Author: Andy Davis

• Cultivating the Cast

  Somewhere along the road during my second annual bicycle storytelling tour in July, while trying to fruitfully occupy my brain without distracting myself from simultaneously scanning for roadside perils ahead and keeping my feet spinning, I came to a new conception of the show I was carrying with me and debuting from place to place.…

  

• Resuscitating Sam McGee

  Each February, the big community event where I live is Winter Fest, which takes place on the grounds of an old inn on  the other side of town. There’s sledding, snowshoeing, cold water plunging, snow sculpture and other indoor and outdoor activities for all ages, followed by a sumptuous feast and a contra dance in…

  

• The “Shaggy Dog”: Definitions, a Confession, and an Epiphany

  This year I debuted my workshop “The Care and Feeding of your Shaggy Dog.” What follows is a revised and abbreviated version of the workshop’s “history and theory” lecture. It turns out that there’s a significant sector of the general public that doesn’t know what we’re talking about when we refer to a “shaggy dog…

  

• Bringing the Ancestors In

  I wrote what follows for a Unitarian Universalist service two years ago. Re-reading it, I think it can be of use right now. A month ago, in early June, on a road trip to be with Andrea’s family in Michigan, Andrea, Fiona and I stopped to sleep for a few hours in a Quality Inn…

  

• Juneteenth!

  Today, Juneteenth, may be our most important national holiday. I say this not because it’s our newest federal holiday, but because it’s about the process of becoming, for some of us becoming free, and for all of us becoming a nation more consistent with what we claim to be our ideals. Today is nominally about…

  

• Our Best Chance Against the Zombie Goats

  (What follows is the commencement address I gave on June 12, 2024 at the eighth grade graduation of the Northeast Woodland Chartered Public School, at Tin Mountain Conservation Center, in Albany, New Hampshire.) I’m grateful to Mrs. Arnold for giving me the opportunity to be part of this auspicious occasion, and for having invited me…

  

• Storytelling as Accompaniment Between Two Darknesses

  (Delivered as the keynote for the Granite State Story Swap, the flagship event of the New Hampshire Storytelling Alliance, on May, 4, 2024,, at the Benz Center in Center Sandwich, New Hampshire.) I’m so inexpressibly delighted that you’ve given me your attention this morning, that the danger exists that my enthusiasm could run over in…

  

• A Knitter’s Courage

  Two dozen years ago today, Andrea and I were married at Otter Brook Park on the edge of Keene. The ceremony began with the skirl of bagpipes and the afternoon ended with the music of our friend’s bluegrass band, “Lost Wages.” There was a potluck feast with mismatched napkins and dishes of random patterns, there…

  

• Rooster-Train-Sun

  One Saturday morning last summer, I was sitting at the Tamworth Farmers Market with Darby the Beagle, listening to a jewel of our local culture, the Bakery Band, play. The pooch and I were carried together to a happy place by their swelling vocals and the bluegrassy blending vibrations of the strings of two guitars,…

  

• For Memorial Day: “Private Garage”

  A few years before my father passed away at the age of 94, I wrote the following story for performance. This Memorial Day I reprint it here for him, and for all parents and offspring who struggle over the passing on of values and family traditions. (Dad’s the handsome fellow on the right in the…