Story-Telling Festival To Be Held In Oxford

OXFORD, CT - From The Oxford Historical Society: The Oxford Historical Society and the Friends of the Library in Oxford will host a Tellabration, a story-telling festival, for adults on Sunday, November 12th at 2:00 p.m. Arnie Pritchard and Jeanne Donato will be performing. The event will be hosted by Christ Church, Quaker Farms and sponsored by the Connecticut Community Foundation. Admission is free and open to the public.

Arnie Pritchard has performed at the CT Storytelling Festival and the annual convention of the League for the Advancement of New England Storytelling. He tells folktales from diverse cultures, as well as literary and personal stories illuminating the American past with humor and insight.

A few years ago Arnie inherited his late father’s Army foot locker from World War II. It contained hundreds of letters and other papers from his father’s three and half years as a soldier, and his two years with the United Nations refugee program in post-war Europe.

From a selection of this material Arnie has created a story, “This Business of Fighting” focused on his father’s letters home from the European Theater in 1944-45. It puts a human face on one of the huge events of modern history, portraying a young man dealing with everything from raw fear to his role as a leader to his exposure to a world both wider and more brutal than he had known.

For more information on the Oxford program, please call 203-910-4574. A full listing of Tellabration sites in Connecticut with dates and times can be found by logging onto http://www.connstorycenter.org/tellabration.htm or by calling The Connecticut Storytelling Center at 860-439-2764.

Photo courtesy of The Oxford Historical Society