Patrick Ryan Storyteller > Projects

Sports Stories A project with the National Literacy Trust and professional football across England and Wales. Sports Stories uses the power of stories to promote reading, writing and speaking to produce a book written by the fans for the fans. My job is to train football club staff: players, coaches, study support centre teachers, and scholars (apprentice players) to tell and read aloud stories to children. These new storytellers then go into libraries, schools and hospitals to entertain children and recruit them and their families to contribute to an oral history of their club created by the fans, which is made into a book. With this and Kick into Reading, an earlier NLT scheme involving storytelling and sport, I've worked with the following football clubs:


Active Learning with Artforms Leeds. The resource pages and reports for Spoken and Written Word Active Learning are now up and running and live on Artforms' Webpages. The children, teachers, librarians and artists did a great job, and want you to make use of their ideas. Do check them out! Active Learning is a project giving teachers and artists the opportunity to learn together, supported by national arts specialists. I am the course facilitator for its 'Written and Spoken Word Programme'. This involves teaching and creating course materials to support 12 teachers, 2 librarians and 12 written and spoken word artists (wonderful poets, storytellers, writers, and performers).

Story Sparks!  A new festival of stories, spoken and written, at The Ark, the National Cultural Centre for Children in Dublin.  The Ark, Children's Books Ireland and Poetry Ireland have banded together to produce 3 weeks of performances, readings and workshops.  Writers, tellers and illustrators will entertain families on weekends and on weekdays storytellers will perform and run workshops for visiting school classes. 

Writer-in-Residence, Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada  This has been a fantastic experience, with a focus on research and writing.  I have also contribured various lectures on storytelling in many university departments, taken part in the Thin Air Literature Festival for 2011, told stories at a fundraiser at Aqua Books, advised creative writing students on their work, and taken part in local storytelling activities.  I've met some of the local tellers, and heard some wonderful authors including many Aboriginal writers and musicians.  My research and writing include various academic articles and conference papers, a new anthology, and with my colleague at Chicago, Donna Schatt, a study of a 120 year old educational storytelling programme which has significance for studies today in cognitive development, critical literacy and active learning.

• Keynote Speaker, Benedict Kiely Literary Weekend, Omagh, County Tyrone, N. Ireland 9-10-11 September 2011
• YLG Keynote Speaker, Goldsmiths College, London, September 2011
• Thin Air, Winnipeg International Writers Festival, 18-24 September 2011
• STORYTELLER AND WRITER IN RESIDENCE, THE CENTER FOR CREATIVE WRITING AND ORAL CULTURE, UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA, WINNIPEG, CANADA, SEPTEMBER THRU DECEMBER 2011 
• Centro Internazionale Studi--tour of Italian secondary schools, Decemeber 2011
• Port Regis School and Wykes Primary School, January 2012
• Rathmore Grammar School, Belfast, January 2012
• Schools in Ireland and Northern Ireland, February 2012
• Residency in Greenfield School District, Greenfield, Wisconson, February-March 2012
• Tales of Ireland--an early start to celebrate St. Patrick's Day!  Celtic Knot Public House, 626 Church St., Evanston, 8 p.m, 4 March 2012
• University of Chicago Lab Schools, March 2012
• International Schools in Treviso and Milan, Italy, March 2012

'A Queen of the Fit-Ups, A Queen of Storytellers: The Life and Times of Mealda Hall' Mealda Hall (née Doherty) is a storyteller and actress, born and raised in Strokestown, Roscommon and a long time resident (and storyteller, women's activist and peace activist) in Belfast. For 15 years I've been recording Mealda's amazing life stories and have nearly finished compiling these in an archive we hope to make available for publication and for other scholars. Her life stories reflect the social and political history of the island of Ireland over the past 90 years, with unique insight into the Fit-Up theatres (travelling rural theatre companies where Mealda starred the '30s and '40s)

'Talking the Game' Over the last ten years I've been working with various football clubs in England and Wales, and football, GAA and rugby clubs in Ireland and Northern Ireland. During this time I've also been gathering stories by the players and coaches, and making observations of their stories and storytelling skills. I'm compiling this data for analysis in a range of academic papers.

'Seven Wise Masters and Seven Wise Mistresses' When researching Shakespeare's Storybook, I came across a medieval frame narrative equally popular in Classical, Islamic, Jewish and Christian traditions. From the 17th through early 19th centuries in Ireland it was used to teach children to read. I'm looking at earlier sources of these two chapbooks, studying various stories from this series. I hope to develop these for performance and to use them in residencies and workshops to explore how stories link and are even a fusion of ideas, narratives and experiences shared by diverse, interacting cultural groups.

'School Storytelling Programmes for 5, 6 and 7 year olds' Donna Schatt, researcher at the University of Chicago, and I are examining the records of a long-running storytelling programme. We hope to identify patterns in the choice of stories popularly told across generations of librarians and teachers, and to find a method for measuring the impact of such long-term storytelling programmes on learning and child development.