Biography
Maggi Kerr Peirce became a storyteller quite by chance at a performance in 1972 she was asked to step into the shoes of an absent storyteller. She has become known for her matter-of-fact style of telling. Maggi speaks like someone conversing at a dinner table, peppering her telling with pithy asides. The flat vowels of her Northern Irish accent give little difficulty to most listeners; they are the true sounds of the stories she tells, stories that range from the Finn McCool giant legends to personal stories from her childhood in Belfast. She has a strong background in local Irish yarns flavored with legends and folktales.
From 1967 to 1987, she served as pillar and Director of the Try Works Coffee House in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
A longtime Unitarian, Maggi has been the guest preacher at a number of Unitarian Universalist congregations.
Maggi has twin children, Cora and Hank, and four grandchildren, Alyzza, James, Sophia, and Ruth. She lives in Fairhaven, MA with her husband Ken.
Maggi
is a member of the National Storytelling Network.
Telling
the Irish Tradition
By Maggi Kerr Peirce
From Volume 11, #4, November 1998 of the Museletter
Published by LANES (the League for the Advancement of New England Storytelling)
As a child I was not aware of my tradition or culture for the simple reason
that I was surrounded by Irish and Irishness. The very blackbirds in the
trees had a note all of their own Ireland. They did not sing like any
bird, they sang with a lilt to make your heart glad, even on fine mizzling
mornings when light was invariably seen through a fine haze of Irish rain.
But one thing I can tell you is, almost from the very first, I was drawn
towards the old ways–the skipping rhymes in the street, the talk
of banshees in the early dusk of autumn evenings. I like old people, and
they were the ones who told me the superstitions: never to bring flowering
hawthorn into the house or ill will befall you; always to say that a newborn
baby was ugly, so that the fairies would not steal the pretty baby and
place a changeling in its place. None of this advice filled me with horror.
I nodded my head and took it all in, as only a child reared by a family
of Irish/Scottish/Welsh bloodline can. Accepting, neither fearing nor
laughing at such information.
The best way to tell a tale in the traditional manner is to imbibe it.
Not stand in front of a mirror watching yourself for effect (and some
do that, so I’ve heard), but rather to observe…Watch the elder
or the young child. See how he tells the tale. Watch how the hand moves
and the body curls in on itself when telling of fear. See how the hands
follow the teller's own particular nature–some open, the fingers
splayed in excitement, others tight, giving little, but somehow emphasizing
the meanness of a character. So often in workshops I find Americans (if
I may speak of you as a nation since I still feel myself an outsider in
some strange way) wish a cut and dried answer to "How can I become
a storyteller?" Telling is not as easy as that. Telling is easy to
watch, look and listen. It is work. It cannot be given at a weekend workshop
costing you $25 or $200, or handed out on a leaflet with "hints for
the teller."
Some people who are marvelous tellers only started telling in public five
years ago, but what many people do not realize is that they have been
watching, listening and imbibing for years. My Aunt Aileen Murphy was
a renowned reciter of narrative poems. I grew up with "Curfew shall
not ring tonight", etc. and with both my mother and father being
fine storytellers, I picked up the idea easily. So that in my teenage
years, when we got home after being lost in the mountains, people would
say, "don’t you tell it; let Maggi." Why? Because somehow
or other I was able to bring to the listeners all of the fear of being
lost and the exaltation of finding our way home.
You see, the role of storytelling or yarnspinning in Irish life is something
that is alive today as it was before World War II. Though today if you
ask for a story, people invariably think you mean a joke. And what’s
wrong with that – to start with? Just so long as you do not stay
there, but continue to seek out the older story or the ancient legend.
This takes time, and this takes patience.
Early in my telling I told the simple legends which my mother had told
to me. But later in the 1980’s, I began to write memoirs of my youth.
These I read. Shortly after, I was asked if I ever wrote poems. Of course.
So I use all of these in my programmes, plus sing a big ballad or a funny
song (always with a story line) to keep the enjoyment flowing.
I remember how we, as children, hid behind the sofa listening to the grownups.
The air thick blue with cigarette smoke and laughter. We were the listeners
then. Now, it’s my turn to tell. "Once, a wheen a’ years
ago, there was this man, he musta been nearly eighty if he was a day……………"
