What if Caliban was right? What if the whole place is like his island, voices everywhere, everything with a story to tell, polyphonic, “full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs”? Say this is true - what then? How do we learn to listen in such a world?

There was an Ashanti farmer once, so the story goes, and he went into his garden to dig up a yam. So far so good; many yams have been harvested in the history of the world. But this particular yam cried out indignantly: “Well, at last you’re here. You never weeded me, but...

This is a book of stories told by storytellers in the city of Toronto. They were told at a gathering that meets once a week, every Friday evening. Toronto storytellers began this custom in 1978, at a café called Gaffers in Kensington Market, and have continued it in various locations ever since. These storytelling evenings came to be known as One Thousand and One Friday Nights of Storytelling.

Kensington Market was, like all markets, a good place for storytelling. You could buy on the same block Portuguese fish, Jewish cream cheese, Hungarian salami, Jamaican yams, and old clothes from places...

One day, the villagers of Akshahir came to Hodja. “Hodja, we’re in terrible trouble! It hasn’t rained for days and days, the sun is burning down like a ball of fire, we have no water left to drink! Please help us.” Hodja agreed to help. “To help you properly,” he said, “I need a large basin brought into the square.”

They brought a large basin into the middle of the village square.

“Now,” he said, “fill this basin with water.”

“What do you mean, fill it with water? What water? Hodja, all we have left are a few drops to...

Once upon a time there was a dervish who had sixty disciples. He taught them as best he could. Then the time came for them to undergo a new phase in their study, so he called them all before him and said:

“I am about to embark upon a long journey. Something, I’m not sure what, is going to happen along the way. Those of you who have absorbed enough to enter this stage will be able to accompany me.

“But first, you must all memorize this phrase: ‘I must die instead of the dervish.’ Be prepared to shout this...

Once upon a time there were three elderly gents sitting on a park bench. They were retired, they didn’t have much to do, so they met every day and they talked about this and that. Probably just about every day they solved all of the world’s problems. One day one of them said to the others, “If you had your druthers, how would you like to die?”

They thought about that for a minute until finally one of them said, “Well, you know, you see those flashy new sports cars that you see driving around. Oh, heaven knows how fast...

I did not expect her face to be blue.

“It’s nothing,” she whispered from the bed. “But this morning I was dead for a moment. I had an awful pain, then nothing. Somebody shouted, ‘Breathe, breathe,’ and I think I heard a prayer - who am I to question? The police came, and an ambulance, too. And here I am, back again! My dear, don’t be so serious. At my age you expect such things. Now, come closer and tell me how you are.”

This was no time for modesty.

I whispered in her ear, “There’s a man in my...

I come from Prince Edward Island. It’s a small place with a small population; but there are probably more ghosts per square mile there than any other place in Canada. My family, especially the members of my grandmother’s generation, seemed particularly close to the spirit world, and possessed that peculiar kind of sensitivity to events that lay on the border between the physical and the spiritual worlds. Forerunners were very common then. A forerunner is a strange happening that precedes news of a death or disaster, and only those specially blessed would be party to the other-world’s warnings.

My grandmother’s...

I can’t remember exactly when I first heard this story I am going to tell you. It was either the summer before I started high school or the summer after I finished grade nine. What I do remember for sure: it was the summer I discovered poker. Learning to play poker that summer was like being admitted through the portals of a shining, new universe. You’ve heard of the expression “beginners luck.” Well, I had it. And with such a cornucopia-like abundance, it verged on the miraculous. Every week on Saturday night I came rolling out of those games like...

When I was a little boy of seven or eight - I can’t remember my age exactly, but I was this high and so much nicer - my father, Teofil, and my Uncle Longin would take me carp fishing on the Holland River in the spring of the year. Now, lest you think this is going to be a Slavic version of a Norman Rockwell painting come to life, I hasten to add that my presence on these fishing trips was vital for both my father and uncle; vital, because I served as their shield to deflect from them the...

I grew up in North Bay, Ontario. One of our teachers told us that we were nestled on the edge of the pre-Cambrian Shield. Somehow that was a comforting thought.

There we were, nestled on the edge, yet the world was a mere turn of the dial away. Magic voices from the Wrigley Building in Chicago floated across our living room, not to mention southern accents from WWVA, Wheeling, West Virginia. Once, on the short wave band, we even heard from London, England.

In those days radios were not little transistors which you could tuck in your pocket, nor were...

There was a man named Osvif Helgasson. He was a great sage, and lived at Laugar in Saelingsdale. He was the son of Helgi, who was the son of Ottar, who was the son of Bjorn the Easterner, the son of Ketil Flatnose.

Osvif’s wife was Thordis, the daughter of Thjodolf the Short. Osvif and Thordis had five sons called Ospak, Helgi, Vandrad, Torrad, and Thorolf. All the Osvifssons were stalwart men.

Osvif’s daughter was Gudrun. She was the loveliest woman in all Iceland, and also the most intelligent. Gudrun Osvifsdaughter was a woman of such courtliness that the finery...

I learned this story from my grandmother. She learned it from her grandmother and she from hers. It’s a story of my ancestress Martha Cory and what befell her in the winter of 1692.

At the time of the story, Martha was in her sixties. She was a stout, hard-working farm woman. Sharp-witted, she always spoke her mind. She had a habit of often being right, something for which few of her neighbours ever forgave her. Her husband, Giles, was older, in his eighties. Quick of temper, he was slow to comprehend. Unlike Martha, he couldn’t use words to win...

My mother grew lilies. Not that she was the only one in the neighbourhood who did, but hers were special; perhaps because the achievement of even four or five blooms in the midst of an extended family of teenagers, as many as fourteen at times, was remarkable. But Mother had dozens of lilies - despite the lawn fights with the hose, the midnight horse escapes, the digging dogs. The cry comes down over the years: “Not in the lilies!!” Farm life was not gentle, especially on gardens.

She grew them for herself, tending them like children, all the while professing...

Now one day, oh one day in spring I was watching the sugar snow melting on the hillside. It formed little trickles that ran down the hillside and on into the lake.

When the spring sun touched the strong winter ice it was weakened. Slowly it broke apart, the wind blowing against it, pushing the ice together in a sort of a symphony.

I went down to the lake to watch Father push his canoe out into the bay trying to catch some fish. How long he fished I do not know for while he was out there fishing I...

Dad worked in the big cities - Toronto, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, and Detroit. High steel, industrial painting, and window washing -Indianmen have always been famous for their equilibrium in high place - something to do with the middle-ear position. Anyway, my dad was away a lot. So, Mom had to look after us kids herself and supplement Dad’s earnings with her craft work.

She worked with porcupine quills and birch-bark. This she learned from Aunt Rena. Aunt Rena was a master at making quill boxes, beautiful quill boxes which she sold at the CNE (Canadian National Exhibition) each...

What I’m going to tell you is all true, as it was told to me by my mother and father. It takes place in South Africa, and a good title for the story would be “The Gold Mine.”

My father and mother lived in Lithuania, were born there and lived there. Things had been bad in Lithuania for a long time, and not just during the First World War, but before that too. The way my mother told it, the German armies would come through, and then Russian armies would come through, and then Polish armies would come through. It...

There are facts in this story. Sam Peppard lived in Oskaloosa, Kansas, from eighteen-fifty-something until he died, an old man with a long beard and many descendants. I went to school with some of his great-grandchildren. And what happens in the story did happen. But why Sam did what he did do and why he never did it again - that belongs to the legend. And the legend was not handed down from his generation to mine. So here is a legend for Sam Peppard.

The wind blew Sam Peppard to Oskaloosa. It was blowing strong out of the west,...

Have you been to Kensington Market in the summer? The poet Eric Miller sees it a sprawling slaughterhouse, unidentifiable carcasses hanging in windows, dead deep-sea fish slopping about in reeking bins, pigeons in their tiny cages pecking at each other.

I prefer the way Joséphine told me about it and showed me through it the first time I was there, speaking to me calmly,“Oui, oui, c’est comme ça”not to let the gypsy carnival overflow rush to my head all at once and send me cartwheeling along the fish-stained streets, among the gutter’s mouldy oranges, bouncing on my hands,...

The man on the other end of the phone said that of course I probably would not like to do an author’s tour of the North-West Territories. He said it as a joke before he got onto the real business of the conversation, which was going to be an offer to tour southern Alberta for Children’s Book Week.

“Hold it! Hold it and stop!” says I. “I will do the North-West Territories.”

Dead silence from the other end of the line. I know what he is thinking - “Shit! I had this guy figured for southern Alberta. His publisher even...

There lived in Perugia a young man by the name of Andreuccio di Pietro, a horse dealer. Having learned that in Naples there was a market that sold horses at a good price, he putcinquecento fiorini d’oro- five hundred golden coins - in his purse and, leaving home for the first time in his life, he went to Naples with other merchants.

There, he soon was at the market, looking at many horses, and to show that he meant business, he pulled out his purse several times, but he failed to make a deal. One of these times,...

You know, sailors are a group of people who spend a large amount of time together and so they have a rich folklore. As do the men who work in lumber camps. All sorts of songs and stories about logging. What about today? Is there a group of people today that spend a lot of time together and have a rich folklore? There is, you know! Strange source, you might think. Baseball players!

Of course I like baseball, but it’s true ... baseball players spend an inordinate amount of time together. They may be in big cities but they spend...

The Council of all the Wise Men of Chelm had been meeting for days now, busy pondering the situation. They were pulling their long beards and scratching their high foreheads.

It was true. A train of nine shiny red cars had come to Chelm. Everyone had seen it. It was true that an engineer sitting inside the train had pulled a chain causing smoke to puff out and that an assistant sitting beside him had pushed a button causing steam to hiss out. They had all seen it, not once but three times. It was true. A dispatcher inside the...

Litvaks! If I was to tell you about Litvaks, we’d be here all night. We had one once, in Sassov, a real, genuine Litvak. How he got there, where he came from, nobody knew. The sun goes up one morning and boomp, there’s a Litvak on the doorstep. And not just any mere Litvak, either, ele alitvak she-be-litvakim,a Litvak par excellence - running around sticking his Litvak nose into everybody’s business, pointing his Litvak beard here and his Litvak finger there, asking, bugging. You know the kind of Litvak, a Litvak. “How come, how come, how come?” and...

“I cannot tell what the truth may be / I tell the tale as ’twas told to me.” This was one of mother’s verses, a grown-up cop-out we thought, as an answer to the question: “Is it true?”

Some years ago, at Harbourfront, after I had told the story of Tsar Saltan to a big, dark roomful of people, a little girl with her parents came up and, very politely, thanked me. Then she asked, very quickly, “Is it true?” Her parents tried to hurry her away but she waited while I did my best to answer.

I told her...

A Hare was once passing by a cave, and in the cave a Lioness had just given birth to her first child. The Hare looked at her and asked, “How many children have you?”

“One,” said the Lioness.

“Oh, pitiful,” said the Hare, “pitiful! I have seven; and the last time I had nine!”

“Yes,” said the Lioness, “it’s true. I have only one child. But the one I have is a Lion.”

A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A...

A mother Mouse was walking down the road with her little ones around her, and suddenly an enormous Cat appeared. The little mice screamed and tried to hide behind their mother. But the mother turned around bravely, and she faced that Cat, and she said to it, “BOW WOW!” And, as the Cat ran away, she looked at her children and she told them, “Let that be a lesson to you. Never underestimate the value of a second language.”

A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A...

There was a poor widow woman once who had three daughters. And one day the eldest came to her and said, “Mother, bake me a bannock and cut me a collop, for I’m off to seek my fortune.”

So the mother prepared the bread and meat, and then she said to the girl, “Would you like the whole of this with my curse, or will you take the half of it with my blessing?”

And the girl looked at the food and she said, “Och, mother, there’s little enough as it is. Curse or no curse, I’ll take it all.”...

Once upon a time in the Ukraine, a land blessed by God and beloved by her people, there lived a rich farmer with three sons. The farmer’s wife had died, and it fell to the farmer alone to raise his sons. The two elder sons were vain and selfish. They liked only to dress themselves in finery. The youngest, called Ivan the Fool by his father and brothers, was a dreamer. He liked to spend his days lying on the large clay stove, and dream his dreams. And when he wasn’t dreaming, he was out gathering mushrooms in the birch...

There was once a man who owned a property outback of Biloela. His land was lush and well watered and he was able to run sheep. He had no sons, but he had a daughter, a buxom, strapping lass. Her mother had died when she was no more than a babe and he had brought her up himself as best he could. Now this girl could ride a horse, round up sheep, throw a ram, shear and tail as well as any man, but when it came to doing anything inside the house her brain went soft and her fingers...

Violet was an orphan. Her father had died shortly after his wife, leaving his daughter well off - the owner of valuable property - and in the care of foster-parents (who had their eyes on Violet’s fortune).

Try as they could, her foster-parents could find no fault with Violet. She was good-natured, did her chores cheerfully, and gave no cause for conflict.

In that village the people got their water from a nearby river, which was muddy and turbulent most of the time. One of Violet’s chores was to fetch water every day; and she alone returned home with her...

Makonde had built himself a fine hut. The beams stood straight and strong, the doorpost was beautifully carved and the roof tightly thatched to keep out the rain. But it was silent and empty. There was no one to laugh or shout or squabble or sing. There were no children to chortle or cry or run to greet him when he came home - not even a wife to pound maize in the mortar, to cook dinner for him and listen to his tales.

Makonde decided it was time to marry. He watched the village girls as they walked to...

There were sixteen brothers and sixteen sisters. That would have been perfect except that one of the sisters was singular. She was the sort who would get up and say, I’d like some ice-cream, and then go down to the sea and catch a fish instead. She wouldn’t catch that fish in an ordinary net, no, she would use a little net she had knotted herself out of wildflower stems, and the poor fish would come out with wet daisies flopping all over it. She wouldn’t eat the fish in the ordinary way, with potatoes her brothers had grown and...

Once upon a time the wife of a rich man fell ill, and, as she knew that her end was drawing near, she called her only daughter to her bedside and said, “Be good and pious and the good God will always protect you and I will look down from heaven and be near you.” Thereupon she closed her eyes and departed. Every day the child went to her mother’s grave and wept and prayed and she remained pious and good. When the winter came, the snow spread a white sheet over the grave, and by the time the spring’s...

An old couple once lived hard by a forest off which they made their living, he as woodcutter and she as gatherer of herbs and such. Yet they remained quite poor despite their hard work.

The man helped fell trees, cart logs, sawing and splitting them, and gathered also the wood for their own use, which he took home in a wheelbarrow once or twice a week. They were allowed only dry wood; fresh still-greening wood was protected by law and anyone removing it would be registered for forest violation and punished - a wise law, for without it the...

This story is about a peasant lad who works hard all day long and barely has enough to eat. From time to time he finds himself at the foot of this vast marble staircase, that reaches up into the sky like a huge tidal wave. He paces back and forth, and every once in a while stops and angrily shakes his fist at whatever it is at the top of the stairs.

One day he was pacing back and forth and he turned around and bumped into the Devil himself, standing there. “Oh, good day,” said the Devil. The Devil’s...

Once there was a boy who lived with his parents in a small house at the edge of a graveyard. One day he ran into the house and asked his mother if he could go out with his friends to shoot rocks at birds.

His mother said: “No.”

The boy begged and pleaded, and pleaded and begged. “Please,” he cried, “the other boys are already outside playing. They will leave me here if I don’t come out soon. Please, let me go.”

“All right! All right! Go out with your friends if you want and shoot birds,” said his mother....

A lonely traveller made his way over a moorland bridle path towards the town of Cromford in Derbyshire. It was summer, but a chilly wind was beginning to pick up as evening came on. The traveller turned onto a footpath that led towards the Cromford road. The path cut steeply down the hillside and then began to level off. The night was drawing in and the traveller could no longer see clearly. Suddenly an old woman stepped out from behind a boulder. “Where would any man be going at this time of day?” she asked. The traveller remained silent. “I...

There was once a house on the moor. The old straight track ran by that house so close, so close that one corner of it had been sheared off, then cobbled up again all askew. Some folk said that the track was a fairy path and that the house had been built too close to it. One day a woman came along that track dragging a small child, a boy, behind her. When she came to the house she stood looking at it, then she walked around the house three times, careful not to go widdershins; that is, the wrong...

I’ll tell you the story of Willie Johnstone the Piper. Now, Willie Johnstone was a tinker-man and he made his living travelling this way and that way, making baskets from the willow, or carving clothes-pegs, or doing a bit of hawking; this and that, and he’d work for the farmers now and again. But the main way he made his living was playing the bagpipes.

Och, he was a grand piper, was Willie Johnstone! There wasn’t a games or gathering the length and breadth of Scotland that Willie Johnstone wasn’t winning the cups and medals. There wasn’t a competition that...

Up on the highest moors, where the heather meets the sky, there is an old, lonely, broken well. Neither summer’s heat nor winter’s chill change its dark waters. Roses grow about and over it, but no one comes near. Passing shepherds leave it to one side, and if a maiden should find herself there, she leaves a gift of flowers or the bracelet from her wrist and flees away - for this is a magic well, the well of Carterhaugh. And nae maid comes to Carterhaugh

And a maid returns again.

But this is a story of a maiden who...

Cric, croc, les enfants!

Parli, parlo, parlonslSac-à-tabi, sac-à-tabac,

A la porte, ks ceusses qui ne m’écoutent pas!

Il y a bien longtemps- a long time ago, in the little village of St Joachim, near Montreal, there livedune jeune filk qui s’appellait Rose Latulippe. Elle était jolie- so pretty!Ravissante!But unfortunatelyelle etait vaniteuse.You know what that means? She was vain.Elle aimait beaucoup regarder dans le miroir.And that wasn’t all.Elle était coquette.She liked to flirt with boys. Now, it wasn’t that she was boy-crazy.Ah, non!She just liked boys to...

This is one of a set of stories, of which there are a great many in China, about just and righteous officials who, by their courage and ingenuity and their caring for the welfare of the people, bring about an amelioration or a resolution of a situation that has been brought into existence by some arbitrary action by persons in power. Sometimes the latter are dishonest, and sometimes, as in this case, they’re simply mistaken. Judge Bao is a figure who occurs in many of these stories, a well-loved figure. We call him Judge Bao because he first made his...

How a hot potato pudding ever acquired supernatural powers is a problem best left to more subtle minds than ours. Learned scholars - natural scientists, theologians, medievalists - claim to have uncovered traces of a now lost continent said to have been ruled by a large rational potato, the sole surviving memory of which is enshrined in the phrase, “the Might has a thousand eyes.” But of the supra-rational tuber, we have no evidence but this:

On a Friday afternoon in the winter of 1897, Mrs Yoshke Furmanovsky,a stouthausfrauof the Moldovanke, opened her oven door and plunged her...

Nanabush was walking; he’d been walking a long time. He’d been walking a long time and he was feeling very tired and thirsty.

“My, my, my,” Nanabush says to himself, “I been walking a long time and boy oh boy am I tired and thirsty. It’s a good thing I’m such a smart fellow and decided to follow this river. This way, if I get lost, I’ll still know where I am even though I won’t.”

And he liked what he said to himself.

“Goodness me but I'm a bright fellow,” Nanabush said to himself. And he had to stop...

There was a woman once who had a son. And as the boy grew up he noticed that everyone around him, except himself, had a father. But this didn’t bother him; this didn’t bother him until one day when he went to the market and overheard a boy say, “Look, there’s Ivan who doesn’t know who his father is or if he has one at all.”

When Ivan heard this, he made up his mind that he would not rest until he knew who his father was. So he went back home and told his mother what he heard and...

He didn’t know anything about the city, but one day the Wanderer set out for Thebes.

There was only one way to Thebes and he knew that the Sphinx lay along this road. And he knew also that those who came through the desert to go to Thebes were given a riddle by the Sphinx and that anyone who couldn’t answer it had to die.

Anyway, he crossed the desert. Do you want to go to Thebes? asked the Sphinx.

I want to go to Thebes.

You know that you won’t see the gates of the city if you can’t...

Dunyazad, kid sister, your part in the story is so easily and often forgotten. There you were, sitting by the royal bed the night Shahrazad must wed that mad King Shahriyar. He was the gendercidal monarch who sought revenge on all womankind by taking a virgin bride each night and chopping off her head each morning. And why? Because he was afraid that she would betray him as his first wife had done (quite spectacularly, with a big slave named Mass’ood, naked by the open-air fountain, with girl-slaves and boy-slaves joining in the festivities). This reign of horror lasted until...