Janice Del Negro:
Storyteller, Author & Editor

Contact Janice:

Experience:

Janice Del Negro in her own words...

I have always loved stories. I remember finding the folk and fairy tale section of my local branch library in the Bronx and reading every book on the shelves.

I read the great storytellers, although I didn’t know it at the time, Padraic Colum, Ashley Bryan, Eleanor Farjeon, Barbara Leonie Picard, Edith Hamilton, and many others.

My first exposure to oral storytelling was in graduate library school, but it wasn’t until I was a children’s librarian that I went to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and got my first taste of the power of storytelling.

It was the beginning of a long road I am still traveling.

As I became more involved with the growing storytelling community, I began moving away from established texts and experimenting with the motifs and structure of traditional folktales.

I realized that I had stories about women from every stage of life, but none of old women, no "wise crone stories." I had been telling a version of Joseph Jacob’s The Sprightly Tailor" for years, and although my listeners seemed to lie it fine, I never felt really connected to it. The story had a lot of good qualities, it was scary, but not too scary; it had a strong structure and a repeated (and repeatable) refrain; and it had a wide range of appeal, not to mention that I already knew it. I collected other versions, thew a lot of elements into the retelling cauldron, and the tailor disappeared altogether, and a spirited old seamstress arrived to take his place.

I’ve been telling Lucy in various incarnations for several years, and I find myself growing more and more fond of her. At a ghost story concert I had some very "cool" middle graders sitting up front, nudging one another and loudly proclaiming their inability to be scared.

By the time Lucy got to the graveyard, three of them had gotten up and gone to sit with their parents! Kids who hear about Lucy like her a lot, she’s funny, smart, and even though she’s afraid, she doesn’t run from the bogle until she’s finished sewing those pants!

Janice Del Negro is a children’s librarian and storyteller as well as the editor of the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

For more information, go to:


To go back to C-U Storytelling Guild, close this window.