The 2023 Tellabration! ™ Storytellers

Tellabration!™ 2023
November 18

The 21st annual Inland Valley Storytellers Tellabration!™ was a live in-person event at the Claremont Folk Music Center (220 Yale Avenue, Claremont) on Saturday November 18 at 7:00 PM. Tickets this year were $20 per person 40 tickets were sold. The audience was very responsive to the stories told by the 6 tellers. Refreshments were provided after the stories outside of the store on the sidewalk. Thanks goes to Chris St. Clair and Jayne Sjodin for managing the eating table and the drinks table. Thanks to everyone who brought food to eat and to Jayne Sjodin for bringing the hot chocolate.

The tellers are shown below with their photo and name. If you click on their name, it will show you a short bio about each teller.

Scroll down to read about the history of Tellabration!™ at the bottom of this page.

In 2003 the Inland Valley Storytellers presented their first Tellabration!™ concert at the Claremont Forum and IVS has produced a Tellabration!™ concert every year since.

Tellabration!™ is a worldwide benefit evening of storytelling. It creates a network of storytelling enthusiasts bonded together in spirit at the same time and on the same weekend.

Tellabration! ™ originator J. G. Pinkerton envisioned this international event as a means of building community support for storytelling. In 1988 the event was launched by the Connecticut Storytelling Center in six locations across the state. A great success, Tellabration! ™ extended to several other states the following year, and then, in 1990, expanded nationwide under the umbrella of the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling, or NAPPS, which later became the National Storytelling Association, and is now called the National Storytelling Network.

In 1995, for the first time, there was a Tellabration! ™ in Japan, brought there by Japanese storyteller Masako Sueyoshi, who had been a part of Tellabration! ™ when she lived in Connecticut for several years. By 1997, there were Tellabration! ™ events on every continent but Antarctica. In 1999, 333 sites, 400 producers, and 6700 production staffers spun stories to a combined audience of over 34,000.

J.G. "Paw-Paw" Pinkerton passed away on November 4, 2008, just 3 weeks before the 21st year of Tellabration! ™ celebrations, on his way home to Connecticut from a family wedding in Texas.

Storytelling was J.G.'s second career, to which he devoted himself passionately after his retirement from Texasgulf in 1988. He served on the Board of Directors of NAPPS (the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling, parent of NSN) for six years, and he also served on the Board of the International Storytelling Center. He has been a generous friend and mentor to hundreds of storytellers.

In this season we remember J.G. particularly as the creator of the tradition of TELLABRATION! ™ - the night of storytelling on the weekend before Thanksgiving. As many of us produce and perform in our hundreds of Tellabrations! ™ across the country and the world every year, let us thank J.G. Pinkerton, with whose vision it all began.