When the tale is half the sale
Professor and cowboy poet teach art of storytelling
By DANA DUGAN
Express Staff Writer
Author and educator Gary Nabhan recently tried his skill riding a camel on Mount Sinai.
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Can the art of storytelling help boost profits for grassroots projects and businesses? According to Gary Nabhan, director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University, it most certainly can. He?s spent a number of years teaching the art of storytelling just for this purpose.
As part of the Trailing of the Sheep Festivities this weekend in Ketchum and Hailey, Nabhan is holding a workshop, Saturday, Oct. 9, called ?Story Telling, the Land and its Bounty.? The workshop is being held at the Hailey Cultural Center on Second Avenue in Hailey from 9 to 10:30 a.m.
Accompanying him is cowboy singer and poet Tony Norris, a Folklorist in Residence at the Center for Sustainable Environments. He is a participant and long-time staff member at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev., and has organized a similar gathering in Flagstaff, called Riding the Rim.
The workshop teaches skills on how to explore new ways of presenting participants? homes, animals, cultures and products.
?I cover marketing and ranching issues and Tony teaches story telling skills,? Nabhan said.
?We speak in a complimentary way. We try to get participants of the workshop involved in new options in maintaining their land and making more out of it.?
Nabhan explained that telling the stories of their land, sheep, and ranches increases the values of their products whether the products are wool, mutton, lamb or ranch eco-tourism.
Proof that this kind of communicative selling works is the proliferation of Farmers? Markets and organic food items from Mom and Pop establishments.
?We?ve really seen that there?s incentive for people to market their relationship to the land, their animals and the product themselves,? he said. ?We adapt the contents and the length of the workshop to the setting.?
An Arab American, Nabhan?s grandfather was a sheepherder on the Lebanon-Syrian border.
?I raise sheep and heirloom crops down here about an hour south of the Grand Canyon,? he said. He is also an avid gardener and subsistence hunter-gatherer as well as an award-winning writer.
Nabhan co-founded the non-profit conservation group Native Seeds/SEARCH and initiated the Traditional Native American Farmers' Association. He was awarded a MacArthur ?Genius? Fellowship and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Conservation Biology.
He is also the author or editor of 20 books of non-fiction and one book of poetry. Of the books he has edited one is called ?Counting Sheep: Twenty Ways of Seeing Desert Bighorn.?
Nabhan is also a tenured professor at NAU in Applied Indigenous Studies and the Center for Environmental Sciences and Education, and helps to oversee the Graduate Certificate program in Conservation Ecology. Nabhan's writing is widely anthologized and translated. He has won the Pew Scholarship for Conservation and the Environment, the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing, a Western States Book Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
