Do you think a child's imagination is nourished through story telling and how have you seen that play out in your story telling?

I think that in the early 21st Century in America - across the board - children's imagination is being put to sleep. Screen life, video form, computers, TV, and information has become a real siren song for a generation of young people. They spend a lot of time in front of screens, which is, on the surface, a stimulating environment for them. Parts of the brain that in former generations - very creative generations - which were nourished by listening to the spoken word and then imagining are missing. Imaginative play is a great component of the natural development of children's brains that is missing a lot in modern culture. So yes, I think that story telling is one of the most powerful antidotes to what's almost a kind of sensory deprivation that's going on in children. I know that sounds rather radical but that's certainly why I tell stories.

We are all capable of imagining and when imagination occurs the entire cerebral cortex of the brain just lights up; CAT Scans have revealed this sort of thing. Whereas when children view a sound picture, like a movie or a TV show that's all complete, essentially the brain is under stimulated. You might think, "What's the big deal? They are being entertained…" The big deal is that after years and years of this sort of thing the part of the brain that would have given them mastery over various things in the real world are left untouched, and the developmental windows of the brain close up and they cannot be retouched. That to me is a very worrisome trend. It doesn't have to do with the content of the media; it's the medium itself. So that's why we work very hard to market my recordings that are full of music and full of voices and song. Everything but the visuals to try to get these kids to imagine things and use these parts of themselves that need to be touched.

What can a parent do about this, because the average parent does use TV and does use computers as sort of a babysitter?

The average parent can buy audios for a starter; they can buy books and read to their children, they can tell stories themselves. If they don't know any, at least they can tell stories from their childhood. They can ask their children to go outside and play whenever it's a sunny day rather than stay inside. What we offer is audios that children find profoundly entertaining, and they listen to them again and again and again and again. Each time they do so their imagination begins to build up. When they grow up in this endlessly shifting culture where jobs are not that secure and life in general is not all that secure, it gives them some creativity so they can look about them and be flexible as people.

Do you think there is a difference in quality when a parent reads their child a story versus tells them a story?

I've taught many workshops and one of the most memorable comments was from a teacher. When she had put down the book and had begun to tell a story her children began to ask her to please read us a book from your face. In a young child's mind watching someone they love or trust begin to tell a story without referencing anything is a kind of magical experience for them. What it implicitly teaches them is that the intellect is vast, the potential to know things is vast, and it can be contained within a person rather than always having some other technological funnel of information, even be it a beautiful book or a theater. There is something very spiritually special about the story telling experience. I've had many teachers tell me that when they begin to tell a story they actually go out on a limb. The quality of the attention they get from the children is measurably higher. There are things that happen when you are telling a story that just don't happen when you are reading a book. It's intense and very wonderful. It's a very creative, intelligent process.

I listen to your CDs with my son and you use so many different voices and instruments, I read somewhere that you have over 100 different voices -- where does it all come from?

Oh, many more than a hundred, I don't even know how many. Well, it certainly isn't channeling. It is artifice; it's straight, flat-out dramatic artifice, that's for sure. The voices come from years of listening to people. I have a sort of mimetic gene that helps me. I've trained my mouth, my lungs, my throat. I've learned to be conscious of my voice, much the way a singer becomes conscious of their voice. If I find a voice that I need to attempt to create, I hear it inside my mind first. Sometimes I go through a long time of experimenting with the possible personas that could come with the voice or vice a versa, the voice that comes with the persona that I'm trying to imagine. And then I'll hit upon it. Years ago at 4:00 in the morning in my kitchen I hit upon the voice of Hercules who tells his own story. It's a hundred minutes long, a deep sort of World Wrestling Federation wrestler voice - it's hard to do, it takes a lot of energy. It's all a kind of dramatic character acting work. It's a very conscious practice.

I'm often in wonder as I'm listening to your stories, I know they are one person - you - and yet I feel as though I'm listening to a room full of people - it's remarkable. You have such a wonderful repertoire of stories, how do you choose the stories to tell?

Lately they've been coming by way of commissions. For example, "The Harper and the King" that your son Elijah likes. A friend of mine who is a minister commissioned it. He wanted a Bible story so he sent me some choices, and I went and researched the books of Samuel and the songs and I decided that this is the one I want to do. It took a few years. I just also finished a commission from the Trinity Armenian Church of Cambridge, MA: "Tales from Armenia."

Do you try to get certain messages across to children in your stories? For example, in "The Little Shepard" he goes on a quest that rivals the search for the Holy Grail, is there a message there?

Absolutely. It's not a message that's original with me; it's a message that's sort of original with all the thousand of storytellers that are responsible for the great body of fairy tales that have been handed down to us over the generations. I didn't write The Little Shepard, it was probably crafted by hundreds of people. I've taken it and changed it and created my version of it. The fairy tale like the Little Shepard teaches about good fortune and misfortune and how they're mixed together. It talks about how life is unpredictable and all these people come along to help you but you can't foresee them, which is the role of what's called the Magical Helper in classical fairy tale structure. Fairy tales invariably have a happy ending. I have a real problem with what a writer, Ariel Dorfman, once called "industrial fictions," like Power Rangers, because the bad guy never dies so the evil is never removed and the kids develop this sort of deep-seated angst and they don't even know why. Fundamentally, psychologically, what they are supposed to do for children they don't even do any more because the writer teams in Hollywood can't kill off their bad guys because they'd have to dream up another one for the next show. So the bad guy gets a headache or something. They have no idea of the psychological ramifications that has for children. Depression in our culture is at an all time high. Kids are being given all sorts of drugs early on. You look around and you say why is this happening? Did you know that recent studies have documented that if children watch more than three hours of TV when they're young, especially still in infancy, that there is a significant increase in the potential for ADD to develop? It's a real media induced syndrome: racing cognition due to the pacing of everything from Sesame Street to everything else. Then their minds become habituated to that pacing so then when they look at real life they get bored. Then they get depressed. It's a big, big, problem and it's at the root of a whole lot of social pathologies that nobody talks about.

You perform for both children and adults, as in your series "The Art of the Tale," a performance series at the Clark Theater at Lincoln Center in New York. What is it about your story telling that appeals to adults?

Imagination, just the juice of imagination and of personal creativity is flat out fun. Adults enjoy, I think, the music a great deal, and as you are, they are probably amused by all the characterization. Beyond that there is a release of endorphins into the body when the imagination is used. It has all sorts of appeal. I've told stories to 150 men in a prison in California and they sat there dead still. They laughed at the funny parts and then sat there and gave me a big ovation. I tell these same stories to juveniles in juvenile halls. They are meant to be almost overwhelmingly dense and powerful. What it gives the adults no time to do is anything other than to sit back and watch their inner movie.

It must be a respite for people to just have the time to do that - to be able to sit and listen and use their imagination.

Yes, I'm going to be performing at the National Story Telling Festival in Tennessee next October where you have a thousand people under your tent for the whole time. It's like discovering a secret stream; you have this giant rock that's dry but there's this little trickle and people gather around it to drink. That's sort of what's happening with good story telling and it's refreshing to use all these other regions of your mind. If you're a modern adult you're working hard and there's a lot of pressure. Our culture is just replete with pressures of all kinds for adults. They're using the part of the mind that's the planning part, and the doing part, and the executive part, but that's a different part of the mind and brain from the dreamer so it's fun for them to get a change and to use these other parts of their brains and their selves.

Do you have any tips for parents who would like to tell stories to their children but they're intimated by the fact that they don't have a reserve of different voices or stories?

I'm a professional with this so it's my job to have all these different voices, but I'm under no illusion that parents who are doing other things and are tired at bed time, that they'll be able to pull out the kind of energy that I'm able to pull out for an hour once or twice a day. But yes, I have lots of hints. There are five imaginations available to people. I talk about this in my workshops, the five sensory imaginations: visual imagination, auditory imagination, olfactory, kinesthetic, and gustatory - the five senses and each has an imagination. If you can find out where they are then you realize that imagining a story that you're about to tell isn't just looking at a quiet sort of picture but if you also think of what it might sound like if you were there, what it would feel like to be there, what would it smell like? Then if you could use all five of your imaginations simultaneously, suddenly you have all kinds of things to say.

The other thing is to simply begin. Begin to try to trust the fact that if you are trying to tell a story that the chances are good that if you're really in your imagination that your mind might spontaneously create something for you that you didn't anticipate. That used to happen to me all the time. I used to tell my little boys a story while they were in their bunk beds. These stories were a half hour long, and I didn't know what these stories would be about until I got going. The other thing is to know that all the sorts of music and the voices and the sounds are not nearly as important as the fact that the child loves you. All these other things just fall away compared to having someone you really know and love there telling you a story.

I think that for parents that's a really important thing because we get so caught up in right or wrong and with something like story telling there is no right or wrong, there just is.

Absolutely, it just is and whatever it is, that's good. And if you start out and try one and it only lasts 30 seconds, then it's a 30-second story. But the next one might longer as long as you don't give up. One last thing for parents, they should remember something from their childhoods, something that had a really big impact on them and to just tell it like a memory. Life stories, they're very, very important, they mean a lot to kids.

Odd Bodkin books, tapes, CDs and a schedule of performances can be seen at: www.oddsbodkin.com.

Margaret Rizzuto Smith is a freelance writer who lives in New York with her husband Evan and son, Elijah. Margaret can be reached via email at mrizzuto@pobox.com.