Good Things on the Way!

What a storytelling month July will be! Today I finished up plans for three days of storytelling, teaching storytelling to children and puppet-making for the Mountain State Arts and Crafts Fair. It was so much fun to mess about with crafty things again; it's been a while since I've had that pleasure. Expect more quiet time on this blog until next week, as I will be working all day each day on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Larry does a good job of taking care of home when I'm gone, but he doesn't blog :)

I have a week to rest up following the fair, and then it's a full week of stories from one end of West Virginia to the other. I will start the week in Sistersville and Paden City on the northwestern side of the state, then head to Weston in the center on Tuesday, and back towards home at Glenville and Grantsville on Wednesday, and then three days with three performances per day in Kanawha county, which is about 50 miles south of home.

I'll follow that with a drive to Virginia on the next day, spend a little time with my sisters, and then go to the eastern panhandle of West Virginia and the Morgan county library on the 23rd. Drive home the following day to be here in time for a performance for the Senior Volunteer program on the 25th, and then a few days rest before another two weeks of storytelling begins with Moundsville and Benwood in the northern panhandle, the Inland Waterways Festival in Marietta, Ohio and teaching a weeklong Appalachian storytelling class at Davis and Elkins College.

Somewhere in there I'll be trying to put up a few tomatoes, green beans and corn, and maybe stock my booths and keep my house in some semblance of order. It looks like a wild ride is ahead, and I know there will be so many things I will want to blog about if time permits. But if I disappear from time to time, you'll know why.

And then sometime in September, I'm going to England! Can you believe that? A real vacation, nothing to do with storytelling, but everything to do with family and finding my mother's past. I am beyond excited, I can tell you. Tickets are purchased and now the passport needs to be obtained next week.

Beyond that, I'll be presenting at the West Virginia Storytelling Festival in October, the Kentucky Storytelling Conference in November, and (this just in!) the Timpanagos Storytelling in Utah in March!

This retired life sure is restful. And I am so loving it.

Copyright 2012 Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.