Well, I'm sure that they weren't, but I don't choose to change, that's the story. Now I'm waiting for the giants to come after me."

Torrence doesn't tell fairy tales, not conventional ones anyway. But she swooned over them as a child. She remembers what her Aunt Sally said when she burst through the door after school one day to tell about Snow White:

" `Snow White, baby, you ain't never gonna be.' It wasn't meant that because I'm black I'm never going to be white. It meant . . . whatever I get, there isn't going to be a prince getting it for me. I've got to make my own way."

Most children know that now, she says. They believe it's possible for a transformer to turn into a Corvette before a plain golden pumpkin will become a horse and carriage. It's one of the concepts she talked about with Spielberg's DreamWorks team. "Stories that could have happened are more successful."

"And," as Torrence would say, "that's the end of that."

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Storyteller

Jackie Torrence tells stories at 8 p.m. tomorrow in the Seattle Center Opera House for the Northwest Folklife Festival and 2 p.m. Saturday at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle. Both are free.

For a full schedule of Folklife events, see today's Ticket section.