The Elephant Tales Storytellers’ Guide

We’d love you to tell a story at Elephant Tales! Please read this in full before telling your first Elephant Tales story.

We aim to be a welcoming, supportive and inclusive storytelling space, whether you’re a seasoned professional or telling your very first story. We are a diverse group and central to our ethos is that everyone who joins us should expect to feel safe and comfortable to tell a story, or to simply listen. We do not ‘vet’ or check stories in advance, nor do we ever plan to, but we do have some requests.

We ask all our storytellers to…

1. Be kind! To yourself, to each other, to the audience, to the team and to your story. 

2. Book your storytelling spot in advance - we have a limited number of telling slots, so booking in advance is essential (email / Instagram DM). 

3. Keep your story to a maximum of 10 minutes. This is important, to ensure there is time for all booked tellers to tell their stories. 

4. Please consider the origin and setting of your story. Cultural appropriation is a tricky issue which the storytelling world is grappling with - these considerations apply to stories from all areas of the UK, as well as from further afield.

We feel it is important that we can tell stories which we love, so long as our tellings are as respectful as possible to the origins and to people of the nationality, heritage, ancestry (and more) of the story.

Appropriate ways of approaching this are not fixed, but avoiding cultural (or other) stereotypes is recommended, as well as making it clear where your story originates from. Ultimately, please be sensitive with your story content. And enjoy telling your story!

5. Consider giving a content warning if anything in your story might be upsetting for other people to hear.

This can also be tricky to navigate. We are a group for adults (so content warnings are not relevant for most stories) and we welcome all kinds of stories, but we also like to give our listeners the opportunity to quietly excuse themselves from listening to any content which may be personally distressing for them. In particular, consider any violent, abusive or potentially distressing incidents. This may be more applicable to autobiographical (or biographical) stories, but may apply to some traditional stories too.

Thank you!

For reading and for your understanding.

You are very welcome to talk to the Elephant Tales team about the above. Just drop us a line - we’re very friendly and very interested in feedback.