I'll be at Toronto's wonderful Music Garden with two great musicians - Brian Katz, guitarist, and Rainos Mutamba, mbira player - on August 8 at 4 pm. We're doing The King's Feast, a concert of dilemma tales, riddles, jazz, and traditional Zimbabwean music. The show is free - hope to see you there.

Other performance news:
Brian Katz and I are taking Talking You In, our canta storia about a father telling stories to his baby in the neo-natal intensive care unit, to the Barbican (October 15, and to The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, October 16. We are then keynoting with Talking You In at the National Perinatal Association in Washington in early November.

I'll be travelling to the Israel Storytelling Festival September 23 - 30 (with support from the Canada Council for the Arts). I'm doing a talk about the art of storytelling, and a performance of Stormfool's Cool Gig, a new "tall tale" about a freelance storyteller who gets the best gig in the world.

And as of August 6, I'm back in the Storytent at farmers' market at the Artscape Wychwood Barns (601 Christie St., 2 south of St. Clair Avenue West), trading yarns with anyone who drops by from 10 am - 1 pm. Come by and we'll "talk story."

Can a folktale go viral? The Tellery and Center for Digital Storytelling have done our second storytelling video. This is part of the Future Folklore project. The story is based on a traditional legend found in several northern countries. You can read my own version of it in Suddenly They Heard Footsteps - Storytelling for the Twenty-first Century, as part of a longer story titled The Storyteller At Fault. For our Youtube telling, the story is told in the second person present tense. Hope you enjoy it! Jennifer Lafontaine (Director of the Toronto branch of Center for Digital Storytelling) and I had fun finding the location. It's a small park north of Queen Street near Leslie. We were amazed to find the rock with the word "spirit" carved into it - very appropriate for this story.