Gathering by the Glow: Storytelling in the Online World

(AI generated image, had to use it as it made me laugh so much at its dodgy attempts to replicate me)

There was a time, not so very long ago, when storytelling lived almost entirely in halls, libraries, pubs, festivals, community centres, church basements, campfires, and kitchens. You travelled to hear stories. You bundled yourself into the cold, drove through rain, crossed provinces, crossed counties, crossed fields and ferry routes because somewhere, in some little room with folding chairs and weak tea, someone was going to open their mouth and bring the world alive.

And then, quite suddenly, storytelling found itself staring into webcams.

I remember the first time I told a story online. Like many storytellers, I approached it with suspicion. Storytelling is a living art. It breathes. It shifts with the room. You feel the audience leaning forward. You hear the small intake of breath before a laugh. You notice the silence that settles when listeners truly arrive inside a tale. Storytelling is not merely speaking. It is communion.

So what in the devil’s name were we supposed to do with a camera?

At first, it felt absurd.

There I sat in front of a glowing screen, talking into a tiny black dot while my own face stared back at me in a little square. No tavern smell. No audience rustle. No warm hum of bodies gathered together. Just silence in my office and the occasional reminder that my internet connection was “unstable.”

And yet…

And yet something remarkable happened.

The stories still worked.

Not in the same way, mind you. Different. Stranger. But alive all the same.

Over the past few years I have had the joy of attending and performing in a growing number of online storytelling spaces. Some are polished productions. Others gloriously homemade. Some feature tellers from a single region while others gather voices from every corner of the globe. And despite my early skepticism, I have found myself increasingly enchanted by the possibilities of online storytelling.

In Canada, organisations like Storytellers of Canada have continued to support and promote storytelling through online resources, events, workshops, directories, and national networking opportunities for tellers across this enormous country.

And what a blessing that is.

People outside Canada often fail to grasp the sheer scale of this place. If you live in Fredericton and wish to attend an event in Vancouver, you are not “popping over.” You are essentially contemplating a continental expedition. Online storytelling changed that reality overnight. Suddenly tellers in Newfoundland could hear performers from British Columbia without needing an airline ticket and a week off work. Northern communities could join storytelling circles that geography once denied them access to. Older listeners who could no longer travel could once again sit among stories.

That matters.

It matters deeply.

South of the border, the National Storytelling Network has embraced online events in fascinating ways. Their calendar now regularly includes online workshops, performances, story slams, seasonal events, and educational sessions.

There is something wonderfully democratic about it all.

One evening you might find yourself listening to ghost stories from Louisiana. The next, a personal narrative workshop from New Hampshire. Then suddenly you are sitting in a virtual room with tellers from California, Minnesota, Texas, and New York, all sharing stories while cats wander across keyboards and someone inevitably forgets they are muted.

And strangely, those imperfections become part of the charm.

In traditional performance spaces storytellers work hard to create intimacy. Online, intimacy arrives accidentally. You glimpse bookshelves. You hear dogs barking. Children wander briefly through camera frames. Someone’s kettle whistles in another room. We enter each other’s homes in a way that physical venues rarely allow. The polished mask of performance softens. The teller becomes human before the story even begins.

The World Storytelling Cafe may be one of the finest examples of this international spirit. Born during the pandemic era and rooted in a vision connecting storytellers across the world, it created a genuinely global storytelling hearth.

And what a marvelous thing it has become.

One night you may hear Moroccan tales. Another night Scandinavian myths. Then Australian yarns. Then Appalachian ghost stories. Then a Scottish traveller tale told from a cottage kitchen somewhere under grey northern skies.

The World Storytelling Cafe understood something essential: storytelling has always crossed borders long before governments ever drew them. Stories travel. They always have. From campfire to ship deck, from caravan road to pub table, from grandmother to grandchild, stories ignore geography with glorious stubbornness.

Online storytelling simply gave that ancient instinct modern tools.

I have particularly enjoyed seeing the rise of Australian and Asian storytelling offerings appearing online through international platforms. There is something deeply exciting about hearing rhythms and traditions that are geographically so distant yet emotionally familiar. A fisherman’s tale from Nova Scotia may sit beside a bush yarn from Australia and somehow the human heart recognizes both immediately.

That is the magic of oral storytelling.

The details change. The humanity does not.

Still, I would be lying if I claimed online storytelling feels entirely natural.

It does not.

There is an odd loneliness to telling into a camera.

In a live room, the audience feeds you constantly. Every laugh, gasp, silence, cough, shifting chair, and widening eye becomes part of the performance. Storytelling is a conversation even when only one person speaks aloud.

Online, much of that disappears.

Sometimes everyone is muted. Sometimes cameras are off. Sometimes you finish a powerful moment and are met with… silence. Not bad silence. Just technological silence. You have to trust that somewhere out there people are listening, feeling, travelling with you.

That takes adjustment.

For a storyteller used to reading rooms and breathing with audiences, it can feel like telling stories into the void.

And yet the rewards are extraordinary.

I have listened to tellers from countries I may never physically visit. I have attended events I could never afford to travel to in person. I have watched young storytellers discover community online when they may have been isolated geographically. I have seen friendships form across oceans because two people happened to attend the same Zoom storytelling session.

That is no small thing.

The storytelling world has always been a wandering tribe. Online spaces simply gave the tribe new roads to travel.

Of course, international storytelling brings its own peculiar challenges.

Time zones, for one, are the natural enemy of storytellers.

You have not truly suffered for art until you have attempted to tell a Scottish wonder tale at two in the morning while clutching coffee like a sacred relic and praying your brain remembers how sentences work.

A Canadian evening performance becomes the middle of the night elsewhere. Australian events happen at wonderfully unreasonable hours for those of us in Atlantic Canada. European sessions can land awkwardly in the middle of the workday. And yet people still show up.

Because stories matter enough to inconvenience ourselves for them.

Then there is the technological chaos.

Microphones fail. Internet freezes. Screens glitch. Entire performances vanish into buffering oblivion. Somewhere, at this very moment, a storyteller is passionately delivering the climax of a myth while unknowingly frozen mid-gesture like an emotionally intense garden statue.

But perhaps there is something beautifully human about that too.

Storytelling has never required perfection.

It only requires presence.

One of the things I have come to treasure most about online storytelling is the listening. Real listening. In a world drowning in noise, storytelling events create spaces where people deliberately gather to hear and be heard. That feels increasingly rare and increasingly necessary.

There is a generosity among storytelling audiences that continues online remarkably well. People encourage one another. They support emerging tellers. They celebrate different traditions. They show patience when technology falters. There is community there. Genuine community.

And perhaps that surprises people who assume online interaction must automatically feel shallow.

It can, certainly.

But storytelling resists shallowness.

A good story asks something of us. Attention. Imagination. Emotion. Memory. It invites us to participate inwardly. You cannot passively consume a truly well-told tale. Your mind must collaborate with the teller. The images form inside you.

That remains true whether the teller stands before you physically or appears inside a glowing rectangle on your laptop.

I sometimes think we storytellers spent years resisting online spaces because we feared losing the sacredness of live performance. But perhaps we misunderstood the source of the sacredness entirely.

The magic was never in the building.

It was in the act itself.

A human voice.

A listening heart.

A shared journey through imagination.

Everything else is furniture.

That does not mean I wish live storytelling to disappear. Quite the opposite. Give me festivals, theatres, campfires, libraries, ceilidhs, and crowded pubs forever. There is nothing online that can fully replace the electricity of a room breathing together during a powerful tale.

But I no longer see online storytelling as lesser.

Different, yes.

But not lesser.

In fact, I suspect the future of storytelling lies partly in learning how to honour both worlds simultaneously. Live events and digital gatherings. Local circles and global communities. Physical stages and online cafes.

The old roads and the new roads together.

And if I am honest, all of this has stirred something in me creatively.

The more online storytelling I attend, the more I find myself imagining possibilities. Small gatherings perhaps. A regular online storytelling circle. Maybe themed evenings. Traditional tales one month. Personal stories another. Guest tellers from different countries. Music perhaps. Conversation. Community.

Maybe even an online concert series.

The idea has rooted itself in my mind like a persistent seed.

Not because I believe online storytelling replaces physical gatherings, but because I now understand it can create entirely new kinds of gatherings altogether. There are listeners out there isolated by geography, health, finances, work schedules, family obligations, or distance. There are tellers searching for community. There are people who have never attended a storytelling event in their lives simply because one has never existed near them.

Online storytelling reaches them.

And what storyteller could resist that?

There is something profoundly hopeful in knowing stories continue adapting. Oral storytelling has survived kingdoms, empires, industrial revolutions, radio, cinema, television, and the internet. Why? Because human beings remain storytelling creatures. We hunger for meaning wrapped in narrative. We ache for connection. We long to hear voices speaking truth, humour, grief, wonder, foolishness, and hope.

Technology changes.

The need for story does not.

Perhaps that is why online storytelling ultimately works despite all its strangeness. Beneath the cameras and microphones and Zoom links, we are still doing the oldest thing humans know how to do.

Gathering in the dark to share stories.

Only now the firelight comes from computer screens.

And somewhere in Canada, Scotland, Australia, America, Morocco, or anywhere else the signal reaches, someone leans closer to listen.