A 2024 National Storytelling Festival Preview
It’s a long way from the far reach of the Yukon down to East Tennessee. 
When Ivan Coyote, who will be a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival, makes their way from their home in the small capital city of Whitehorse to the tiny town of Jonesborough, the journey will take four flights, three airlines, and 36 hours—and that’s if everything goes according to plan.
Coyote relocated from Vancouver back to Whitehorse, where they were born, a few years ago to care for their aging father. It’s the kind of place where the mobile phone service is spotty and the neighborhood alerts track the antics of errant grizzlies and moose. Coyote’s personal nemesis, a fox, trolls the property like a cartoon character, sniffing out human food.
Adult life in this semi-wilderness is one thing; growing up there was quite another. As a kid who always felt different from their peers, Coyote turned to music as a source of solace and validation.
“All of us need representation,” Coyote says. “It’s a very simple thing. You need some vision of yourself as a grown up.” A friend of theirs refers to this as a “possibility model” — confirmation that people like you can exist and thrive in the world.
The possibility models in northern Canada were slim pickings during Coyote’s childhood in the 1970s and ’80s. But Coyote was resourceful, and found models in everything from Van Halen songs to the musical “Grease.” This coming-of-age journey is the subject of Coyote’s signature story, “Playlist,” which they will perform at the National Storytelling Festival.
Coyote has been a touring artist and possibility model for some 30 years as a storyteller, author, and musician. “I know what it’s like to grow up with no representation and no positive role models for who I know myself to be,” Coyote says. Their life’s work on the stage and on the page has helped fill that gap, artistically and in Coyote’s capacity as an educator and community builder.
In Care Of (2021), the most recent of Coyote’s 13 published books, the artist answers their fan mail, a correspondence that forms a powerful testament to the power of storytelling to build connections between people in all their similarities and differences.
“I believe in the power of stories,” they say. “If there’s anything that can make someone see me as a human who didn’t before, it’s a story. Sometimes you can be an ambassador in a way. And sometimes people are just going to hate you. Your job at that point is not to take it personally. It really has nothing to do with you.
“Every culture has some practice of documenting, honoring, and celebrating who everybody is,” Coyote says. “I just hold that in my heart.”
Ivan Coyote is the latest featured teller in our New Voice series, a preview of the 52nd Annual National Storytelling Festival. You can read our profiles of Sufian Zhemukhov, Lipbone Redding, and Sarah Liisa Wilkinson on the ISC website. Watch for one more profile next month, and learn about our other featured storytellers here. Join us for the Festival in Jonesborough October 4-6, 2024.