Courses & Workshops

microphone

In-Person and Online Courses in Storytelling

Storytelling Toronto’s teaching program helps all our students, regardless of experience, to achieve a deeper connection with the stories they tell and better communicate those stories to to everyone who listens.

Our First Steps (Storytelling I) is typically the course most begin with. Next Steps (Storytelling II) is open to those who wish to take their telling further, whether they have taken First Steps in the past, or have equivalent experience. We offer the Master Class for advanced and professional-level storytellers.

We also offer a variety of themed courses, whether it is taking your story from a narrative to a script for a puppet show, shaping your family stories, to bilingual storytelling. Our non-foundational courses vary from year to year.

Financial aid is available for those students for whom cost is a barrier. Please email us at hello@storytellingtoronto.org. Be sure to let us know which course you are interested in taking; how the course can benefit you; and, how much you can afford to pay. Assistance will be awarded on a case by case basis. 

In addition to our core and special courses, Storytelling Toronto also facilitates private courses and workshops tailored to client needs. If you are looking for a professional development workshop for teachers or librarians, or leadership development for corporate employees or interns, you have come to the right place. Reach out to us and we’ll help you create the right program to suit your needs!

Transformations, with Jeffrey Canton (Online)

Zoom

Zoom
This course offers participants techniques to take a story based on a transformative personal experience, and to craft it into a polished performance piece. The five-week interactive class offers an opportunity for participants to take an anecdote or memory and learn how to shape it and give it the power it deserves. The course will end with a final concert where participants will share their stories with one another and also their invited guests.

$288.15

Improv for Storytellers, with Christel Bartelse (In-Person)

This two-session workshop will focus on guided improv exercises to help you build confidence in your storytelling ability and loosen your inhibitions. Through a variety of interactive games and exercises, you’ll gain inspiration to be more spontaneous, find your authentic voice, and as a result, develop a deeper connection with any story, personal or traditional, that you choose to work on in the future. You’ll learn how to take risks and fail–but gracefully, and with wild abandon. And you’ll have fun!

This course is open to anyone who has taken an introductory storytelling course, from Storytelling Toronto or elsewhere.

$141.25

Improv for Storytellers, with Christel Bartelse (Online)

Zoom

This two-session workshop will focus on guided improv exercises to help you build confidence in your storytelling ability and loosen your inhibitions. Through a variety of interactive games and exercises, you’ll gain inspiration to be more spontaneous, find your authentic voice, and as a result, develop a deeper connection with any story, personal or traditional, that you choose to work on in the future. You’ll learn how to take risks and fail–but gracefully, and with wild abandon. And you’ll have fun!

This course is open to anyone who has taken an introductory storytelling course, from Storytelling Toronto or elsewhere.

$141.25

Meet our Resident Teacher

Resident Instructor Marylyn Peringer joined the Toronto storytelling community over 40 years ago when she began sharing French-Canadian folktales and legends at local schools and at the 1,001 Friday Nights of Storytelling. Those stories, and many others which she added to her repertoire, have carried her into more than a thousand schools and libraries across Canada. She is grateful to Storytelling Toronto for the multiple awards which helped her in researching the traditional tales of her Maltese heritage and was delighted to have been chosen by Storytellers of Canada-Conteurs du Canada to record both French-Canadian and Maltese tales as the 2017 StorySave artist. Marylyn has taught with Storytelling Toronto for over twenty years and takes pleasure in knowing that many of her former students are accomplished tellers who contribute their talents to local and national storytelling organizations.