What is your earliest memory of storytelling?
I don’t remember the exact experience, but I know that my mother told me the story of the Sleeping King and the Wizard of Alderley Edge (where I was brought up) when I was about 4. I know this because the story had a very profound impact on me. From then on I could not separate the place from the story, their landscapes were one and the same, and to this day being in the place is to be in the story and, conversely the story is a doorway into the place. This capacity for stories to bridge our lived and imagined landscapes (though their differences are far more subtle and intriguing than that) has proved to be fundamental to my developing practice and interest in storytelling.
Which character do you most relate to and how?
As time has gone on, I have found the most compelling characters are those that walk the edges of the stories. They somehow have the keys to the thresholds at the margins and remind us that the story is actually part of a wider landscape, a bigger order, a meta-world. So whilst they may only appear fleetingly in the story, shimmering with lightness, they also bring a gravity of tectonic proportions which we often don’t understand until the story has begun to resolve.
I heard of a wood carver once, who kept all the shavings and fragments that fell as he carved because they were what made the piece what it was. Stories are run through with the same fragments, and I feel that it is those pieces that link our stories together.
So it’s as much about what you don’t tell? Would you say the silence is as important as the words?
Yes absolutely it is. My feeling is that the words frame the silence and ultimately return us to it with a greater sense of it’s depth.
Which landscapes appeal to your creative impulses?
Bleak, wild, open places. The crown of the hill. The twisted thorn in the teeth of the wind. Places where the earth swells up to meet the sky. Indigenous aboriginal cultures see them as sacred places, where the heart is closer to the vast openness of being, the limitless.
Generally speaking it is natural landscapes that touch me. In a slightly confused, bewildered way I also love built environments, but it has taken me many years to appreciate them. They are, after all, places where our stories are confronted and contested more tangibly, and that is for me their great power.
I struggled to see the beauty in built environments until my partner expressed his opinion that we, humans, are part of nature and that’s the environment we have created. I began looking at towns and cities in a different way after that. Would you consider transplanting a traditional, countryside story into a cityscape?
I have done that yes, and in some ways I think it’s an important thing to do, but in the end it’s of little consequence. If the story is being well told then we have entered the archetypal landscape where there we are closer to a fundamental poetics of being, where symbols of the modern are incongruous and hold no sway. They are too young and have not yet earned the currency.
Perhaps it is also that stories are more about our relationship to the living world beyond ourselves, and in cities it is hard to find anything other than the human to encounter.
Do you hunt for stories or do stories come to you?
Well I guess early on I was a hunter, but I see now that I am also the hunted. I think that once we begin to tune in to the resonant music of our deep imaginations we start to hear it in everything, and stories (or rather their component images) pop up all over the place in our daily lives. I also feel that as we start to question and interrogate the experience of living, through art, the same seeds that inspired our ancestors in the stories they ‘made’ and told begin to flower in our own everyday lives too. Stories are like dreams, each involve trance, and each are somewhat beyond our control, they have a life of their own.
Do you ever find that you become too involved in a story?
In the research or creating stage I really don’t think it’s possible to become too involved in the story, in fact my fear is that I’ll not give sufficient of my deepest attention, thereby not become involved enough. But yes sometimes in the performance I do, I can sometimes slip too far away from the audience and forget to remain present to them, however live performance always has a way of letting you know that you’ve stopped paying attention. The storyteller (or perhaps any artist) has to stand between two worlds, the imagined (the story) and the hear-and-now (the telling), and if the link to either one of those worlds is lost the electricity does not flow.
If you had to tell one story over and over which one would it be?
I do so, frequently. On tour I often have to tell the same story night after night. But what’s really interesting is the living pulse of the story pushes through, and I find new things in it every time. The Sleeping King (see above) is one story I never tire of telling. It’s such a simple one, yet it’s capacity to reveal new, hitherto unseen facets of itself is seemingly endless.
Myth or folklore?
Both, and lots of them.
How important is the relationship between music and story?
I don’t see them as separate to be honest. Words are, in their essential nature, songs. They are the world singing itself into being. They shimmer in the same way music does. Music and words both meet in the soul. Perhaps we could say that story is the natural order to which both music and words align themselves.
But to me the shape of a story is the same as the shape of a song or a piece of music. In my performance I try to express that similarity, and to use their combined power.
How do you see the form of storytelling changing in future?
“The best way to predict the future is to make it”.
A singer, songwriter and storyteller, Nick Hennessey is a dynamic and passionate performer with skills that draw an audience in. With a love for the traditional culture of the British Isles his craft draws together the note, the song and the spoken word into a unique and engaging style.
As both a singer and storyteller, his interest is to bring out the song in the story and the story in the song, something that has taken him to West Russia to research epic songs of the Finno-Ugric people, and to Finland where he won the 2000 World Championships in Kalevala epic-singing.
As a solo performer Nick has entertained audiences in venues as diverse as village halls, the South Bank and the Albert Hall and extensively at folk clubs and festivals, storytelling festivals and literature festivals throughout the UK. International visits have included Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Canada and two national tours of Japan.
He has three solo albums to his name, the most recent of which “A Rare Hunger”, released on Harbourtown Records, received critical acclaim, with airplay on numerous radio station in the UK and the US, as well as on the BBC’s eclectic Radio 3 program Late Junction.
He will be taking his show ‘Where the Bear Sleeps. Stories from the Frozen North’ to The Institute, Kirby Lonsdale on Tuesday 20th December (6:30 pm) and Shap Village Hall, Shap, on Wednesday 21st December (7 pm). Admission £7 adults, £5 under 16s. More details available from the website at www.nickhennessey.co.uk
Vicky Ellis is a poet and novelist from Blackpool. She is a member of the Blackpool Dead Good Poets’ Society and is a regular blogger on their Dead Good Blog. The Dead Good Poets’ Sociey will be guests at Word Soup in the New Year.
Vicky’s review of The Liberty Tree by Hugh Lupton and Nick Hennessey can be found here.
Another of her Litfest reviews can be found here.